Meeting transcript
Board of Selectmen- Budget Workshop
January 31, 2024 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Okay. Alright. Got it. So, I'm going to call to order the town of Andover, board of selectmen special meeting, budget workshop for Monday, January 29. It is, 07:01PM, and our first order of business is the pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Okay, public speak. Jay, would you like to speak?
Sure. Alright. We're gonna get right into the budget. Let's go.
Alright. Before before we go, Eric, before we let you go, Jay. Eric, you sent us this budget. Yep. Can we go to your main page? So or, your mill rate calculation page first. Yep. Okay. So Let me pull it up. Yeah.
Okay. So your your current information, calls for a $600,000 total expenditure increase, $609.06 54. Right? And then we have, an estimated revenue increase of a $175,400, potential use of fund balance of a $100,000. And I wanna make sure I understand the abatement exemptions is a reduction in taxes, right, that we provide to the firemen or to other organizations. What's that what's that related to?
Right. So there should be a number assigned to that. When I put out the original budget, I didn't have the abatement list for the fire department. There are two things that get abatements. The first is, the fire department members who work a certain amount of calls. Yeah. And the second is the abatement for the Hop River Homes. Those are the two things that fall under abatements and exemptions. So
that in essence is a reduction in revenue, correct? Correct. Okay. Alright.
I just don't have an accurate number for what that is. That's an outstanding question for John. And then I did get the list the other day from the fire department, so I should be we should be able to calculate their portion of it.
Okay. So what I, what I'm driving at is, I want to make sure I work with you to make sure that our spreadsheets add all the way through what we're doing, because it concerns me when I look at this and I, and I, I'm looking at it going, okay, we have, what we're what we're talking about proposing is an extra $609,000 of expenditures reduced by a $175,000 of additional revenue. And and I just need everybody to understand that as we're talking about this, because that's the biggest thing I think that we all have to get on the same page as to what is our threshold. We want to do all these things, but it's gonna end up being, you know, and I'm okay doing it. I really will tell you. I'm okay doing what Eric is asking for. I'm okay with the person at the scene, the community center. But we have to have the right number so we're all on the same page because it's not a small amount of money. And and I don't want the the way that the spreadsheet is is calculated to throw anyone off. So, okay. That was it. I I wanted to understand what that exemption was, and I think the number is somewhere right now around $400,000 if you use the $100,000 in fund balance. So okay.
I'm looking at total dollars. Okay, Jay. Now let's go to you. So, Jay, spend less. Alright?
Okay. I'll do my best. Alright. Alright. I got the screen moved over to my big screen so I can see what I'm doing. Alright. So I'm assuming Eric sent you everything that I sent him in regards to my my spreadsheet, my email notes, or anything like that, or just want me to go over each budget? I mean, we're gonna go over it, but I'm just what are what are you seeing so I know what you're looking at? Starting with the operating, budget and snow budget.
Eric, did you send us that? And am I missing looking at what?
As far as I know, I sent you all of that. Tell me the email that's related to it.
There's one email with about 10 or 12 attachments. Mhmm. It was on January 23.
Thank you. No. That's king. Oh, working copy of the budget. My bad. My bad. Go ahead. I I was opening up the other one. Okay. Don't you Can you share your screen?
You may as well. Yep. Let me, I'll bring up my post disabled participant screen sharing so I can't
Hang on. Give me two seconds. Okay. Try it now.
Alright. Share. Alright. Let me bring up operating budgets. You might have to walk me through this because I've only done it a couple times. So I got my operating budget. Now I gotta share it. Right?
Yep. So if if you've said share screen, if you've clicked on the green button on the bottom that says share screen Yep.
There we go. Okay. It should show you whatever windows are open. You just pick the right one. How's that? You're seeing anything? Yep. Yep. Okay.
So I'm gonna expand on that. All right. So this is the spreadsheet that I use once I get my final numbers from you and from the Board of Finance. For my operating, I am asking for $4.50. Well, let me back up a little bit. So salary and full time, you're going to have to take salary and wages. You're going to have to take that out of it, the equation, because Eric has all those numbers. I just kind of assumed things. So basically, we're just looking at, you know, vehicle maintenance, supply shop, the stuff that I take care of, stuff on your end, you know, you're gonna have to back that out of it because I didn't have that information at the time when I was making this. All
of all of his employees except for Jay, our union. Correct. So all contractually rated increases that we have to deal with. Right. What is a variable
is the overtime, how much we allot for overtime. And the second variable is temp salary, which covers if we're using somebody other than a public works employer employee for a road guard. Yeah.
And sometimes, you know, we'll use the guys from the transfer station because one of them is qualified as their roadguard license. And, you know, we'll ask them for help once in a while. So that being said, if you look in there, I tried to put in last year's budget or allotments and what I'm asking for this year in each category. As you go through so right now, let's look at vehicle maintenance. Alright. Vehicle maintenance on your end, you see a one number line item, which I take your number and I break it up a little bit because I try to keep some money set aside for specific reasons. So it's the same number, our same account number, but it's, you know, I just break it up. So in this year's budget, I asked for a flat budget increase on the maintenance vehicle maintenance, but I asked for more money in tires, which increased the totality of maintenance equipment maintenance. Specifically, we have two trucks that are actually three trucks, two are our big dump trucks need rear tires and our five fifty needs tires all the way around. If you click on tires maintenance, well, it's me. All right. So you'll see that I gave an explanation at the future expenditures for tire maintenance. That's the cost of the tires.
We have the ability to use state bid pricing for Firestone tires, which are a little lesser quality. We would save not quite $200 a tire. But the Michelin's provide a deeper lug tire, longer lasting, and that's really a better way for us to go. So I priced out the Michelin's on for these tires, just much better handling, longer lasting, heavier tire. Our front tires are fine. And, you know, sandblast, what we would do is we would take some existing tires and wheels, get rid of the tires and sandblast our, you know, wheels get little rusty and crusty. So we like to get them repainted. Alright, so let's go back to summary.
Any questions on that?
In your spreadsheet, just so I understand this, when I look on the detailed tab for tire maintenance, you have a surplus in the deficit. That's what you expect not to spend?
Yeah. Well, I'd like to keep a $2,500, surplus. So I increased typically we hold about $2,500 for tires. Yeah. So I'd like to keep that because, you know, we'll have tire maintenance throughout the year. If we have a flat tire, I know that our chipper needs tires that that'll probably be a couple $100 per tire. And if we get a flat tire like our roadside mower, we usually have some kind of repair or something during the year, the tire, whatever. So the added expense really for tires above the 2,500
is the new tires on the trucks. Okay, understood. I get what you're doing.
Okay. So back to our summary page. Now we move into supplies. And if you look at supplies, supplies in totality is 19,500. And if you look how I break it up, supply shop I increased by $500 Seems like we never were borderline either having enough or not having enough each year, so I added $500 this year. Lubes and filters, kept flat. Supply sweeper, I brought it up a couple $100. Uniform and safety, we have a little bit more in uniform costs here this year because of increase of, uniform, rentals, and I can bring that up. So this is my breakdown for uniforms through the year. We also have PPE is our if we needed gloves for state equipment, stuff to I try to keep a little extra as a buffer in there for PPE. Rain gear, sometimes we rip our rain gear, gotta get to safety shoes, and then our difference in uniforms throughout the year. So come March, there's a 3% increase. So that's what the increase is. That's kind of the breakdown for our supplies on uniforms. So supplies, break up in, one, two, three, four
four categories. Right? Yep. Any questions on that?
Is the per is the maintenance budget will that can we expect that to go down when the as the fleet gets newer and newer, or is it always gonna stay the same? Well, this year
hang on a second. We're doing pretty good on maintenance. Yeah. That's the hope, Scott. And we're doing pretty well with that right now. I'm gonna bring that up on the side here, and I'll tell you where we're at. But we're still see. Still fixing older vehicles.
Yeah. You know, so right now, I just reconciled. Had vehicle maintenance. Okay. So we had 29,000 again. And right now we've spent 6,500. We've got a surplus currently, by my calculations, right around $22,000 We have, I just put in for I bought some supplies. You know, one of the things that we've been working on since I started was, you know, having a better stock of items to repair equipment, you know, in event of emergency. So we just spent $9.07, call it $1,600 on just hardware to repair battery cables, electrical cables, you know, the the ends. There's all different shapes, sizes, you know, just so we're pecking away at things. I don't have any big ticket items right now between now and the end of the year. Excuse me, for maintenance. So, you know, I'm just keeping an eye on that. Our tires right now, I'm just a little over. We actually spent 4,500 in tires this year. Answer to your question is yes. We're working on that, but we're not quite there yet that we're gonna,
I don't think we're quite ready to lower. You're still fixing everything.
Yeah. Yeah. We did some maintenance on the chipper this year. We got that running better. So, you know, we're doing pretty good, actually, I I think in the maintenance end of things. All right. So moving on back to the summary page. So equipment. Well, miscellaneous labor, I just brought it up to $1,800 We have rented some equipment if we bring in somebody to give us a hand if we need to, but basically this is rental. So we've had, did some utilize some renting some equipment this year. I'd like to do it again if it works out. We started screening our own loan. If we can set that aside and we continue to bring loam spoils in and we stock it at our pit and we screen our own loam because that's kind of expensive, expenses, expensive, sorry. And, you know, that way we don't have to purchase it. Let's see. Tools. Tools were running about the same. We spend about the same amount of money each year. We're pretty good there. Left that flat. You know, we're we're gaining on that as well. We got a pretty good supply of shop tools. We, you know, continually to upgrade some of our abilities. So we look to buy something for our shop or what we need out in the field in the way of hand tools and miscellaneous items. Equipment signs. So signs is something we'll bring up now and we can, know, bring it up later as well. Signs, traffic control equipment, cones, barrels,
you know, we've been doing improvements here and there, pecking away at that as well. As a town, a whole, need to address our signage. And we kind of started this year, did some couple of intersections. I don't know if you've noticed Hendy, Long Hill. We upgraded the signage in there. We're kind of starting with stop signs, warning signs ahead. You know, we really need to get into our speed limit signs. And having them placed properly on our roadways and then into our warning signs as we go along, Hoping the state comes in with, I don't know, we applied for a grant not too long ago or a program that they were going to help us with some warning signs and we got a communication that, you know, it's still a go, and we're on the list. They just don't have no idea when it's gonna happen. But I figure if we start with stop signs and warning signs ahead and speed limits, that's a good good way to start. And I I'm gonna address that again in our capital improvements as well. So I'd like to see a little bit more money in signage if we can do that. And the total for equipment tools, I have it as $8,000. So, and then, our radios, you know, we're gonna have to we're gonna that's another day. You know, we we know that our communication is subpar. We're having difficulties on the North End of town. You know, Gilead at the North Side. Gilead and no, that's South Side. Gilead, Jarrabadi, Burnout, all that area of town, it's like a dead zone for us.
Jake, quick question. Yep. How has the buses changing frequency and going their own way affected you?
We have no communication with them whatsoever. I was alerted to that a couple of weeks ago. I asked, if we would be able to get the frequency, whether we would be able to our radios. I haven't heard anything as of yet, but we have absolutely no communication with them. If they were to get into a little bit of a bind somewhere, the only thing is I have, you know, pretty good communication via phone text. That's all we got.
Now did they go on to the state system or did they just change frequencies?
They changed frequencies. They're on the frequency that RAM operates on. Got it.
So that's what I'm told. So that's really all I know about that. K. How often have they called you for any issues?
Oh, we communicate quite often, actually. You know, if there's a a tree down, a wire down that we know about, I immediately call, bus one. Some sometimes if I know it's, you know, I know where bus two typically is, I know where bus three typically is, but if you know, most of the time I communicate with bus one, and she relays to everybody. And that's who I have phone communication with. So, you know, it's a little bit more hiccup in our communication, our ability to communicate in a safe manner, or I shouldn't say a safe manner. That's probably the wrong terminology, but you know, just to it's not as efficient. Let's put it that way. It's not as quick. You know, we have road closures due to whatever flooding wires down. You know, I can tell somebody, hey, look, Wires partially blocking the road. If you're really careful, you can drive the other lane. But, you know, sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do, but that's hard to do when you're talking on the phone and and, trying to communicate
that way. Why did they switch, I
guess basically because of the communication levels that they have or the abilities to talk to each other. So now that they're on the same frequency with RAM, through RAM, you know, they can hear Marlboro, Hebron, you know, they can all talk together, which leaves us out of the loop.
Well, let's let's last year we talked about potentially the state system. Yes. And so upgrade to that. Yeah. Eric, that is something that probably should just be addressed, you know, in capital, our capital budgeting, if, you know, it's necessary and we wanna do that. So
Yeah. I mean, would that even help you? I I guess I guess let's make this a little more efficient. I went through and I I you know, your your total in this segment of your budget, your total increase is $28,000.27 $8.84 22. Yep.
And of that, you know, the biggest, the two biggest components are the, the fuel 13.9%. It's, increase of, of, of $4,000.38 75. Anybody have any questions on that? I'm assuming, Jay, that that's are you are you determining you're using more fuel or just higher price? Both.
Most of most of it is just higher price. Actually, I take that We're a little bit less this year than last year.
So we have had some increases in fuel usage. So part of the issue too is that we have ended the last two years with absolutely bone dry tanks, have either had to put a little fuel in at the end at market price or went into the following year with zero in our diesel tanks. And so I added a thousand dollars to our total or a thousand gallons to our total usage this year when we signed the contract, because I want a little bit of buffer at the end of the year. I'm not planning on getting back to full full tanks, but we should have a little left at the end of the year.
So so all that extra usage, we'll just blame on Paula and her ride alongs. They are very important and informative.
Absolutely. I'll give it to you. Alright. So, alright. So that's that's one that's one of the larger pieces on this. And then you have tire maintenance is tire maintenance, which is 18.63%, and you at least provided us that those details there. So anybody have a problem with the tire maintenance? No? Okay. And then the the biggest piece of the whole thing was, salaries. And so Eric, that is a $16,000 increase, and that is all contractually related. Right?
So that is correct. The so it is all contractually related except for Jay Tunnel's salary Yes. Which is set by you as a board of select.
K. And and is that included in it $3.37 currently?
So that's not the actual number. The actual number is, which is what is in the budget is $3.33 or $3.32 $4.59
for public work salary line up. All right. So we'll go over that separately in a different, a different time because I saw Jay's email. I, I guess what I'm, I'm after is does anyone have anything specific for Jay? Because his overall increases aren't that, you know, you know, listen, Jay, I'm just telling you, in my head, the biggest thing we're gonna end up coming back to you on is in total. Like, if the board sits there and looks at the increase, in total of $600,000 we may come back to your budget because it's such a significant portion of what we do and say, hey, Jay, we're gonna have to cut $10,000 $20,000 $50,000 and I'm just throwing you out numbers, to get our overall budget increase to a more manageable number for their community. And that's all we'd be doing. So I'm just asking the board, does anybody, because what he's providing us, you know, he's not doing it as detailed as I might want. I might want each one of these tabs with what he's expecting in here in just global terms. Like, if you went through each tab,
Jay, not every tab's filled out, but I don't necessarily need it when it's a 2.4% increase, $625 of your total escalation. So
Yeah. It's I mean, it I'm just showing you know, I showed what we had last year, you know, in as approvals and my increases, you know, or flat, it would be this year. Now
I would ask you, Jay, from your spreadsheet perspective, because you could add it in differently. You can't you can't access that cell because you typed in that cell that gives me last year's number. You have to put that number in its own cell so that you can calculate on it. Okay. Right? So I'm I'm just letting you know. So I broke all those out. So, you know, what he's talking about here in his operating segment is a total increase of $627,000. And I'm not gonna Eric has a different number that will go into budget. And as long as it's less, it's fine. It's $27,884.28 is the total increase from year to year. And biggest components are wages, which are contractual, the tires that he's discussed, which we absolutely need, and the increase in the fuel. Anybody have any questions on anything specific, or can we, or do we need them to do anything in more detail? Are we gonna go over the capital budget for? Yeah, that's a whole other
section that I'm assuming we're gonna talk about. Hey, the algae side, is that something that you have to do regularly, Like No. That's every time? They bring fuel in? Let's just quickly I'll click on diesel.
So I have the tanks tested every year, And the answer to your question, Scott, is no. It's not done at this year. Our water was good. We had no bugs. We didn't have to do algaecide. And, you know, so we were good. You know, we have the company we use tests our fuel for free. The only thing that we do when we stay on top of is our fuel additives, make sure we try to, you know, keep our fuel. So, you know, anti gel and some, know, we have put in some added lubrication because that sulfur fuels a little dry. So that's kind of the breakdown right here.
On our fuel side, I like to, you know, a thousand dollars for fuel additives, we usually go through two buckets to five gallon pails at a time to two and a half pails depending. Then we have a summer additive and then our tank maintenance. Tank maintenance is kind of an unknown, whether we need a water pump out. Last time we did a water was a year before and I think it was $450 somewhere around there. And we did have algaecide bugs in it. That would that's like a $300 treatment give or take depending on, you know, what's needed. And then just other miscellaneous things, you know, we might need a hose and I know we need a there's a dial up top to figure out what they call it, but exactly that needs to be replaced in that. I'm not sure where Eric has this, but I did get a quote to have our fuel system updated as far as our software. Eric, can you say where that is? Is that a good time to bring this up, or is that someplace else at another time?
No. We can talk about it. Where did I? So I put under, if you look in the notes under the transfers, one of my notes was that the board should consider adding 12 k to cover the cost of the fuel system upgrade for public works under the public works equipment fund.
So I didn't have that in here in my spreadsheet. So I'm assuming everybody's aware we're having issues, occasional issues, and and don't ask me why other than this system is really old. The software program is not supported like six times out from upgrades, we can't even really do anything with it if we wanted to. And to do an upgrade, it's I have a quote for 12,147. And that's through equipment service. And to do a new system? What's that? If you wanted to replace the entire system.
Oh, that would be big money. I didn't last time the last time it was, you know, it was 20. Yeah. That was a lot of money. This Well, actually, to tell you the truth, this is replacing the pedestal up front. The only thing it's not replacing, it wouldn't be replacing the pump because the pump still is operational. It's just the electronics and, you know, the the just the software. We'd have to do a computer upgrade. I'm not sure whether I can use this. You know, just have to check with it. I'm not sure whether this computer would support it because I have a separate desktop
dedicated just to this fuel system. I don't I don't use it for anything but that because I'm scared to use it for anything but that just because it's so old. The last time I tried to get back into it to do something, got into some old DOS program and I just like, no, I don't know enough. I'm backing out. See you later. Bye. But we got it to work again the last time it stopped working. So, yeah, that's all I gotta say about that. Can you provide
the cost of a brand new system and the cost of the upgraded system?
No. This is this is a brand new system. This isn't an upgrade. This is The $12,000 is for a software system.
Brand a brand new system. Yes. It it would be a new pedestal out by the pump. There's a new control panel, the control panel out there, the one that turns everything on, bells and whistles to make the pump run and activate, it's outdated. It's working, but it's outdated. So it would be a whole new thing out by the pump. Cause you put in new keys, new fobs so you can turn the pump. Each vehicle will get a new key, whole nine yards, and then there would be a new computer software here, and it'd all be with CAT, whatever the cable, you know, we would utilize the cable that's existing between the building and the pumps. That cable is okay. So we wouldn't have to do any underground between here and the pumps. We can still utilize was a cat five set in my is that the right terminology? Cable. So is that in your budget? This the 12?
No, it's not. I did not put that in this, because I wasn't sure where this was gonna go.
Well, just tell us tell us this so we so I understand. If the system fails, what happens to you?
Every we gotta do everything manually. I gotta ask all the departments to record every time they come in fuel. They gotta write it down manually. I gotta come up with, you know, everything's on paper and, you know, doing it on a, I can't just come sit here behind the desk and click on it and bring up everybody's, know, when I do monthly reports for fuel reports and calculate what the cost is. And right now I calculate the cost. The only thing I get from anybody's report is gallons used. I don't get, you know, the I can't go into the system and put it the actual cost and have it already calculated to gallons to cost and then hand it to the finance department,
you know, to Chris at the office. So how old is this system, Jay?
Since whenever it got put in. So I, to be honest with you, I don't I don't know how many years ago that was. I'd have to look it up. So it's whenever you went whenever you changed over from the the gas and diesel pumps on the side of the building and brought everything out front. So a long time. Right.
Okay. So, Eric, the assumption is that that would be
part of CIP's, CIP request? So if you decide you wanna fund it, then yes, that would go through. That would probably be a CIP expense. But the question becomes what budget do you want to put that through? Because although it's related to public works, public works is not the biggest user of diesel. The school is the biggest user of diesel total. It's basically public works plus the fire department plus the school.
Okay. So so so just just because now I I, you know, I I'm I if we did this, well, and and it's part of the pump to sit there, aren't we billing the school for the actual diesel they use? Yes. Okay. Are we billing any other entities within the town other than public works for the diesel they use?
We bill the school, we bill RAM, and we bill the fire department for their respective diesel use.
Okay. And so why, why, if you know, let's sit there and say that you want to, amortize the cost of the software over three years, why couldn't you sit there and determine an amount to put on top of the per gallon rate so that we can sit there and get this upgrade covered? I mean, you could, it's just like
public works usually incorporates in their budget, the cost of algaecide and the diesel additive that is used by everybody. But again, it's all coming from the same pool of money. So it's just, to me, it's semantics where you fund it, you decide to fund it or you don't decide to fund it.
Understood. But if if if we chose to, could amortize those costs into the per gallon price that's charged to any entity. We certainly could. If that's how you want to recoup the costs, we could certainly do that. Well, I'm just asking the general question so that we could do that if we chose to, or we could sit there and send it to CIP and say it's a town. I mean, it's if it's not under public works, then what's it under? Right? It's so that was your question. What were we putting it under? What department would we put this under?
So then I mean, I could see that legitimately either going under the building maintenance fund or the public works equipment fund. Those are the two funds most likely to that that would be applicable to.
Okay. So if we put it under public works, as long as it doesn't impact negatively impact the view of of the community, or something that's used by the whole town. Like, I would sit there and think it would be something to put under the general general town, because it's everybody, it's all the organizations. So, like, I know what you're saying. I would I would if you put it under public works, just as long as it doesn't visually take away from, like, a what public works might need for overall equipment, then it's fine. But, yes, I I I I am actually happy that Jay told me that it could still run even if the software breaks down. So, no, I know you need a new system, Jay, but at least I know you're not gonna collapse and the trucks aren't gonna go.
Yeah. I mean, right now, if the software were to go by the wayside, just have to Each department has to do manual recordings and we do the best with what we have. Gotcha. 5¢ a gallon till it's paid off.
Well, that's just spreading around tax dollars from different places. It's just, you know, I agree. I mean, it is a way for everybody that's participating in this to understand that this is a piece of equipment that's necessary to continue to operate the diesel pumps. But it's The
other thing that this system gives me is I have to manually go out and stick that tank every week. I can just in the office, I can push a button and it'll tell me how many gallons I have in that tank. So, you know, after a month or so after my order, I can come in here and push on the button and start watching the usage. When I get to about 1,500, 1,200 gallons, I usually order the next, batch.
But I would I would also assume that the new system would be able to give you transactional details by vehicle as to. Yes. And I have that now.
But, you know, so that's another part of the system that, you know, you can look back and say, hey, why is this vehicle using so much fuel or whatever? We don't do that now. We just do totality and what because I don't I don't want to break the system on trying to figure all that stuff out. And not that we really need to because we're, you know, we're kind of a small, department, so it's not that critical
to do something like that. Would be able to get through this year without this piece of software. Yeah. Hopefully.
Yep. Well, I mean, it it has stopped working for a fairly extended period at least once in the last year. Oh, yeah. How long was that system down for? The last time? Yeah. Almost three months.
Yeah. So this has not been the system that has been reliable. What got it up and running?
A hammer. I don't know, Jeff. Had the company come out. They went through the pedestal upfront. We started checking things on the software in here and pushing buttons and wiggling wires. The guy left and charged us $112 for the service charge. Nothing happened. And the following week I says, You know what? I'm going to start moving wires and stuff. It started working again. I don't know.
Just So it's not the software on the computer, it's something with the hardware? Because you said the CAT five cable is working okay, but I'm just trying to Yeah,
there's two systems here. There's the recording of There's the tank monitoring system, and then there's the software that gets all the readings from the pump that, you know, the information for each vehicle as you key in. So there's two systems here that are supposed to talk to each other. Well, apparently, they stopped talking to each other, and they didn't I don't know which one. I'm sure it's a software because that's been an issue before. Sometimes I'll I'll key up a report and it magically appears at the at the end of the day. Sometimes I'll key up a report and it's in instantaneous.
I you know, I don't know. I don't I don't understand it. I can't tell you why. But, and sometimes, in the past, I it says error error, and I just shut it off. And a day later, come back, I turn it on, and it works again. I don't know what
it is. Okay. So we all know we have to do this. It's just a question of when. So you have that number. It's a question of when, not if it's gonna end up having to get done. Okay. What else are Okay. Going So, let me back out of this. Give me one second. K. So now we want snow budgets.
One more question for you on that, Jay. Yep. If if we go or when and if we go with that upgrade, will you need a new computer or are you gonna be able to put it on the computer that you're using right now?
I don't know. Like, you know, this this desktop, I I don't have an answer to that. They whether it's would support them I mean this, what is this? I don't know, it says Windows Vista. So it's an old desktop. So I would venture to say no. But I don't know. That would be a question for the IT department, I guess. Just be a it just be a desktop. It'd be nice to have a dedicated a dedicated desktop just for the fuel system. So it's not that it's hooked up separately from, you know, my operating computer here.
Jay, this is Jeff. I just, I'd like to meet with you sometime and take a look at the existing system that you have there. Yeah, I know a lot of stuff about fuels managers and tanks and use things. Do a lot of that for my day job. So there's a lot of stuff out in the market right now that's really reliable, especially ultrasonic tank monitoring. You can tell the use just by the level of the tank, and it can get down to within a half a millimeter of tank levels. You can calculate the tank curvature and the shape, and it will calculate your fuel use per fill.
So there is some stuff on the market that's like non contact that works a lot better than the older stuff. So there may be some options out there for, you know, pretty reasonable prices. Okay.
Yeah. And for the record, I think that tank was installed in 2008. And since Windows Vista was launched in 2007, and that's what that's on that computer, I suspect that's probably a a 2008 PC that's in use. So it's
there's no way we're recycling that thing. Too old and primitive. Yeah. Let's take a look at it. That's way overdue for an upgrade.
Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, it's it's six, seven times beyond any software updates that's even supported by the current company that this, system is.
Yeah. We should be updating those every five to seven years at a minimum, so we should probably update that machine.
Yep. Right. But the thing is is that the pedestal and the equipment itself is so old, it only runs on Windows Vista. We couldn't put a modern laptop there and run that system. That that I thought was the the major problem with it. It all had to be done at once.
All right. Any other questions on that? In my snow budget or our snow budget? So again, wages over time, that's a contract, you know, that's I just added. Here we go. I added 5% to last year. So. Where I I increased a little bit from previous year. Which we had it at 66 to 50 increase to $250, bringing up to an even number. Sand, same. Just if we ever have to purchase any sand, it'd be nice to I mean, we have a current sand pile now that kind of just this number just rolls over every year. But if we do have a need to buy sand for any reason, we have a little bit of money for that. Plow blades flat sanding equipment. I brought that up this year a little bit to $800 from $5.50 last year. We just have, you know, miscellaneous winter items, equipment items that we buy. We we tend to spend that money every year. So and we tend to run out a little bit, so I increased it a little bit. Meals, I brought up the $7.50. Building ice maintenance, which is our bag salt for site. I actually
brought the meals budget up more than that because we have a contractual increase in what we pay for the meals based on the union contract. That was the first increase in, you know, three rounds of contracts. So it had been stagnant for like twelve years, and now it's gone up to reflect what's closer to current meal costs. Okay. What's so would you increase that to? So I increased the total line item meals to eight fifty, which is about an 18% contract increase, which is roughly what was built into the per meal cost.
Okay. Alright. I can change that on my end. Building ice maintenance, which is, the bag salt for the buildings. Usually buy a pallet of that every year. This year we're doing okay. I'll have some leftover, but I left that flat. And pretty much it's it's a flat budget with some minimal increases on salt. Salt, we tend to and and I don't have the answer to this question. Hopefully you can provide that to me. So we tend to budget for like 800 ton a year or I should say contract for 800 ton. We're running between last year we purchased 400, a little over 400 ton, I think it was. But whatever we contract for, we're obligated to buy at least half of that. So fortunately, we haven't gone over our budget allotment for salt in the past few years. We've always stayed under.
But if we get a bad year, we could go over a little bit. But seemingly, this is a pretty decent number for now. And salt did go down just a few dollars a ton this year. So that's a good thing. Any questions on snow? Nope. Alright.
Get rid of that one. EPW building. Bring that up. Garage. K. Everybody seeing it? Nope. No. Oh, I gotta push the share button. Hang on. Share.
How about now? Yep. Okay. Alright. Phys physicals, I increased because physicals have gone up to $150 plus for everybody. So I brought that up last year. So for five guys, you know, give or take $750 Not every not all of us have to go every year, but, some of us are every two years, but there are some that have to go every year. Training conferences, seminars flat. Building maintenance, I left that flat. This year, we are question? We got a question.
No, that was just me clicking back on. I apologize. Okay.
This year, we're going to use up just about everything we have in building maintenance. We had a couple of unforeseen large ticket expenses. But I was kind of hoping that we could do some other things. But, you know, we had an alarm panel that went south and but we didn't get to do some of the electrical upgrades that I'd like to take care of in this building. Just kind of put them off till next year. And we've been picking away at electrical issues and just making things a little bit better around here. So we'll just I left that flat. Furnace maintenance flat, alarm systems, internet cable that hasn't changed. I mean, the their bill is the same. Electricity, I don't really I just gave an increase here of I added 5%. I'm not sure if that's really accurate. I don't see the electrical bills. It's just when we reconcile, I'll see what they are and I just put them into my budget as I get them. So if that seems within the realm, I just added 5% to electricity. Heating oil, left flat.
Going back to electricity, I actually dropped in the overall budget, the electrical budget for the town hall down to 5,400 because it looks like we've gotten through the big spike in electrical costs. We budgeted 6,700, but we spent considerably under that. And looking at today's numbers, I think 5,400 should cover it.
For, DPW? Correct. Okay. Alright. So we can drop that 5,400. Alright.
Heating oil, I left the same. Again, that's something that's a variable that I don't see. Office supplies flat, computer flat, and that's what I have for a building.
Yeah, and if the board wants to see separately the calculations for fuel, oil, electricity, I can give you those spreadsheets separately because I did go through looking at both diesel and, you know, heating fuel oil usage for all the public buildings and then backed it out to what our current rate would be.
Eric, are any of these line items significantly over budget or under budget in the current year? So Because that's what you could do for us as we move on to other departments, as we talk about the other departments, is identifying what's significantly over budget or under budget. Because what Jay's doing here is just giving us their flatty, flatty, flatty, And we really have no exposure to where he's currently at. Like he said, he doesn't see the bills, but we're not sitting there seeing the rest But see, he
he's seeing the bills for everything other than fuel, electricity, and heating oil. Okay. So he has all the details for that. It's just that those three things because I'm the one that signs the overall contract for fuel oil, and all the electrical bills come in to me. So I see so I have that information. That's the only reason why those two get handled separately, because I see that globally for all the but like normal bills, he's got as much information as I do.
Okay. So so what would be positive for us even in other departments is to understand the current situation plus or minus, you know, that all of these accounts are good, or we might have an account that is significantly underspent and we can sit there and decrease that line item because Jay's not really telling us that if he's got anything significantly underspent and he's just asking for the same number as last year. So, I mean, we need to look at those, Eric, and see those.
So, Jeff, not that I'd be able to get it this done in time, probably for you, but, unless I spent the god amount of time doing it. But I in the spreadsheet, I guess I could add a column that would show you what we're currently at. Like for for physicals, we've currently spent three zero one dollars Seminars, we haven't spent any money yet. Building maintenance, we spent $15,000 already. Furnace I'm
expecting Jay all to be reasonable. It's just a question, you know, it's the outlier accounts more than anything. If there's a significant under expenditure or there's a significant over expenditure, then it makes sense as to why you're trying to increase something to a given level, or, you know, do we have an opportunity to decrease in another area? And that's all I'm after. Yeah. I don't necessarily, I mean, I would love for you to do that. I would love for every department to do it like this and have the detailed tabs behind it and then say, here's the details, because then we can walk through it. I mean, you're Eric, what is Public Works? Half of our total budget? Maybe 40%?
I don't know the answer. It's probably close. I would say 40%,
probably. 40%. So in one night, Jay, we're going through 40% of the budget and understanding that if we don't give money to you, then things don't happen. So roads don't get plowed, ride alongs don't happen, we don't move our roads, we don't do good things. So we have to fund what works. The question is, does every but every line item need to be funded at last year's number? Are there any potential areas where we can drop? Because we're gonna have a big increase this year, and it's gonna be tough to push to the the the town residents. So Right.
And, Jeff, if you look at the overall town budget spreadsheet Yep. You'll see that I addressed some of Jay's numbers either by putting notes in the column or actually physically changing that, because I also look through last year's completed profit and loss Yeah. You know, in compare, which is essentially not what was budgeted last year, but what we actually spent department by department in each line item. You know, you'll see a bunch of stuff in senior transportation, where every year they budget for a certain amount. And every year I tell them they need to increase it because, you know, they're spending way more than that. And they say, well, no, it should be the same budget as last year. So I've actually done that. And if you look at the overall budget document that you have, you know, you'll see I put notes in there where we spent, you know, money that was either over or under the previous year, you know, and what I did. So the budget, the overall budget you see is not exactly verbatim what you get from any department head.
No. You're already making adjustments based on where we're at. So, like, if I look at your budget, I look at public works, the total spend on that tab is $6.27. And then I click down the line. We had, snow removal $1.00 2. So now we're at 700,000. Are there any other segments here that are related to Jay? I I just don't wanna miss something. Is there something No.
Jay is basically True. Town garage, public works facility, snow removal budget,
and then the capital line item that relates to public works. Okay. So where, am I missing a tab for town garage? I'm not. I don't think I am.
In the overall budget, it is $2.30 line and line $2.33 and on.
$2.33 and on. Oh, not in not in Jay's spreadsheet, in the overall In your spreadsheet. Correct. Okay. Tell me, because I'm missing it. I can't see that tab because of the way you have it laid out. Okay. It's it's So if I go through your tabs Row two thirty three. So you're going into the main budget, two thirty three. Correct. But does that relate to a tab that you have downstream?
I don't think town garage would necessarily be a tab. I'd have to look and see whether I made an independent tab for that.
No, I did not. Okay. So that's only a $35,000 budget, that section. Am I Town Garage? I Correct. Okay. Is there anything else there that town garage, public works and snow removal? And then the capital.
Yeah. And then we got the capital line items. Public works equipment fund. Treaty.
Well, that's true. Tree maintenance. Tree removal should be considered as part of your purview. So
we set with building. You want me back out of this? Or you got any?
Just slide up for me. Okay. Slowly so I can look. Oh, sorry. I actually I have yours open on my other screen. I I I had opened it already. Okay.
I had opened it. Where did I open it? Oh, no. Did I?
I have too many things open, Jay. That's there it is. Oh, it was part of Eric's big email. So you are on the garage budget?
Yeah. Currently, I'm on the garage budget. I had it at 37, $8.45, and then Eric decreased on the, electricity side, which brought it down, almost 2,000. So
Okay. So there's nothing there's nothing of you've only had a couple line items here that you're asking for in excess of the prior year number. Yeah.
Yeah. Just yep. Okay. Is fire extinguishers in here? No. No. Okay. Alright. Fire extinguishers was in the operating. Right? Yeah.
Okay. Which which one are you going to next, Jay? Alright. Thing that might change on this, just so that you're aware,
is I finally got updated contracts from fire protection services for the annual maintenance and alarm, you know, the monitoring contracts. I haven't even put those numbers in, but we do have updated numbers. So I will probably adjust those values when I've looked through and figure out what the contracts are actually going to cost us.
Jay, So without you having to open TreeWorks, TreeWorks $50,000 you're moving, you're asking for the same number. Yep, yep. And,
you know, we're doing pretty well there. I try to get as With several sources arm as much as I can to get some cooperative work. You know, obviously we've got a lot, tremendous amount of tree work to be done. We did quite a bit ourselves this year, raising canopies in different parts of town, which helped a lot and thinning out some of the brush on our roadside edges. So we're pecking away at it. I'm I'm okay. You know, if we can hold that $50,000 I mean, we always like to have more, but if we can hold that, that would be helpful.
Alright. Did you have during any forums, did you have any problems? With trees? Yeah.
No. Nope. Just, can't can't get to them fast enough for everybody. You know? We've got we've got a lot of what's that?
Because if Scott doesn't complain, no one's complaining. So, Scott, have you been complaining about the trees and the removes? I think that everything looks really good myself.
Okay. I always look, Jeff. Yeah, I know. Mean Dieter Mill's about there's problems down there, but he knows about it.
Oh, yeah. I'm trying to get Eversource. Now that we're into the new year, they say they have some money, and they, now they're willing to talk. You know, and actually just quickly, I'll just make a couple minutes on cider mill. We need to do a lot of work there to get to take care of those trees. A lot of lot of trees need to be removed. But I'm assuming because of the historic nature of that road, you want to keep it pretty much the same. We should put up some start replacing some of those wood guide rails and, you know, leave them as wood guard rails. I'm assuming that's what you want in that area. And you, you know, just to preserve some of the historic value of that area.
Jay, what's the cost per linear foot if we went to a timber backed guardrail? Timber guardrail. I know they're bloody expensive, but how expensive is expensive?
I I don't know, Eric. I'd have to I couldn't I couldn't even say at this moment.
I mean, Scott, Jeff Jeff Murray, because you've lived here, is Cider Mill really considered a historic road? I know it has the the the cemetery, but
the rest I would say so. They used to live on it.
Yeah. Mean, it's got the old mill and everything on it, so I don't know. It
has the old mill on it. I've been on Cider Mill multiple times. There's an old mill. I mean, there's a little house down by the river.
There's only like three houses on it, four houses. The bridge going across, was a mill site right there behind the, the Tudor.
Right where they used to have the ceremonies right next to the in that small area next to the cemetery, they used to have the ceremonies.
I I don't think it's any more historic than any of the other roads we have in town. Alright.
So if you wanna do guardrails, I wouldn't see a big issue with it.
Alright. Well, we can discuss that another time. Alright. Let's move. Let's see. Capital tree, we're all set. We bring up. Capital equipment purchasing. And I'm not sure I have this on or do I? Hang on. Did I put this on a spreadsheet? Skid steer. Nope. That's not the one I'm looking for. Hang on. Okay. I got it. Share. Alright. Did it come up? Yeah. Yep. Okay. I'm getting better at this. Yeah. Okay. So first line item is we have our 2024 Freightliner plow truck coming in. And I know it's 56,000 and change. I just rounded it up to 57.
It's actually 58,881 with tax. Oh, okay. For not without tax, but with with,
that's the invoice amount that we have for that. Okay. Sorry about that. 58 what was that again, Eric? 58881. 881. Okay. Yep.
Alright. I have a question about the trailer, though, Jay. I thought that that was, you know, a $10,000 trailer.
Correct. But we wanna put a new deck on it. Yep. And new springs on the ramps. So I increased it by a few thousand dollars. Whether we would spend all of that money, didn't. I don't know. It just depends on the price of lumber and miscellaneous items. Why we have the deck off, you know, we can paint anything in in the rails and whatnot and clean things up. So this particular, now that we're talking about this trailer, So this trailer is owned by Mark Williams. We've looked at other trailers and some other trailers in this. 20 ton price range, the webs underneath their cross members, you know, were rotten right out and weren't even worth looking at. So. This trailer is is available. It's got newer tires and the brakes that were done a couple of years ago, so we know that that's all up to date and it's bringing our 45 year old trailer up to a 2,004. It's a little wider, it's a little longer, better suited for our needs. Any questions on that?
No. Did we talk about this last year and just didn't do it? Yes. Okay. Yep.
Thought this was, I thought this was already, that was already getting done the trailer. My, is it just got pushed over year to year or what what is the situation?
Well, we didn't get to do a few things that we wanted to to to, fund it. So we were hoping we could, fund it through other avenues and we weren't able to do it. So we just put it off. Commercial snowblower, just a simple, It's a push, it's not a self propelled, but it is a commercial. We have a homeowner, one now that's an older one. It works. It's a two cycle. It'd be nice to keep that one as a spare, but we do use these. They're convenient. They're not too hard to move around. It'd be nice to have this for walkways that we do currently do. Town hall library and in front of our place to once in a while when we know it's not self propelled. No, it's it's one of the it's it's a it's a commercial, you know, it's it's got the rubber the rubber paddles. So it flips it right into the chute and spits it right out. And,
it it's not a heavy you know, it's not you're not gonna go out and do, you know, the whole sidewalk along the roadside with something like this. This is just you know, you gotta you're going from building to building, doing short sidewalks that, you know, are difficult to shovel. Yeah. But she you know, as you get older and your back's not such good shape. Right. I'm crying. Instead of shoveling.
Yes. Yeah. So, you know, to work with not doing so much shoveling, let's put it that way. Alright. So we talked about the Freightliner, the jumping jack compactor. Our current compactor is twenty three years old. We can't get it. We can't get parts for it. It needs a new carburetor. It's just it's not running well anymore. It's hard to use. We need a new jumping jack. Eric, you will appreciate this. We did look at the electric one, but the electric one is is twice the money than some and for the amount of times that we use it. And to be honest, not not so sure we want to have that big of a battery being stored on-site with some of the things going on out there. But anyway, we did look into the electric one. If we ever have to do something inside anywhere, definitely this would be the machine to have. But this jump and jacks four cycle and all other compactors or whackers from Able Tool. Big ticket item this year is the John Deere roadside mower. It's a same size mower as what we currently have. It would be a four wheel drive. If we go with a two wheel drive, it only changes at about $2,000, and it's longer to get.
We do have very rarely, but we do have the occasion where four wheel. Do we need it? No. But on occasion, it would be nice to have when we do get in those bad spots and just availability wise, like anything else, they're available. Others are not as as so readily available. It'd be a special order on a two wheel drive machine.
I looked that up, Jay. That's quite a quite a tractor.
Yes. It is. Yep. And this has a 22 foot boom instead of an 18 foot boom. Yep. What kind of mowers on it? It would have a 60 inch flail head. We can use the same knives that we currently have, which we have cases and cases of knives. And the With a with a new mower?
Oh, yeah. Everything brand new. And we'd also have the ability to put this change the knives out to the axe head, put axe head knives on when we're doing some beatbacks where we get into the heavier brush. So rather than behind the school? Yes. The stuff that's behind when we initially did that big stuff behind the school. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We could when we rented the machine. Yes. We could do stuff like that. Yes. Hopefully now with the stuff all beat back, we don't have to, hopefully, we won't have to do that as long as we keep up with it. We won't have to rent again?
Correct.
The question becomes, now I I just for number's sake, I inflated this a little bit by about, 5 to $8,000, just because of timing and, you know, getting some final numbers or some real good solid numbers. The question becomes how we finance this. I was asked by Eric to provide you, and I apologize I didn't have time to do it, but an update on, you know, a capital equipment replacement over a period of time, you know, so many years. And I know that we're working towards replacing trucks every five to six years. And then, you know, having a just our spare truck go away as when a new one comes in. But because of the cost of equipment. From pandemic have skyrocketed so much, you know, that we have to look at that differently. I think, you know, we still can do the. You know, the future outlook. But I think you're we're looking at looking into a lease purchase for this machine as well. You know, these machines are not a $140,000
anymore. $150,000. They're they're big money. And to get a small machine or a smaller machine now we're instead of a commercial grade, you're looking at economical, you know, machines that aren't really gonna, stand up for the test of time. So our our current machine is 23 years old. That's a 2,001. Still in pretty decent operating shape, has some value. If we were to sell it, you know, I hope hoping we would get somewhere between 20,000 or plus. I don't know. That's kind of a hard number, but we don't have no idea where it would come in. But that's a good starting number to to market that machine. Getting a little more difficult to get parts. We've we've had to do extensive work, continue to do work on the boom.
We replace pins, you know, it's a they're high, high maintenance machines. You know, they are what they are. So any questions on that?
Eric, we have the Public Works Equipment Fund. Yep. And last year we funded $101,100,000 dollars $125,000. How much money is left after paying for the plot?
Not much. In last year's budget, we overspent the public works equipment budget by about $40,000 or $35,000 to make the first lease payment, which we've made. This year, I don't know where we're at so far in expenditures this year, but I could find out. Roughly half of this year's budget will be taken up in the payment to the cloud truck.
Okay. I mean, that is in my mind where we need to start putting money away to allow Jay to pick and choose what he needs to do. I think we should probably put this on a capital, CIP, put it on their table because that's what we should do, and then evaluate whether we can come up with the money or not come up with the money. But if you don't get it, Jay, it means that you have to put more maintenance dollars into your current piece of equipment.
Yeah. We would just continue to maintain as we've been maintaining. It's part of It's equipment. Just part of our maintenance budget of what do I got 17, almost $18,000 requested in maintenance, equipment maintenance. So that's where we fund, you know, a lot of time, you know, some some of that time is just felt spent grinding and welding. You know, it's part of our budgetary dollars.
And and I'm assuming that's what the guys are doing now?
Yeah. Yeah. We you know, if something if something breaks down, we fix it. And it's all part of our gets incorporated into our maintenance. Okay. So you would Hopefully hopefully, we don't have any major things come up. You would like hours are on that tractor?
Three it's not quite four thousand four thousand hours. I'd have to go look at it, Scott. I know it's I know it's 3,000 and change.
Last time I Is there any is any programs like what that we did with the new power truck?
Yeah. There are. I just I don't have those numbers as far as, lease purchase. I can get them. I just did I didn't have time to get that before this meeting. You know, like if it was $50,000 a year for the next four years or, you know, spread over five years, I can get those number. I just didn't I didn't was able to get them before this meeting.
Right. And when I look at this, I look at not what we need this year, but I look at what your equipment requests are over a ten year period, what the average cost of those pieces of equipment amortized over ten years, and I assign a number to the public works equipment fund for any given year. You know, the object being to level out the funding year to year in all the departments so that there aren't any big spikes up or down. We've obviously exceeded the Public Works Equipment Fund overall almost every year since I've been here in one form or another. So, but without seeing an actual ten year plan and understanding what the costs are, I did not increase the amount that I put in the overall public works equipment fund.
K. So we need to get you and Jay together to come up with a ten year plan. Okay. Yeah.
I I I sit there and I look at what Scott is saying, even though I hate interest and I I don't I don't like it. I understand that it's it's an easier way for the community to swallow the overall annual expenditure. So if you can come up with that, then we can sit there and revisit it. But we should also do what Eric is asking Jay and come up with a plan for the next ten years of and and it and it's just gonna be when it happens. Here, there's a list of everything that we we should replace within the department, and here's the current costs, and it's gonna escalate the longer we wait. So. Anybody have any questions on Lamar?
Right, but remember, we went from an original plan of trying to modernize public works over fifteen years to try to modernize public works in five or six years. That's really the difference. You know, it's just a question of, is that budgetable?
That's the point. Mean, we're not making a decision today whether that's budgetable. We're listening, understanding what his request is. And then we just have to sit there and determine, okay, we either pass this to public works this CIP this year or we don't. And isn't that what we're we're doing here? Yep.
I I was asking Eric that one. I mean, that's Yep. Yep. Right? I mean, is
the tractor good enough, Jay, to put a new mower on it?
I would say no, Scott. I don't I don't know, you know, there's little nuances that are happening with the tractor, you know, sometimes it doesn't shift right or something, you know, just the the hydraulics, the hydraulic motor, you know, there's a lot of screaming going on. That thing runs hot. It just, it's getting time, you know, and it's really something we need to put on our radars and figure out how we can replace it, you know, when. You know, fortunately, we haven't had any major breakdowns with the machine since I've been here anyway. Yeah, we've had some, you know, where the boom needed to be repaired or, you know, you get some, like I said, some welding needed to be done or when the mower head went down, we had a hard time getting parts. You know, we do have a spare set of bearings for it now. So if the bearing goes, you know, we can get them replaced. Hydro one, you know, last time was a hydraulic motor. The drive motor for the mower head Took a long time to find one. It just, you know, it just gets harder and harder to find stuff to repair on these older machines. Yep. But when it's running, it's running. So K. Alright. Any other questions for anybody? No?
Okay. Do you have any other segments you wanna go over, Jay? Yeah. The last one.
See if I can get this one up. Capital roads. So capital roads, and forgive me because I don't have a spreadsheet for it, but I can for the new one. Do you have the email that I sent Eric? I'll bring out the only what I can put up is my current Capitol Road spreadsheet. Okay.
So do you have the email that I sent Eric on this with my notes? I had it up. So
Okay. I don't know where I put it now, but go ahead. I I I was looking at it before.
Alright. So keep in mind the way my head works as far as I'm combining the totality of Town Aid Road, which is typically, you know, dollars 180,000, dollars 190,000 a year. We get a couple payments of 90,000 and change, right, Eric? 96,000, something like that? Correct. So just for numbers sake, say it's $190,000 And then, and then we have the town contribution of on that. For road improvements. So last year, I'm not sure I got all these numbers correct, but last year we got $3.76, Call it $377,000 from the town. And then if you add in the tar. So that was my total money that I had last year. And if I go through, and this spreadsheet, this design, you know, layout, patching, pavement, chip seal and drainage is the same for my tar. I tend to spend money out of tar before I come before I come here because tar tends to be my startup money in the springtime prior to getting the approval, you know, the budget. So at least I can start the construction season ahead of time. I know we've talked about this a few times. So, anyway, so to my email, bottom bottom of the email, you know, I'm asking for $600,000. So that's the totality between what we would get from TAR and
what we would get from the town. And then I gave you the breakdown of approximately the the items that we try to accomplish during the year. Now, last year, besides the preservation that we did of the roads that we had list for chips sealed, which we had, if you recall, Wheeling, Pine Ridge, Shadlow, Dogwood, Woodfern, Hutchinson, Times Farm, Old Coventry. So we ran into a little bit of a snafu last year of 100 and Chip Seal was 152,000. That didn't get done. So currently, that 152,000 is still in our budget this year. And waiting to be spent if we approve to, have that, chip seal done.
So for this year you get can you use that or can you get the chip sealing started in June?
Yes. So I have the and that's something Eric and I've been discussing. Are we going to use the same contractor or not? And, you know, we'll we him and I are talking about that. You didn't like that contractor, did you? Well
no. I gotta be honest with you. I like I like this contractor. Are they sometimes difficult to work with? You know, it's not the first time. They they kinda piss me off. Oops. Sorry. They, you know, I was a little upset with them last year. But, you know, I still like the work they do. Do things happen once in a while? It happens with everybody. I I don't know. But they're telling me the June 1 to to have this work done to complete this job, and they're holding the same price. So and that'll be a decision that'll mean at another time, I guess. So last year's budget, due to reconcile reconciliation, we had some over through the audit process, we had some over expenditures and. We overspent the budget. So $80,000 came out of the capital improvement fund to pay for the deficit in TAR. So which lessened the account
to 8, you know, the capital account for this year, 80,000. So I guess it was in retrospect, it was a good thing at the time the chip seal didn't get done.
In the meantime, he was put back in your house.
Yes. So I still don't have all the you know, I was told that I still have to reconcile these accounts. So I did put that money back in, you know, into the budget, made notes into my spreadsheet. But, so my numbers currently, show that we would have right now 239,322 and change in Town Aid, not the Town Aid Road, in our Road Improvement Fund. If you back out the 152,000, we spend it in June, we would have a balance of starting, the new fiscal year eighty eighty seven thousand and change, to start the new year. And tar would be showing a bet is, according to my numbers, $500. So, that's what we would be starting with this year. Now I don't know. I think we received a new par since the last time. So, you know, that should be increased by 90, if that's correct. So those those should be the balances currently, pretty close to it anyway, because like I said, I don't have the exact numbers yet. So that would help us get into the start up of the season last year because of the budget and the the audit process. We shifted gears. We didn't get to do some of the things that we wanted to do, but we did some other things. We did a couple of catch basin repairs. We did some road edge repairs on Lake Road. We did, you know, lots of tree work, in house stuff, and we just utilize utilize some money elsewhere to do other things. But long and short of it, the list that I have that I gave you in the email
is really close to what we spent this year. And I'm going to now I'm going to go back to this year's budget. So without bringing in the TAR money, and I'd have to I'd have to split the screen. I don't know if you want me to do that or not, but, you know.
Well, this is the one spreadsheet I don't think we got.
Right. But are you seeing this in the screen? Yeah. Right now? Okay. So let's see if this works. Oh, I can do it. Alright. Hang on a second. Tar. Can you get over to the left?
And then k. Now I wanna bring this one in. Is it gonna let me do it? And bring this okay. Let's see. Let's this one. Ah, okay. Alright. So you're looking at can you see the two my two spreadsheets? No. Oh. You have to go back to
I gotta go back to the share button. Hang on. You gotta go no. You're in we've seen your primary one, but you did something to your screens. You you need to show your full screen, and you need to split your screen.
But I don't think you can share from two different screens even if you can see them on your screen.
Well, he can he he he's probably on I don't know if he has two screens up, but you have to drag the spreadsheet over to the edge of one of the screens.
Right. That's what I just did, but I thought it alright. Oh, let me let me hang on. Let me back them away and see what we gotta do here because I probably didn't share it when I was supposed to.
Yeah. We're still looking at you. You're still doing it, but this spreadsheet is probably covering up the other spreadsheet. So Okay. So which spreadsheet are you seeing?
Right. It's the 2023, twenty twenty four Capital Road budget.
Okay. 202324 Road budget. You're seeing that? Correct. Okay. Alright. Let me bring up the other screen.
No. I don't Jay, you have to do everything on one screen because you're only sharing one screen. Hang on. Sorry.
It's alright. So if on your screen, you you split the files? Yeah. I was trying to bring put up two two spreadsheets on one screen. And you should be, you should be able to do that. And then you share that screen. Oh, is that what it is? Yeah. You can't have them on two different screens. You gotta have them on one screen. Yeah.
I still don't think you can share because your screen is still two screens just side beside, but I don't know. I've never tried that.
As long as it's showing on your desktop, on your screen, and you share your desk and you share your desktop that way. Yeah. It'll show it. Yeah.
Alright. What do you got right now? Just one spreadsheet. The twenty three twenty four capital tar? Yeah.
Road. Oh, no. No. Road road budget. Capital road budget. This one's different. This one has Target, Kuwait.
Correct. That's that's this year's. I was trying to anyway, it's not working for me. We'll go through the technical lessons. Paula will Yeah. I guess up there could be another lesson later. Let's get to our numbers. Road budget. So in the All right. So you're seeing here's my spreadsheet, the summary page. We're on that. All right. So in capital improvements and capital tar, Initially, beginning of the season, I start using tar monies and I got the tar in my previous screen. So I mean, my other screen. So I'm going to just tell you what I spent. So in paving and shimming, you know, through the subcontractor we use and expensive asphalt in the tar side, I spent $121,000 And then I picked up the balance of that in the road improvement fund of an additional $17,000 Okay, so that's what we just that's what we spent last year between the two for paving. Now chip ceiling. Last year, now we didn't do initially, we had budgeted for $230,000 you see on the bottom and ended up because of through adjusting what roads we were going to do, ended up being $152 because we're going to do some drainage on some of those roads that we initially wanted to do last year,
which we didn't do. And.
Well, we did the crack seal, which was 39 and change, which I have this year, 40,000. If you look on the list that I gave you in the email. So I'm still budgeting. I'm still asking for $40,000 in crack seal. I'm still asking for approximately $200,000 to 25 per chip seal, give or take, depending on the roads that we do or what we're, you know, what we decide to do. Haven't locked down that list yet. We do know that we want to do last year's chip seal roads, but we want to do some road improvements up towards if we can burnout Brook area, get up into that end of town. So the asphalt, getting back to asphalt again, $95 a ton is still holding, give or take a dollar or 2. So I try to budget for a thousand ton at and $95,000. And the contractor, we budget for twenty two days at $4,450 per day. Last year hang on. Last year, it was I think it was it was $4,002.50. So he's a couple $100 more a day than he was last year. Catch basins to our list.
Stock replacement, I had asked for 14,800 last year, and pipe 14,250. This year, I'm asking for 30,500 for stock replacement. Catch basin cleaning 20,000 that last year we did. Hang on. I think I did that in where did I do the catch basin cleaning? We had, Shaw's back services last year was 18,936. We spent for Shaw's catch basin cleaning. And not only are we doing catch basin cleaning, we try to do inlets and outlets of all the cross culverts and any pipes that we can get to from the edge of the road. So any exposed pipes that way, hopefully the natural course of, you know, water running through these pipes, they tend to flush themselves out. So we try to maintain the the ins and outs of those pipes as well and get them cleaned. So I include that in the number of catch basins. So, roadbed material, $15,000 I'm asking for. Flex beam and guardrail. So this year
think I know where's Jay my Jay, do have a summary of what your plan I mean, I know you're asking for these numbers, but do you have a list of the roadways you're planning on doing? For this for this year, I don't have a For every for every year. I mean, it's like the ten year plan. What what are you looking at doing? And then these roads become the priority that you're planning on working on. Mean, just so we as a group understand, okay, this is this is what what should get worked on in the next in the coming season. It may not. Like, there might be items that are down at the bottom you might not get to, but that would be helpful.
So this this year, the roads we would like to complete the chip seal roads, we know that, and we had plans on the drainage to start Skinner, Long Hill through Hendi and and then the drainage on Hendi going down to Pine Ridge. We want to start that project. Last year, we didn't we weren't able to. And that's what we would like to do this year. As far as preservation for to do chip seal roads, we want to start in on Burnout, that area. We have some problem spots that we need to address. And to have an exact list for you, I don't, other than to complete what we finished last year or what we wanted to start last year in chip seal roads and start on our drainage. We have that water issue on aspenal that we need to do. That's going to be just tearing up the road and see if we can take care of getting that water down to the catch basin where the water, the spring in the middle of the road, and I'm not sure if you are all aware of that, so that needs to be done. Kinda still in, fire mode. I I I don't have a list, an exact list for you right now.
Alright. That would be helpful. So, like, we we look at these dollars and go, okay. This is where the the resident's taxes are gonna go, and this is the plan you got working forward for the schedule of roads.
Yeah. I mean, it's like the the flex beam and guardrail. We'd like to continue replacing the guardrail on Long Hill. That's all contractual. Last year, we did 1,300 just over 1,300 feet. And it was $36,965 from Atlas Vets. And we have all of that and then some left to do on Long Hill. We're gonna be getting rid of those That rope rail would rope rope rail. So it's a continue, you know, these things are continuations of other work. It's what we've been spending. Road markings and striping, same same money. And the roads, you know, the road signage I asked to increase to $8,000. We haven't really had any money for road signage. I've been just taking a little bit from here and there. So that was a an increase there. But these items that I've listed are base basically what we've been spending the last four years since I've been here. You know, they've been altered a little bit depending on what we've, adjusted as we go along. They haven't really changed. Okay. So
does anyone have That doesn't really answer your question. So I don't I don't have a list a specific list of roads. It's just the amount of money and keep applying them to what we have continuing long held to flex beam, continuing roadside preservation move into, you know, we would have we may have to adjust those dollars where we don't get to do as much chip seal, because we gotta take care of Aspinall, because that's been a that's still a problem. We really should get over get over there and do that.
Well, what what I'm asking, well, you know, it's it's like the list of all of the roads. And then if we have the list of all the roads and we know that we chip sealed Lake Road ten years ago, Lake Road can last another five years, but you have your cycle. So you just, you continue to put up that list and go, here's the cycle, this is where I'm at. I can't guarantee you I'm going to get to it in exactly the order that it's presented, but at least we all know that this is the cycle. Yeah.
So June, you're starting with the chip sale with Gorman. Not if I can help the And then and then road and what road are you gonna be going onto next? When are gonna do a hospital? I think what Jeff's looking for is a, you know, some kind of timeline. But you gave it to us last year, remember. And what, what you're gonna be doing when, and, then we can tell better what money you're going to be spending.
Well, it's, I mean, the way I look at it, Scott, is like here's the list and it's going to all get done. It may not get done in the next fiscal year. It may get done the following fiscal year. May get done five years from now. Right. At least we all, you know, like, I don't want, I would rather the community understand where public works is prioritizing the roads and what their expectations are. Like, Jay's out there all the time and his guys are out there all the time. I mean, I know we have two you know, local guys on our board that understand the roads and know what the heck's going on and can come back and say, these are the right roads to spend the money on. That's all I'm after. I'm just after more of a, hey, I could come to you, Jay, and if we sat there and said we're going to spend $600,000
every year, you're going to come to us next year and say, here are the roads that we're going to spend this on, and if you want me to spend it on, you want me to do more roads, I need an extra $100,000. You might not get it from us, but at least we would understand where it potentially would go. Yeah.
Part of the problem is that you don't know where that grant is, right, for MD. Correct. That is the problem. We
know we know we have to do the drainage, you know, and we'll patch as we go along. But, you know, Ridge Road is another big problem. We got to address Ridge Road. You know, the beginning of burnout Ridge Road is a drainage issue there. We got to take care of that road, you know, and there's some smaller roads that are busting up here and there. But we're trying to trying to make the circuit, you know, round robin some some sort of process where we're kind of going in order around the town. And I don't know, got to find it. I know I've got a spreadsheet that, you know, we can keep up with the dates and when the roads were. Well, we have our that other system too. But, you know, when things were done and when we'd look to the life expectancy of these roads.
How long is Aspenol gonna take to fix?
Depends on what we find, Scott. You know? Could be it depends on what we have for ledge, how deep I can go so we can get some, some underdrain underneath the road without it affecting the frost heave of the way things move during the winter. You know, if we can get low enough where we can draw that water off and get some under drain in there without changing the whole whole road. You know, we got we got half a lane we got to go up at least partway, you know, at least a little bit beyond that house where the second house on the left, they're going up the hill. So we got a little bit of work there. Less than a month, I would hope. I mean, it should only take a few days to dig that dig that thing out, box it out, see what we got ledge, I don't know, two, three weeks. It's hard to say until you get into it. You never know what you're gonna find.
Okay. Does anyone have any questions for Jay specifically on any of his requests? Okay. Jay, what we'll end up doing is, like I had said earlier, I would like the summary of your expectation, especially by road. I think we should have a list of all of the roads and a corresponding date to the last time something was done on that road of of significance. And, you know, even culverts or even things that you're working on here, the potential problems, they might not be worked on this year. They might be worked on five years from now, but at least we see it. But for this year's budget, we're gonna have to sit there and take your numbers and then look at them in totality of the whole budget. While So I personally don't have really a lot of issues with what you're asking for because they're similar to the prior years, you're not asking for anything crazy, you know, that's a new project,
but we're gonna have to take this into totality with the rest of the town, and we might have to make some adjustments. Understood. We'll come back to you on that. Okay.
Alright. Eric, is there anything we should be thinking about related to his budget that you want to talk about now while we have Jay on the phone?
Yeah. So, so my concern is, I'm still quite pissed that we don't know whether we're getting or not, because they haven't announced who they're giving the grants to for the trip program. If we get the trip program and we're funded in this budget cycle, then we desperately need to get the, you know, we need to get the drainage done for that project because we have, you know, we'll have money to pay for the actual road surfacing. And at the same time, we ought to start talking about how and what we do to reconfigure the intersection of Hendy and Long Hill, because that intersection's
been, you know, been a problem for a while, and the perfect time to tear that thing up is when you're tearing it up anyway and reconfiguring it. So, but we just, we flat out don't know. Personally, I think Gorman has kind of screwed us two years in a row. I personally wouldn't go back to them. I would switch to Comer or a different chip sealing contractor, You know, but that's just, that's me.
Who did the, which chip sealing company did the work on Lakeside? That was probably four years ago.
Four years ago, Lakeside was not ship sealed. That was That was Cape Sealed. Sealed. Yeah. Who did that? That was Indus did the Cape Seal part. Company called Comer did the initial chip seal. Okay.
And if you're not happy with them, why would we continue? Do we have a contract with them for a timeframe? No. We don't have any contracts with them.
Jay, are you you seemed like you were happy with them, or is that not true?
I'm not happy with what occurred. I'm happy with them in general. I like the work that they do. I'm not opposed to having somebody else do it. It just there's things that they do that other people that other companies don't. They're all they're all different. Their process is a little bit different. I wasn't happy with the the previous year. They had a lot of dust in the in the product. It happens. Could it happen again? Maybe someday. I don't know. And it could happen with other people too. It's stone not necessarily the contractor.
Correct. It's the type of stone you use. It's where they get it from. Was it washed properly? Was it two, three times washed or did they only wash it once? Apparently, when we got the desk last time, it screened enough, wasn't washed enough. And then just the timing of them getting in last year. Yeah. So it was a problem. Wasn't happy about it.
So what was their reasoning? Are they gonna fix that this year or did they reply?
Did anybody talk to them about that? Oh, yeah, I talked to them about it. So last year they had some huge contracts in their home state of New York and they pulled all their crews over there. So they didn't come back till too late in the season and I wasn't going to have it done at the end of the year when it was too cold and not have a good product. So I said ship them on. We almost had them do it, but because I wanted to get done, Well, we didn't. So that's where we're at. Okay.
So with without
having us to get involved, you and Eric are gonna battle this out and you're gonna be the right contractor. I'll side with Eric on this one. I do not wanna see the dust bowl we saw the year before. It was it was awful. And a lot of residents couldn't even open their windows on a long hill. The dust was so bad. It was terrible. You couldn't even see on the road. It looked like, you know, even with cars in front of you driving, you couldn't even see on the road. And that went on for months. So definitely not.
I saw that Coventry had done chip sealing on, I think it was Silver Street, Silver Lane, whichever it is, last summer. That looked like a good job. I don't know what company. If you can find out who Coventry used, it's any better.
So that was also a different, somewhat different material and a much more expensive product. That was a rubberized chip with coated stone. It does come out great and there's very little dust, but it's also almost twice the cost of what we do. Either you double the money or you half the number of lane miles if you do it that way. I see. Okay.
Yeah, if they can guarantee that they can keep the dust down, I wouldn't have a problem using them again, but I don't want to put any of the residents through what they went through a couple years ago. I heard a lot of personal complaints from neighbors on Long Hill.
I mean, Jay's point, though, every time we chip seal, we get complaints.
Yeah. That that wasn't dust. This this this was just bad. I mean, there was Yes. Just
I don't disagree. I drove that every day. It was really annoying to a lot of people. You're not going to get zero complaints regardless of who you do. There's always going to be some dust involved with the process. That was just a particularly badly dusty year, and I agree with that, and I was very unhappy with it personally.
And our sweeper broke down and we couldn't get out to sweep in time. And so it sat there a lot much longer than it was supposed to.
And I feel like it was a dry it was a dry year environmentally.
So it was it was the perfect storm. Yeah. But we did get a lot of rain and it just never seemed to get the wash the dirt out of the stone. It just stayed in it. And then like every time it dried out again, the dust bowl started again. Yep. It took a long time. Don't disagree.
Okay. So Jeff Murray has voted for against Gorman, and the rest of us just don't want any dust, I'm assuming. So, Eric, you and Jay battle it out and figure out what you're gonna do for the money and
make sure there's no dust. We will hold you accountable. Unless you unless you change the process, we're not gonna be without dust. Understood.
Yes. You I understand we're gonna have some dust, but not excessively like we had two years ago.
Alright. And they assured me that that wouldn't happen like that again. But I yeah.
Is there anything in in, is there anything in the contract or an addendum to say if it happens again, they're gonna give us a credit or I don't know. Is there any way to hold them accountable for that? Yeah. Choose a different vendor.
All right. Let's not harp on this. Let's move on. Okay. You guys, you're gonna do a great job to fix it. We'll move on. Battle it out. All right. Any, specific anything else, Eric, besides those issues that you wanna address while Jay's on the line?
No. The other thing I don't know how it's going to shake out because I don't know how much the the school actually has to spend on the upper parking lot. I mean, they still are adamant that they want to reclaim and repave the upper parking lot, but we don't have a dollar figure about how much they're actually going to contribute. And then the question becomes, do we do it anyway? And if so, where do we take the excess funds to do that?
So that's an open question, and I just, I don't have an answer to that. Well, we need to talk to the Board of Education and sit there and understand because they were, I mean, they had extra funding that basically what you're saying is the auditor doesn't believe that their number that they thought they were gonna have extra is there anymore.
That is correct. So they spent the money that was in the for that check? Or the check was no good to start with? What happened there? Would it it's, not
the conversation. That that's, I mean And I don't I don't have because they share no financial data with the town, I have zero insight into what they have budgeted or what they've expended.
Okay. Alright. So all things that we need to to deal with. And if the Board of Education wants that done, as discussed previously, they had the additional funding to assist in the majority of the cost of that. So we'll work back toward that, and we will get through the issues. But I would assume if they they must have had a problem with the auditor. So we'll sit there and we have to get and I'm I know what you're gonna say, Eric. I know you don't have the details related, but that would be the that would be as an accountant, my guess is they had a problem with the auditor, or they would be here talking to Eric about doing it
and saying they had all the funding they needed. So, okay, we'll deal with that one down the road. That's not that's a capital improvement item. It needs to go to CIP. It needs to get addressed regardless of whatever agreement we come to with the Board of Education, it'll get put in line. We'll
deal with that after the fact. Sure. Anything else for Jay?
No. I think the only other question we've got to decide is whether it's worth it to renew our contract with with street scam, you know, and whether we want to get the roads rescanned. What value has it given you guys? Well,
I'm not directly doing the roadwork or accounting for it. So it's it's not that's a Jay question, not an Eric question.
Okay, Jay. I to be honest with you, I haven't had time to use it, You know, with with taking care of what's the business side of this facility and working with the guys and filling in, you know, and doing the work beside them, I just haven't had time and I haven't been able to use that system. And I actually the time that I have spent, I've found it difficult to use. We had some hiccups with it and they did some upgrades. Just I haven't had been able to spend any time with it. Oh, do you wanna renew it? How much is it to renew it? 1,800, I think. Right.
No. I thought it was more than that. Because I don't know. What what is the price to renew that, Eric?
I don't know. I sent it to you. I can look it up again. I'd have to look.
Hang on. Well, the what what you're just telling me is I don't care what the cost to renew it is unless we have a person that's capable of utilizing effectively. It's a waste of money. Right. So whether it's Jay or not Jay, you know Yeah. If it's not getting used Don't renew it. Right. Just wasting money.
I mean, the the question comes down to do you wanna have an objective third party review of our road network periodically or not? If you don't, then street scans are waste of time. Well, You know, that's today's not using the rest of the functionality. Yep. Was it value, was it valuable and was it accurate? I felt like sometimes,
unless I'm wrong, it wasn't always accurate or am I wrong?
Was it perfect? No. Did it reasonably reflect the overall quality of our roads? Yes. Were there a couple roads they evaluated that said, don't think you that makes sense? And did they have to go back and reevaluate? Yes. But I mean,
I don't know. Get us get us get us the costs and and we'll we'll take that into consideration. That might be one item,
Paula, that we can cut because Yep. Street street can Street scan is $1,800. Scott. Nailing that. Damn dunk, Scott.
Yeah. That's just for the annual fee to allow the usage of their software. Correct. Get them to rescan the town and give us an actual updated evaluation, which normally for roadwork management, you figure on roughly every fourth or fifth year going to an outside vendor to make sure that what you're saying you're doing, you're actually doing. That total cost would add about 10,000, you know, basically every fifth year or fourth year, if you choose to do it. If not, then we drop it. I think we should just let Jay decide. He scans the roads every day.
Yeah. What's the pitfall on not having it? If Jay's,
you know I mean, know, let so here's here's what I know about StreetScan. And I've I've been, you know, looked at it through previous jobs or previous employment. It does serve a purpose. It all depends on your your road maintenance program. You know, if the if the town as a whole, I mean, obviously. The town went to street scan because people needed to know what their roads were really like, because a lot of people spend the only roads they ever see is the roads when they get up in the morning and they leave to go to work and the ones that they come home on. They don't see the rest of the town, so they don't know what the rest of the their road may be perfect. And but everybody's screaming about somebody else's road or their road so bad. So. The the street scan in that process gave you an overall view of what your town and people people were able to see that. So that's a that's a good good thing. The, the maintenance of that and keep, you know, for me to sit here and and put all the documents takes up time. I frankly, I don't have it. I have enough just sitting here doing all this and then working with the guys and fill, you know, working with that. I got enough on my plate. And when I came here, there's a lot of busted up stuff all over the place and and. You know, we did. We switched to a better, what I like to think, better preservation program and did things a little differently and we can get around.
Now, is that the end all end all? It is not because the town as a whole has got to start banking some money because these roads that we preserve now, you know, you may do, you know, every five to seven years, you got to go back and hit the road you did. So either you're doing another chip seal and on it, crack sealant in between. But at some point you're going to look to do reconstruction. So that's when you got to start incorporating reconstruction costs. So we kind of hit that a year ago where we did some road preservation and we did some reconstruction. You know, that reconstruction is big dollars. And we're talking hopefully if that grant comes in, we'll do another section of town. But you have 35 miles of roads you're going to you know, you have to cover. So that that's a whole nother process that you got to incorporate and start sinking some some dollars into your infrastructure.
Well, I mean Maybe you don't do We were, we were on street scans. I mean, we've already talked about, about our preservation program, Jay, right? So, you know, if we're going to talk about reconstruction and the total dollars of reconstructing, it's kind of what I always talk to Eric about is have the entire plan, lay it all out and say, it's gonna cost you $25,000,000 to repave all the roads in town, just so people have an understanding of when we ask for an extra $400.500000, we're doing it with a logical reason to do it. Yeah.
That's why you use street scan to produce that data, if that's what you want. And I agree. And but the difference is I think Jay is the guy that's gotta be putting the information in, not me, because it used to be me. And, you know, it's not me making the roadwork decisions, so it shouldn't be me dealing with the software.
Okay. So, I would sit there and say that if we're going to get the software, then we have to figure out how to get Jay some assistance to get the software utilized. Because if you're not utilizing the software, there's no reason for the software. It just sits there for four years and you're paying $1,800 a year to just keep something sitting there on your computer and not utilizing it. So really what we're at is we just are all in a situation where Jay is probably not having enough time and, you know, technologically, he needs some assistance to sit there and manage that. So let's talk about it and sit there and see what makes sense. But I don't necessarily know I need a software to tell me I have 35 miles of roads, and here are the names of the roads, and this is when they were last worked on. And if we chose to to to, you know, reclaim and repave each road, this is what it would cost today and just use a static per mile or per foot rate.
And then we can at least just have a ballpark. That's a small spreadsheet,
you know. I mean, I'll give you that ballpark today. If you wanna reclaim all the roads of town, it's about 18,000,000 plus or minus, not including drainage,
not including anything else. And those are the things that we have to put in. Okay, there's drainage. I mean, you know, it's like that. And Eric, to me, I would show that all to the community at the budget meetings and go, this is what it would cost. We don't have it, but this is why we're doing X. Eric and Jay have done a great job maintaining the roads to the level they're currently at. And everybody's got to be aware. It's like the trees. It's, you know, we spend $50,000 a year on trees, but you had more trees fall on the trail during an event than you had fallen all 35 miles of roads into. Wow. That was very good.
And, but that's, that's
what the community needs to understand. Right. What we're doing and why we're spending this money. Now, we may not be able to get everything we want, but that's just my opinion. That's something that I believe that the people need to understand. It's, you know, it's like their own house. You have to maintain your house or it falls apart around you. If you maintain what you have, then it doesn't fall apart around you. If you if you just sit there and ignore it, it falls apart around you, and then you end up with bigger bills. And what we've been trying to do is put money in the bank. It's not enough, Jay, I get it. I would tell you, I understand totally, but we don't have, you know, a revenue base other than grants, which Eric, you've been doing a pretty good job on, but you got to do better. And, you know, residents tax taxpayers. And so, and Eric, you're a taxpayer as well, so we all sit there and have to pay into the fund. And to be really honest, it's a lot better than it used to be. But we have to explain to them it's still, if we did this, it would cost us $20,000,000 We can't do that. We can't spend an extra million dollars, but we can spend 600 or $700,000 a year and do a reasonably good job until we have a catastrophic rain event and it washes our roads away.
Right. But, I mean, that is the whole point of of street scan, to be able to logically show the public where you're at, what the overall road conditions are, and to be able to do it graphically year after year, and then every five years or so, do an objective, this is what I've told you, you've increased the road quality by doing X, Y, and Z, and then have a periodic independent inspection that comes in and says, you really did it or you really didn't. Here's what you have. You know, that's what street scan is. You know, it's just a question of the, Jay is right. I mean, it took me an enormous amount of time initially to get it set up, you know, and to work with it and to generate that data. You know, and he's right, neither of us frankly have the time to do it correctly, but so, you know, and I recognize that you've asked me for that data multiple times, but again, kind of putting that all on paper and giving you, you know, that that's an enormous amount of work. You know, I can do it, but what else aren't we doing if we're doing that? So that's really the question.
It's $460,000 a year to do one mile. I mean, so if we put away $460,000 to redo, restructure a whole road every year, in addition to what he does now, we could do one mile every year. So it would take us thirty five years to get the entire Exactly. So we need And we'd have roads that are failing because they're 35. Well, they'd be done. I mean, a lot of the roads probably were done thirty five years ago. Yeah. We need to double what we give Jay to do this correctly.
Okay. And you and I both know or should know that we're never gonna get that much from the community, but we have to explain to them why we're asking for what we're asking. So, I mean, all I'm sitting there, I like exactly what you did, Scott. I would put it on one slide. It's $458,000 a mile. We have 35 miles. You know, we need 17 or $18,000,000. Five years. And The thirty five year plan.
Yeah. It's a thirty five year plan. But we're not what Eric and Jay have been doing is not doing every mile because you're chip sealing and you're preserving the road. I mean, is the Lake Road the best road I've ever driven on? No, but is it a good road? Yeah, it's fine. Yeah, yeah, it's fine. Biggest complaints for everything that you, I think that you get is that people complain because the road's not flat and it hurts their dog's feet, or they don't like to ride their bikes on it. Those are the complaints you get from chip sealing.
I mean, are there any other complaints from chip sealing other than dust? I mean We we we need need to, maybe we need to do, four quarter mile places every year or two half. We need to redo some of these roads completely every year.
Well, makes no sense to split them because you're mobilizing equipment, you're mobilizing people, you wanna get it done quickly and for the most cost effective. Have to make up the decision just like we did with the trees.
Right. The problem comes in with a limited budget. You know, until you've shim and chip sealed the entire town at least once through, your priority still has to be basic preservation and increase the drivability of the roads. And Jay has done a fantastic job of that. But we all know once we get through that round, we're going to have to start switching a fraction of the funds over to classical reclamation. And it's really, it's more than just reclamation. You should be looking at all the potential techniques from cold in place recycling, the hot in place recycling, you know, because every road doesn't necessarily need exactly the same treatment. And reclaiming something like Cider Mill Road is probably a waste of money. Reclaim you know, your trunk roads and your highest through traffic roads and use lesser quality improvements on your less, you know, populated roads. But, you know, sooner or later, you gotta you gotta address everything.
Yeah. We we need a new line item and put away every money money just like we did for the bridges.
But the bridges but the bridges, we got we got grants. And now we got we got them for free. That's what we got to do across everything. We got to sit there and target grants and target opportunities to utilize money for, like, what we're planning on doing in Endy. And we have to do it, you know, I'm sitting there looking at it, Scott, we have to justify to the community why we want $600,000 more total dollars. I mean, this is the biggest impact. This is what gets done and people drive on. I mean, there's only two things in this community. It's roads and the transfer station. So you've done a pretty good job improving the transfer station. People pay a little bit of money for it, that's fine, but it's roads. And our buildings have been looking better. And Jay have done a great job with that. They have everything looks good. Let's not forget the cleaning guy because I love that man. He does a great job. Billy is awesome.
He is. My, that building looks great. My cleaning guy does a great job down here too.
Yeah. You do a good job, Bert. Yeah. Good job. Excellent. I love it. You know, the time you're cleaning, can be spending, like, using street smarts.
Well, yeah. Right. Yeah. But no, you go But then the crew is doing something else. I'm glad to get out of this seat for an hour.
All right. Anything else for Jay? Because, I mean, globally, we just all have to understand that what Eric is presenting us is an increase in total spending, so we're going to have to come back and evaluate what's the threshold that we're willing to put toward the community. And if
we get to a point that we need to cut, we need to figure out where we're cutting.
Jay, thank you, Thank you, Jay. Appreciate it. Thank you. Appreciate your time. Yep, thanks for putting up with me.
No problem. Just give me my list, will you, please? Have a good I tried to get you some more money. Nobody wants to buy into it.
No. We all do the best we can. Have a good night. Yep. Thanks. Night, Jay. Alright.
So does anybody have anything else they wanna discuss, related to what we've got going on? What's, when, when is, the town planner available, Eric?
Is that next week's? So the town planner will be on the regular scheduled meeting, which I think is the thirteenth. Okay. Yep.
Yep. He's penciled in for that. So that will be, you can have the discussion regarding affordable housing. You know, he's prepared to talk to that at length about, you know, what your, what your goals are and what can be done in terms of affordable housing.
So what are we gonna talk about next budget meeting? What's up? Well, what would you like to talk about at the next budget meeting? I don't know. I think we need to decide tonight so that we're prepared and efficient.
One thing I think we should probably talk about at some point is what's coming down the pike for the transfer station, because I think we should probably be aware of that. It's not huge dollars, but we're definitely going up a fair bit at the transfer station if we get into a new contract, as we get into a new contract, because our contract is up as of July 1. Now, some things in that are not fully negotiated yet because we're, for those of you who do or do not know, the town of Andover is part of Midnirach, which is the Mid Northeast Recycling Consortium, which is 13 towns that all go in together to have increased buying power
for bidding on a lot of the things that go on at the transfer station, as well as runs
a hazardous waste facility in Willington, where Andover residents can bring their hazardous waste to be properly disposed of, because we don't have that capability in hand. So most of the contracts for that for the upcoming year have been settled at this point. You know, we've been meeting for that all through the fall. There are a couple, they have asked Casella to come back in because they're, you know, as a group, we're not particularly happy with some of the aspects of what Casella is charging the members towns in terms of hauling fees and the cost of recycling. And they've added a new kind of slush fund fee on top of all their other fees. So I would be happy to give you the proposed contract and an Excel spreadsheet that talks about the budget costs. And I think then we also need to be starting that conversation with do we keep dues the same, or do we keep dues, or do we increase dues for the transfer station? So that would be one subject. And then other than that, you tell me what it is you want to see and talk about the budget next. What's Casella called the slush fund? You want the name of the fund? Yeah. What what do they call it?
I'll tell you in a second. The energy and environmental fee. That
would be a floating fee that they determine based on some arbitrary formulas, which they haven't shared with anybody, and they apply to the total bill. So you have your contract, and you itemize and you get billed what you get billed for the month, and then you add x number of percent, which they won't guarantee on top of that, and bill that to you as their energy and environmental fee, which is supposed to make up for all the things that, I don't know, they haven't already charged you for. But there are a couple of things going up. The compactor lease fee has gone up a lot. Tipping fees are going up a pretty modest increase, so I'm not too worried about that. The thing that is really going to hammer us is the cost for recycling. The recycling costs are going up, oh, somewhere around fourfold compared to what we're paying now per ton. So that's going to be a big bite. I mean, we're obviously not the only person, you know, in, you know, when I look at when, you know, we've we've talked about that at the COG or Capital Region Council of Governments, and I've looked at other areas outside of Mid Near that are with other suppliers, our fees are actually pretty cheap compared to what they're proposing, but it's still a big jump for us. You know? So bulky waste is staying roughly the same. It's going up a little bit. That's still being trucked shipped via rail card at the same facility in Ohio,
that it gets landfilled in Ohio. We're still using the trash to energy plant, I want to say it's Montville, for burning the garbage. You know, but the recycling costs are what's really driving that. You know, I'm trying to do some structural changes by dedicating a cardboard only dumpster, you know, which that helps. But and so get that out of the weight of the revenue. We have room at the transfer station. You know, we wouldn't save enough money. I mean, the ideal way to do it would be to put in a separate cardboard compact. But given that we're going to pay $8 a year to rent a compact or I don't want to pay to rent another compactor just to we wouldn't recoup our money. But putting it in an open container does seem to be cost effective versus putting it all
you know, in the single stream recycling.
What if we just burn cardboard? What if we burn it? Yeah. The
only thing that I would sit there and say related to that is you need to tarp that that if you if you sit there and allow you have a a corrugated container and it just gets wet, you're just paying excessive because you can't get the moisture out of the corrugated. Right. And
it blows all over the place. That's the other problem. The problem is that's more labor because now you got to put the thing on at the end of the day, and then every time Public Works goes to compact it, you got to go up, you got to get the cover back off, you got to compact it, then you got to put the cover back on, and then the next time you use it, you got to take the cover off. So it's kind of a pain in the butt any way you cut it.
But that's where we're at for now. Are we gonna talk about this next Monday?
That would be my guess. But then again, I've kinda already just talked about it. What what are the do we have What was our priority list?
Well, you know, we just went over 40% of the budget. The question is, are we going to and do we want other organizations to come in and present their budgets to us? I know Elaine Bucard for economic development, which I know is not a big budget, but she she requested to sit there and show us her budget. Are there any other departments, Eric, that you want to come and visit with us? Why don't you do that? Why don't you figure out, Eric, what departments would be good that we hear directly from those department heads and what their budget presented is for next year, whether I don't care, town clerk, assessor, tax collector, or whatever you want, or you can present all those, and we can go through those sections next week.
That's kind of open ended. I mean, you tell me what you wanna hear. I mean, I I don't know what you wanna hear or what you wanna know. That's what
I'd like to see what the heavy hitters are gonna be. Let's go over all the big let's let's roll up all the increases and go over them.
So you wanna go through the wages? Yeah. Okay. Anything that's got a substantial increase we should go over because that's that's the that's the low hanging fruit. We should go after that first and look at it because it So you're you're sitting there saying, look at Eric's spreadsheet that he's currently prepared for us and where there there are escalations from last year's budget to this year's budget. Correct.
Now do you want it in terms of total dollar priority in terms of dollar value or priority in terms of percentage increase? Dollar value.
I mean, we should want it in dollar value because our total, you know, not a not a percentage of their budget increase or whatever. I mean, if their budget is a $500 budget and they ask for $250 that's a 25 or 50% increase. It's not $250 I don't really care. But we have a $600,000 total increase in overall expenditures in Eric's budget that's been, not Eric's, but our budget. And so we just need to understand where those dollars are coming from.
Okay. So you want how many? Top 10, top 20? What do you want presented to you? And how do you want it presented to you? Well,
what I would do is I would wanna know the total departmental budgets that are increasing, and then we can sit there and take the top 10. And then, I mean, but but, you know, you're basically skipping out of j's, all of j's, because he had slight increases across everything. Yeah. And and and then break it down by that that department. So if you have the top 10 departments or here are the departments or here are the departmental budgets that are increasing, these are the top 10, Here's the amount of money. I mean, I you know, I'd like to know it in dollars, and then then you drill down on those individual budgets so Jeff and the rest of the team can see what's being spent in that department and why they're increasing so much. And I gotta believe you're not gonna find we're not gonna find a lot of overall increases. It's all gonna be in labor. That's gonna be our problem, is it's gonna be in labor.
Well, I mean, the biggest total chunk, really, is capital funds. I mean, that's your biggest expenditure, you know, increase. That's, you know, $350,000 out of this. The total is just is capital funds and what we fund and what we don't fund.
So out of that $600,000 increase, you're sitting there saying $300,000 of that is related to capital investments. Beyond the prior year? Yeah. Compared to the prior year. Yes.
Well, we definitely have to see that because that that doesn't make sense to me because it's not like last year we didn't invest. Yeah.
Mhmm. It's like the trees. It's like you're going, okay. The trees don't go up or down because we invested $50,000 last year. It's not. So, one, starting
a capital fund for AES, you know, because they're going to have a bunch of capital expenditures, and we can't absorb that with the current building maintenance fund. So if you're going to do it, you're going to to have a funding mechanism for that. Now, part of that should be money they return to the town, But I don't think that's going to be enough. And I think you're going to have to fund that on an annual basis. So that's one I think should be done. The other one, I think off the top would be what do you do with the Public Works Equipment Fund? Do you continue what I proposed, which is essentially level funding? Or because Jay is obviously asking for a lot more than what that level funding is. The second or third big one is bridge and culvert fund. If we're going to plan on not this year, but in the following budget, actually replacing the Lake Road culvert, which is I think about as far off as we can push that, given that we have a agreement through the
state local bridge program, then we're going to have to up the funding to that from about $100,000 a year to about $175,000 a year. So over the next two years, we can accumulate enough money to do it. So
I mean So why don't why don't we start this year?
What do you mean start this year? Funding it. Funding it. We put a 100,000 in this year.
Yeah. But if you're saying that we're gonna need a 175, then put in a 150 this year and a 150 next year and a 150 the year after, and then we have it all there. I mean, spread it out. Anyway, just bring those next week next week because we're already at 10:00. So next next next week, we should go over those types of transactions so we understand where the increase increases that we're going to potentially ask for are coming from. Because that's gonna be the big thing for us selling this to the residents if we choose to go in that direction. Wages and capital. That's fine.
So you wanna do the top 10 budget increases, or do you wanna do wages and capital?
No. The top 10 budget increases and the wages we can review because that's a pretty quick review because It is. You know, who who's left? You and Jay. Right. Most of it's contracts.
And and the librarian and the head librarian, but she's not part of our we don't set that budget. We we can Well, no. That's not true. You set the budget for for everybody other than Amy or Lumosky because there's already an in place contract for Amy. But everybody else, you set. Alright. So, I mean However, we're just over the minimum wage. All I'm trying to do with those employees is get them up enough over the minimum wage so that when they increase the minimum wage next January, you know, we're not shocked and we're already not having to increase their salary again mid year. Okay. Let's,
let's do it. Let's pick
the top 10 pick the top 10 and actually have the wage support so we can go over that, because then that will knock out the majority of the big increases, and then we can do small budgets and then talk about our overall spending, increase or decrease, whatever we choose to do. Because if we decide to decrease from what people are asking from, which we probably will in some aspects, we just got to make where those cuts are coming. It's like going to Jay and go, okay, we're going to cut you here, cut you here. And the other part that we need to know or we should see is current expenditures versus the prior year budget, so we understand these departments in these areas and where they're currently at. Okay. Anybody have any other problems?
Okay. So I will get you the spreadsheet of not this current budget year, but the budget year previous, what was actually spent by each department. So I'll get you that, and I'll get you year to date spending for all the budgets for this current year. And then I will get you essentially a list of the top 10 departments. And you've already got the wage information. Right? Does that sound like a reasonable? What your expectations
are? Correct. And we do have the wage information, but we can also just review, know, the wages are just going to increase. I mean, they're going to increase based upon the contracts. We should talk separately about the ones like your compensation, Eric, and Jay's compensation, because I know there was a note in our package related to Jay that we should review separately other than from his budget. Because we'll have to talk about that. Yep. Yep. Anybody
else have anything they want Eric to get ready for next week? Yay, budget season.
Yeah, we're working on it. I know we don't have public speak after this, but is everybody good with where we're at for the workshop aspect of this? Let a public speak. Joanne Ebert, do you have anything to say?
Thanks, Jeff. I won't keep you guys. It's been a long meeting. Just I did want to say that I was very, very disappointed like Jeff Murray with that contractor that they used for the I know that the tree not the tree work, but the road work is so important in town. I learn about it. But living on Bear Swamp Road and waiting for it for the longest time, we had a horrible experience with it, with everything you all said. And I hope you know, I'm going to ask Eric again. He gave me an example of a road to go down where it does look good. I think he said Burnout Brook.
Yeah, because whatever was done on our road, I would have rather saved up and enough money to just repave and that kind of thing. So, we were one of those. I have other thoughts, but I won't bore you all with them now. I'll try to get my head around it for public speak the next time. Thank you. Right.
Okay. Thank you very much. And now we'll go to our last item. So we have a meeting next Monday, correct? Next Monday. And then the following week, we have our regular scheduled meeting. And then do we have a meeting scheduled for the Tuesday after our regular meeting? Well, I think it's on You took that week off, right? No, I think it's on Wednesday. Oh, killing me. Yeah. Okay. No rest for the weary. No. Let's sit there and do it. So, alright. Does somebody wanna make a motion to adjourn? Motion to adjourn. Alright. Second. Second. Scott, second the ballot. Alright. All those in favor? Aye. Jeff Murray, you voting?
A rush for the wicked. Voted yes. We're just gonna say Jeff Murray voted yes. Alright. Right. Thank you, Eric, for all your hard work. Appreciate it. You are welcome. Have a happy evening. Yeah. Bye bye. Good night. Good night.