Meeting transcript
Board of Finance - Special Meeting Budget Workshop
March 3, 2021 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Meeting of the Board of Finance to order. It's a special meeting Wednesday, 03/03/2021. I'm going to go ahead and recite the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States of to the Republic for
which it stands, nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Okay, thank you. You've all probably had a chance to review our agenda item or agenda for tonight's meeting. It's pretty short. Doesn't mean the meeting will be, but let's do what we can to go through this expeditiously. Our first agenda item after the call to order is public speak. Do we have any members of the public who would like to speak? We have an iPhone that just joined us.
No name associated with it. Think it's your opportunity or you can speak at the end. You have to unmute yourself. I don't see that it looks like it's not muted. Okay, I guess hearing no public speak, let's move on to item three, which is the budget workshop. Item 3A is board and department presentations. Eric are you going to handle this for us basically do the run through?
I will several board of select members had asked to do it but they don't appear to have
for one reason or other been able to do that. Of course, we start our meetings on time. I'm just making that point. Ouch. Okay. So We do have Jeff Murray here. I thought that was Jeff. Maybe that's his iPhone.
So the the first thing I would like to ask is, is there anything particular that you want to review or focus on before I give essentially a general overview of the budget?
Anybody have anything particular for Eric? I know you'd asked that question last week, I know that you know I talked about wanting to understand kind of what the impact was in the five year plan and somebody else had asked for clarification and some things or potential clarification remember exactly what that was.
I just have a quick question. Shoot. How much in this budget year did did the town get for COVID relief? Did the town get anything or does it all go 100% go to school?
No it doesn't 100% go to the school. I think the town got a total of $31,000 in two total of which we have not spent very much of we have reimbursed. So we had asked various different departments within the town what their expenses related. So the only group that we've reimbursed that I know of is I know we've reimbursed the library for their COVID related expenses which was basically putting up the shielding and a few other things that they were required to do before they reopened under the governor's executive orders. Okay.
So we also spent about $4,000 out of that money on we put towards the combined finance office and equipping them getting the IT support for them to be able to function regardless of where which office they're in. That was one of the requests from the school that because they were took on the majority costs for acquisition of the software that they asked us to reimburse them for that, which I thought was reasonable and agreed to.
We don't think we're as a town that we're going to get anything this year, right?
It does not look like it. The only funding that was identified early on for the town was ESSER funding which is strictly school related not town related. Okay. And there's some question whether we're even going to get that. It sounds like maybe we're not. Okay.
So my suspicion is what we've got now is what we're going to get in terms of that for funding.
Eric, if I could say, we're going to need to find a storage area for all of the PPE and cleaning supplies that we have stacked up in our meeting room at the fire station. Most of this equipment will be received through our EMS system, and they made sure that us and the town were totally prepared. PPE, cleansers, all the everything's there. We're gonna need to find a place to stockpile that for the next pandemic. That never happens, but it's gonna have to all get to one central location. I'm sure the school has some also and maybe even a library that we're going to have to stockpile somewhere. Just just just, you know, think about it and it's a ways off before it happens, but we're going to to do something. Sure. Okay.
We'll put it in the new senior center building we're gonna build. Sure, you'll fill up the basement, why not? Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. So the first thing I wanted to say is that if you look at the budget in broad strokes, last year there was quite a bit of uncertainty because we were hiring a number of people and whenever you're hiring a bunch of new people, you know, didn't really know where we were going to end up with benefits for them because it obviously makes a big difference between whether they're single or they have a family plan or whatnot. So we ended up better off than we anticipated, you know, when we did the actual hiring. And we also were under on salary in part because the hiring process takes a while. So there's always a gap in time when you're not paying for an employee. So overall on salary and also I declined to advertise and hire a separate senior services coordinator which we built into that budget. I did that for two reasons. One, because of COVID we weren't really able to offer any programming and two, because I think it actually works pretty well keeping that assignment with the assistant assessor. It's a fair bit cheaper to the town, number one. And secondly, the times when you need the most support there are different than the times when the assessor's office is working the hardest. So there's periods of time when the assessor's office is 100% occupied and there's times when they have slack so it works well as a combo job there. The second thing is that with the combination of the finance office, the town is now really only required
to supply salary and benefits to one individual and even though Marina makes more than her predecessor at the assistant role considerably than Maureen Broncado, she also brings a lot more capability to the job number one and two now we're paying for one person instead of two. So that has been the savings that we're able to project through in this budget. And the other thing is that we were able to further reduce the expenses in the tax collector's office. Basically, we've kind of worked out, we're still in union negotiations but we're gonna, that office is gonna end up going down to average twenty six hours a week from thirty four. And there's gonna be a change in essentially a change in benefits and a change in hourly rate. But the net savings to the town is about $12,000 over what we were doing before. So that's fairly significant from the town's perspective. The cost of insurance was fairly flat, although that also includes the fact that Kerma has dropped their cyber liability policy. So yes, their costs didn't go up, but the benefit portion of it dropped. So that's something we may have to revisit at some point in the past. The bottom line is for the town's what I call the operating budget, which is the town budget not including school, the cost of education, and then not including what we are putting into capital funds is decreasing about 1.5%. And that's due to a number of factors. We were able to tighten up a few things, you know, and yeah yeah so so that's that's kind of the the town general operating budget. Where we did go up was in the capital funding
which is basically roads and bridges and culverts and physical infrastructure. As I talked fairly extensively last year, you know, our biggest single issue in the town is the just the fact that we've we kind of underfunded the physical infrastructure for a bunch of years and it's gotten to the point where it's it's you know it needs some serious attention. We're assuming we're pushing out the work we're doing and the intention is to kind of deal with it over the next fifteen plus years so it's not a big hit all at once. Although I know the Board of Selectmen does want to consider bonding for some of the projects to accelerate that. We did get a kind of final wrap up report on all the town culverts and kind of the bottom line with the culverts is we have five we need to address relatively quickly. Two we should probably be addressing as fast as we can fund and three more that definitely need to be done within, you know, say the next ten years. So that's kind of where we're looking in terms of culverts. Right now we have some money set aside for the Bunker Hill Bridge and we have some more money that we're proposing to put into that this year,
which should probably leave about $120,000 to fund the budget after this one. So that project in total should cost the town somewhere around $400,000 We'll have a better guess or we'll have a better estimate when the engineering firm has completed what they call the 30% portion of the bridge, which means the design is 30% complete and they have they they're ready to basically present and we're going to pick which way we go in terms of bridge design. And that has been delayed basically because the state didn't finish surveying before the it got too cold and since one of the things they have to do is kind of contour the riverbed which involves somebody standing in waders in the river with the survey poll they have elected to put that off till it's warmer which is a little unfortunate. We're moving ahead with some aspects of the design but we're definitely going to be a little delayed, but probably not so much that we can't anticipate a start date next spring. As far as the roadwork goes, I've been working with Jay on the presentation of kind of what we're planning on doing for roadwork. And we're keeping very much the same motif that we did last year other than you know we're just we're changing up the order we do things a little bit and you know we're trying to get a little more you know economical with it. I mean the reality is you know we're many millions of dollars in the hole on road work because we underfunded that for you know twenty plus years.
And so what we're looking at doing is that what kind of compromises can we make because some of our roads are bad enough that you know they're you know the potholes are substantial enough that that they're you know they're it affects their drivability. So we're looking at you know essentially chip sealing doing a lot of chip sealing but doing a lot of shimming and filling in some of the really bad depressions and kind of doing it systematically and then doing a section of the town each year with the goal of you know in the next four or five years at least getting all the major defects and then putting out nice cat by the way and then putting off the most reconstruction work because that's so expensive we're going to have to do just a very small amount of it each year just because the cost per mile to reconstruct a road is somewhere around $300 and we just don't have the funds to reconstruct a lot of what we need to. Other than that in terms of capital, we're the Board of Selectmen is proposing to fund the fire department at $75,000 for their capital equipment, which was less than what we originally requested, but there's currently about $33,000 in that account right now, so that is enough that we should be able to purchase everything that was on their priority list.
You know we'll run the account back down to zero but they'll have the stuff they need to to work with, for now.
What else? Eric, is Eric, me on that? You're talking about the fir the first three of the five on the priority list. Correct? Correct. Yeah. There's five items that the long term, and, the selectman decided to we asked for the number one, and the selectmen decided to fund one, two and three. But there's still four and five coming later on down the pike. That's what everybody should know. Right. But not in this current No. Follow on budgets. Right. Yeah.
Yeah. And and obviously we know there's gonna be a large ticket item at some point when they go to replace the older, you what do you call that big toolbox?
The older two trucks, the oldest two trucks, '91 and the '98.
Yeah so we know we are going to have a big expense for that coming down the road because one of the vehicles at this point is 30 years old and as you well know at some point it starts getting very hard to even get parts due to the age of the equipment. The other thing we're funding again this year is we're funding tree work. The Board of Selectmen's proposing to fund that at $50,000 We left about $15,000 in that account unspent last year just because we'd had so much storm damage we were afraid a really big windstorm you know would put us in the hole for a lot of emergency work.
So given that that's not probably an issue right now that gives us effectively about 60 or $65,000 to spend this year on tree work which gets us about the equivalent amount as we did last year. Last year we hired a company with basically what's called the grapple saw and we hired them because their cost per tree is their cost per day is much higher, but the equipment is so much more capable and so much faster than a bucket truck that you get three or four times more work for the same amount of dollars. I think conservatively, we still have 700 or 800 dead trees on the side of our roads that we need to address. With a little luck, we can get 400 to 500 of those taken care of this year and then keep trunking away. We've chosen because we had limited funds to not really take all of the ash, just take the ash that's already dead. But you can see a lot of the stuff even that we passed over the last year is already blonding pretty badly. So it's likely to be dead in the next year or two. So I would expect for at least the next three to four years, we're going to need a really
healthy capital budget for tree removal.
Did we have a lot of trees come down yesterday in town?
Yeah, yep. Okay. Yeah, I mean, we were fortunate in that. Well, I mean, were fortunate and unfortunate, roughly a little over a third of the town was without power due to various different and then more later because of an issue in Coventry. Yeah, we had lines broken in probably 10 spots, something like that, not including individual leaders to people's houses. Right, right. And we had, I think one, two, three, four public works cleared I think five you know full or partial road closures because of trees that weren't on the lines but had fallen in the road and were blocking the road. Not too bad, but you know, not nothing either.
It seems to be the wind is getting us now. So it's not snow, it's wind.
Well, we're very vulnerable because you know, we have so much dead stuff that's sitting there we're, you know, we're in a very vulnerable spot. So the other big thing that really affects this budget badly is the fact that the last three years or so we have spent down our unexpended fund balance surplus. And we like for instance, last year we put $780,000 in between unexpended fund balance and also by taking older funds that weren't really being used that had been created in the past and repurposing them and basically getting rid of cleaning out all the old funds that really, you know, weren't accomplishing any purpose. So that's even if we had a level budget today, that would still be $780,000 more that we had to raise through taxation if we had a perfectly flat budget. So that's probably one of the biggest things that's affecting us and it's actually more than $7.80 because if you remember at the end of the year you authorized us to transfer a 100,000 of the surplus from last year into this year's budget into the capital. So it's really $880,000 last year that we put in the budget that we don't have available for this year. And we can talk transfer a little bit, but we're not going to go anywhere near covering that gap. So those are kind of the big overall highlights. The town portion of the budget is about 27% of overall taxation. The remainder is the school spending. So that's kind of where we're at.
Do any of you have like specific questions or how do you want to approach
reviewing this? I have one Eric. Sure. Know I brought it up before. Do we do we have a specific grant writer in town hall or is that being done by whoever gets up to picks up the pen
I mean you know most of the big ones we've gotten I've written
you know Well the reason I reason I ask is I mean the, expanding our fund balance, works both ways. I myself when I was fire chief, Chief Coble and now Chief Mike have, you know, every year we put in for fire act grants and any, fire, DEEP grants, things like that. And we get denied, mainly these background under my tenure because the town had such a large fund balance. They look at it. They look at every bit of funding the town has. So spending down the fund balance actually is a plus for us to apply for grants. And I don't know if you know, my neighbor, Suzanne Hicey Maynard. She is a retired, grant writer for Oak Hill. Her and her husband both worked at Oak Hill. He was a, I think he, I think he taught art or something there, but, they both were, retired employees from that Oak Hill organization, very large. And she was the, she retired as the grant writer and she has offered her services. She lives right around the street here on Lake Road. Her husband Roger has since passed due to cancer, but she has offered her services before. She actually looked at a couple grants for us at the fire station. Again, getting turned down because of the town's fund balance was
so large at the time. She I mean, if someone was to reach out to her, I think she would probably donate her services because she wouldn't take anything from us. Even if we did get the grant, you know, we wanted to pay her a certain percentage or something. She refused, of course. But she did it for a living for Oak Hill. So, that's just so maybe somebody with the town could reach out to. And she likes to be getting involved in the town and, you know, if anything she could do, I'm sure she would help. Amanda knows her well, so she could even work with her, but, her name is Suzanne Hisey Maynard and she's awesome. That's all I got to say about grants. We
need to apply for grants. There is a bunch out there, especially now. We just need somebody to go after them. I'm not saying for you or anybody else that's tied up with their regular jobs, but we need a specific grant writer. And even if we had to pay them a percentage of what they got for grants, think personally it's well worth it. Just a thought.
Can I just throw one thing in there? I agree that we want to get every grant we can get just with respect to the fund balance. I mean, years now, I've been on this board for a while. And when I was first on this board, we had a fund balance of something like 22% of the town budget. And that was a target on our back. And we understood that. And there's a reason why we accepted funding a bunch of things through our fund balance, our unassigned fund balance and paying that down to get to more or less 10%, which is what the state target is.
And now we shouldn't have the target on our back because we should be right in line with what the state says we ought to have. The problem is, and I had this exact conversation at a democratic town committee meeting recently, is that we can't keep doing that. We're now at the point where we've spent it down. Now at the point where we've hit. Mean, correct me if I'm wrong, Eric, but 11%, something like that. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. We're done with that. Now oh, Mark, your cat's awesome. Anyway, we need to deal with it through taxation or or grant funding or something else, but we cannot keep pulling continually.
No, I mean Fund balance. Clearly we spent that down and that just that option is not really available to us. I just wanna throw that out there.
Mean, like it's great. And if we have somebody in town who could help us get more grants, that's fantastic. But just from the standpoint of kind of how that conversation started, it had to do with our fund balance and using it to defray things. And I'm just saying, like, we're kind of at the end of the road there. Sure. I'm done. I'm good.
Yeah, just I'm not going to extend this because I think we need we need to move on. But, you know, Eric, you said one thing that's hurting us. Well, the other way to look at it is one thing that allowed us to. Avoid raising taxation more over the last. Absolutely but the usage of the fund balance, otherwise that would have happened. So Pointing it out, looking at it from the other end, that's a likely scenario.
Okay. Yeah, no, totally agree with that. And I think we're getting closer each year to what we actually need to fund to run the town properly, you know, would be what, you know, and we're still running pretty frugally. I mean, if you look what we actually expense for the town hall, you know, we're still running a pretty lean and mean operation overall. Are there always areas where you can improve and cut costs? Sure. Yeah. So I guess my question is, I've given you all the written material and the Excel spreadsheet. What else do you want to review or you know what do you want to see? Do you want to go through it line by line or how do you want to approach the town's budget?
I think we're going to have to go through it at some point line by line. It doesn't necessarily need to be in meeting. Know that I haven't had an opportunity to do so. Your report's fairly thorough, definitely read through that and looked at it.
I mean, I've had a chance to go through everything line by line. Spent a lot of time over the weekend and this week going through it and there's not a whole lot of places to find some money except in the transfer section, the transfers into the funds.
Right. I mean, in truth, that is, you know, that's the only place where there's any been any growth, you know, in this budget. And that obviously it's somewhat elastic, you know, and I'll give you like the board and selectmen and I had a long conversation about what we really needed to fund for the town building maintenance funds. And I can tell you, I mean, I could run down 2 or $300,000 worth of projects I would like to do at some point. And I can tell you what, you know, what I think right now at this very time, the biggest priorities are, but the way I look at it is you tell me what I can you know what I have available and I'll come back to you with a wish list of what I think is most appropriate.
You know if I get $45,000 that's what I'll spend. You know, if I had more, that's what I would spend. If I had less, that's what I would have spent. You know, and road works the same way, that's probably, you know, if you really think about it, our biggest capital asset in this town is our road network. Combined between roads and bridges and culverts, there's somewhere about $30,000,000 worth of stuff that the town owns that allows people to drive around and get from point A to point B. Of that, just on the roadwork portion alone, we're about $4,000,000 in the hole. So the question is really how much can we get in any given year, and what parts of that can we tackle? And the other thing is what will people accept? When I say that because we're switching to more and more ship seal and lower cost preservation techniques, because we just flat out don't have the budget to really repave very much. So we're going into this realizing that in the end we're not gonna have beautiful roads but we're gonna try to keep the roads serviceable and get to kind of like a uniformly serviceable road with a chip seal surface.
Again, that's a budget where it's a lot of money and the same thing with bridges and culverts. I mean, we're talking about right now funding bridges and culverts at about $220,000 So to put it in perspective, more than likely Bunker Hill Road bridge is going to be the town is going to be out of pocket about $400,000 to do that. The first culvert we're likely to address is on Hutchinson Road. That one should be somewhere around $200,000 And the one after that is going to be the one on Lake Road by Basola. And that one's probably somewhere around a $600,000 project. We will apply for state funding for that. We should be able to get basically 50% of the cost reimbursed from the state. And after that, there's three more waiting to do. And we got two more small bridges that I'm in the process of picking an engineering form to evaluate because our town engineers looked at them both and said, yeah they got problems
but I'm not insured enough to tell you to put any kind of stamp or guarantee on this bridge. So, I mean, again, that's funding where you can decrease it, but that just decreases the rate at which we can actually go after some of these problems. And I'll be frank with you that my goal is simply to be able to replace bridges and culverts before the state closes them and we can't drive over them anymore. That's my goal to stay ahead of state closure. I think we'll be able to do that on Bunker Hill. You know that's still that was downgraded last year you know to a three. It's a scale you know from one to nine. But the bridge inspector for that said if we had another sinkhole appear in that they would probably go through and either put a weight restriction on it or close it completely. So hopefully that doesn't happen in the next year and we start the replacement before we actually lose the ability to drive over it. And that's really my goal. I mean, it's not to do it for aesthetics. It's just to do it, get these things before they fail to the point where we can't drive over them anymore. So not a lot of fluff there. It's a lot of money, but it's money we need to spend.
The money that we're putting aside for the road improvement fund at 300,000. Correct. Is that 300,000 an annual number that we need to fit into our taxation budget every year because that's just going to keep us status quo. It's not going to get us. We're not getting ahead of the game with that. Correct.
So if you look at it objectively, a really good rule of thumb is to plan on about $10,000 per centerline mile per year to keep your road network constant in Connecticut based on our cost of roads. Those are for rural roads much less than the state. The state uses a number about 10 times that high per lane for a highway but a local road with less traffic that's about the number you need to stay stable. So every year we're going to need between the money we get from the state in town aid road and the money we put into town into road work. We need to come up with a number somewhere around 300 or $340,000
somewhere in that range is what the break even point is and everything we can put in above that long term will go towards improving the quality of our roads. This year we have one advantage and that is we were able to get a steep grant which we're using towards reconstructing a section, two sections of road. One, the first section of Long Hill and the first section of Shawty Mill. So we were able to get about $130,000 in additional state aid for that one. So this year all total, we're looking at spending somewhere around 530,000. So with a little luck, we're going to be gaining on the roadwork this year, which is a nice change. And we were able to gain a little bit last year. What we're doing is we're using a company in a program called StreetScan, which does basically an automated road evaluation with the plan to do that every, reevaluate the roads every three to four years, just to make sure that what we're doing is really effective and is increasing the overall road quality. What I would say is that we're going to succeed but we're going to succeed by giving up on
essentially really smooth road surfaces and we're going to accept a chip sealed surface as kind of the default road surface in town which is not completely popular. Definitely got some negative feedback from people who walk dogs on the road. Definitely got some people feedback from kids, you know from people whose kids like to skateboard because often that's too rough a surface to really skateboard on. You know so it's not ideal but it will be serviceable. And given the budget constraints that we have, I think we're really targeting serviceability, not perfection, if that makes sense. Any other general questions for Eric on this.
I just have one other question. We're doing an increase in funding into the Public Works Equipment Fund from 55 to 110. Correct? Yes. Yes except that we supplement All right we spent that money already right?
No we haven't spent the 110 we're putting in. Okay. But we've certainly wiped out everything that we put in up to this That fund balance will be basically zero in a couple of days.
And that's because of the sweeper and the truck we just bought right? Correct. Correct.
Yeah, so we're basically wiping that fund balance down to zero. In fact, we're taking money out of Town Ape Road to make up the difference because we don't have enough in there to actually buy what we need right now to replace the truck. Okay.
The other thing Diane you had asked me to do at the last meeting was to bring the year to date expended column in the budget up to what we've actually spent. I pawned that off on Marina. I have a copy to give you. I'll email it all to you. I would have given it to you before the meeting but I just got it at like four this evening. So that updates the year to date expended. The only thing I would say though is that this is a really weird year because of COVID, you know and there's a few things that you know we've had to spend a lot more on but there's a lot of things we just you know like I mean the senior programming we really just haven't done any mean, we've spent almost nothing on that budget. Same thing with the rec commission stuff. We really just, there's a lot of areas where we just can't spend the money right now because we're not allowed to. So I carefully looked at areas and looked at not only our current expenditure but what were previous years
when we weren't really operating in that mode.
And one of the things I would like to know, know it's going be hard to pinpoint it down before we have to improve this budget and everything, but get as close as we can on year to date to see if we have any excess money we haven't spent this year so we can kind of figure out how we're gonna end up at the end of the year to see if there's any money.
We're going to be, yeah, I mean, I would say conservatively, we're gonna have at least $100,000 in surplus at the end of the year. Just because we're gonna be considerably under in the benefits category, that's one spot we're gonna have a lot of money. We also, because the Board of Ed ate the cost for paying for the software admins transition, we still have that whole fund, that whole allotment untouched which is $30,000 and there's and then we have the coronavirus relief money which we haven't really touched there's at least $20,000 in that so I would say conservatively we're going to underspend this budget in total by at least $100,000 and probably more than that but there's a bunch of expenses that we just can't really fully forecast right now.
So it's up to us if we want to decide to apply unexpended funds against this budget going forward.
Yes. So there is some excess and unexpended fund balance because we didn't transfer 100 we didn't get all the way down to just 10% at the end of last year because again, because we didn't really have a finalized audit. So we know without doing the same thing we did last year, which was at the end of the fiscal year transfer into the funds, the capital funds to get rid of the excess money, not get rid of, but to repurpose the excess money. We can probably do that this year. Exactly how much, I don't know, but I would be comfortable saying that there's probably about a 100,000 that could be repurposed at the end of the year. You know again depends somewhat do we have any late snow events because that can chew up money pretty fast. We definitely have some money left in the plow budget right now. We've only expended about $45,000 in salt and we still have some to go in labor you know and in overtime for that budget. So there are definitely areas where you know we're considerably under. Yeah if that answers your question. I think we certainly could do what we did last year which is transfer money in at the end of the year to the the funds. If I were to pick a fund it would be probably bridge and culvert because that's where we're you know that to me is the sketchiest in terms of being able to fund culvert work.
I'm shocked that you said that shocked. I think that one's pretty clear. Anybody. You look through the detail on this town budget. I mean there's some big variations, but when you look at it as Eric I think it kind of explained in one of the previous meetings, a lot of the variations department to department is moving. The benefits out of the benefits category and then into the specific department so that we can see hey you know what is our building department actually costing us what is our you know. Public works department actually costing us? Not just the salaries, but also the benefits. There's some fluctuations there. They seem to be offset pretty straightforwardly. There aren't a whole lot of variances honestly beyond that. These that I see flagged as things that I would be concerned about.
Yes, and if you all want the full personnel cost breakdown, I can certainly provide that if you want all the exact salary data for employees. You know, I don't generally share that because you know it's tied to individuals and but it is FOIA able information so I will if you want it,
can certainly email that to you also. Well, there's not much we can do with that because it's really salary benefits and whatever we're giving people for a raise this year and they have to have some kind of increase this year. There's nothing. If you've already cut the positions that we didn't decided not to fill and things like that.
Yeah, so the one thing I would say along that line is the one thing that's definitely in this budget that falls in your realm exclusively is the salary increase for the town clerk and the salary increases for the registrars. And the reason is that by charter, the board of selectmen set the salary for employees other than those that are elected. So the town clerk and the registrar are both elected positions. So that's solely your discretion as the Board of Finance. It's murkier in terms of who gets to choose for the other town employees because that's technically wages and benefits are
by charter set by the Board of Selectmen. I'm not sure what would happen if you decided to overrule that, but maybe you could. But certainly for both the registrar's office and the town clerk, that is set by you. The board of selectmen has made a recommendation in both those cases but the final decision is up to you.
Eric, since I'm not looking at the spreadsheet at the moment. Okay. How much money were you talking about there? For those two positions? Not a lot. Know rounding It's not a lot. And the registrar is basically Increased workload, right? I mean Yeah, that's
straight work. I would actually bet that probably WALL E right now is overall probably making minimum wage. You look at the number of hours it takes to actually do the job because the state is pretty radically up to the responsibility for that office in the last twelve months. And it's somewhat unclear whether it's gonna stay at that same level, but certainly there's a lot of push from the state to consider or to keep pushing absentee balloting and some of the things that really increase. And I can tell you the town clerk this election season was in here basically seven days a week. And it was enough that we had to hire her temporary assistant
for about a month and a half because she just physically wasn't able to process all the stuff that needed to come out of her office. So I think in the town's clerk's case, what she asked for was a 6% raise and the board of selectmen agreed to her rationale for it but it's kind of ultimately it's up to you whether you think that's appropriate or not and you can certainly bring her in at one of the meetings and you know have her justify that if you so choose.
I guess what I'm getting at is how that translates to our overall budget. I mean, you know, the town budget as you mentioned was what 27% you said? Yeah, the town budget's 27% of the total budget.
Okay, so we have this particular line item with a particular salary line going up 6% and the overall impact of that obviously is a fraction. When's the last time we gave a raise to that position?
She did get a raise the year before. I think last year we granted 2.5% raises to employees overall. I think there have been some significant periods where the town operated in austerity when none of the employees got raises for a bunch of years. That's true. Her salary objectively is still fairly low compared to her peers and she has been the town clerk for twenty one or so years. It's not like we're in in many ways blessed that we have a good town clerk but you know 6% is still 6%.
Right. You know it's up to you to decide whether that's reasonable or not. Yeah that's the reason I ask is that six percent's a little eye popping in one year but if we have a history of going back you know it's like with the teachers you know you have flat budget for three years and then you do a big increase okay but if you know we did an increase last year you said two and a half percent something like that okay that's basically the raise I got this year okay great that's fine I have no problem with two and a half percent raise. 6% raise is clearly something where you're trying to backfill where you did some, you know, you didn't,
The idea is you didn't pay her enough before or extraordinary circumstances and granted cove it is that.
Well, I think, I think the this did get a lot of time, I think, the board of selectman meeting and discussion and there was pretty seem to be fairly unanimous. I don't want to say unanimous that may be a little strong but really good support for for such increase, given the workload and kind of what she's had to do. Okay. So we're talking $2,800 which really.
It's a rounding error day and I agree, I do, I agree. But it's not compared to school budget. Yeah but
you know it's it's our duty to review these things so there's. Yes, a fair question.
Personally, I really don't begrudge it I'm just saying we know that we're under the gun that we're pinching every single penny because we're staring down yeah look if we all if we approve everything what did you say Eric was 7.6% or something like that tax increase yeah which is a lot Which is you know, flatly impressive. As
presented so far, it's a 7.58% increase in the mill rate. Right, so 7.6%,
I was rounding, but yes. Seven Yeah. Point 6% is easily the highest increase this town would incur since I lived. I bought this house, I bought my house in 2007, go me, great timing. Anyway but seriously we all have to understand right we have to somehow get that number down a bit if we think it's going to pass. Well we did 1.76% last year Jeremy there's no way.
7.5 whatever it is 7.6 whatever. Look I am not allergic to public spending this is not my issue. My issue is I know this town and I also know that in one year to go that big a jump, that's dramatic and in any town that would be contentious, in our town I think it's flatly unpassable. So therefore, and since our purview here is to produce a budget is not only fiscally responsible and deals with the things the town needs to deal with. We have to present something that's passable But we're in a position unfortunately where frankly 27% of the town budget is actually under our control
that's strictly true because we do have some say over the Andover elementary school budget. Okay we have okay fair Mark.
The town budget is more directly under you know right we are clearly
we have clear control of town budget being 27 and the town budget being pretty lean, I mean we've hacked and slashed this thing for years, this thing I mean sure could we cut a few $100 here or there yes we can we've done this I remember doing it back when Adrian was on the board and we sat here and we went through every line and we stripped out $200 here and $300 there and we tallied it and we ultimately stripped out a few thousand bucks of the town budget and of course as against the ed budget it does almost nothing so to me I mean I would love to see if we if anybody here has a clear objection to anything that is in the town budget and you know full well that it's wrong by all means but where do we go? The reality is this is already lean where do we cut?
I mean any significant cuts would have to be out of the capital budget. Right, it's just enough funds
because you're not really gonna practically make substantive cuts to the operating budget. The operating budget is like this much, exactly. Right, and in truth, we've made the cuts we've made so far have essentially limited employee hours and we're basically the cuts now are limiting services to tax payers and you know maybe that is a discussion we have and you know maybe long term we end up with the town hall open less hours you know and maybe that's a solution. I mean, there's never, it's never impossible to cut budgets. You can always cut things. The question just becomes what level of service do you want to provide you know and are you willing to deal with the repercussions for you know lowering services and is it appropriate?
Right and this brings me back to the old issue that is long dead with the tripper you know we proposed cutting it people didn't want to cut it okay Right. But that was a significant line item. It remains that. I mean, depending on who we get for a permanent trooper, whatever. Yep. At the end of the day, the the tech wanted that service. However you want to define that service, they wanted that service and they will only pay for it fine. So you know the same deal with the town hall. Do we want to pay for the town hall but only have it open Monday through Thursday right now we have what half day Fridays Eric am I right? We're closed Fridays. You closed Fridays, god I forgot okay yeah there you go but you could could further reduce.
You can, you can and like for instance we have given up on having evening coverage Monday nights in the building department just because I tried it for a couple months to see whether I could get away with it and not too many people complained. So I said, fine, we won't fill that, you know, and we're going through that now with the tax collector's office. So in the non collection months she'll be there three days a week instead of four. And there are some cases we can do that, but there's limits obviously. And you also have to accept the fact that we have to attract and retain staff. And at some point you make conditions, and let's be perfectly honest, our turnover the last few years has been very high. I mean, if you think about the employees in the town hall that have been here for say four years, you have Carol Lee, you have Roberta Dougherty, and that's it for the full time staff. Everybody else has been here less than that because we're, it's not a slam dunk that Andover is necessarily a place you want to,
you work. So I think we have to be a little careful because I can tell you that there've been, we're low enough on the salary scale that I've had positions where I've hired the fourth person I've asked to take the job because the first three wouldn't take the offer. So it's not like we're living high on the hog. Are there places to cut? Sure. But now the cuts hurt and it's just the question of what. If you're at the point where you have to do it then you do it but if you don't you don't that's my take on it.
Agreed. I mean all those points are the things that were rallying around my brain when I think about how we square the circle How we get to a budget that can pass. That incorporates. The school budgets we're getting. And the town budget which has no slack at all. I mean, I know I've been on this board long enough to nowhere. There's almost no slack there at all. Almost. I'm sure we can cut a few $100. That's not the point.
Eric, is there any funding for the senior senior center here? I mean, I'm not sure I could log in some of the transfers in these buildings. We have $4.50 in the capital fund, right? Yes. So I think we had 50,000 going in this budget multi use building yeah yeah $9.00 7 okay okay yeah because I remember that being $4.50 last
Right. We spent out of the we had put $4.50 in it. We spent about $3,000 on furniture for the community room to kind of give the seniors some place to call home until such time as a new facility comes up.
Okay. It So the building committees, the senior center building committee is going to come to you guys for money this year in this budget year to do conceptual drawings. We need to take money from that and replace it. We're not because that building is going to cost well over $1,000,000.
We'll either have to bond it or we'll have to find other money for it. Right so we'll have to figure out. Because we had about half a mill maybe in in fund balance for it right
yeah we've got 450,000 currently 447,000 the idea was to add 50,000 in this budget but assume that we were going to spend a significant chunk of that on the architectural renderings to try to bring it in preliminary design to bring back to the people and see whether what community support is there.
Kurt I think you were starting to say something I didn't catch what you said. No I was just I was going to ask Diane they're also talking about hiring architect, right, to do these drawings and things like that? Right, so the first step we wanted to hire somebody
just do these conceptual drawings and not spend a lot of money so we can get buy in from the town before we, you know, we don't want to go to full engineer drawings and spend tons of money and have it get voted down. Do know what So we need to get some kind of concept drawings put together so we have something to talk about and something to put out for, you know, referendum or vote or whatever, town meeting, whatever. Makes sense. Yeah. All right, thanks.
I know I've mentioned this before and I still personally think, I mean, last meeting with the school superintendent, we talked about maybe a 1 mill a year increase for capital spending. We've been kicking around a bond issue. Always thought that the town needs a bond issue and is ripe for a long term bond issue right now to take care of all this cap equipment, including the seniorcommunity center. The Board of Selectmen, since they've taken over, this Board of Finance, I feel since they've been taking over, they really got the message out on how bad this town was left. And the present Board of Selectmen and this Board of Finance has inherited forty years of neglect. I've been here the sixty seven years that, you know, that I am. And basically, it's always break. I'll go back to Gene Gasper, administration. You know, they did what they had to do to keep the roads passable, whether it be oiling and sanding and plowing and stuff like that. They were driving the oldest trucks and I mean, we had the oldest fire trucks in the old firehouse that was our beautiful senior center. And still, I still think we could blow it up. But you know, I really think that there's there's enough transparency now between the Board of Selectmen, between the Board of Finance, and even the school board, and RAM, that the townspeople know that we're in bind. And the only way out, I feel, is a long term bond issue. We took a twenty year note on the fire station back in nineteen
eighty eight-eighty nine. We actually, the committee hired a banker from, at that time, I think it was Connecticut Bank and Trust, and she researched, the best rates possible to get us, you know, funding on a twenty year note, which was I think paid off probably three years ago, Eric. I'm not sure the fire station bond three, four years ago. But, it really was we had it figured out where it cost the, every taxpayer in town, dollars 2.25 a month in their taxes to fund this fire station next door for twenty years. That's how fine tuned we did note. That was on $2,500,000 that we had approved. So just my thoughts. I think the town's ready for a long term bond issue. We can periodically pick off all of these, especially the road projects. I mean, they're the worst by far. They're the worst and the seniors have been waiting forty plus years for a decent facility to meet in. I think the seniors are going to have to get something. Yes, they do. I think that they should be put on a priority list, Diane, as far as I'm concerned,
you know, first and foremost, and the roads come after them, far as I'm concerned. But that will leave it up to the townspeople. But I think the majority of the townspeople know how bad as you know how bad this town was left to the present board of selectmen and its present board of finance, and I'll be
quiet now so Rob no worries I just wanted to say with respect to bonding I mean I'm of two months on the one hand we're in a low interest rate environment so if we're going to bond this is perhaps the best time to do it we're in a very low interest rate environment, I don't know what exactly interest rate we could get, I could just think about what mortgage rate I could get and compare it to Kurt you mentioned late 80s. I remember my brother regaling me with tales of what his mortgage was in the late 80s. His percentage you know multiples of what I'm paying now right. Okay so there's that on the flip side that creates a long term payment obligation where we're paying money not the principal we're paying the interest obviously, I mean, everybody knows this when you take out a loan, you're gonna pay much more ultimately than the amount of the loan over time.
Course that depends on your terms, right? Just how aggressive we get with that. Okay,
fair point. I'm just saying like, the school bond that we just recently paid off, think Eric, are we done with the school bond? No. One
more year? We got one more year. One more year. So close. Do we have to budget for it next year too?
90 ks maybe. 90 ks a year. We're so close right? This is the last year. Alright awesome. Okay. But just as an example I mean you know one of the things we've done so well in this town I mean though we have neglected many things we've also been able to just straight up buy things and not pay interest costs. If we bond things, if we get in that mode, know obviously we're gonna pay interest costs and we're gonna increase our overall cost for any given project and I'm not against it again like I said we're in a low interest rate environment it's actually a pretty good time to buy debt, to do a bond, to get a loan, it's a good time to do that overall, I mean over the last thirty years or forty years or whatever basically the course of my adult lifetime, this is about the best time you could ever take a loan out. So I'm not against it, I'm just saying that what we do ultimately is we add to our kind of operating expenses or ongoing expenses and we still have the fundamental problem where our taxation level is this, our expenditure levels here, we've been plugging it now for two, three years, I won't say with fund balance and we can't do it anymore. We still have that fundamental problem.
Rob, I think you're right to point out that Any, any, any taking on debt is not just picking the can down the road a little bit which I'm not in favor of women, if not necessary,
it does have the real cost to it as well. Yeah, that's just that's all I'm trying to say I don't want to belabor it. I'm done. I think we just have to make sure that we're not
bonding money that should be funded with taxes. The regular maintenance of the roads has gotta be built into the budget every year. Operating budget versus Gotta do more. Completely agree with you. More project oriented,
you know, the Right. Frequent things. Right. We we have that distinction between capital and Right. Operate.
Right and I want to be very clear I would not be in favor of bonding things you know if you're taking out a twenty year bond you don't bond for anything that doesn't last at least thirty to fifty years you know you bond for buildings and you bond for bridges and culverts because those are items with you know sixty to one hundred plus year lifespans and that's a reasonable thing to do You know you don't bond for you know road work because by the time you're still paying off the bond then you need to go back and work on the road again. Right,
you're right Eric, would be the firehouse was a plan for a fifty year building. You know, we've already been there well over twenty. We're only we're pushing thirty years already next door. So,
you know Well, you're right. If if you look at the facilities the town owns, the town to my knowledge has not yet ever given up a building that it's owned. I mean public works, you know, is more than 150 years old. That structure dates back to 1850 or a good portion of it. We're still using the old town hall which was eighteen something. Know, yeah
the old firehouse, you know we acquired used for like you know 1,500 you know back in I want to say 1927 and then the fire department membership rebuilt the building and expanded It it about was back its general store.
So, I mean, the one thing I wanna say is that as we get into building buildings and anything we build the senior center, you know, we live with the repercussions of our decisions, you know, for the next hundred years. And we need to think about that very carefully when we build it because our grandkids' grandkids, you know, are gonna be using that building. You know, we've got to spend the money to do it right because we don't really turn stuff over. The school is the same way. School, the oldest parts of that school date back to 1947 I think, something like that and it's still in use.
Some good discussion. It's not necessarily going to have a huge impact on this year's budget but I do think it's worth bringing these up talking about them. Personal belief is that you may well need to do the bonding to get anything done in terms of something like the senior Center. But I'm also with Diane and I think that there needs to be a recognition that you know we can't just kick the can down the road entirely so there needs to be a mix of funding from current taxation revenue sources and fund balances effectively. And then potentially bonding in order to get that done. So just kind of my point of view right now, looking at it from this side. Can I ask a question about the health director? Go ahead, Louise.
Just wondering what the health director actually does in town.
So the health director, and it's kind of a misnomer, but that's what we pay the Eastern Highlands Health District globally for their services. So that's everything dealing with COVID, that's dealing with school safety, that's dealing with the health department does the inspections on septic systems, the site plan review for any developments, monitors everything from restaurants to liquor stores to hair salons. So they have a pretty wide ranging responsibility. At one time, we had kind of done all that internally. We had a sanitarian and then we just farmed out. We had a physician that worked a couple hours a year for the town and we farmed out some of the other responsibilities. But overall, we've gotten a lot more professionalism out of being part of a health district.
And isn't this if I remember correctly isn't this a mandated roles that we need to be filled by the town?
Yes, a lot of the items are town requirements. Like for instance, if we had any hair salons, we would be required to do semi annual inspections of hair salons. Well, you know, that kind of stuff does not scale down to a town our size. So a municipality like Willamantic can get away with its own internal health district and a larger town does but most of Connecticut utilizes regional health districts.
So we couldn't really regionalize that particular position? It has to be town related?
Well, we are regionalizing it. We just basically write a check to the health district three or four times a year to get all those services rolled in. All right.
And we do have oversight on that. I am actually on the board of directors for the Eastern Highlands Health District as Andover's administrator. So I sit in on everything from their planning sessions to their budget sessions.
Eric used to have a regular medical doctor as our health director appointed each year by the state board of selectmen? Yes,
we did have our own standalone but it's more than that because your physician's not going out inspecting septic systems. He's not going out and looking at hair salons. So you actually need about like probably five or six different individuals to take on different roles within that and what the health district does is basically they've got one physician that covers the whole health district you know and then they have you know all the sanitarians and you know then they have you know they have all the the subsets but it's not like they have one assigned to each town. You know one person can you know covers multiple things. You know and honestly the health department, Eastern Highlands Health Department is about fiftyfifty funded by the towns and about fiftyfifty funded through state and federal grants. So overall given the level of service that we get in the state requirements I think that's a reasonable expense. Mark you're muted.
Any other general general questions or specific questions for Eric? Ideas or thoughts? I don't want to keep it rolling. I think it's been said, but you know it seems to me like other than reducing services there's not a lot of extra in here other than the funds. We could opt out of funding some of these long term capital projects or other projects, but we all know that's come to bite us already. I think some of the sentiments of the residents of Andover have been made pretty clear over the last few years that I've been involved. So that's something I don't think we would take on lately.
I guess my thought, Mark is, do we want to set a target that we want to hit for the bud in terms of a tax tax increase and then we can work towards it. You know we're at 7.6% right now right.
Let me let me I think the 7.6 is the mill rate change. Think Eric, I'm not sure it actually was that spelled out and you think I think the mill rate increase that you were talking about given the current proposed budgets from RAM AES and the town after the grand list increase was is like right about 7.0%. Does that sound about right? Point 58%. Okay.
So I mean that's just where I'm you know in terms of making this getting us to a point we can bring a budget to town you know I'm thinking about where do we want to end up? What do we think is a reasonable increase that we can bring to the town? I mean I think everybody understands here that we're not going to the town with a flat budget that's obviously not happening. So what is the level we think we can try to hit and then how do we get there? That's all I'm just trying to think about it practically. You know, in the past we've had these small increases these these 1%, 2% kind of things or flat budgets and now we're looking at seven and a half or whatever 7.6. So how do we get to a budget level that we can live with that we think is responsible that takes care of the town and at the same time as possible, what's the number we need to hit and then we can kind of go from there. I know it's arbitrary.
I was playing around with some numbers today. So if we kind of, and I was looking at last year it was 1.76% increase in the mill rate. So if we doubled that and tried to cap it at 4% that still brings our mill rate up to like 37.03. Do you know what mean? Somewhere around there. It's still going to be a significant increase in the mill rate. Do you know what I mean? And I think if I look at that to get to 4%, whatever we're talking $300,000 at least trying to find that kind of money.
Right, so there's an example. Right, exactly. So, you know, I think to myself, my gut, my gut and my gut can lie. My gut is we have to get under five.
Under 5% increase you mean and I was kind of thinking okay if we doubled what we did last year we'd be up four we can't be more than five I agree with you I don't think.
But let's also keep in mind what last year was not last year was was not an ordinary year. No, no absolutely would have increased taxes more last year, I think we would have recommended a significant mill rate increase had this situation different, you know we took into account the fact that the pandemic was in full swing or not even in full swing it, but we was there was a risk that. We saw it coming yeah. We planned for it appropriately. We had to make the decision as a board of finance, you know I certainly was much more restrained in terms of the spending, I would have been comfortable with it, I would have been much more comfortable putting a higher amount out front of the town. But we felt like we couldn't do that. And we all I think at the time
anticipated that we would be playing a little catch up this year. Yeah, I'm not I would have expected us to hit 4% just as 4.5% as a matter of course last year to make up for the deficiencies that we have seen and talked about for the last twenty years, whether the residents would have accepted that or not would have had to be determined by the vote. My personal feeling is that we're even further back. Know now because of what we had to do last year and it was the right thing to do. It was the right thing to do. Think we as a board finance we're not, you know we're not in a position to make that decision when when the House people didn't get a chance to vote, due to the pandemic so. Oh, I agree. Want to take last year too much as a baseline. But I do believe that we have to take into account that there have to be some limits on what people are going to be willing to stomach.
Yes. I don't know this because I was interested in trying to look at trends and so in 2021 we did 1.76. Don't know the numbers for '18 and '19 and '19 and '20. If you go back another last three years, what has been our percentage increase it would be a good baseline to have to show okay before COVID we did these months, COVID hit this year as far as even as a selling point we were pretty were flat. There were no increase. My recollection
is that we had almost no tax increases until recently. Linda, you can you're the other long standing member you can chime in but my recollection is that for a long time and to our detriment I think we kept it really flat.
We did everybody's goal seemed to be we we can't raise the mill rate Right. Maybe by point five and I'm the cheapest person I know and even a couple of meetings I'd say, you know, we can't keep doing this, you know, your home, you can't just stop fixing the furnace it's, you know, wind up with a bigger bill. It's
it's been going on a long time. That's correct and then we also have to recognize this day and we've acclimated the town to this up until recently to this idea that every budget cycle we we have a zero to 1% increase kind of thing. And if we come out of the box with seven and a half, it's his dramatic departure. I completely agree that we have a backlog. We have to deal with it. And I'm personally not allergic to spending when it's called for. I'm totally for it. I'm just saying in terms of getting a budget passed, we have to think about it and honestly I believe that 7.6% is flatly unpassable. That's just my take. So we have to somehow get from that to what we think is a reasonable budget that we can take the town. That's all. I don't think this is anything I'm not saying I'm saying anything crazy here. We have to find a way towards something that we think we can bring to the town that will pass pass that time meeting. Assuming we're having town meeting this time or last
year was unusual. We as Mark said, we did something that we are not accustomed to doing and we were very reluctant to raise taxes because we were doing something unilaterally as a board which is not what we're supposed to do. It was we were in a weird situation this year seems more normal and so if we're going through the normal process then the question is okay how do we get a town meeting to approve a budget, send it to referendum and pass that budget. Budget. That's all.
Still to go from seven, what seven and a half is that we're up down to five. That's still a lot of big stuff. So we cut to get to get to that number is a big chunk of money and there's not a whole lot of money around.
Correct. And this is kind of my point. Like even if we want to target 5% which is the biggest tax increase by far since I've been in this town since '7 that I moved in. I don't think five percent has been even approached since I've been here in a given annual budget. I will go to bat for a budget that we think is the right answer and we think has to be done. But I want to be sure that we've done everything we can do before we do that and then if we are if that's the case I will sit up and tell me I will defend it with everything I've got.
It's all I'm saying. It's one thing for us to sit here and we've been on the board for ages to sit here and know that the infrastructure is going, we have to work on it. We have to take care of things. And it's another thing to go to the town and say we want to increase the mill rate by whatever. Even if people intellectually know it. I don't think they're going to want to do it.
Which is why we have to make the case. That's why we have to come to a point where as a board. I feel honestly, I feel like we have to get to a point where as a board. We agree broadly whether it's seven zero or six to one or whatever we have to get to the point where we really buy into our own budget and we can try to sell it because I think it's clear at this point no matter what we do we're bringing a significant tax increase to this town right no matter what we do, no matter how many cuts we try to make in a town budget or the capital budget, we're still going in with a significant taxing and we're going to have to sell that we're going have to convince people that it's the right call.
So, and some of the board of select my meetings they had been talking about the concept of. A dedicated one mill ten year finite increase just to fund this infrastructure stuff we have to do and selling a concept like that to the town that it's a temporary,
you know, I don't know. That's probably not a tough sell. The problem is we've got this large increase coming out of RAM and ADS. That's not on the agenda tonight and we're not going to talk about it at length, but I think that's where the increase is coming from. You know it is. Well, Ram is a decrease this year. So we're down on Ram from last year.
Well, think we're down because we're down as a percentage. Right. I don't know that Ram isn't down overall right. Right. No. Yeah. No. And
I just got a note from my husband. Do I have a? We have a 4,000 decrease from $4,000 we're good we're good everybody
our department budget is flat from last year so hey current all right I'm not looking at you man Zero increase. I know it. The
work is going to be on the education budget. I apologize
Mark for going. I know I'm off topic when I talk about the bigger picture because we're trying to focus tonight on the town. I just apologize. Is part of the bigger picture right I mean I think that it's, it's, we don't want to go too far off topic I do agree with that and we remain goal here is to review the town budget. But what we're facing on the other side of the town budget, in addition, that it's going to make up the title total total expenditures for the town is affects our town budget, it just does. So we all know that there's going be limited appetite for tax increase. And nobody wants to pay any more than they have to. And we're just gonna have to come up with something that makes sense that the town will accept.
I don't know how to do that with the town budget. The only, and I think Eric alluded to this, or not even alluded just flat out said it is that the places that we could realistically really cut our capital and then we're kicking the camp and this is what kills me about about it is because yeah that's where we could cancel out some real money. And at the same time we're killing ourselves because next year the year of that the year of that those capital expenditures are still going to sit there. Knees are still going to be there. And it's just it's tough. We don't have a lot in the operating budget we can cut anybody who's been through the town budget. Mean I've done this year after year we've gone through it line by line there's not a lot there and Eric's been pretty on top of stuff so I mean I don't think things have changed dramatically where we're going to suddenly go through our town budget and find hundreds of thousands of dollars that we can cut no you're going to cut $5,000
that's what you're gonna do. So what do we do? I mean there's You need to find $300,000 Yeah and you know I've been through this process the last time we really really hacked and slashed at the at the town budget was when before half of you were on this board and you know Adrian Mandeville was on the board, I was on the board, Jeff Murray was on the board, We went through and we we cut a whole bunch of stuff that we thought we could cut. Some of which we were right about. Some of which we were wrong about. Yeah, I lived with some of your. You lived with a lot of that. He's exactly right, right? You can speak to this better than anybody we did our best we're trying to do the right thing Eric but we absolutely you know at the end of the day what did we say you know maybe I'm trying to remember now what we cut out of the budget but it might have been 5,100 ks something like that after hours and hours of going through every single line dollars 200 here, 300 there and so on and
the real money is in the capital and the education budgets, there's no slack in the town budget especially when you just accept that town employees have to be paid, they're going to be salary and benefit increases and whatnot. So I'm just sitting here going how do we square this circle where we know flat out our town budget is more or less what it needs to be. Could we cut it a little bit? Yes, a little bit. But at the end of the day, how do we get from a seven and a half percent increase to even a 5%? How do we do that? Well, the only way we do that is we talk about the Ed budget, which we're not here to do.
What does everybody think about because no one was able to vote on the budget last year and there was some feedback about that last year, do you think people will be more engaged this year and more paying attention because they didn't get their opportunity to vote last year?
I would say people are going to be more engaged and paying attention because we have a high tax increase on the table. Whether they're going to be more, if we had done something egregious last year I'm sure we would have heard more about and people would have been attending these meetings and enforce. So I'm guessing that probably won't have any any significant impact. But I do think the fact that we're looking at a significant tax increase is going to get some attention and it should absolutely correct.
That's exactly how it works. Things run smoothly until you change something and then people show up that's how it works and how it should work fair enough.
So the other thing that the other piece of the puzzle is revenue So, you know, in terms of cuts, the only thing you could really do that would make a significant impact would be other than capital would be to cut out an actual service. There's really only two you can flat out cut out and both would have enormous repercussions. The first is the library. You could get rid of the library entirely. You could combine it with another town. You would get killed. They would kill me first, then they would kill off. The second is the resident state trooper. There has not been any support for that. I mean, of those are fairly big ticket items, but both of those in a sense are the cost of doing business. We get killed.
Other than that we're obligated to run a residential transfer station in some form or another so you can't get rid of that you could increase fees for the record the transfer station we bring in in revenue from stickers about 20% of the total operating cost of that department. So there's certainly room to increase fees. Which are another form of taxation.
Which is another form of taxation, right? Exactly. A user fee.
I'm not against that by the way to pay for the service to have some kind of balance in the budget. But to be honest, we're pointing out as long as it's not regressive or something but go ahead. Right and we've
essentially increased the fees for the building department pretty dramatically as of March 1 you know because we had lagged behind in what we were charging residents so now we're know we're doing that with the intention of basically recouping the cost of that department. You know and we've looked at doing that with the other land use boards planning and zoning and inland wetlands. Inland wetlands fees have gone up pretty dramatically. Planning and zoning fees have not gone up that much but the it's in a lot of cases it's you're never going to make the planning and zoning commission completely cost neutral. So I mean from a revenue perspective, you know most of the fees we collect from the town clerks those are set by state statute so there's not really anything we can do about it. So there aren't a lot of other revenue streams
the town has. So I just wanted to point out that we're not getting out of it by you know we could make you know we could double the transfer station fees and bring in an additional $30,000 You would have some really unhappy people but you could do that. Maybe you could charge people to go to the library a little bit and offset some fees but you know I think the people who tend to use the library tend to be people who are fairly limited means anyway so that would be fairly regressive. You don't have a lot of other options to increase taxation So if you want to make up the difference, you're doing it with budget cuts. Again, the only areas where we can really look at big budget cuts, And as far as departments, one of the things I've done is I pulled all the CCM, Connecticut Conference and Municipalities data department by department, position by position from finance through the assessor's office to the tax collector's office and then kind of normalized the costs based on the size of the town we have. And we're know we're still running a relatively, I mean it's always if you search hard enough it's always easier it's always possible to find a town that has a position that they pay less than us but you got to work at it a little bit. You know we're running departments pretty efficiently in terms of our cost basis So, you know, in the bottom line from my perspective is, you know, our per capita cost for, you know, for the everything non education is about $10.75 which you know and that includes all the capital expenses you know and that's really in line with you know what other towns are.
So I guess what I'm saying is that the town's portion of the budget is certainly in line with other municipalities and considering that's heavily weighted towards coming up with capital spending to repair previous sins, I think that's a very responsible number.
That's kind of my take on it. Mark, can I move half of my time to Dave Hewitt? I think he'd like to say something. We're not, nobody's limited. Go for it, Dave.
No, there's an elephant in the room. No one's really mentioned it. The trooper is the only line item. You can go on and on and cut, really hurt some of these other departments. And unfortunately, that's the only one you could make that money up to get a decent amount. I'm not saying that's something I think we need to consider if we wanna put that town, let them decide. I know they didn't like it last time, but basically it's coming down to a large increase. This is the only area we could possibly cut without Ram looking at it. So don't think we should just discount it. It's gonna be ugly. It's gonna be tough. But it's something you present to the town and say, look, you got a 7% budget. This is the only place you can cut if we word it that way. Let them decide. And that's what happened last time I didn't take it personal. It wasn't personal to the trooper it's a line item to get the budget down. Yep. You know, mean, that's the reality. We can sit here and go back and forth and really,
Eric will agree. We cut some of these other departments. They're really gonna be struggling to operate. And at the end of the day, what are we talking maybe a tenth of a percent maybe.
Right, by the way, Eric, I don't know what the number is off the top of my head but even the trooper, which is the single largest line item, single item and if you just X out, if memory serves was you know less than 1% it's like half a 175,000
so it's not a mill Right. A big line item, there's no It's
our single largest if memory serves line item in the town budget, not departmental but just individual. I think that's correct.
Yep. And that's why we looked at it that, you know, when I was on the board and we tried to cut it and Linda remembers and it went horribly, but we tried and the reason we tried was that that exact reason it was the easiest single cut that you could make and the fact is that it was something like 0.7 of a mil or something like that at the time. Yep. Is that about right Eric? So yeah I'm for it I'll go to bat for it again sure I'll tilt it that windmill again no doubt that gets us to 6.8
I don't think we can just put that out there without looking at the AES budget The AES budget has to be down. That's my point is that I
don't wanna hack and slash at that budget anymore than anybody else does, especially given I have kids in that space. But I've also told my friend Kurt hang on one second Kurt I'm good I've also told my friends on that I know that are on the Andover board of ed they're on the dtc with me I've already told them I'm like look I love you guys, I get it, I think AES has done a phenomenal job with COVID, they really have, at the same time the budget you've presented us is flatly unpassable. I flat out told them that. It's just
passable so and they know it so they're expecting a counter offer So the question is what's our counter?
I don't know that it's a counter offer it's just the decision what to present to the town so but I take it in spirit of what you know what I mean. I mean we have to make our decision and leave it up to the taxpayers I mean that's our job but yeah I think I think you guys. Surprised, but I think we've kind of come to some consensus and that the town department by department budget is fairly reasonable there's not a lot of opportunity there. The opportunities are in the funds which again kicks the can further down the road actually gets us in the hole because degeneration happens, Every year we push it off, it gets worse. That's right. Chaos happens, entropy happens, things are just gonna get worse. So we can't, it would be irresponsible, think to go too deep there. But that is an option that doesn't have an immediate impact on service. And then there's the AES budget and the resident state trooper you know to me those are the the areas we have.
Yeah, so the things yeah, I mean that's it. So we got well.
If I can, and I know this is the big picture that we're talking about, and I'm gonna mention AES. I haven't got my nose out of their budget since Superintendent Bruno's report to us, what last week. She answered a lot of questions that I had, in regards to the budget, but one thing I cannot get my hands around is 22,000 plus dollars per head, per student, even counting the, the preschoolers. I just, there's got to be somewhere to knock that down to a reasonable level at in line with Marlborough and Hebron, per head. I mean, they run they operate schools too just like we do. Yeah. We have to operate the facility. They have to operate their facilities. They still keep their cost a lot lower. So I can't in anywhere have I seen so far, of of why it costs 22,000 plus dollars per student to run that school. I just, I think that's something that we really need to take a close look at. And that's it.
Yeah, Kurt, did you look at Bolton too? Were they similar? No, I'm just talking about the region. We're still in our high schoolers. That's why I mentioned Bolton is that they're the one I know they're not in our regional district, but they're in our region. What are they? They have their own school district. I understand that. What's
their cost per pupil? I know, I don't know off the top of my head, that's why I'm asking. I know if you looked at it. Okay, I have to research it.
What is that? Excuse me. I think it's 18,000, Kirk. I mean, it's pretty simple math. It's the number I of mean, ratio is very low compared to other towns. I mean, extremely low. And that's what's driving the numbers it's not hard to figure that one out. We've got about 150 students. Well, 183 counting
three classes of preschoolers and we got 14 teachers. There's a problem.
Mean yeah and far be it for me you know this is I tend to get a little hesitant to go too hard one way or the other on this because I do have a vested interest because I have my kids in that school right now. I got a second grader and a fifth grader. One of my daughter's classes was almost split but then not split due to parental intervention I guess you could say. So I try not to go too hard on this, but I will say that for whatever our system is false may be, they've done a tremendous job over the last year from the perspective of somebody who has kids in that school. That doesn't necessarily mean that their budget is all is a okay no matter what they want.
Rob, both my kids went through Andover Elementary School when the ratios were higher. They both turned out fine. It's a fantastic school. Think my son's here is coming. He said he had about 20 kids in his class when he went through. So, know, they can do a good job. Just, that's where the number, that's where the driver is. That's the easy math.
Yeah, no, I understand. I mean, you know, when I have a kid with a class size of 12, I get it, Dave.
You know, you know, Rob, we all have a vested interest in that school, you know. I I went through that school from, first grade to sixth, and I think I turned out okay. Both of both of my both of my sons went through that school. And again, we had a very large classes, you know, all the way through. My my grandson's there right now. He's finishing up his second year of preschool. And I know, my son, dropped off his, his partial payment. He's paying over $6,000 a year, for my, for his son to go there in the preschool program. I'm trying to grasp the, the tuition payments versus the, with the towns paying for my grandson.
They're putting $22,000 on my grandson's head. My son picks up over six of it. No, no, I hear you. I put my kids to that preschool too.
That's the only thing I can't grasp in her presentation to us. Class sizes, I think she explained it very well. You know, my son's going into kindergarten. He's going to be one of those, ten ten ten kids in each class, you know, but she I think she explained that very well. So that answered one of my other big questions. But, so again, 22 plus thousand dollars per head in that school. And you're right. It's a great school. We have great teachers and everything else. But that's a big nut. That's a big nut that we have to tackle. Yeah, it's a lot of money. No question.
I mean, I think long term, the bigger question is, education is a big, it's obviously the driver of the budget. It has been in this town since ad infinitum basically. Way back when I went there, Eric. Well,
know it's funny that I have a, I'm getting it digitized. It's a budget presentation from 1955 which was basically done by hand. It's a two foot by three foot and they did the graphs by gluing on like squares versus rectangles. I mean it's really kind of cool old school history. And if you look at the ratio of school spending in 1950 when our budget was like $2,100,000 it's basically identical to what it is today. You know the town got a quarter of the money the school got three quarters of the money. I think the bigger long term question is there's no question that the ram levy and costs for RAM are quite high and costs for elementary education are quite high. I mean, that's why Bolton looked at us last year and said, holy shit, look at what they're paying. We could suck up their whole class, and we'd be happy to do it for half that cost. I mean, of course that doesn't account for special ed students and things like that. So it wasn't, it's not a complete savings that it looks like on paper. But the big question is what do we wanna do as a community? Number one. And number two, is there some way, there's lots of possibilities. And I feel personally that RAM is almost a bigger problem than AES. If you look at it right now, our RAM levy is $5,200,000
We're sending next year two twenty three students or two seventeen depending on which number they use. And that works out to $23,500 per student. And that's just the levy, that's not their budget because they still get all this other funding that comes directly to the school district. And when you add that in, their actual expenses are somewhere around $25,000 a student. 25, 26,000, yeah. Yeah, which is really high. And the question in my mind is, is there a way forward, Is it worth contemplating the unthinkable, which is breaking the contact with RAM? I mean, one of the options that you could float is simply taking the seventh and eighth grade and do like a lot of schools and run seventh and eighth grade in with the elementary school. You certainly have capacity for it. And then try to come up with some alternative for nine through twelve. I mean, the question is we're gonna be forced at some point to do something because we can't just keep cranking up town taxes because, you know, we're gonna have a revolt going.
Wasn't that looked at some time ago? Basically, Hebron and Marlborough said they wouldn't let us go because of because of what we were paying there. Would cost us tremendously to get out of the compact.
Yeah. I'm sure it would be a lawsuit and it would take a year or two and it would be ugly. Don't don't I don't ugly in dollars.
We did try it. My son Ben graduated from RAM in '96 and I think when he was starting seventh grade. So sometime around '90 we were start we were talking about going in with Bolton. Right. We had huge meetings and what their curriculum was they they wanted more kids and it was just too expensive to get out of the Ram. That was so that was about 1990.
Right. Yeah, Bolton has their entire own system. I mean they have rent Bolton has elementary through high all by their onesies and they pay
taxes commensurate with that. Well, also they also bring kids in from other towns, Rob. Well, not Coventry, but Columbia kids had the choice to go in there. Kids and Bolton kids had its choice to go to Manchester.
Sure, but I mean in the past whenever I've compared our towns Bolton's tax rate, their mill rate has always been higher and in part that's due to the fact they have their own complete school system what they're paying for.
Table. Think we have to be a little careful here guys because the agenda really doesn't cover the occasional budget. Right.
Know this is not, you know, I think in context of the overall expenditures in the budget, it's okay to talk about, you know the overall picture we got way too specific, think, probably on the AES stuff and that is going to just needs to be tabled largely and probably gone over again in another meeting. Okay, just
the you know it's we're we're getting into sketchy territory we're talking about that when it's not on a budget. It is part of the overall picture, we have to understand that, but I think we have to probably. Move on. Okay, I think I think the Ram budget and the overall picture and the contribution to the overall budget that's okay in the context of the town's budget and what we're going to have to do, and how do we get a budget that passes, but I think we have to probably think about going on. That. Okay, that being said, yeah, mean, Is
it the board's intention to take it to a vote to see whether people want to retain the resident state trooper? Is that the is that what I'm sensing? Are we there yet for that?
I am not averse to that question because I know we just did this two years ago. Two years ago, three, it'll be three years coming. Three years ago. Yeah. So But, but the reality is that that is, you know the biggest. Expenditure that probably honestly, in my opinion, dollar for dollar is going to have the least impact on services for the average taxpayer. However, it's also something people feel strongly about and they totally get it. So that that that is. I don't necessarily advocating for it one way or the other, and I think the town spoke pretty loudly three years ago. But you know we're in a situation now it's a little different than them so.
I would just say that during that discussion three years ago, we brought many facts and whatnot to the table and it had zero impact whatsoever. And we got, I believe it was something like seventythirty we got killed. So I am not against this because I actually believe you're right that this is something that the town could cut without it being a serious detriment to our services but the townspeople clearly don't think that at least didn't think that three years ago and when we try to present them with data that said otherwise, it had zero effect whatsoever. Will tilted this windmill again with you, but I'm telling you, it's almost assuredly a loser.
Yeah, I think it's fair enough. I mean, if you got a 10 swing, it's still not going to pass, right?
That's what I'm I actually think it's the right call, but I've been there before, been through it. Right. Telling you we lost. I would
say I don't I mean ultimately I get it that it's a big nut to crack because it's you know it's a large expense But what I would say is interacting with the resident state trooper there's an awful lot of intangibles you get, you know, from having somebody, you know, kind of at your beck and call that can work on town priorities that you don't get if you're just simply interacting with the barracks and assholes I or would also say that what we've gotten, you know, if you think about it, the last time there was a murder in the town of Bandover that got resolved by the resident state trooper because he dug at it for like a year and a half until he finally got enough information to prosecute. And our current, our just the resident state trooper we just lost, Darryl, we had a rash of burglaries on our commercial enterprises in town, you know, that was really problematic. But you know what, they've apprehended, you know, pretty much the guy who kept robbing the mini mart, the multiple people, they've caught them all. The guys who robbed the store here, they caught them. The guys who vandalized the mural,
they tracked them down and caught them. So what I would say is they've actually been very successful about working out the town's priorities in the issues that are having in town. Do we have enough presence that we're going to stop the crimes in action? Probably not, because with one guy covering a town, you know, the chances that he's on the shift, you know, when a burglary takes place are pretty small and he would have to be, you know, right there. But the ability to have one guy dedicate his time to investigation is really kind of nice, I think. But it's expensive and it's just a question, is it worth the cost?
I think our job is to look at the budget financially, not get emotional about it. If there's a way we could put it to the town because ultimately, honestly, I think it's a waste of our time getting the facts like we did last time. And personally, I think it will probably fail. I think it's just an option we can offer to the town and say, look, we got a huge tax increase. This is the only thing we can cut what do you want to do, that's kind of the way I would suggest to be framed.
I agree with that, especially with all the burglaries and all the things that were going on lately. I think a lot of townspeople are going to say, what's going to happen to the town? It's going to get worse. And I don't think a lot of people know the facts that you just said, Eric, that all these people were caught. I think they may still think that people are still lurking out there. I think good indicator to get rid of some of that money. But the town's gonna I think people in town are gonna be fearful. That's my opinion on it.
I'll just echo Dave and I think he's right on this is that you presented as a choice. And last time we did this, the clear choice and multiple people stood up in town meeting and said it, I will pay more in taxes to keep the trooper and if that's their call, if that's what the public wants, so be it. Right, so we presented like this, like look we can do a budget with or without the trooper, if we cut the trooper it saves us this much money you know it's straightforward that said guys I mean we're talking about like half a percent something like that out of the butt out of it and we're looking at, you know, a seven and a half percent increase.
You know, this is not something that's going to get us in and of itself where we want to go. It helps and we should consider it and should be on the table, it should probably be put before the town but in and of itself it doesn't get us there it's just the one thing that we can do in the town budget that'll have a significant impact.
Just just as a comment also, I talked to acting Trooper Ferrara today. He's, filling in for Daryl at this time and he had informed me besides himself there's four other troopers who have put in for this job. Apparently Daryl had made this Andover job fairly attractive to other troopers. So they have actually five applications right now that the lieutenant has to pour through to fill the position here. So that was as of this morning.
Yeah, these are small town resident state troopers are highly sought after gigs there's no question which is the good news is that they tend to assign you know very good officers on the whole so I mean we've had a history for a while of having really good resident state troopers other than the one that you know got a little out of control.
I'm gonna suggest that we probably talk these things through pretty carefully at the town level. I'm more than happy to discuss any more details or any more thoughts that people have. My thinking is we let this gel, we go back, we look at the numbers, we think about how the best way to approach it might be. We're gonna have to obviously pull this together in an integrated budget with recommendations for the town, for AES and in totality with RAM, and then decide how to present it. Does anybody else have anything on the town budget that you want to dig into?
I guess I have one question. Do you have something that could be quickly put together? Because I know you did a lot of work about what needs to be done on the roads and for next year. So when I'm looking at all these fund transfers and the money we're putting in there, what do we actually need for next year? Do you know I mean? I mean, I don't have a good handle on this is the bare minimums we need to maintain the status quo. Do know what mean? You mean in terms of just roadwork specifically? Yes,
because that's where, that's the biggest money. I mean, okay, bridges and culverts, I guess that's gotta be outside of it because those are events that are gonna happen. I mean, sooner or later they're going to fail and that's it the decision's made you know.
Right and the reality is you got to get to it before you have to close the road so that's your kind of drop dead date. So
I guess for me I'm a little fuzzy on coming into the next budget year what has to be accomplished?
So the the if you think about it this way the break even point for roadwork is about $340,000 a year in this town. In other words any year we put less than $3.40 total into road work on average our roads are getting worse any year we can put more than $3.40 in on average our roads are getting better If you wanted to say what is our total know our total backlog of road work I mean it's somewhere between 4 and $4,800,000 depending on what assumptions you use about cost per repair. You know, we're I'm working with the public works foreman right now on, you know, kind of an approach to stabilize our road network really is how I would put it. Going very heavily on, you know, kind of chip seal and the minimalist approach to a road to keep it serviceable. Mean accepting that you know what I had hoped to do is be able to keep the main trunk roads the through roads at a higher standard and then just chip seal all the secondary and the back roads. But looking at it objectively, we can't afford to do that. So at the end of the day, we're going to basically, we're going to leave everything with a serviceable chip seal surface surface and try to get to everything. We did about seven miles of roads
this year all total between fog seal and chip seal and something called cape seal. We're probably not going to do any cape seal in this upcoming year because cape seal is just too expensive per mile. And given our budgets, we just can't afford it. I would have liked to do it in the Lake District because in the area that's heavily walked and bicycle, that's a better surface underfoot. You know, chip seal leaves a lot to be desired in terms of a surface, but, you know it's cheap and you know and that's why rural towns do it. I totally lost my train of thought. So and I think we don't have any other roads everything that needed to be fog sealed, which is basically a technique when you have good pavement to start with to seal it and keep the oxidation from becoming a problem. So we've done everything that was an appropriate road for it last year. So we don't really need to do any of that this year. So we're basically going to be crack sealing roads. We're going to be shimming, which is putting asphalt
in the areas of the depressions in the road like if you have significant wheel runs essentially filling them in so you get the crown of the road right and then chip seal and basically trying to do as much road as possible and pretty much only do that and then concentrate on the drainage projects that we need to do because one of our biggest problems is that we've just really neglected the understructure of the roads and how we get the water away from the roads. So we have a seven to ten year backlog just of regular drainage like catch basins and things like that. You know, with the intention of taking two roads either later this fall or next spring and reclaiming them completely. And we're doing that on the more heavily traveled roads that have significant structural problems. And that is the first section of Shawty Mill Road from Route 6 up to where it intersects Wales Road, maybe just a little bit farther like 150 yards past the intersection. And then also the very first section of Long Hill from the church basically up past where Wheeling Road intersects. And again that was just because that was an old state road that was initially just oil and stone and that at some point was So it just basically has a failed substructure. So we really need to that's one road that you know there's no possibility of kind of patching that up over the long term that one has to just at least that first section you got to just grind it up and start over. So that's really what we're anticipating doing. There's around $450,000
in to address about nine miles of road that would be crack sealed and then shimmed and then chip seal. The goal being in basically over the next four years to chip seal, to shim and chip seal everything in town and at least get it serviceable and take care of the worst of the issues. And the thing about it is if you have a road that starts off bad and you chip seal it, you don't get as much life out of the chip seal as you do if you start with a road that's still in reasonable shape. You know, you can chip seal once every seven years and keep that road perfectly functional. But when you get down to a like something like Bisola, which is pretty shot, When you chip seal it you really only get yourself maybe three maybe four years before it's back in the same condition. So but the cost of reclaiming that road and doing it right
is so high at least at this point I mean we're you know so the basic approach is band aid the really bad roads and keep them serviceable and then take the good roads and do enough to them to keep them in a reasonable condition if that makes sense. Okay perfect thanks.
Yeah so we're not you know we're not trying I hate to say this but we're not trying to deliver really good roads you know we're trying to keep the roads that are good in reasonable condition and bring the really bad stuff up to acceptable condition is how I would put it. Okay thanks.
Any other questions for Eric or comments from the board? I have a question. And then go ahead.
Was just gonna say, kind of go back to the trooper, but not really talk about them. The next time we do have an election if we wanted to put a question at the bottom of the vote on how people feel about it, it might give us a better idea of what the true population thinks.
Well, the other thing I would kind of The numbers of people that come out for a budget meeting and actually vote is pretty small as opposed to the total population. If you were gonna do that, that would be like an unofficial question at a fall election
would be Yeah, that may have been what Lynn was talking about when she said election, that's kind of what I think. Non binding. Well,
you know, this brings up the issue of when we have our elections, you know, some of our elections are off kilter from the main event. And so we have low turnout like we'll have a municipal election where we have 36% turnout and then we have presidential election with 80% turnout and you know it's factor two. So yeah, if we're gonna do something and we're gonna ask the town, if we're trying to canvas the town, I would think we would want to get the highest number
of respondents we could. That's all. Okay, I just thought I'd throw it out there. No,
Linda, good call. I agree with you that if we could put a non binding thing on there just to get, take the temperature. Right.
You know, in a context, hey everybody, we're looking, we're staring down all these issues and we're looking at these major tax increases in that context. Do you still value the trooper the way that you did three years ago? Maybe they do In which case, okay. Hey Louise, you had something you might have asked?
Yeah, did. On the mowing services, humor me on this, but do we use people in town to mow the properties or do we contract out?
So the only thing that we use an out of town mowing service for is the actual athletic field. And we subcontract that to Hebron's Parks and Recs director because they have a really good turf guy and there's an awful lot of art and science into maintaining a good athletic playing field and we were cutting that using local contractors to cut that and it was really problematic. We've done a much better job but for no other reason they kept wrecking our sprinkler system by running over the heads you know which is expensive. So we've subbed all of that out you know kind of en masse
and that budget includes both the turf itself. So that that's mowing essentially irrigation fertilization cycles done correctly and they're taking care of the sprinkler systems now too.
Okay and I assume they do this on a weekly basis as far as mowing?
Yes the field is mowed weekly during the high growing season. I mean, you're not mowing it every week in November, certainly, but during the high growth season, yeah, it's mowed once a week. And it's mowed in conjunction with the athletic groups that use the field. So it's kind of the goal is to mow it in such a way to maximize the use for the teams that play on it. And part of that cost is offset. We do charge, we do have one travel soccer team that uses that field extensively. And we charge them, they pay about half the total maintenance cost for that field gets borne by them so we're recouping about half of that it doesn't show up in that budget that sits in the revenue category but it is there.
Is there any way to shave off any of that for the non field, like the town properties, where instead of doing it once a week, they would do it once every other week. I don't know if you'd save a lot, but I'm just looking to see if there's something that we can do to kind of reduce that budget, that part of the budget.
Yeah, so if you look at that budget, the vast majority of that is the cost of maintaining the field. Our regular mowing is like, I don't know somewhere around $3,000 a year for the down. The regular mowing is pretty cheap. That mowing's you know the field itself is expensive yeah.
Is that field used a lot? Say again? Is that field used a lot?
Yeah, I mean our biggest problem is we have scheduling issues with being able to get everybody in on the field. Yeah and we've had the kind of favor because we have the travel soccer team that's paying for it. We have kind of preferentially allowed them to set when they want to use it and fill everybody in, you know, around it. But yeah, that's a really heavily used field. That's I think probably, I would say that field is probably at the limit of good use and the thing that saves us is that for a lot of the smaller kids they play on a reduced size field so that field accommodates essentially three teams at once during peak practice. Practice. Thank you.
Eric if I can to go a little further with Louise's question you take like what what town properties does Andover Landscaping do for you? Do
I think they do the town hall, the museum, they do all the outer areas at the athletic fields. I don't want them on the field itself but Hebron's not going to mow all the back areas and stuff like that. Right. And I think they do I have a list somewhere. I can't tell you It off the top of my
took us long enough to get the, the school, the town hall, the fire station, and the library into one vendor for, crack filling, sealing, and line painting, when it's due for all all of the facilities. It goes out to bid, you know, to to to various contractors, and they do everything at once on a schedule. Now you get the school has their own custodian and all their own equipment to mow just the school. You have the Endor Landscaping mowing the town office building. We use Sears and Son, from town at the fire station, does a fantastic job. And he he's been trying forever to, you know, have the town go to bid on all of the other, you know, the other town buildings, you know, and I'm sure I'm sure Matt Cordner would also submit a proposal for that. And then you have, like you said, you got the you got the Hebron Public Works doing just the field part. I think it's time that we get every, you know, say one vendor, whether you- whether you bid it yearly or bid it, you know, every other year, to handle, you know, one shot, think we get a much better deal. Right now, Louise, each individual board or commission are paying for the mowing. You know, we're we're paying it out of the fire commission budget. The school's paying for their custodian to work overtime usually to mow mow the fit the, the grounds there. And then, of course, we're paying end over landscaping to mow the rest of the town. So, I think that I agree that that's I I personally think that should be reeled in, just like we did the, the the ceiling.
So why aren't the, the town like the people taking care of the roads doing the mowing as well instead of using it land Andover landscaping?
They they they talked about that and they they don't really have the personnel to do what they're doing now and and and and add on to that to tell the truth.
Yeah, nor do they have the equipment for I mean, do have one mower that can do finish mowing, a smaller one, but it's really slow compared to what a landscaping company does. And I mean if you take mowing you know we basically for lack of a better term employ one guy full time just mowing sides of roads and you know trail side. So but that that's a completely different specialized mowing. You know we've looked into that you know and I thought one of the possibilities would be to see whether we could get you know the make some kind of deal with the the school to use the custodian to run around and mow everything because they're not, you know, working as hard in the summer. But now we need a vehicle to move that thing around because the school doesn't have any transportation vehicles. You know I do agree that that's something we should run out with we should rebid that on a town wide basis you know it's going to come with some some heartburn because neither the fire department nor the library wants to give up their you know the company they have because the library uses Ron's Landscaping. You know but I do agree that's something that at some point we need to bid out as one combined entity. I would agree with that. It's just it's that's low enough cost that it's kind of down my priority list a bit, but should be developed,
should be looked at. I would agree with that. Other questions or comments ideas?
Carding costs, let's look at those carding costs again at the transfer station. That's a hefty bill yearly to have, Willie Ways come up and pick up our our containers and bring them back and forth. Again, I I I'm all for getting our own compactor truck and having our own highway crew drive it once or twice a week down to Willimantic. Just I think the cost would, number one, savings would pay for the truck itself, even starting off with a with a used one like the other towns did. And then, you know, and then have our own driver take it, take the the containers back and forth twice a week. Those, those, those, those carting costs are expensive.
So just another thing to look at. They're so high we can have another employee?
No. I'm talking about another employee. We we have we have four employees that that can drive the truck right now. And and I'm just going along on the basis of what town of Hebron did, what the town of Marlborough has done for a long time is they purchased their own karting truck. Hebron went when Andy Tierney, the town manager up there did it, he bought a used one at auction. Okay. And and and they're one of their drivers off the public works crew takes that the all their containers from their transfer station down to Willie Waste and dumps them and brings them back and drops them. And that's only twice a week, you know, for probably an hour or two turnaround to take all the containers down there and back twice a week. It would pay for itself in the long run. Okay.
Not sure I agree with you on that one. I'm sure I know, I know you don't. That's okay.
I think it would take up more time than you think because on average, we're swapping out either four or five dumpsters, you know, twice a week. So on average, we're running somewhere between eight and ten tips a week total between bulky metal recycling and household. And 10 trips a week, you know, that's you're not doing a round trip in less than forty five minutes. You're telling me right now that that Willie,
Willie Waste is doing 10 trips a week from our transportation? Come on. Yeah, right about. Yeah.
I'd have to see that. I find that hard to believe. Eight, at least, sure.
Okay, we've already reduced two. I did say four to five It's twice a got, you know, the bottom line is you have to save money in the long run. Just just a thought. So all we're talking about that. Absolutely.
Anything else? Going once, Going twice. All right, if there's no objection from the rest of the board, I think we'll move on to our next agenda item, which is to Item 3C, which is a schedule additional budget workshops. We currently have a budget special meeting scheduled for March 17 two weeks from tonight. How does the board feel about that schedule? Is that going to be enough? Do we sit on that right now or decide we want to add more?
I think we'll probably have to have at least another one after that I would think. There's no way we're going get it all done next week.
Agreed, what's our schedule? Remind me where, when do we have to go to try to get things to town meeting?
Town meeting has to happen the first ten days of May. Yeah. Think May.
Yeah. All right. So we have March and April basically. Correct.
Last year, don't think we finished up until the last week of April, right?
Last year, I don't know that we want last year to be the way we run things. So in April we have the seventh, the fourteenth, the twenty first, and twenty eighth, Four Wednesdays. I'm just throwing Wednesdays out there because I know they work for me I know other people may have other takes but we personally the question I would have is if we want to have if we want to schedule additional meetings what are we responding to is there some new information that's going to come out between now and said meeting that allows us to do so.
I'm guessing that, you know, I'm totally okay with just sitting where we are with the seventeenth and then we can reschedule add another meeting on the seventeenth or we're not making progress we can add two meetings, which is
yeah I'm with you I think I'm with you on that I think we need if we're getting if we know we're getting a pile of information prior to the tenth then we could schedule a special meeting but if we're not then there's no point.
I think we're going to need a meeting to talk about the education budget AES And then if we go back to AES with a reduced number, we're going to have to allow them time to come back with a revision, right? True. That's an option.
An option. I mean, we're going to come back. We're going to say, you can have, you know, X less than what you want. And then they got to come back to us with a new number for us to finish the budget, right? So. Yeah, that's a good point.
The Board of Finance want to do the same? Is your intention to make any recommendations to the Ram board or leave that alone at this point?
Have we in the past actually formally, I think maybe once we did, send something to Ram and tell them we thought they were wrong. Where are they at this year? I'm sorry. Somebody remind me, what's their overall I know I understand our percentage dropped but what's the total what's what are they actually asking for $55,200,000, which is what what is the percentage increase.
Half a percent down. Well yeah they're actually. Allocation. More to the point they're there per student increases, you know, it's an increase it's their expenditures are very high per capita. I think that's really the point that Eric has been making.
No, that's just it. I'm not asking about our contribution amount because our amount is just a formula, we got hammered three years in a row because we had a higher percentage of students in their student body and we just sucked that up and we dealt with it. So this year it just so happens that the worm has turned and we have a lower percentage but that's not really my question. My question is you know their percentage increase overall because yeah okay maybe we're negative 1% but we could be negative three if their budget was more responsible who knows.
Last time when the superintendent did his presentation to us at the board of selectman meeting. I think he was talking about two and a half percent wasn't that their overall budget increase at that point in time. Don't know what it ended up at. Because it After wasn't
they rolled in what they overexpended from last year and used it to offset the rate, their budget increase for Andover has to be somewhere around their budget should have been up about 1.5%. And they lost somewhere around 90 students, something like that.
So if you wanna, here, let me share screen for a sec. So Amanda can you allow me to share screen? Done. All right. Yeah there we go. So
there's if if you look at it that's Andover Hebron Marlboro Ram relative to inflation and cost per student. And that's essentially what I would say as gross costs. In other words, that's not how the state calculates the costs. That is the total budget for the school divided by the number of students going to the school, which to me is your essentially true cost.
Right, it doesn't allow you to hide anything. If your total budget is divided by a 100 students, that's the answer. And it doesn't let you hide something in some you know weird little budget line item that doesn't count somehow. Right. So I have a question. Sure. I'm looking at the graph and there's something weird going on with this graph.
You're missing data for the third year, three years ago for RAM and that's causing a discontinuity there. Yeah, I don't have
all the data. I mean, it took me forever to track down these town by town and, and come up with them a lot of this stuff I took. Yeah, yeah. You could average, you could probably average those
two years that you're proceeding in the year after and come up with some reasonable curve. Yeah, you would put a little dash line there and you could see how it could link up. But the point is it's gotten really high. Clearly well above inflation. We all know this. And
I thought we were closer to 26,000 coming up on there or is that the current budget, Eric? Well, I mean,
that's the current budget. But the other thing to consider is that this is the only number that I can access, which is because these are derived from budgets. These don't take into account like the money AES gets in from grants and stuff like that, which never hits the town budget in any way shape or form. Those aren't represented here. So the actual cost for RAM and for AES is higher. And this is in all cases, I think including
You mean the amount they spend Correct. Versus the cost to the towns.
Correct. So I'm reflecting the costs to taxpayers here, not necessarily the total budget. Because I don't necessarily know for every town, every school, I don't know what all their grants and all the other income streams they have I only know what they report in their budget.
The salient point really ends up being the cost of the town. Right, yep. So I mean you can still grab that if you have a data good. So you know to answer your question Eric and I'm not sure that I can answer on behalf of the board but you know I think that it is. Behooves us to make some statement I know you've been trying to get us to do that and jointly with the board of select men for a while. Suggested them at least a couple different occasions, so I think it does behoove us to do that I'm not sure what the effect is going to be in terms. Know, in terms of this budget year how we can really affect that but. We could be at a net zero increase and I still think it would behoove us to go to the Ram board of Ed and and challenge a little bit the per pupil spending.
I mean, if you think about it, RAM spending is $3,000 a year higher than the average in Connecticut, and Connecticut's the second most expensive school in the country. You know it's three times the budget we would be looking at if we lived in Utah let's put it that way.
I mean, we don't live in Utah, but as somebody who grew up in Connecticut and grew up in a particularly affluent part of Connecticut, I grew up in Fairfield County which you know we call it the Gold Coast for a reason. I think back so we're region what are we Region 10 guys? 11? Eight, sorry I knew you were within one of nine, why because I went to nine, nine was my high school and if you look at Easton Reading district nine what you're going to see is even more ridiculous expenditures. Expenditures. Flip side is that's down there. That's on the Fairfield County side of things. Scary part is that we're even close to them.
I'm going to suggest though that we're straying a little bit from again our agenda topic. Mark. It's not your you know if anybody Eric's want to brought it up. Know, I think it was just kind of a fairly straightforward question about whether we want to approach that and tag that in one of our meetings or some other mechanism. I'm not sure what the effect is or what the what you know how we do that with the best mechanism is, I do think that it would. Make sense to have some presence there at their meetings and discuss that not sure about the best way to do that there is a there is a public meeting on Monday, I believe. I wish they started a little later than 06:30, but it is what it is. So, know, it probably makes sense for us to talk about that or make some kind of statement. Don't know if the Board of Selectmen want to have that, you know, have a part of that also, but certainly as the Board of Finance, I'm willing to get involved in that more than I have been, which is zero close to it, other than watching a presentation so. But back to the agenda item in hand, which is you know, additional do we want at this point to schedule additional meetings to discuss and review the budget. I don't necessarily think we need to know we have a meeting scheduled in two weeks, We could
just as readily use that opportunity to schedule additional meetings. However, I would suggest that as Rob pointed out, Wednesday seemed to work. So if we can try to keep those a little clear in our schedule so that we do have the opportunity to kind of get together and do it in a timely manner, that that would probably be prudent. But if somebody wants to make a motion to schedule meetings, I'm open to that as well.
I agree with you that at this particular juncture I don't think we necessarily need to add meetings to the calendar. We just kind of keep an eye on it.
Any more discussion or emotion. Okay hearing none, I think we will move on to our next agenda item, is public speak. We do have members of the public attending. Amanda, do you want to go around and see if we have any public participation? Yes, first we have Joanne Hebert.
I will keep it short and sweet. I kind of want to digest a lot of it. You have a tough job to do. Just
generally and not speaking to it because I know you're not speaking of the education budget but you just brought it up right now. I just hope that someone from the board has selected or even Eric will hold acting superintendent to his word that he was going to get back to the board with how they figured out that cost per student because when any of us try to figure it out it comes out to about $27,000 $30,000,000 budget and as you guys all know I do the homework and things so if you looked at some other high schools with a lot more students they're not even close to that figure so I just hope he gets back to someone with he was going to check with the state to find out how they because they published I think 17,000 per student so I just hold people accountable what they say you know if they say they're going get back to you and I haven't heard it yet and so thank you too for you know questioning all the things or just doing what you have to do and kind of having One of the things that you questioned earlier tonight on the town side which
is an amazing worker and she's a great lady Carol the town clerk I know she came forward with the 6% request and just in all the meetings I've heard I just haven't heard the backup of when she didn't get a raise you know and that might be nice to hear so there's been ample time to gather that so I've heard different people question that and I know you know the history of the town so and you know I'm sure she's very deserving and all that but things that I had said in the past is because it's a pandemic year maybe go to you know give her a big portion of it this year and then maybe say because we're in a tough year you know we'll address it again next year but that's all up to you but I just like to to have the facts behind it. Okay, thank you. Thanks and good luck. I mean, they didn't mistake too quick. Thank you. Amanda. Next up we have
Brian Briggs and I believe that is all. Jeff Murray is on also we should be given an opportunity. True. Jeff, are you with us? Yes, I am.
Perfect. Okay, Brian Briggs first, would you like to speak?
Yeah, I was just gonna say I know you guys have a lot of tough decisions to make. Seven percent, even five percent during a coronavirus year is going to be a lot for Andover residents who are already suffering from the pandemic. So there's going to be a lot of tough decisions to make. And I kind of just would stress that try to limit the amount of money that you cut from the schools because they've had a lot of issues. I know Andover has been in class but they're going to be a little bit far behind and the Ram students I believe were hardly in school. So I would maybe look at some town stuff that you could come up with the cut before you start cutting from the students. Some of these projects might have to wait a little bit. I don't know, like try to find things to cut, maybe cut everywhere, but I would try to go light on the school.
Could probably use a lot of that funding right about now. That's all I really have to say. Okay, thanks Brian. Thanks Brian. Thanks Brian. Jeff Murray.
Just one comment. I know you guys talked about the transfer station sticker fees and everything and that was brought up to the selectman as well. One thing that I found out is it's Mira, which is the new Pira, is going to be closing the trash plant in July of next year. And our tipping fees are going to probably go through the roof. And that's what I suggested to Eric is we revisit any fees for the transfer station in the following budget year because we don't know what our tipping and our hauling fees are going to be. But I'm guessing they're going to be substantially higher. That's it. Jeff, is that the plant in Hartford?
Yes it is. It's going to be closed. Yep, it's closing July of next year and everything's going to have to be hauled out of state. Oh hell, I didn't know that was happening. Thank you. Yep, you can look it up if you look at trash your energy plant closing the statements are on. Used to be PURA I think now they're renaming it MIRA Yeah. That's going to be a huge issue we're going to have to deal with next year because I'm afraid those fees are going to go sky high and we're probably going to have to come up with some creative ways to keep our hauling costs down. So that's why I suggested Eric and the board just we hold off until we see what happens there. Gotcha. Thanks. No problem.
Yeah there is no question that that's going to have a direct impact on us in a little over a year from now. We've talked about it a little bit you know from the recycling perspective but you're right and I don't think anybody's really come up with a solution so far. There aren't that many you know states are getting rid of their trashed energy plants. I know a friend of mine lives in Maine and they just made a decision to close the one right where he is also, you know so it's problematic from a bunch of different angles.
Interesting, all right thanks. Nope, something else we'll have to deal with. Okay I think that's is that everyone Amanda? Looks like it. Looks like it.
Okay, so if we move on, if everyone's all set, our last agenda item is five, which is adjournment. Anybody like to make a motion to adjourn? I so move. Okay, Rob's move to adjourn. Second. Second.
Oh, I thought maybe everyone wanted to keep talking. Rob moves to adjourn Kurt seconds any discussion. Hearing none we'll take a vote all in favor of adjournment say Aye. Aye. Opposed
Any abstentions? Okay, looks like the motion passes unanimously. You everybody. It's good meeting, lots of discussions, a lot of work to do still, but I appreciate everybody's perseverance and we'll talk in a couple weeks. Sure, and if anything as usual. Have anything.