Meeting transcript
Board of Finance - Special Meeting Budget Workshop
March 31, 2021 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
First item is the Pledge of Allegiance. If everyone would join me. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States and of to the republic it stands, nation under God, indivisible, liberty, justice frown.
Okay, thank you. So welcome everyone to this special meeting for the town of Andover Board of Finance. Obviously the budget is our focus today. I do want to say upfront and the board may take this another direction, ultimately, but our main focus today is going to be talking about the town's budget. And trying to nail that down, so we don't at this time plan to expend a lot of effort or maybe even any effort on the educational budget today. So I see a lot of people from from both the board of Ed I see Valerie I see some other folks who I know have very, very. Concerned or interest strong interest in the Board of Education budget but we're probably not going to hit that today, I just want to let you guys know that up front.
Do want to remind everybody we do try to stick to about a three minute public speak session and of course if for some reason you have more to add, as I've said before, we'll allow you additional time once everybody who chooses to has had their opportunity to speak. Okay, so that being said, Amanda, do you want to poll anybody who would like to offer public speak, public discussion? Okay, first up, Val Bruno.
I'm good, but I would just like to tell the boards that as of today, we're all vaccinated over at the board of education. So if you come into the building, we're good. Thank you. Adrian Mandeville? You're muted, Adrian.
I don't know if you want to do it during public speaker or you want me to ad hoc, but I've got probably take about four minutes.
Do you want me to it now, Mark? Or Go ahead and go ahead and do it now. And if, you know, if we need to Okay. No. That's fine. Alright. So a couple things. I
was able to have some conversation with Valerie this week regarding the budget and some of the questions that I had. And, you know, I feel like I I may have, you know, unfairly, you know, said some things last week. And so, you know, I wanna apologize to her for that, to for being a little you know, my impression of why she was doing things may have been wrong. So I need to say that. Second of all, she also has informed me that that we had talked a couple months ago regarding the school budget where they were first starting. And I basically said to her that if she could get down to around $2.20, that I would support the budget. And she's basically there now. She's at 01/2019 or 02/19. So my reasoning for doing that and for explaining to her that I would support the budget was that the town revenues
increased about 190,000 between the supplementals, motor vehicles about 130 and about another 60 ish from our revenue adjustments for people that had building permits, things like that. And so that will pick up some of the other slack. And so really at that point, you know, we're we're pretty close to covering what they're asking for. You know, and not for nothing, but the bulk from here on out, if we actually look at it now, is contractuals. So could they do some other things? Probably. But we probably have to give probably have to give her a chance, you know, to get a handle on the school and and do some things that she wants to do. So I'm willing to give her a chance to do that. She's assured me that if they get some grants or anything that they would give that money back to the town if it covers some of the things that are in their budget that they need. So I'm supportive of that. But more importantly, think it's as a as a selectman or even a town person coming to a board meeting and complaining doesn't help anybody. So I do come to you with a solution. I looked at our revenue rollovers for the last couple of years. What we left on the table last year and what we rolled back in after the audits
comes up to about $250,000. That is 1 mil. Right now, we're give or take 2.4 mils is what you're looking at. As it stands right now with the school budget the way it is and the town budget the way it is. If you're asking for 2.4 mils and we could take 1 mil off the table by not rolling any more money into our fund balance. And my point of that is that that's how we got into some of this mess in the first place with all of these things that the town is trying to fix. We got into this habit of overfunding our reserve fund by just rolling this money in and never really pushing it forward. And so over the course of ten years, we accumulated, give or take $3,000,000, you know, and that was a problem. And that's what put us in this situation. So that now we're trying to play catch up with roads, with culverts, and a variety of other things that are on the on the horizon. So I although I am not a fan of taking money out of reserve, we did it to get our reserve number where it needed to be on a on a on a regular day basis. I don't agree with it.
But this isn't about this is about not letting money roll back into the reserve fund. This is about not letting money roll back into the reserve fund and using it correctly. It's already been taxpayers have already agreed to it. They've been taxed on it. We shouldn't be putting it and increasing that fund balance anymore. That's my own take on it. I realize you're the board of finance, and I can't force you to do anything. I can ask you to look at it, please, and realize that, you know, this isn't a we we don't wanna be growing that fund balance anymore. That's gonna get us back into the same situation. We've already taxed the taxpayers. They've agreed to it. Let's look at that $2.50,
it takes away a mil, and then you're going to the town and asking for, give or take 1.5 mils, 1.4 mils. And I think that's, I would believe given everything that's in this budget and all the things that are moving forward with this budget, that that's a passable budget. That's my take on it. You guys may have a different one and I'll let you guys sort that out. I think it's an easy way to address this. If it fails at referendum, we should have something on the question that says yes or no. Is it too high, too low or something, but we can work that out later when we do that. And again, just my take on it, I'm not you guys do it you feel is appropriate so okay. All right, thanks Adrian.
Appreciate that input it's I think helpful. And by rollover you're talking about rollover into the reserve. Not exactly talking about the AES rollover or something. Okay. No, I mean, as a bulk of the we had give or take
between what we left on the table that we didn't take out that was already excess. And then what we rolled in, we should have about two fifty ish. So that you can work with, your audit will play out the final number, obviously. But if you look at that number versus total accumulation, I think we have the room to do that. And the taxpayers have already proved it. So it really should go to these things that we know we need it for. But unfortunately, you're not always able to spend it in a given year for a variety of reasons. Yeah.
Okay. All right. Agreed. Yeah, I think it's something that's been on the table.
All right. Thanks, Mark. Thank you, guys. We'll go back to you. Have a good meeting. Thanks, Adrian. Thank you, Adrian. Yep. Bye bye.
Diane Grineer. No I'm all set thank you very much. Thank you. Daniel Foran.
Hello, how are you guys all doing tonight? Good, yeah. Adrian,
what I'm about to say is not directed towards you, okay? We'll just get that out there. What I do want to say is that there were some claims made last meeting about the education budget being up, had it things of that sort. That is factually not true. On top of it I feel that some of the claims that were made about what other schools were doing I feel that you know some of the information obtained was obtained around the argument as what the individual wanted to prove. I think if you have any questions about what other towns are doing or why we are doing what we are doing it's important to ask our superintendent she is very transparent very knowledgeable and is well aware of what is going on in the towns surrounding us and throughout the state. So I just wanted to say that. Thank you. Thank you. Scott Prasan. I'm all set. Thank you Amanda.
Scott. Jeff Murray. Jeff Murray, you're muted. Oh, there you are. Sorry about that. I just wanna reiterate
my statements at the last meeting. I've sent you plenty of information about the school budgets and I've yet to find any kindergarten in the state of Connecticut that has 10 students and a pair in each class. I still feel like there should be significant cuts and the school board should come in at a 0% increase. That's all, thanks. Thank you. Paula King. All set. Listening in tonight. Thank you. Thanks for being here. And we have Carol. All set. Thank you.
Thanks, Carol. And then we have phone number (860) 977-3484. If you would like to participate please press 6.
Okay, I would like to speak. This is Joanne Hebert. I am, currently finished up for the day at work and wasn't able to log on to zoom. Here I am on my phone. Quickly, I know this is a meeting that important decisions are going to be made. I, as many boards know, I'm a familiar voice because, you know, I've taken in a lot of meetings, listened to everybody. And, you know, more importantly, like I said, listening to all the stakeholders. So fact, we know the budget has to be cut because there's no way a seven and a half percent increase will pass. I think the time is now to look for cuts wherever they can be made in order to bring this increase down to a manageable number. So, I think the town side of the budget and the town manager has done a good time a good job. Sorry, long day, with combining things, looking for cuts, doing whatever he could to reduce some things. I agree too that we have to, as hard as it is, look at the educational side of the budget for further cuts. The data supports this. The BOS has been sent countless things, you know, supporting it, whether or not mister Foran agrees that we really I'm not wasting my time by going to all these meetings. I really care. So I don't, you know, find any happiness
in asking for decreases or whatever. I just think the time is now that we have to. You know, we've all put a lot of time and effort into this and make sure that even on a long day that I'm dialed in whichever way I can. So I want to tell all of you that I'm making this statement as a very important, very involved town resident, a mother of three young adults that are successful now that have gone through the educational system and RAM, and also working in a school system. I'm sitting in a school right now doing some things that have to be done on my own, on my own time, which is fine. That's the kind of person I am. No one says I have to do that. So anyways, I have worked a lot with budgets and things like of that nature. So I want to also speak directly to parents because even though I am asking for educational cuts, I do hear your voice. You support your beloved school. You're afraid that if money's cut, the value that your child receives is going to suffer, and I don't believe that at all. I think it's quite the opposite. If you really, really want your school to keep running and be sustainable, with all the other things that are happening in town and the money that needs to be spent elsewhere,
we really need to look at cutting that just to a manageable way. You know, given the enrollment, given what's been going on, and just trying to do the best you can. If you don't want to cut teachers, you know, take a certain amount of money and try to, you know, cut that and maybe do something another year. So again, the bigger picture here that I want parents to hear is that people don't want to move into Andover. There's not a lot. I mean, Andover's great. I love it. It's quiet. It's peaceful. But young families are not moving in because they want to go where they can get the most bang for their buck as far as their taxation. They're going to get a school, but in a lot of other towns, they get a lot more.
And, so we need to keep it manageable to run the town, run the school, have families want to come so that enrollment can increase in years to come. And we don't keep seeing this declining enrollment. I myself work with a lot of young families that are bypassing Andover and going where there's a lot more amenities. I've said this in the public. So again, it's a big picture thing. It's keep that manageable so we can do this stuff for the town, and that's it. Thank you for your time and good luck with the hard job that the board of finance has to do. Thank you, Joanne. Thank you, Joanne. Alright, we're all set. Mark, you're muted.
Once again, you think a year of this, I'd be an expert. Thank you everybody just wanted to thank you for your input. We're going to move on to item three and our agenda which is the only agenda item which is to discuss and act upon the proposed budget. As I had suggested earlier, I think the board would like to focus primarily in the town budget. That's what we're going to look at and then probably look at maybe online by live, department by department tonight. We have some things that I think we can change. We talked about some things last week, but again it's going to be on to the board to make that determination, but I would like to get some traction and maybe getting close to final budget recommendation for the town tonight if we can. For the board what I would propose that we do is, first of all kind of go through eric's recommended not recommended but eric's proposed cuts that we had last week. Aren't that many of them, we talked a little bit about them
it's like to find out whether you know there's some strong feeling one way or the other, we can implement those move through them quickly I don't want to have 23 votes tonight, I think that's a very inefficient way to go. But let's go down through there let's go through these proposed ideas let's move through. With any remaining departments and see if anybody has any suggestions on where to make changes
and then we can go on through there. Yeah, Rob? I have a quick question just kind of as a point of information. The
number one on Eric's list, if memory serves and correct me if I'm wrong please do jump in and tell me if I'm wrong the consolidation of the position that would save us $45,000
that was very provisional on agreement from the union if memory serves. Do we have an update on that? Yeah, we do. Eric, do you want to go ahead and respond to that now since that's number one on your list anyway?
Yeah, so we can talk about that. So what we had based on what the assistant town clerk had asked the town to do, we had proposed to the union combining the position of the assistant town clerk and the building department admin. The assistant town clerk has kind of gotten cold feet and this afternoon told me she was not interested in it based on the conditions the union would have put in to do that. Now that is not dead because the board of finance can certainly force it if they so choose. But I don't want to tell you what the board of selectmen is going to do because the Board of Selectmen has not made any decisions about that right now.
I can say that it may not be a debt issue yet.
Oh, I don't, I mean, you know, there's, the town has a lot of options if they wanna do it. It's just the options come with some serious negatives and the board would have to decide what they wanna do about that. Yeah, I think we need to have an executive session though
with the employee in question and work through this. I don't think it's a debt issue even there.
All right, so just to bring it back for the purpose of our discussion, that is up in the air. Well what
I'm just trying to say is if we were to try to make a decision tonight and say okay we can bank that 45 we can't really.
Sure you can you're the Board of Finance you can force that decision. If you so choose, but we can we can't make the personnel decision what we can do is peg the number right and true. If it doesn't go through we can you know we can recommend a change at the town budget meeting or we can, you know, we can make some other change down the road, nothing's in stone. But
think if we cut it if memory serves at the town budget meeting you can't add you can only cut. Correct. Overall the top number I believe.
Correct. We only line item individual line items either. You can cut into just can't add to.
Yeah, that's right. So like the trooper got put back in the bathroom at the field got taken out, you know.
Right. And it was a trade, right. Fair. I'm alright. I was just trying to get clarity on that. And thank you guys. I think I understand the state of play. Thanks. Good.
So and be clear, I've only known about this for a few hours. I mean, I'm gonna have to have another discussion with the town's labor attorney and then we're gonna have sit down with the board and the board is gonna have to decide what it is, how they want to proceed. The hard part is how do you incorporate a cut you don't know. Yeah. Which is my point.
Okay. All right. I think what I'd like to do is just to kind of give us a structure and framework here. Let's move to, if I could, I'd open up this document, share that. Document that Erica provided earlier. So we can just go through these one by one and rob's already brought up one of the big ones here. So this one is, as we mentioned, kind of up in the air, it seems to me that it would be problematic for us to cut this out of the budget at this time, though I think we all probably hoped we could do so, But if we take it out, the problem is that we obviously can't add it back in, in the budget meeting if it turns out that we weren't able to get this deal done. Well,
I mean, you could add it in if you took it out now and I'm not saying that's a good idea, but if you did take it out now you could put it back in after the public hearing also prior to the meeting. Prior to the budget. Yeah,
yeah. Well that's true we could do that and just, it's another change.
We have another workshop next week so do we think we're going to get any clarity around this item in another week. Yes. Maybe. That in itself is lack of search. There's
a lot of moving parts to it. So I I can't guarantee we're gonna Right. Have
let's be clear if Eric is the pessimist and I'm the optimist. We have a problem. Right. That's classic here, Adrian. Yeah, very good.
Eric just to be clear this would affect the building department. Yes. Salary lines and benefits correct?
Correct. What this would have done is it would have basically taken the building administrative position, which is technically a full time thirty hour a week position with benefits and combined that with the assistant town clerk position and made one full time employee between the two of those is what this would have done. Okay.
I mean, we could just choose not to, I mean, yeah.
My recommendation was let's put this cut in and see where it gets us and we can make that change later as Eric and the Gatoran mentioned. Anybody in the board disagree with that.
No, we have another couple weeks before we're going to finalize this anyway. Yeah, right. I'm okay with provisionally doing it I just want to be clear for our own selves before we take this thing to
a budget meeting. Yeah that we have our ducks in a row. Yeah yeah I mean we can't put that in there if we think it may not happen, it just wouldn't be irresponsible. Okay, agreed. All right, I'm making some notes in the budget spreadsheet as we go along, but we'll go ahead and take a look at that. You guys are still seeing the Word document, correct? Correct. So item number two is to eliminate the board of finance legal budget. I'd recommend that we do so. Concurrent or feel differently. It's
different now and that was a very specific thing for specific time. I'm okay with letting it go. It's not a lot of money but everything helps so let's do it. I am also.
Me too. Listen, I will. Can I just say as a selectman I think you guys should keep it? It gives you an it's great that you trust the board selectman that's there right now. But this isn't about you guys, this is about every board of finance. You guys should have that money. Because we we could make a mistake too, and you need to have a separate opinion. You know, we're not infallible. You need to protect the town. You know, you guys are like the last stop. So, you know, as much as I feel that we have a strong board and we're doing good things, maybe we maybe we don't the next and next length cycle or maybe we make a mistake and you guys need to know whether we've done this incorrectly. So I mean, it's $2,500. It's not a lot of money, but it's enough for you guys to get a couple of opinions if you need it. You know? I mean, that was our original take, Adrian, as you know. Was there. I know. And it listen, I I appreciate that that this board of finance is is is supportive of the board of selectmen, but protect the town, keep them it's $2,500.
David you've been around to and Kurt you guys have any stronger feelings about any, you know, Dave you were here I think when this happened. Yeah, I was here.
I have to agree with Adrian. Unless there's a process where we need funds to get legal opinion because we remove this out the, and something comes up on our board or future boards, the hands could be tied potentially to get some legal counsel and that concerns me. So I'm not in favor of removing it. Okay.
I have a question. Is there a way of reducing it instead of removing it?
I don't know what I don't know. You know what is, is that if I.
Yeah, mean, the likelihood is that wouldn't, it wouldn't be spent and it is not a material amount relative to the budget so from, you know, an Adrian kind of made that point and, you know, so it won't buy us a lot but
it's basically a rounding error, I was okay with letting it go but I mean the counterpoints are very good and valid. When we had a more contentious relationship between the Board of Finance and the Board of Selectmen it was put in because frankly if we needed to question something and we had to go to the board selectman to get the approval to do so it wasn't going to work. So you know the folks who are speaking up in favor of it are right for another context and that context can come again. So they're not wrong and $2,500 isn't a lot of money. I'm just saying, you know, in all hands on deck scenario, if we're looking desperately to make any cut we can, Okay. But yeah, all things considered, I'd rather keep it. Sure. Well, think of it this way. You guys
cut the budget and we overspend out of the fund balance without going to the board of finance next year. Right? If you don't have that $2,500, you can't go get a legal opinion or draft a legal strategy to to correct us without asking us to to approve a pl.
Yeah. But I know where you live. Right. Because I'd say that we know where you live. Mark, Mark, if I can have a clarification. Go ahead, Kurt.
What what stops us from using Mr. Mr. O'Brien, the town attorney for an opinion?
So we're already paying him. We don't have any money. No, so it's on retainer
right now. But but I mean, listen, I, I like Dennis O'Brien, he is very good to us. But please keep in mind, he is not a young ripper snapper. And the next attorney probably will not we will not be able to afford to keep on retainer. Now, he's doing this because he's semi retired from his regular practice. He likes doing, you know, this type of work with towns. It's, know, we're an outlier, he likes our little town, he thinks it's kind of fun getting involved. But the next attorney is not not gonna do it for anywhere near what he's doing it for. So we're not gonna be able to afford retainer. We're gonna have to go to opinion by opinion work at that point. And we're gonna have to be a little stingier about what we do. So because we because because he's on retainer, we still can't use him for, an opinion? Well, technically, Mark as the Board of Finance chair, because he's on retainer could. And obviously, Eric can, but right, it's not. But again, his contract is coming up again, and he could decide not to renew it. And then you guys are back to square one. When does that contract end Eric, you know?
The board of select men has to do the annual review for the attorney in the next couple months. Then usually the contract is by fiscal year. So July 1, that contract is up.
And he could decide he's not gonna renew it. And then we're again, we would have to go back to opinion by opinion.
And if you're paying $2.50 an hour, that's ten hours.
Well, Debbie Downer, so $2,500 is not a lot of money. And in my life, my career. I have never been able to get a legal opinion for less than twenty four. So it's kind of a move point because if we have a serious problem, we're not gonna have the money anyways. Right. It gives you enough money to get started.
Yeah, he does have a point there that we should strongly consider, you know, and as he said this is, you know, we have a, we do have a responsibility to, to retain some independence. So that is a reasonable concern.
Well, know, we can't just run all night but I kind of maybe call the question. Let's act on it. Yes or no. We could beat around a bush all night on this
one Yeah, we could and it's not really a significant amount of money to make up in. So I thought thought it was. Wait, we need a motion. Make your move. Yep. I'll make a motion to call the question.
No, no. Hold on. The motion has to be the cutter or not. So I mean, well if it's in there, we don't have cut it. So the motion would be to remove it. Yeah, so yeah we would need we would want to take motion to take action so the motion in this case would be
a vote that the Board of Finance recommend that the legal portion of the of the Board of Finance Department expenses be removed from the budget. That's right. That would be the motion. Yeah. Does anybody second that motion? This is the motion to remove. I'll second the motion just to for discussion.
Okay. Okay, so I guess then I made the motion. Yeah, seconds it. Okay. Okay. Any further discussion on this?
Because we actually have that kind of talked it out. So it's really, you know, let's go ahead and vote on it.
Okay, hearing no discussion. Let's take a vote. Members of the board all in favor say aye. Aye. Who's voting aye. Louise Louise Louise and you.
Louise and me. Linda. Okay, you're going yes to remove. Okay, all voting no. Aye. It's David. Diane, no. Will abstain. And Rob is going to abstain. Okay, thank you.
There is no free reign next year. Let's go after that budget. Passes
to remove. I'll just remind everybody this is not mean we cannot change our minds at a later time. And prior to the budget meeting that yeah, you're on notice Adrian, we're watching you.
Okay, if we could let's go to the next item that we had here this is to reduce wage increases for the non union employees obviously the union employee that's defined by contract. What Eric put on the table here would be to reduce non union employees from three to 2% the town clerk from a board of selectman approved 6% increase to 2% reduce the salary for the registrars each one by seven fifty total salary gets us about $4,600 We talked about this fairly significantly at our last meeting. I personally am not in favor of this. I think we it's going to cause more problems than it's ever going to solve for us it's not really material to the budget. That's my opinion. But I'd like to hear what the other rest of the board thinks on this. Completely agree. I think it's
for a minor amount of money. It's going to stir up all sorts of problems. It's a small effect on the budget. It's a big impact on those employees. And I think it's a terrible idea.
For the record, I am certainly not in favor of doing it. I'm sure not. But you asked me to come up with $75,000 worth of cuts. So I don't, there were not a lot of options to do that. Eric, get, I think, I hope everybody gets that.
Just like when we had this discussion with the board of ed years ago, when we had Valerie come to us and give us scenarios, nobody wanted to do it. Nobody wanted to do it, but it was just, you know, all hands on deck, everything we could find in this particular scenario, don't think the bang is there for the buck.
Anybody else Louise, Kurt, anybody want to David. Would anybody like to make a motion to reduce wage increases as a recommendation of our budget as a part of our budget recommendation. Okay I'm hearing none so let's move on to item for Reduce the board of selectmen salary stipend from $1,200 to $1,000 It saves us $800
Adrian, how do you feel about that? Got it, I don't care. I donate every year. He gives it back anyway. I'm kidding man, I'm kidding that was the joke. Take it.
It saves us a whopping $800 so from the standpoint of the budget impact it's negligible but whatever. I don't care one way or the other, we don't get a siphon so whatever. Yeah I mean that could be your argument I mean oh shoot sorry guys
getting a call Great bank tone, man. Yeah, right. Not Yeah, very willing any appetite for doing that unless somebody wants to make a motion that that'd be part of a recommendation. Can we,
is it possible to make it just to table that come back to it? Absolutely. We're $800 away. Have our budget meeting. Anything could be changed.
Yeah, we're so fine. I mean, I don't have a problem with either way. I don't feel strongly either way. Does anybody feel strongly either way?
I think it's more of a symbolic gesture than anything else and you know.
Think that's true. The level of effort and the site visits, things that they have to do occasionally that frankly, most of us don't have to do so. But
to be fair, Mark, from my point of view, the Board of Finance puts in just as much time, so does planning and zoning and so does all the other reports. Mean, get it. I get that it was structured that way. But mean, I just don't feel that it's that's one of the reasons I give mine back because I don't feel that anybody else, nobody else is getting a salary and they're all doing the same amount of work as us on some level.
What extent to which is this is a little bit of an artifact shoe, but the before time when we had no tenant administrator?
I think it's a lot of an artifact to be honest with you. I think that's a very fair question. I know some people would like it, but I can only speak for me. Know, I know some other board members that definitely appreciate it. But that's my opinion. Okay.
You might want to take a survey of the rest though.
But I think we have and that was the recommended budget that they passed on right I think the board of slack and felt strongly they didn't want that it would have come out of the budget that we got so I think we've already, you know, we can take that as confirmation that they feel is appropriate.
I personally think it's a it's a it's a it's a reach for $800. We're really splitting hairs here that I don't think it's gonna make a difference either way. There are other larger fish to fry here.
We could always make more money than to be Yeah, more than
know, I mean, I agree with the symbolism though that makes sense.
So I will tell you that there is precedence for that one prior board of finance who was pissed at the board of selectmen for not delivering a budget to the board of finance in time deliberately cut their budget you know, to encourage them to produce their budgets on time. I remember that. I vaguely recall such a thing. When I involved, I may have made that motion.
This week or this budget year so somebody wants to make a motion to include that in our recommendations I'd like to move on to item five. Fair mark sorry. Okay, Item five is to reduce the assessor legal counsel line item. Talked a little bit about this previously too. We could do $1,000 to $3,000 savings. Eric feels it's risky in the revaluation year. It's hard to argue with that, I think. But what do you guys think?
I mean, agree. This is exactly the last year you do it. You do it in a quiet year, not in a year where you're expecting lawsuits.
So for the record, we do shrink this budget that line item in the non reval years but in past reval years we have bumped that up.
Have we Eric just I mean this is a small monomony as well all these things are past your first item. Have we in the past reval years spent this kind of money? Oh yes. I think we've gone over. And more, a lot more. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking. So I'm thinking cutting this is just shooting ourselves in the foot.
Well, I mean, hard part is it's one of those moving targets where you really never know. It just simply depends on how many people sued the down. It depends a lot on the board of appeals. Yep. You know, and what they do, it depends on people's moods. I mean, there's a lot of things that go into it. So, but yes, we have considerably overrun that in the past. 15 or 16,000. Yeah. Yeah.
And the reality is that property values have been on the rise during the pandemic and people may not necessarily see that in their day to day life and right that could be a disconnect that is going to lead some disagreements that may not have occurred in non pandemic here. Yeah that's true and I mean if memory serves I mean that's what I was remembering Adrian is that I almost feel like we had to pull from contingency one year for that yeah we did shift money around yeah so
yeah that's a cut that doesn't make any sense to me appreciate being put on the table, Eric, and I know you're not vouching for it as a thing that you want to do. I'm just saying.
But listen, you guys have a handle on this. I addressed the issues I had concerned with. It looks like Eric has some
great support or reasons for everything else. I'm gonna let you guys go. Good luck. Okay, so we can go back to the Board of Selectmen thing once Eric even leaves. You do what you need to do, guys.
All right, thanks. Thanks, Adrian. Okay, back to item five here. I want to keep this moving along. Does anybody feel that we should reduce this or put it on the table? Take a vote? Keep it.
Yeah, I'm with keeping it. Okay. That was a keep it. Is that I hear that correctly? Okay. Yes. All right. Okay. Hearing
no other opinions, let's move on to item six. Eliminate the old firehouse alarm maintenance and stop heating the building completely. So Eric, you talked a little bit about this before. Sure. So, and I'm wondering, is this an either or, or you know, this an either or, but we don't have to do both, And we could do with, is there any reason to keep the alarm maintenance going versus the heating?
No, I mean, I think we're probably not going to bother to alarm that building going forward. I mean, it's a little risky because we do have three senior transportation vehicles. Worst case scenario, we burn them all up in a fire and have to go to Kerma to replace the vehicles, which would be unfortunate. But if we really are taking the heating system out of the building and we're down to very minimal electrical loads, the chances of catching on fire is greatly reduced also. So, I mean.
I mean, isn't this the first step to like putting that building to bed? I mean, it's gotta go, so to speak. We just need to find a place for the vehicles.
Yeah and and we are working on that. I mean we're you know we're looking at the we're looking at a couple options at Public Works, you know, for storing the vehicles there. I mean, you know, it's nice to have them indoors and it's nice to have many people building because that way the drivers don't, you know, complain as much. But you know at the end of the week I mean the diesel vehicle would have to be plugged in so whatever building it goes into if we're not heating it we have to have the ability to plug the thing in so it will start in cold but that's our only real you know,
right. Yeah, but that may require some alterations we thought possibly too. So is that really going to be a net savings? We talked a little bit about that. Do you need block heaters and fuel tank heaters?
Yeah, and you know what, that was on my list and I did not check into that. So that was my fault. Yeah, I mean, you've got to do either of those things, you're going to chew this up pretty quick.
Yep. I think we would all agree that there probably needs to be a long term solution to this situation. That might make a little more sense for us as a town.
Yeah, desperately need to get out of that building completely. All right. No question.
So we may have some savings with alarm maintenance, but likely we're either gonna have to heat or we're gonna have to alter the vehicles, do some modifications to allow them to operate in cold weather. Doesn't sound like there's really gonna be much savings here. It might be a little bit of money, but. Yeah, it's definitely not a big number, no question.
All right. Well, I'd say we probably you guys make your best judgment and review Eric and your what to do with the alarm, but I don't know that we actually changed the budget line items for this. Anybody on the board feel differently. Kurt you muted. All right, your question is.
I was just wondering if anybody felt differently, like we should we should take take a budget cut here somewhere to support this.
In regards to the old firehouse you're talking Yeah. Yeah. Do we wanna stop heating it? I wanna I wanna I wanna level it and have it haul hauled away. Yeah. So back to my back to my point about a long term The bunker's down to town garage no matter what we have to do for now. The place is an eyesore and, you know, someday somebody's gonna get hurt there.
Yeah. So yeah, we need a long term plan. Sure do. And some some point it becomes a liability, right?
I think it's a liability right now with a mold in there. Yeah.
Okay. Well, if we could let's let's move on to item seven, reduce the overtime for snow removal. So that if we did discuss this at the other the other meeting we had if everyone remembers that. It sounds like what we've got budgeted currently is not quite worst case scenario, but bad case scenario, so what Eric was suggesting is we could take out some of the overtime budget for for the snow removal. Still most years, we would. Be okay depending on the number of plowable events. If we had a bad year we would, we would run over budget. So one of the things that Eric here and Eric I'd like you to clarify this a little bit since we decided to town to accept lower expectations for road surfaces and. An angry and result potentially of angry residents, is it is that really the trade off or or is the trade off that we might have to hit some contingency fund in order to cover the plowable events? Well, I mean both those things are possible. So
on average in Connecticut there are 13 plowable events per year but there are other times when you're going to salt because of ice. Now it's anybody's guess when those events are going to occur if they all line up during the middle of the workday, you know, you don't run any overtime. If it happens on Sunday, you're paying double time. So it's really, it's all over the map on the last two to three years, we've had very mild winters. Winters. So we've been under that historic threshold by quite a bit. Like this year, for instance, we've only gone through, well, we've gone through ballpark around fifteen thousand dollars in overtime expenses for the department just on snow removal. But we also had two really long stretches of a month each where we had no
snow events whatsoever. So what I'm saying is that if we really think global warming trends are going to hold and we're going to be running on average less events, we can reduce that number. Right now, I figure we're gonna go over about every fourth year, we would be well over. I mean, if you look at the trends, if you reduce that, maybe you design it so half the years you're over and half the years you're under. Just That's what I would suggest. Comfort level is. Let's not budget
for extremes as long as it's not so egregious that we can't cover it through either some other transfer or through a contingency funding.
What are we budgeting for now in this proposed budget, what's the number?
We budget 25,000 a year in overtime costs for snow removal.
And to go over that would be an extreme year is what you're saying?
I would say if you look at historical trends that should be about right for say the twenty year average historical year. We should be somewhere around there. So in twenty nineteen-twenty
twenty we spent $10,800 in twenty twenty-twenty twenty one year to date we spent 12 well assuming this is up to date it may not be 12,150, so. And
some of that was misallocation. Think we're truly around 15,000 right now. So yes, the last two years we've definitely under spent that budget. And I've definitely sat through when we've overspent that budget when it was 25,000. So there's a lot of variability. Most years we're gonna be under 25,000. I would say most years we're probably under 20,000, but it just depends on your comfort level. And if you reduce it, you got to know that fairly regularly, they're going to exceed that.
I'm personally comfortable with that. Think that's how we should budget as long as we have the ability to cover it elsewhere which we do.
You mean so keeping the 25 that we have in there is what you're saying. No, I think we should reduce it. We do it. So my question to you, Eric is if we reduce it. Okay, I get that we may have to find money somewhere else for you know, average year that we have too much now, but we're not going to and normally just have lower expectations for the road service because if we have to treat the roads we have to treat the roads we're not going to do less treating.
See, I kind of disagree with that. Mean, there are a lot of places you go that don't do anywhere near as good a job as we do with road cleaning. You know, we have accepted the fact that we are going to use the hell out of public works and we're going to try to do a really good job all the time. And that's the expectation that's set. That's not the expectation that's set in every community, you know, and if we set a lower expectation, we can spend less money, but that is the expectation of the community. So if we do that, we have to do it deliberately knowing that, hey, you know what, I mean, sometimes our roads are going to be icy, deal with it, you know, and I don't know that we necessarily want to do that. People don't know how to drive, so.
Back to our budgeting question, know there's there's two different things going on here one is that do we as a community feel comfortable with reducing the level of service on our, on our snow and ice removal. That's one question. I think that that's almost outside of the purview of this discussion. I mean that is one one way you could reduce this budget, because if we are comfortable with that boom let's make the decision to take $10 out. The other what I'm proposing is that we ought to at least take $10 out just because we're over budgeting on average. And then, you know what if we decide we don't want to reduce the, the level of services the level of, work on the, on roads, you know, though, then I'm okay with that. But I don't think we should over budget to take care of unusual years. I think we have a contingency opportunity to handle that when and if it's needed.
I agree, I think we should have enough money in there to deal with things on an average basis, not you know consistently budgeting over.
The only comment I would add is that the more we do this with various budget line items where we try to get things close to the bone and budget for the average year and rely on contingency to cover it, we have to just be mindful of the level of the contingency and whether we really have enough in there to account for a black swan kind of year. By and large I'm agreeing with you guys, I think you're right that we should budget for kind of the new normal. We haven't had a significant snow year for a while now and we should maybe budget accordingly, that you know we have to dip in contingency for this that and the other thing we have what 50 in contingency? I'm going to remind me is it 50 or seventy five? Fifty thousand. Yeah I mean that can go fast if we need it. That said I think I'm generally in agreement with those who are saying we should reduce this a bit. That's all.
I guess I would move that we recommend that we reduce this line item by $10,000 that's I'm going to make that motion normally as Chair I avoid doing that, just kind of move this along. Recommendation would be that the board my my motion is that the board recommend. The budget line item be $10,000 less only set that for $15,000 instead of the $25,000 with the understanding that we likely can cover that out of contingency. I'll second it.
I got Louise on the second. You. Any more discussion. Okay let's vote all in favor say Aye. Aye.
Aye. Aye. Any opposed. Eric you wanna this one, I think it's a little bit. A little bit back and forth, this was kind of interesting you know I'm not generally a fan of street lighting I prefer to see dark skies, but I think it was Kurt that made a good point that. Where we actually left it in last time we went around as the town and eliminated the lighting was at the intersections for safety purposes. And I haven't gone around and examine this I don't really know kind of what this current status is, but does anybody have any further comments on that? Eric, is there any potential to convert some of this to LED and just save electrical costs?
Yeah, most of our street lights are converted to LEDs. The ones that are not are the ones out in front of the town hall and the ones on the athletic field. And I have looked into with Rick Lenco what we would have to do with athletic field lighting. I think if we were ever going to do it, we would probably it gets tougher, because the lighting there is a lot for security but it's not a lot to play. And in the fall, those lights are used to extend the season. In fact, if you notice they bring in one or two portable light towers, diesel light towers, so they can play after dark in the fall. I mean, long term, we would probably be better off to switching
to some kind of combo setup where we set up actual stadium lighting, but have all but just a few of them turn off as security lighting and feed it the meter we already have there that runs the pumps in the irrigation system. But that's a fairly expensive longer term solution. I know I got a lot of complaints in the fall when the lights weren't working because they were burned out. The soccer players complained to me pretty incessantly.
There's an off and I don't I'm sure you guys looked at this with lanco but I there still is some and it's gotten easier, and I know because I've done it recently with my company, but we've, you know, there's still a fairly reasonable ability to get rebates and support from Eversource on this or whoever your supplier is,
Yeah, and I think, I mean, I feel like what that has to do is, again, that has to be part of, I mean, a bunch of different people want to do a bunch of different things down at the athletic fields. And at some point, the town needs to appoint a grounds committee and start making some of these decisions and setting priorities. But, you know, the board decided not to do that in the fall, you know, for whatever reason. So I feel like there's gotta be a plan before we arbitrarily start saying we're gonna go do a lighting upgrade at this facility.
Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah, I would agree with that. And I don't, I'm not necessarily advocating for it. I'm just wondering, I just wanna make sure we're planning for savings if that's an opportunity, I guess. Sure.
Mark, I can make a comment. Go ahead, Curt. In 1988, we had our fiftieth anniversary celebration, fifty years for the fire department. And I had picked up, I think it was four of these 1,000, we used to call it 1,000 watt floodlights on brackets that we took down from some, I think it was a, may have even been Monaco Ford's lot, where they used to light up the lot with their cars. He he had upgraded to a different light. Anyways, these things at no cost, to the town of Andover, just my labor on a weekend with the okay of my supervisors and this was under the old Connecticut Light and Power. We installed those lights. We installed the wiring to light those lights and probably for the good part of fifteen plus years, those lights went unmetered and were on every night, at no cost at the town of Andover. So actually, to cut anything from street lighting, I'm totally against because we actually owe them money. But it was done in kind because it was a community event. At that time, the company was decent with doing that. The new company Eversource Energy is not like that. They have to meter every kilowatt that's used. But, as far as I'm concerned, the town of Andover owes them a lot of money
worth of usage electricity. So I am totally against cutting any type of street lighting in this town because we don't have enough. I think I said that the last time but I'll leave it with that. Well, no, will add something. Same with the monument site. The famous monument site, I think I talked about that last time too. All that original service that's still there, which I think is now metered or maybe not, was all free and a donation from Connecticut Light and Power. Okay. That's it.
All right. Does anybody want to suggest a motion to make changes here? I'm not necessarily in favor of it at this time, but somebody else may be Make a decision on this because
I don't know the downside to the safety side of it. To me, when it comes to a safety item, dollars 6,000 isn't a lot of money to save
for one person getting hurt. Do know what I mean? Yeah. I agree with that. Mean, you have to look at it from a kind of a I'll look at it in the statistical side. But yeah. All right. If nobody has any objections, let's move on to item nine. Item nine was to reduce the fire commission budget by 3%. Was that just a round number, Eric, or was that something that you
No, that was a completely round number because there's two entities that we essentially just write checks to as a town. One is the Board of Fire Commission, the other is the Andover Public Library. So, you know, I said if we're proposing an overall reduction, that's going to be somewhere in that range, then that would be the effect on the Fire Commission and that would be the effect on the library.
Yeah. You guessing Kurt probably would be in the best position to comment on what impact something like this might have. Yes,
I will. It I just think it's pretty tough to cut a zero increase budget from last year as far as operating goes. And where the cuts will if the cuts are if the 3% cut does go through, it's to affect training, it's going to affect building maintenance and vehicle maintenance. Keep in mind, I mean, our newest fire engine is a 2005, it goes as low as a 1989 vehicle next door. We do keep them a long time and it's not free maintenance, trust me, especially on the older vehicles. It's getting to be hard to find parts and things like that. But I think it's ludicrous to cut a zero increased budget that we presented to the town originally. We basically kind of thought we were going in with a $100,000 request for capital. And that was, I think, cut by, what did you say, Eric, last month, 50,000? It was cut 25,000
by the board of the salon. Excuse me, 25,000 from that. So, and those were, those were, much needed capital equipment that, did go through capital improvements committee first, after the fire committee pushed it through. But training and things like that. And we're also wondering how much how much of the COVID, 19 money that may be coming to the state or the town of Andover that may come our way at at next door because if everybody remembers, I mean, they're they're training tonight on on on some some COVID protocols still, and we're still running calls every day, you know, and the dispatcher tells us whether it's, you know, the person we're going to pick up has been tested or vaccinated or anything else, those actually come through. These people next door are working 20 fourseven, still, you know, to protect the townspeople of, you know, Andover and the, and the people passing through. That's my, I'll end it with that. I, I, as you know, I, I won't vote, I'll abstain from any vote regarding this, but that would be to cut us 3% would be devastating in the training end of it. Training
is key to keeping these guys safe. While I know a little bit from my involvement in Suffield and maintenance is a constant thing. These things don't get used very often, surprising how much maintenance they require from sitting around
And just one last note is we have brought in probably, well, Chief Mike and the group has brought in probably close to a dozen cadet and junior members. A lot of them from Mr. Bancroft's EMT class up at Ram High School. Both guys and girls are joining the town of Andover Fire Department to practice their skills. There's some training expenses there for new people.
Exactly. Mean, did lower the age to 14 and it was slow getting started, but right now it's kind of taken off. And like I said, we're looking at a dozen young kids that are the future of this department run it. So as volunteers, both boys and girls. So, know, if anybody stopped by and actually meet these kids and meet the rest of the people that are doing the job every day twenty four seven.
Personally am not going to propose anything to do with this is anybody feel like we should. Anybody want to make a motion to reduce the fire Commission budget. No. Okay, hearing none. Let's move on to item 10. Reduce the library payroll operations by budget by 3%. I'll just say upfront, I would not support this.
You probably never hear me support that. I mean, the only thing that's expense in the library is really, it's all salary. I mean, there's nothing you can Right. So,
and I wanna be very clear that that would result in less hours of operation. So that is not a low impact cut. I say no on that too.
They're gonna save a lot of money. I say no. For one of the few cool things this town has is a great little library.
Yeah. And can I say something that the library, we haven't had a meeting since this came out, but I'm sure it won't be much, but the library can come up with few cuts if you're talking like $500 here and there because their operations was zero from last year too and they had 2% increases and raises, which really leaves little wiggle room? You take 3% off the whole budget yeah. I say that let's not touch it. Greg.
I mean. Everybody feels differently now is your opportunity to speak. Okay, none. Let's move to item 11, reduce the recreation commission budget trim rental and programs by $2,000 so. What's the rental and programs isn't the rep is what's the rental
define that for us if you would. The rental is basically two porta potties one at the athletic field one at the rail trail. Okay. So, mean the likely one to cut if you had to cut one would be the one at the rail trail and at the Andover Museum. You know, I personally think it's worthwhile but you know I gave you a no stones unturned. I mean you can also if you cut the regular rec commission the program's budget so you're just talking about hosting less events per year. And that's really it.
Their budget is so small to begin with. I mean, that's correct. And you know what, we do need to have some kind of sense of community and some kind of, you know, this town doesn't bring that much to the table for people.
I'll echo what well kind of what Diane said but really echo what Rob said is one of the cool things in this town and you know we we can
support that I'm personally in favor of it. Yeah, it again if this was a cut that would actually really move this budget, then I might feel differently but for $2,000
really? Right but I mean I guess my global point is that you know it's very rare that you're going to find some thing that other than the residents they Trooper. Trooper. Trooper. Right, I'm just saying that if you wanna make big cuts, you're whacking out a whole department.
We know. Know Eric, we know. We asked you for this, you produced it, I get it. Right, yep, understood.
Okay. Does anybody feel like we should reduce the recreation Commission budget. Okay, hearing none. I'll just point out that at this point we have supported a recommendation of about a reduction of 57,500 from the budget so far. So it goes on here, two pools of money from the budget that we could use to preload expenses for next year, the first is the 30,000 town allotted for the software transition that has not been used so Eric you're basically. Proposing that this could be used to cover expenses for the fiscal year twenty twenty one-twenty twenty two?
I mean that's one possibility is at the end of the year allocate that. You could for instance pick one of the capital items and transfer this money into that capital item and then reduce the line item for the capital budget for instance if you so chose. That would be one possible approach to do that.
I have a question just so I understand it fully. Earlier tonight when Adrian was talking about some money that's gonna be potentially rolled over. This would be separate and apart from that or part of that?
Well, so this is money that's in this year's budget. So it's not a capital rollover. It's a separate, yeah. The operating budget. Short answer is yeah, it would be separate. So the answer is if you don't spend it and you don't do something with it, then that money would go into the unexpended fund balance and would be available roughly a year from now when we audited the books and we're sure where we are.
Right and I just wanted to just clarify that that is separate in part from what Adrian was talking about. So if he talks about there being $2.50, if there was $2.50, it's not $2.20 plus this, it's $2.50 potentially plus this. Correct. I think we need to just run through those numbers but yeah I think that that's correct. Okay that's all and I understand it's all provisional that's fine I just want to inform it to have it in my own head I understand what we're talking about. My general feeling is in a situation like this that this makes a lot of sense that to try and alleviate things if we've over budgeted or rather under expended whatever happened that we can take that and we can use as an offset for next year and it's an operating expense already it's not a capital expense We're not mixing and matching. I love it. Sounds good to me. Yeah.
Weren't we looking at, and I don't know where the money was going to come. We've talked about that $20,000 for the Veterans Memorial that we have to find the money out of this year's budget. So isn't that money up for grabs for that?
Well, very possibly, Because the reality is the only other place to take it is out of the building and grounds fund, which currently started off, I think we've got a little over $40,000 left in that fund. As a round number we got to assume we're going to knock off about $20,000 dealing with fire alarms and new fire alarms for buildings and I think we've already accounted for about another 3,000 of that for replacing the overhead doors at the transfer station and some work on the doors at the Public Works Building. I think we're going to chew up another piece of that. We definitely have some more electrical issues we have to deal with at the town hall. Which we're still working out with LENCO how much that's gonna cost. So yeah, if we don't take it out of there, we're taking it out of the building and grounds fund and we're just reducing the other things we're doing basically, know, and putting stuff off.
Don't want to bank on spending that money if we're really not going to have it because we're going to use it for stuff this year.
Well, mean, I think you could take one pool or the other, could leave either the COVID relief money and allocate the other plan on allocating the other to a capital item, or you could do the COVID relief and leave the other 30,000 and assume you were gonna end up spending that. I mean, the good news is we haven't touched contingency and we're doing okay on the budget. So I think the budget is still gonna come out in the green. It's not gonna be a lot though. So we're not gonna be doing what we did last year, which is transfer 100 plus thousand dollars into funds. But those two funds right there, the COVID money and then the money for software potentially could end up, one of those two could end up getting transferred.
What's remaining in the COVID-nineteen relief funding, Eric? Do you know? Somewhere around $18,000
So that's pretty close to the 20,000 we authorized last meeting Okay. For the
We know what we have left over that we need to that we don't really want it to roll into the unexpended funds because we wanna keep that at what 10%? Yeah. Once we're on We need the audit.
We need the audit. Right. So so we have, Diane, a very preliminary audit number. So that preliminary audit number is that we have somewhere around 3%, two to 3% of the reserve that were, in other words, our reserve after the audit is gonna be somewhere around between 1213%.
We want to keep it at 10, right? Right. So we can, well,
I mean, we as a town have decided we want to keep it at ten. Our auditor will tell you that the GAAP accounting standards is two months which is 17%. He would also tell you that most towns don't hold that much and hold less. So if we were to continue the 10% being our target, we can theoretically run about 250,000 safely. Now this is just preliminary numbers from the auditor too, but he was pretty confident in that. He was pretty sure we could do two fifty if we had, if we chose.
I'd like to pipe up and We have like $2.50 to offset. Go
ahead. I was just gonna comment that maybe we should take that up separately. Yeah, okay.
So my only comment to add to it is that to remind everyone I'm sure most everybody here knows this but the 10% value was politically driven as much as anything. If I had my druthers, we'd be running 20%, it's nice to have a big reserve. Our issue was that it was putting a target on our backs at the state level. Right. So we're, you know, 10 to 12% is hardly crazy to have as a reserve. The question of whether we wanna use that reserve to plug some capital fund, you know and do some more roadwork makes sense to me, I hate the idea of using it to offset. Operating expenses. So.
Well, let's just take these line items that if we could, know, Diane made a good point that we had looked at this 30,000 as a possible source of funding for for the the Memorial Park. But currently we also have about 18 left in COVID-nineteen relief funding, which we have some flexibility with. All in, that's about 48,000, take out $20 that still leaves us 28,000, maybe we round it down to 25,000 that we could take out of a capital fund take out of a capital fund transfer for next year and cover that. I mean, that would be one way to do it.
Between those seems reasonable. We just need to pick a fund. If we think we can count on that money and I'm comfortable moving forward on that. What do we have? So for instance, we cut or rather the board of settlement cut the fire department capital by 25,000. What do we have that we haven't touched that we could maybe cut and plug this money into.
Well, in theory it's going to be a wash right. Correct. I know I'm just trying to do
is pre funding this account so you know we were gonna take another 25 out of the pre removal fund. Yeah, we would just, you know, we're just gonna pre fund that right with this year. Correct.
Yeah, I guess it doesn't, it truly doesn't matter which fund we pick, I don't know I was just gonna pick something else. Eric, do you have any strong feelings about that one way or the other, how we would handle that? Make sense? You or Sherry have any input?
If you were to put it in now, I would say put it into the tree removal fund because in truth, we're talking about doing a little work in about two weeks and bringing distinctive tree care in. And I'm not sure we have enough money currently budgeted for everything we were going to try to get them to do now. So if you did that, you could put that money in now, decide to transfer that. Actually, you can't do it technically till tomorrow. April 1, you can do it as a board. And because you're in the last quarter and then you could back off back 25,000 out of the tree budget if you preloaded, you could do that.
Can we make a motion? Does anybody know can we make a motion tonight to do something that takes effect tomorrow? Sounds a little dicey to me. Don't know. We've got another meeting next week yeah we have a meeting next week maybe we should just put this on the agenda next week as a up or down vote.
But, but I think for the purposes of consolidating a budget recommendation we can, we can vote that we want to to recommend this we don't necessarily take that action quite yet, though. And then we can we put on next week's agenda. Yeah and then we actually take the action in a future meeting, so I would think that the that the motion would be to. Remove 25,000 from the tree removal fund with the intention that it would be pre funded through excess leftover money from this year.
All right, so I would then make a motion that we take $25,000 of unexpended funds from the software transition project and place it in and set it aside for the tree removal fund and simultaneously reduce the next year's budget for the tree removal fund by $25,000
Does that work or do we need to be exactly right anybody anybody want to second that motion? I'll second it. Thanks Linda. Linda,
okay thanks Linda. Okay any further discussion on that Just to clarify what we'll be doing is pre pre funding with the excess funds from this year into the into the tree removal fund and we're just going to decrease the amount allocated to next year's transfer of the budget. Okay, hearing no more discussion. Let's take a vote. All in favor, aye. Aye.
Any abstentions? Okay hearing none we'll put that into our recommendations.
Thank you. Okay so you want a formal motion for next month next week. Why if you could put that under your budget and then you want it taken out of the budget. Okay yeah it works for me.
All right, so I'm going go down to cuts the capital here and the Board of Selectmen had already reduced capital requests by 25 ks for the fire department 25 ks for removal 15 ks building maintenance. Potential additional cuts that are in the budget. So these are all in the capital budgets right now, Eric, you're saying? Yeah,
the first one, yes, correct. The first one is the loader. Now the Board of Finance decided essentially the last two years to not consider the lease payment for the loader as part of the $110,000 a year capital allotment for public works but that doesn't mean it kind of is and it kind of isn't so that's why I put that in there it just depends what you're you know
but just to be clear that's just moving money around from a capital fund to plug the operating budget That's not That's
not a cut. That's a transfer. Well, you're taking money to pay the lease out of the capital budget.
Right. That's exactly what Marcus said would be what you would do. And I mean, it is kind of, Yeah, that's exactly what that it's accounting. It's not actually
cutting anything. It's taken it from a different fund. Yeah, well, it means it would be $32 less we'd have in the budget for next year. Correct. But we're taking it out of a reserve. Correct, we're taking out of fund. But it's really going to have it for another purpose. Correct. Eric is the intention to like lease to buy on this loader.
It was. We basically this was one of those things where it was an emergency. The backhoe blew up completely. So we were stuck without a backhoe and we rented one because we needed the piece of equipment. So, what happened was we looked at all our options and we got Volvo to agree to basically, we were essentially renting the thing and they allowed us to put the rental fee towards purchase of the machine and we made a decision simply because that's what we we didn't have the funds to buy it outright that we spent town aid road money basically for our first year and then we agreed to budget for it in subsequent years and pay it off over four years. So that's what we're in the process of doing now. So the intention then is still to
purchase this at the end of the lease? Yeah, I mean, we're yes,
it's I'm just trying to figure out whether it's maybe that isn't even the right question, but whether it would be appropriate to use the capital fund to basically pay for capital equipment.
Right, and that's exactly why I put it in there. I would say that we're struggling to fund public works equipment as it is. So that would essentially reduce 32,000 the funding available for capital equipment. And as you know, because we had to replace the truck, we essentially ran that budget down to absolute zero. So that capital fund essentially is at, it's not zero but it's in the 2 to $3,000 range right now. So this would basically give somewhere around 70,000 or 78,000 something like that in that money.
At the end of this lease, do we still have to come up with money to perk a capital expense to purchase the rest of the loader or just this? No, no we're And we totally own the whole thing. Yeah, yeah. So it's maybe even lease is not the right. I mean, was
basically a lease to own deal. So you might as well call it a loan, not a lease anyway. Think of it as zoning and we're just making We're in a few years.
Are we paying interest on it? Or is it? Yep. But to me, it's not a capital expense. It's a lease expense. Yeah. Well, yeah, I mean,
you're trying to talk. I wasn't quite saying anything worthwhile anyway, I just said yeah I mean it just depends if you're buying it to own it I mean you could, you could make the argument there'd be a capital. Looks like from what I'm seeing on the budget spreadsheet you've got a note here that this is the last payment on this loader.
I'm pretty sure this is our last payment on the loader.
Okay, pretty sure. But to get back to what Diana is saying, you know, I think you can make the argument that it's a capital equipment purchase if our intention is to purchase it, but what I think we really are facing here is do we want to do that and deplete this fund and you know. Basically throttle that so that we don't have the opportunity to fund other capital works of the other public works. I don't know what the plans are with that fund. Always breaks down. We're always gonna need something.
Can I just, the capital equipment fund as it currently exists has how much in it roughly? 2,000.
Oh, that's the one you were saying was like $23,000?
Yeah, because remember we did two things. One we've opted for a used sweeper which meant we could buy it out of the money we had. Right. Everything left to replace the truck.
So wait, 32,000 in change, public works capital improvement fund reducing that by that amount if that's the amount of am I missing something here if we have 2 or $3,000 left in that fund how do we do that? Are we gonna add to it? So
let me back up and say what are we loading $50 in or something? I'm not forgetting. Yes, so what has $110.
Oh, okay. We have said in the past, if you look at the total of capital works equipment and you cut them down to their minimum operating number of pieces of equipment, which by the way is not at all what the public works foreman would like. Of course, yeah. But as we've had this discussion, there are wants and then there are needs. If you look at what fifteen year capital equipment budget does, you know, when we started that calculation kind of after we bought the loader, because we bought the loader on an emergency basis, because we blew up its predecessor. If you look at that, that equates to somewhere around $110,000 a year if you're frugal over that fifteen year period. So like anytime you're under $110,000 you're you're kind of going in the hole a little bit. That's how I would look at it. Oh yeah. Okay.
I'm not sure if everybody's totally clear on that but this would deplete that that target $110,000 funding that is planned for next year. And right now you're saying there's very little in there.
So the net net you're talking about roughly going from reducing it by about 30 ks because you got about $2,000 in there now you're talking about taking 32,615 out. Sure,
netted out, you know, it's your negative 30 ks, basically.
And what I'm saying is that that 30,000 is there is that 110,000 that we're funding it you're reducing that by 30,000 in this scenario, and basically putting yourself in a situation where you have to make that up down the road so it's another situation in my mind we're just kicking the can down the road. Correct, it's absolutely a can kicking exercise. And sometimes the can has to be kicked but
that is absolutely what this is. Does anybody want to make a motion on this? I'm personally not in favor of it although it is tempting. It's a nice number. Think you can
we just kind of put it on hold and remember it in case we need it. Oh, we
always again we can always go back to it, you can revisit this next bill we have the town budget meeting, all of this is, is just a recommendation, so we can always reverse that right my recommendation is going to go to the town budget meeting which is going to happen in early May.
That's right, and I think we should probably table this and come back to it.
So this is a desperation move in my opinion. Yeah, there motion that we added as a recommended reduction I say we move on. I agree. Let's just remember it. Okay, yeah.
Thank you, Eric for this document by the way it's a good way to kind of roll through this. Item two on here we could choose not to fund the multi use building fund, AKA the community center center. Does anybody want to touch this third row? Push this button, I'll say right off on I'm not in favor of reducing this funding.
I mean, you know, there's an argument that says that the town's surviving just fine without it, but we've had this on the drawing board now for how long? Forty years. Much longer than I've been in town. Forty years. Forty years you said, okay, so most of my life. Great. You know, I personally moved into town in '7, I've only ever known the way things are today but I know there's a lot of people who care about that. And it's, again, this gets back to the issue of what do we do as a town that's worthwhile. So as much as I'd love to save $50 in the budget, that's when I I'm hesitant to touch, especially, you know, as somebody who's got kids in the school and we're gonna fund that but not this thing that bothers me. So I'm gonna let that one go personally.
Stop by town hall and take a look at the stakes in the ground with the tape on them and they've already marked out the spot where it's gonna go, so. I saw that, Kurt, I wanna check that out.
That is That's still still going out where our office is gonna be, it was pretty cool. Yeah, that itself says it all, as far as I'm concerned, so. Let's go, let's move ahead. Call before you dig.
Anybody on any further, you know, want to make a motion around that or are we good to move on? I think we're going to move on.
All right, not hearing any. Let's move on to item three for the cut the tree trimming budget, not in favor.
Well, we already talked about moving the money around before.
Can I just ask, how are we doing on tree trimming generally, Eric? Like are we catching up, do you feel?
We're doing way better than we used to be doing. That's good.
So we've done it basically by using a company called Distinctive Tree Care just because they got this way cool super fast That truck that does everything? Yeah, yeah. I've seen
And so last year we were able to cut basically around five fifty trees in the right of way that were predominantly dead ash. We should be able to budget to do roughly that same number this year other than we are gonna pile up an expense because we have a problem on Juravadi Road, Juravadi Lane. We got a bunch of really huge trees that are right by the roadway that we really need to address in a mad homeowner because one of them came down last year and smashed a bunch of his stuff which it happens get over it.
I live down that way by the way so I'm not surprised.
This is a matter of record we're funding this by $50,000 in the budget for next year.
Correct, I only, I just asked because I guess my thought is this. I'm thinking forward. Do we get over the hump at some point with the ash problem?
Yep, one way or the other we're going be over the ash hump in about three years because all those trees are going to either get taken down or they're going to fall down. Correct. Because from the time they die to the time they fall down is only two to three years.
Oh I know it, I mean I've had a bunch of trees come down in my area you know I sit and working one day about a month ago, I'm sitting here in my house typing away on my computer and all of a sudden the whole house shook. I couldn't for the life of me figure out what happened until I went outside and sure enough a massive asteroid come out, come down way in the back and crushed my fence and so I get it. I just think about like, okay, we're funding at a certain level because we're kind of in a bit of an emergency situation frankly. Very definitely, very definitely. And
at some point hopefully we can get to a point where we can decrease that budget but it's like I conceptualize it the way that I think about when we were in that period where we are enrollment at Ram was rising as Ram's room was falling. Were getting killed on Ram costs. Sure. And we gotta get over the hump. Right and you can tell me you know can we guesstimate when that might be?
I mean I think we probably have another 100 and a quarter to $150,000 of short term, say three year expenses that we're gonna run. And then after that, we're going to spend probably 50,000 to $75,000 just addressing our road canopy because we haven't done any canopy trimming now in twenty years. And we get a lot of complaints from both the bus drivers and trucks whacking tree limbs driving down roads and we have to address that but that's not as big a priority as the dead stuff that keeps knocking out power and keeps closing our roads every time. I mean, we lost power.
I see that as a problem and a safety hazard. It's an issue for the fire department and the emergency services have
to respond and yeah. Yeah, no, this is money well spent. I'm just trying to. Right. Mean,
it's good to understand the scope of the problem and the plan. So I think your question is valid Rob for sure. I mean, and let's be honest, last year I asked for, two years ago I asked for 50,000
and got 10. Last year I asked for a 100,000 and got 50, but then we backfilled it with 25, when we still had a bunch of things we had to address. This year we put it in as 50, but we got a little left in last year's budget to put towards it. I mean, I wouldn't wanna go less than that. I mean I'd love to be more than that but I get that that's not a practical you know.
Right I guess so taking that all in and the reason they kind of asked the question and was trying to quantify it is that to me saving 5 ks one year on a problem where we're in you know a three to four year stretch where we need to deal with this is kind of dumb. That's just where I'm at. Think we
stick with where the plan we've got which is by no means overkill. If it was overkill, we'd be trying to knock this out in one season and it's not happening. So we're trying to slowly over the course three years chip away at a major problem. I don't see the bang for the buck on $5.
Anybody else on the board disagree or want to take another look at that?
I personally don't disagree, but Eric, have you seen that monster that's leaning over Lake Road near Brown Drive? Nope, I haven't. Please take a ride by tomorrow, maybe have Jay with you and look at that because that's going to do some serious damage when it blows over. Near Brown Drive? Brown And Lake. You'll see it when you come down Lake Road heading, say,
I will tell you that we were intending to the one area we didn't get to last year that we wanted to address was Lake Erdonia and West. Because we know we have some significant concentrations of ash there that we have to deal with and actually the road I live on Wheeling Road is really problematic right now. We're also trying to do a kind of cooperative thing with the utility company. Know, we're the Distinctive Tree wants to do a demonstration for the utility company because they want some of that business too. So we've agreed to allow them to demonstrate in our town their ability to trim on the power line side safely for the utility company.
So we're hoping to get one street out of the way on the utility company side and do a big cleanup in a couple of weeks. Yeah, but we got a lot to do that's for sure. It's a problem.
All right. It sounds like there's no appetite for cutting this unless I'm misinterpreting something. So I think let's go ahead and move on to item four here. Everyone's in agreement. Feel free to speak up if you're not. So Item four is to further cut the fire departments, the capital equipment fund budget. So Eric is just saying throwing 25,000 out and noting that this is a CIP approved budget for the purchases in there so right so again
Eric if you want to comment on that or So I can say that the of the three items that so CIP went back and forth with the fire department based on the fact that per our capital plan, we were assuming we were gonna put $100,000 a year into that budget to fund equipment. And CIP said, given that, why don't we address the three biggest priorities that you have? And with that $100,000 it would have been possible to do all three. The Board of Selectmen cut that budget 25,000 at one of their budget meetings, but they did that because given the bids that came back, the fire department could actually technically purchase given the amount of money that's in the budget in that fund now plus the 75,000 that put in it could just barely squeak and purchase all three of those pieces of equipment. You know, if we cut it further, they're not buying all three of those pieces of equipment. And the more you cut it, the more, you know, they're giving it up and Kirk can tell you can talk to you more about the impact of that. Kirk you
seem to feel like that might be doable I think in our last discussion about this but do you want to go ahead and give us your perspective?
Yeah I will and I'm the one that had the responsibility of getting the three RFPs for each of the three items. We went with a total of five originally, five major, and these are not apparatus rolling stock. These are a new jaws of life system, battery operated instead of hydraulically, which is really going out of style type. Second was the commercial washer dryer for our turnout equipment that we, NFPA, is requiring us to wash our turnout gear after a structural fire. And this all has to do with cancer. And then the third one was the air compressor, which fills our SCBAs and dilatantine breathing apparatus. Even with a cut, we started out with one item this year originally, and that was the jaws of life. Like I said, the hydraulic system that we have is becoming antiquated.
We can't get parts for it, things like that. And the battery operated tools is what everyone is going to and it's state of the art today in battery tools. So that was our originally request and then the CIP and a couple between Eric and Adrian and a few others chimed in that sit on the CIP said, well, let's go for three out of the five. Like I said, the total was about 100 and I think it was either a 102 or a 112,000 Eric total if you added all three up the way the rfps come in and we we we chose the low bid for each and we went over the 100,000 I think by $2,500 which I would probably think that the Fire Commission could find that extra if needed by basically cutting into a maintenance budget or one of the other budget line items that we have. But the compressor would be the one that we can put off for now. That was the largest cost of $61,000 because the one we have is twenty seven years old. We maintain it yearly through the company that we bought it from, Shipments Fire Equipment, and they happen to be the low bid on the replacement
of this machine, taking our old one in trade, actually. But that one, if we had to, we could live with and wait another year for it. But the Jaws of Life and the Washerdryer are both a high priority for us. That's pretty much our take from the last Fire Commission meeting, knowing that we were cut by the selectman 25,000.
So if we were to assume that you guys could go for another year without that compressor replacement, Where would that take with that with this $25,000 reduction Eric proposing reflect that or would there actually be an opportunity to reduce it more? No,
think for me the numbers were bouncing around and I'm speaking for myself right now. I'm not speaking for the commission because we never really brought it up of the priorities would be. But just based on the information that we have, we could do that. But like Eric mentioned, even with a $25,000 cut, we still may be able to get all three all three items like originally planned based on what was was left in the in the fund and with the, you know, the amount of money after the 25,000 reduction that would be getting to the fund. So we still may be able to fund all three. Yeah. That was 25,000
of the border selectman already did. Correct? Correct. That's not if you if you increase that cut and you cut an extra 25,000 then we can't then that's definitely out.
Was my question that's exactly right that's a huge deal right so you know all of that if all that makes sense but we take another 25 out and it doesn't, mean that's what we're talking about. The 25 ks that Boris Leichmann already took out is not. We can withstand that right now and still get all three of the top three of the Take out another 25 you're down to two out three. Then we
would have to probably cut the presser because that was third in the list. And the compressor as you said was about a $60,000
piece of equipment. Low bid was 61,000 out of three. Right.
Go ahead, Rob, I'm sorry, so that's going to be pushed to 2022.
Correct. But we're kind of funding half of it right because we're only cutting half of the cost of that so you're right, you'd almost be banking half of the cost of that compressor. Right,
granted, I mean the flip side to that and like I want to find money in this budget too but the flip side to that is that we have these capital budgets and they're worked up for multiple reasons and you know the fire department is supposed to be looking ten years out right? Yes. Correct. Yeah. So if we kick the can and we may have to but you know we create our we create potential budget crunch however many years forward.
You're actually looking at if you put this off a year so you say the compressor off a year you're looking at anywhere from, I would say four to 7% increase for next year. Oh, because of the increase in the equipment cost?
Just the increase in the equipment cost, yes. A lot. Our equipment averages from anywhere from three to 8% every year. That's well above inflation, wow. Sure is.
Wow. The business opportunity there. Right, somebody should arbitrage that.
Some fancy Wall Street guys should come in and make a lot of money.
Buyer apparatus is three to 5% every year. I'm just saying, I mean, wow. Probably just increasing technology sophistication.
So I guess what I'm hearing is that this is doable in the moment. It's doable in the moment, is it a good call overall though? I don't know, I'm fuzzy on that.
Anybody want to make a motion to include a $25,000 reduction in the fire department equipment fund?
Mark, you mean the one that's listed already by the selectman? No, we're talking about additional.
This is an additional 25,000. Cutting again, this would take it from 75,000 to 50,000. Gotcha. And it would eliminate that that possible third capital purchase are only partially funded for next year, I guess, is another way to look at it. Understand. Emotions. Well, I think that being said, I think maybe what we do is we treat this as we did some of the other items that we if we decide, we need to come back to it, we always can. Correct
in the in later in this process up to a point up to the point we have budget meeting for the town. Or if it gets rejected that referendum and you got. Well then then we we have an iterative process and we get there hopefully we avoid that because
frankly we cost a ton every time we do a referendum. So you wanna take something in town that's possible. If
it happens, it happens but we try to avoid that. Well, this could always be if during the bud town budget meeting somebody could always move to make this reduction as well. That's true. And it could happen whether or not board of finance recommends it. You can indeed. If we leave it in there's still a couple opportunities to remove it prior to the referendum. Very true. All right.
All right, if everyone's good with that let's move on to the next item, which is the road improvement from. So $20,000 Eric said is a target amount or suggested possible amount. This reduces the lane miles of shim crack seal and chip seal by about a half a mile.
I'm just gonna pipe up and say that I went on a walk, well, little bike ride and one of my kids were on a scooter. We went down our road today and our road is not even one of the roads will show up on the town, survey is particularly bad and it's a mess, it's deteriorating significantly. I don't even know why since this winter wasn't even that bad but it's really beat up. We're way behind on our roads and I think this is probably the last thing in the budget that I would wanna cut.
I can vouch for Rob's last statement because I passed them this morning coming from my son's house who lives down the street. So I did see him and his daughters on their Did you really? I did.
I didn't realize I was here. You didn't see that pickup trucks swerving your direction? No, no, no. Was in the red I was so hyper focused on my seven year old and whether she was I paying attention to the was so freaked out having my seven year old on the road on the Country Road that was just completely focused on that. Yeah, my daughter in front of you who was going like crazy and you had one coming up behind so. Yeah. Like crazy is my seven year old yes.
Anecdotes only tell part of the story, but you know I live on Lake Road and there's a section that we've done you know it's just South of Merritt Merritt Valley here, and that was a dangerous stretches to walk on. Wife. Both of us have no darn near turned our ankle significantly just because of the gaps and yeah the the shim and crack seal is not optimal. But it does helps it does I think it's a safety issue frankly I'm also not in favor of removing this and I just want to point out for the purposes of scope, though, that this is a $300,000 line item So this $20,000 reduction is It's half a mile is Eric said. Right,
but remember too that right now we're behind about $4,000,000 on roadwork.
I mean and that's the part that kills me about it and that's what I'm thinking of is that I know we're trying to back further behind right so right this if memory serves Eric's plan originally was to try to slowly catch us up over ten years and every time we cut we kick the catch up date out
right Eric, is that about right? Yeah I mean you can look at it this way and say that the break even point for our town roads is somewhere around $340,000 a year. Every year we put less than $340,000 in our road network they get worse. Every year we put $340,000 they stay the same and every year we put more in they get better and that's a rough where are we at pre cut? We're at 300,000 so we're getting worse. So we're under. Well no because we're also taking money from town aid road. Oh okay. Funding about $400,000 total in road work between those two.
Okay. So that in theory you're catching up by you know 60,000.
Yeah I mean we're doing a little better this year because we have a steep grant, we got a steep grant that we're putting into roadwork. So we're actually putting you know we're actually spending over 500,000 on road work this year so we're making a positive difference definitely this year but that steep grant's a one shot deal you know and it's a long process I mean we're you know
yeah we got a lot of ways to go. No I agree and I actually was really disheartened when I went out on Gilead today because you know my room I thought my room was in good shape as of last year and I don't know what happened over the winter but damn it's just really in much worse shape than I thought and that's not even one of our roads I think Eric that's even on your radar.
No Gilead's not that bad yet I mean and I'm just telling you right yeah And the thing you're seeing Rob is that from the time you pave a road for about ten years the road seems fine no matter what you do and then you know, over about a five year period, it goes down rapidly. And if you do stuff before that, if you intervene early, you can fairly cheaply delay the aging of the road. But we haven't done that historically. Historically, we've waited till roads were completely trashed, then we completely rebuilt them and then we ignored them again. And then, you know, the problem is that we just can't do that anymore because we don't have the budget. So you know we're trying to do this as frugally as possible but roadwork is an area where you know we'll spend believe me I will happily spend every dime you give me. I mean it's just a reminder that we blew this up last year as a board of finance and we
backed way off some of the plans we had. We didn't want to go to the town and say we passed a budget
laterally without jacked up your taxes and we passed an increase. Yes, absolutely. Had plans last year that we shelved so.
My take for what it is, is that the last thing this town needs to do is to cut our road budget because we're way behind, we're behind you know more than I even realized and I know we've actually caught up a bit and that's great but we have so much more to do.
Does anybody have an opposite opinion, does anybody feel like we should look at this, this is about a 7% reduction or so of the overall. Proposed budget.
7% reduction in the overall proposed budget or 7% reduction in the. December said of the 300,000
that. Yeah the road budget. Is board of selectman's budget. Not the the town. Not the town that may include the town road and all that but. Right.
Okay, so I would say again let's Shell or table that one. And move on to Item number six which is cut the building maintenance fund further some backlog of several thousand several $100,000 of projects that are needed, rate at which we accomplish projects is simply driven by funding.
Mark, I'd like to make a note also that it's 09:04PM. Okay. Based on your email earlier today. These things are aspirational, Kurt. Jinx. Yeah, funding is aspirational. Okay, that's pretty funny. Point
point taken however I would like to move this launch. I mean, I'm certainly not in favor of this based on what we've talked about and what we know what does anybody have any questions for Eric or want further explanation?
You don't have a lot of money in that fund already, I mean, there's not much in there.
No, no, there's about $40,000 as of right now, but the fire alarm's $15,000 The electrical upgrade to this building's about 8,000 just to take care of the backups properly. We've got roughly that much that we have to do in public works. We got a tank removal in public works we got to do. Yeah, I mean, again, that's one where we're just, we're kind of nickel and diming and doing the kicking the can down the road. Water from coming into the buildings things. We're not doing the optional things or the it would be nice to do things. And this is only a $45,000 line item. So just for context.
I don't want to belabor anything but the tank removal you have to do is that like an UST with oil in it? We are so
we have one tank removal we got to do quickly and then one we should probably do at some point. So when this building was when we put the community center on they drained the oil tank punched a batch of holes in it and dumped it behind public works and it's been sitting there for the past
you know. So no you don't have to drain any oil from it Rob. So we need to get rid of it. It's already been done. I'm gonna get the hop river back there.
That one we need to get rid of. What? I'm sorry, I deal with environmental claims. You did what?
Sorry to tell you sometime off of. Meeting about that just offline anyway, so does anybody have any any sorry want to make a move that we that we cut this fund. No. A recommended cut to the fund. Okay hearing none. That kind of gets to the end of our list here that Erica proposed, so I guess what I would suggest is do any of the Board of Finance members have anything else that they want to look at line items that are in the current budget?
I have a question there was something in the River East about getting money back from Ram.
Do we know how much and what are we going to be doing with it. Yeah, we do. That was actually, that was something we talked a little bit about it. Our last meeting I think Eric did have the final numbers and that is in this last spreadsheet budget. Yeah yeah that was the that was the conversation I'd had with Lori Blake prior to that and then strongly suggested that they may consider returning to town and I wasn't sure how that was going to roll but apparently they decided that they would return all of those access funds to the towns this year.
Yeah, I think we had that last meeting, Yeah, we talked about it. Don't know, we had the final numbers, but it's now rolled into this. Yeah, think if memory serves last meeting, Eric had come up with the numbers himself. Best guess. Well, now we might have the exact. Yeah, I have the exact numbers in.
Okay. Okay. Yeah. The I think that the one thing to that and we don't have to decide this tonight, but I do think that. We should we should probably talk about whether frankly, use this use the fund balance and in the way that Adrian has suggested it we've kind of kicked around the idea before has come up a few times. Know, do we want to use that fund balance. Overage and target that 10% and use anything above 10% to offset some of these fund contributions from next year because that's really the mechanism that the how that would work is that capital. So we would, we would rather than, you know, funding you know the, I don't know, public works equipment fund the total amount we just wrote a fund we move that from the, from the reserve fund. Yeah, I know Rob you suggested earlier you're not a fan of that. No, no, I disagree. No, no, no. I wanna be clear. Like to do that for operating expenses.
For operating expenses, no, but to move that into a capital fund I'm not opposed. I was just sort of throwing out there the idea that 10 is a nice a nice enough target but it's actually kind of low in my opinion. We did it, we've done it for reasons that frankly are not my own. We did it for reasons because we didn't want to target on our back from the state and so we should continue to do that. This is just my own gripe. So put aside my gripe. The point is, I agree that we, if we actually have $2.50 ish in money that is above and beyond our 10% target, that we should be feel like we should be able to take at least some of that money and put it into capital. Only concern and the reason why I keep bringing this up with respect to operating expenses
is the idea of getting addicted to that. Every year we do that and then the money stops at some point and we can't do it anymore. In this instance, if we're putting it into town, if we're putting it into road fund so we can catch up on our roads. Yeah, I don't a problem with that, that's capital, it should be done that way. My issue would be, oh, our mill rate, we want to lower our mill rate and we're going to take that money and we're going to throw it at something that's not a one off. I would have a problem with it. I think it's bad budgeting. That's just my own bugaboo, whatever that's the way I think of it. But no, generally speaking, I'm fine with the idea if we're relatively certain that we have X amount of dollars above our target. What I'm hearing is that we $2.50 ish we don't know exactly. So maybe we take 200 as
our because we're not sure and And we take that 200 and we throw it at various capital equipment funds and there we can therefore just decrease the amount we have to plug in from our operating budget. I mean functionally does the same thing but I think it's better than doing it to just flat out offset operating expense. Yeah that's all.
It is semantics to a degree and but. Is. You I do agree with the semantics in this case, I think, are symbolic but important. Yeah.
That's where I'm at you're right, it is in some level semantic but it's a question of what you get in the habit of doing.
Yeah yeah and you made that I remember point a couple of times, you know, when we when I first moved to town that was, you know, remember you and Dave both making that point is doing it to cover operating expenses is not a great idea.
So you get used to it and you just keep doing it and then the money runs out.
So I would say I would offer a counterpoint and here's what I would consider doing and you may kill me for suggesting this but if we look at where our biggest kind of liability is in risk it's really in bridges and culverts. Okay.
You know and I mean honestly I'm trying to size this budget to stay, make it as reasonable as possible. But my goal really is just to stay above the absolute failure of culverts and be able to replace them before we're stuck with road closures. And I think I can do it with the current budget, but I'm far from guaranteeing that we're gonna be able to do it. Now, there is a possibility of a bond also, you know and I think if we had a couple of them closed you know we'd probably end up bonding to deal with it but if there was some area you would plus up it would be bridges and culvert funds If you were leaning that direction. Now, I know you probably don't want to increase the budget, so you're probably not going to really want to contemplate that. But if I had a surplus in Eric's world,
that's what I would spend it on.
It's good to know what your failure point is, that's good to know, like where's danger? And actually, I mean, if a culvert's unacceptable, it closes the road. That's a big deal. Right, yep. A road slowly deteriorating is one thing and it's bad.
Yeah, you just get stuck and realigned every couple of weeks and it's fine.
But you can't drive on this anymore because the culvert's no good is a much bigger deal. Yes. Yep.
How about hear from the rest of the board? Anybody have any strong feelings one way or the other about the use of this, the fund balance to offset this a little bit. Rob throughout the idea of maybe rounding it down to about $200,000
And that's just my thought on being safe because we don't have the final audit. Yeah, I would feel more comfortable than that than trying to maximize it somehow.
Right, or if it's $2.25, whatever, we don't know whether it's $2.50 or $2.40 or $2.60. I'm a little worried about budgeting on something that I don't have the final numbers for and this is why every year we'd like to have the audit in and we don't have it in and it causes. Eric, do you have a sense for how often might be?
I mean, it would be nice to come up with at least a mil because I mean, otherwise we're not. We haven't cut anything yet. We still are. I know. We were last week.
Well, I'll Diane, we look at what we've done so far, We've taken about 82,000 out of the budget. Not a huge amount, you know, but it is that something right. Yeah, it's not a mill.
$2.50 mil roughly $2.70 It's gone up you see because the Riva used to be paid out 2.40 or something.
Yeah, because I mean, the taxpayers are gonna look at the middle rate. What am I gonna have to pay? Do know what I mean? No, agreed. I mean, gonna for
purposes of illustration. If we were to apply $200,000 from the fund balance and offset contributions to one of our capital improvement funds, would put us at $282,500 currently which is more than a mil. Oh, current cuts plus the 200. Yes. That gets us And the final mill rate would then be? Just under 37 like 36.998.
Hey less than Simsbury winner. Sorry, have friends and sisters, my bad.
So, okay. So that's something we I get think, yeah.
Know, look, you guys all know where I came from, a couple of meetings ago where I just sort of threw out as a target, could we get to 5%? I don't even know that I'm saying that 5% is my number. I was just like, okay, we're at seven and a half. Can we get to five? Where does that put us are we at five we do that. We're closer to
if I got these calculations set right that's closer to less it's a little less than four. Okay
that's still a significant ask of the town. Yeah. But that is well within kind of my original gut take. So I'm interested, that sounds, you know, I don't think we're getting out of this budget season with a zero increase. Don't think that's realistic. Don't think anybody here actually thinks that we will. Last year, I believe we did what 1.75. You know that's the sort of thing that somewhere between that and where we are let's see if we can tighten it up but you know personally I always want to try to take a budget to town meeting and referendum that'll pass. That's my gut take having had been through some periods where we failed repeatedly at length. So that's just my take but I don't look, I know we didn't do a lot tonight in terms of substantive decision making but we talked through a lot of good things.
Think we're zeroing in on what we're gonna end up with the town. Yeah, I agree. You know, I think the only real to me, the real question mark is what do we do with the fund balance and how much?
Yep, yep. And, you know, if we're confident that it's $2.50 ish do we go to $2.25 for instance? I said 200 that was just off the cuff as a super safe number. When you have a fuzzy number and you don't have a full audit, you don't wanna overstep. Maybe is it 200, is it $2.25? What is the safe number? And then what do we put that towards? Do we, my opinion would be obviously you throw that at capital. Yeah, I would agree.
And that would help a lot obviously that number would cushion the blow significantly. I don't think that throws out all the issues we have to work through with the board of ed, but it helps. Then I say that as somebody who has friends on the board of ed. We all have friends on the board of it. Unmarried to one.
Hey, hey. Yeah, all right, well I'm gonna shut up now, I'm good for now. I'm happy to come back next week.
Well, I don't want to, I would really like to get us and I know we're past 09:00 so I'm not going to push it but you know we're if we. If we were to do 02/25 I'll tell you where we are right now, that would be that would mean that our estimated mill rate would be at about 36.89 which is the 3.6% increase. So I what I think what I would like to do what I'd like to have the board leave this meeting doing is is have some agreement that we want to. Propose or at least have this type of this is the budget, where we are right now we're we're you know we're comfortable with this, we can always come back and change it, know as lens and
Linda said we can table something we can come back so.
All right, so I there I'll go ahead and do this mark I will move then that we take $225,000 in funds that are to what roll over from the current budget and utilize those funds to Road improvement fund is that the one you're
I'm just gonna I don't care which fund we pick I we're gonna try to be non specific but if we have to be specific let's pick a big fund we can dump on it. Let's a fund and I would say road improvement fund is the good is the $300,000
line item it's an easy clean one right there is wrote it does that have
culverts and stuff in there is that a different fund. No, that's a 12.
Yeah, the bridging culvert fund is different, that's only got it's only funded 100,000 in this current budget. So if we were going to do the fund balance what I would say is that we will move the fund balance into the road improvement fund and reduce the funding in the 2022 fiscal year budget by that amount.
I mean, could I move we split it in half between two funds. Yeah, it's not that hard. Good. Well, it won't. So, all right, I would move that we take the two twenty five that we think we're getting excess funding from last year's budget and split it evenly between the road fund and bridge and culvert fund.
How about that? Okay well bridge and culverts only at $100,000
right? Oh so I'm boosting it above its current level Which is great, I like it. Now Eric, I see his point though. I mean, we could do that. We could increase the bridge and culvert fund to 150. No, I see your point though, from the standpoint of budget reduction that doesn't make sense, fair. I rephrase. All right, the road fund is the easy one because it's got enough in it that we're not increasing. Okay, fair. So we take the $2.25 from the current year's budget that we think is going to roll over and we put it into town aid Road, or sorry, the road fund. And you know TBD on what we do after that, that's my.
What we would be doing is reducing the transfer to the road improvement front for next year's budget.
Right. As an as an offset. Yeah. Okay. And then if we want to do something with the culvert fund, we can do that separately. Yeah.
Okay that's my motion I'm sorry if that's not clear that was a little mangled. I plead that it's almost $9.30 in my defense. Anybody
want to second that motion? I'll second it. Thanks, Linda. Thank you. Any further discussion? Hearing none, let's take a vote. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed.
Any abstentions. Okay, the motion passes, I wish I had a gavel right.
Diane, I feel like you and I have the same thing going on. We're both kind of like, yeah. I'm tired. Mark, I think just like, yeah. Go ahead Eric your
accounting in the reductions you're accounting still for the elimination of the building department administrative position correct because you guys haven't actually voted on that. So if you're gonna do that you should make a motion to do that.
So we kind of didn't we didn't we didn't we we Yeah, maybe we did not. That was the old
for a couple weeks until we can figure out what's going on. But I'm sorry we're saying we want to not put that in there for now until we find out. Well what your the $82,000
number you're giving that includes that correct. Correct. Yet you as a board haven't actually made a motion for that. So if you're going to include that. Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make a motion then that we also recommend
that reduce the building department budget line item by $45,000 in anticipation of a possible combined position which we can reverse in a future meeting if it turns out that that's not tenable Do we have a second. I'll say, any discussion that we haven't already had. Okay,
we'll take a vote. All in favor say Aye. Aye. Opposed. Aye. Any abstentions? That motion also passes Thank you, Eric. You're okay. Alright, so. I was kind of hoping to avoid mine and both with this probably better this way. Right. Okay now that does get us to a reduction that, as I said, puts us at $3.636.0.89 mil if my calculations are correct, which I believe they are, which is a current 3.6% mil increase. So I will I've got this updated in the spreadsheet that I have I'll update the actual columns Eric I'll feed that back to you and if you want to just review it with Sherry and just make sure everything seems to be correct and then we can distribute it after that. Okay, do have a couple other quick things I know it's late, but I think it makes sense for us to get some dates on the on the calendar, They are related to the budget. So looking at the calendar, we are getting down kind of to the wire folks. We have to have a town budget meeting at the beginning of May.
So I'm going to move that we have the town of Andover budget meeting scheduled for Thursday, May 6 at 7PM. The reason for that is we've got a couple other votes early on in the that week and so we're trying to get the registrars kind of a break and go to Thursday I know Thursday is not always the best for everybody, but maybe with enough advanced planning that'll work. Does anybody have any thoughts about? That's the annual meeting, not the referendum.
I'm sorry, it's too much talking there. Is that the annual meeting or the referendum we're talking about? No, that is the annual budget meeting. I'm kind of working backwards. Referendum scheduled
after that meeting. Okay, that's the meeting that has to get things to center referendum. Correct. And will that date works for me. Will that be a remote meeting? No. Well,
I would think so. It's gonna be tough to do. I don't know. It is in flux right now because
nobody knows exactly the governor's executive orders authority would have run out April They're extended until May 20. They
have been extended however they haven't they're not saying which ones they're going to extend. So the answer is we don't know. Right now we're setting up for an in person budget meeting that would also be remotely broadcast. Will there be people who can participate remotely though?
I mean, maybe. Yeah. Right. That's a stretch for us technologically,
but you know. I would like to see us get as many people as we can in person because we didn't have anything last year, give everybody the opportunity.
Yeah, and I think we just have a better understanding. So the more people that are there, the more people hear about it, the more people are going to be, you know, understand what we're trying to do and we'll know kind of what the temperature of the residents are. But I'm just thinking maybe you know some seniors may not want to come and people may be out of town, things like that. Yeah, well I think we leave the format to the meeting to be determined but by law we have to have it within the first two weeks of May. Right. And so I think that that date makes sense. Eric proposed it and he and I were talking about the calendar. I think it does make sense. It gives us a little flexibility and timing to go to the referendum.
Okay.
And actually, to be perfectly honest, I think the Board of Selectmen set that date and they've already kind of selected May 6 anyway. You set the public hearing date, but I don't think you set the budget meeting date technically. I could be wrong though. I mean, you agree with the sixth anyway.
I agree with it, but let's get it on the calendar. There's nothing else in the town calendar that day except the Democratic town committee meeting earlier. So, yeah, I think it's appropriate. Okay.
Okay, we still have a motion on the floor to set that meeting that date or approve that date. Does anybody want to second that? I'll second it. Okay, Louise seconds. Thank you. Any discussion further? Okay, all in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Aye. Was that aye for Robert came in late, that
aye? Yeah, sorry about that. That was an I, I was muted. Okay.
And then no, any opposed? Any abstentions? Okay motion passes okay very good. Would also propose. That we set the. Town of Andover. Oops. Problem up here. That would be the. Finance budget. Public hearing.
The pub, yes, the Board of Finance budget here, this is the public hearing that has to precede the meeting. This is just where we present our proposed recommended budget and here input from the town, by which we would potentially modify our proposed budget before bringing it to the budget meeting. I would move that we schedule that meeting for Wednesday, April 21. I think we had a special budget meeting scheduled then and we could basically co op that date for the for the budget hearing.
We did indeed have a budget meetings, the board of finance.
It's already a pre planned meeting, but we'll change that into our budget hearing date if anybody if everyone agrees. Have a second motion. Okay. Anyone anybody want a second the motion. Oh, David. Right. Robin David okay. I thought I heard. That's fine I'll take it.
For the record Dave seconded the motion. Further discussion. All in favor say Aye. Aye. Any opposed. Hearing none, any abstentions? Also hearing none, motion passes. Okay, I think that's all we have to do as far as setting the calendar. Assuming the order selectmen agree with the May 6, I think that works all around. Following that town meeting and the budget for which we need to do a little bit of work, and by we, I mean probably me and Eric mostly, we have to do a five year capital plan as part of that and just do a general presentation of the budget, explain where we are and what we're doing so that we'll go forward there. I think that's. That's kind of where we are, I guess, the last thing that I would personally like to just note is that I will apparently be out of the country for two weeks, starting next Friday, so I will be. Doing that budget hearing remotely. As I am now, but I won't be in the country so we'll have to kind of run that remotely. Six hours ahead,
Yes, I will. That's one of the more. I was gonna like a standard board of finance timing these days. Yeah, it's that one's going to be a little tough but I'll make it work somehow, and hopefully I have adequate internet service. I also will not be here for the budget meeting we have scheduled for the fourteenth. We'll have to see where we get next week as to how much needs to happen in that budget meeting kind of hoping that we may be able to wrap this up next Wednesday if fall goes well, but there's a lot to be considered until then. So that's just informational for everyone's sake. Okay. Else they'd like to bring before the board regarding the budget.
So I just have one final thing to say. There will be some slight and I mean slight numbers changes when we get the actual employee cost for healthcare, which we will plug in as soon as Sherry and I get that information. We just physically don't have it yet. And that's basically it from the town's perspective, unless you have other things you consider.
Okay, thank you, Eric. Hearing none, I'm glad you brought that up, forgot about that earlier. Next agenda item is public speak. Amanda, do you want to pull the crowds and see if we have any public speak request. Thing okay. So we have Jeff Murray.
Hi, I saw Kurt yawn a few times so I'm gonna keep this kind of simple but yeah, great job everybody going through the town budget tonight. I think it was, it had to be done but as we probably all find out over the last two hours, it's pretty lean. There's not a lot of reductions to be had there. And I'm going to be looking forward next week. I guess we're going to talk about the education budget or you are and I'm going to be looking forward to Valerie's presentation on the suggested levels of funding reductions and what they can do to maybe find some efficiencies there. So I'm kind of interested to see what she's going to find. And I think it could get us down to a palatable level if she finds some efficiencies there. With that said, I mean, I'm not trying to be like a hawk trying to cut the budget. Actually, I've got a second grader in the school. I just wanted to say that I really wanna keep the costs at the school low compared to competing towns because eventually at the state level, keep hearing about this regionalization that keeps coming up. And if we stay competitive with regional towns or a little bit less, it's a better chance for us to keep that school open if we do ever regionalize.
If we become a very expensive school in the state that has a say in it, they're gonna be looking at us and saying, Andover Elementary needs to go. I mean, I don't really wanna lose that school. I wanna keep that school there. And that's why I'm fighting to keep our school running as efficiently as possible. And I know I've sent a lot of suggestions to the board of finance. I've discussed this in-depth with Valerie but I still believe that there's some deficiencies to be made there. And I think if they are realized, we could probably come forth with something that would be very palatable to the residents in town. I really like what you did tonight. I would like to see that done at the school level. I'd like to see us be able to look at those expenses and have them justify their increase because I think we owe that to the taxpayers of Andover. I think we owe it to all the residents. So with that said, I'm looking forward to next week's presentation. Thanks.
Thanks, Jeff. Carol Lee. I'm all set thank you. Thanks Carol. Joanne Hebert.
Thanks Amanda. Yeah I'll keep mine short too. I really like all the work that was done tonight I appreciate the process you know you keep finding a little more and a little more so you know thank you for doing that for the town you know like it or not we have so many things that have to be taken care of to make our town you know presentable to families to move in you know like Jeff Murray just said I agree you know I I'm in favor of the school I like the school I hear how much parents love it I know how much the administrators are working hard there it's just hard to fathom the high budget, again we're taking so much time or I'm taking so much of my time just to kind of, address things because I do work in a school and feel I like maybe my voice can be heard a little and I do care you know a $4,000,000 school is just hard to fathom the town being able to sustain that you know families aren't coming in I'm afraid our enrollment is going to get lower and lower and then there's going to be no choice but to regionalize so again I want to work with the town you know I want to see the town look nice and safe I'm afraid of the trees falling down there's a lot of you know a lot of road work that's spoken about and a lot of trees that really need attention
so you know money has to be found somewhere so I really am looking forward to the conversation next week too I can't wait to hear it be you know whatever comes to the table because I've heard the town two weeks in a row now thank you so much and good luck with all you do thanks julianne valerie bruna I'm all set amanda thank you Thanks for joining.
It looks like it might be everybody. Okay. So if that's it for public speak the last agenda item is adjournment. Let's see who is yawning the most you know who wants to make the motion to adjourn. Kurt raises his hand you're muted Kurt. About that. I move to adjourn. All
in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Hearing none. You everybody ran a little later than we'd like but I think we got done what we needed to do. Thanks, Mark. It and talk to you next week. Care. Thank you.