Meeting transcript
Board of Finance - Special Meeting Budget Workshop
April 6, 2022 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Okay,
again we'll call this meeting to order this is Wednesday 04/06/2022 special meeting for the budget workshop of the town of Andover board of finance will call the meeting to order and start with the Pledge of Allegiance. Thank you everybody. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God
indivisible with liberty and justice for all. You. Okay, the next item on our agenda is public speak. Everybody in the public wants to speak. Eric are you are you administering or
I am administering. The only person I can see here on it is from the phone and I'm pretty sure that's Marina Pandolfi. So I don't think there's any members of the public here for Who is the KK? Kincaid? That is Amy Knox who's doing the minutes for the meeting. Oh, okay. Okay. New person. Okay. You told us that last time. Okay. Well, she's just using a different computer. So Different son's name. Okay. Confusing the old people.
Okay. Okay, so we have no public speak we'll move on to agenda item three which is the budget workshop for fiscal year twenty twenty two twenty twenty three. I think it'd be appropriate for us to start with Eric kind of giving an intro and some explanations for some of the changes he did send out around a revised budget file late today. Probably most of you hadn't had a chance to really look at it. Haven't did discuss some of the changes briefly with Eric, but I think that it would be appropriate for us to review those here. Eric, you good with that? Yep,
give me two seconds. Let me just make sure I have the right one up. Okay, you should be seeing the screen. Yeah. So I did revise. We went through Diane Chokett graciously provided me with a list of all the things that she wanted reviewed at the last meeting. So we did two things. One, we went through and we commented in a lot of spots. We didn't have comment before explanations about why things are the way they are. So, see one error right off the bat, but I'll deal with that later. So,
we'll just kind of go down through it and talk about the things that, you know, I did make changes to. Number one, the actuarial services. I did bump that up about $300 And the reason I did that because I'm we finally got
just trying to find the line number you're on. Highlight it. Okay. 117. Row117.
Okay. I'm just I'm good if I know the wrong numbers. Okay. Okay. So the reason we did that is because we finally got the second bill, which completes our billing for actual services. And the total was $5,200 So I made the assumption that probably gonna go up a little bit next year. And I bumped that up a $100. What we were estimating was less than we actually got charged this year. So it seemed likely that it was gonna be the same or more next year. If anybody has heartburn with that, I suppose I can turn it back down if you wanna discuss that further. Is everybody okay with that one? I'm good with it. Okay.
So this was a previous question that you had is, you know, why is this up when we haven't really spent the money? Again, it's a reval year. We do expect to deal with a few lawsuits. However, because of the actions of the Board of Assessment Appeals, the fact that they pretty much granted everybody everything they wanted for reductions, I suspect we're not gonna spend all of that. So I left that yellow because potentially we could reduce that if you're looking to reduce. Because at this point it's looking like we might lawsuit. There's really only one person that I know of that seems to be unhappy with the process at this point. So that's a judgment call. I leave it up to you whether you wanna try to reduce that or let it roll. Normally in a revalue year we assume we're going to get sued at least three or four times. We may still but right now it's looking pretty good.
So, question, so that legal services for the assessor, we don't budget in under the assessor.
No, because we've always budgeted back in the. We've always done all legal in a, you know, under one placeholder in the budget. Now we did carve out about three years ago, four years ago, we did carve out the legal counsel for the planning and zoning commission. And that was because we made a decision to not just have that cover legal, but legal and professional services. Therefore, we took it out of the regular attorney spot and we put it directly into the Planning and Zoning Commission's budget. If you think it's more appropriate to put it in the assessors line item, we certainly can.
Oh, correct me if I'm wrong. So, we didn't have any actual expenses from last fiscal year.
Right. And we would not have expected to have much last year. So
I guess if we need to make a cut somewhere, do we really need $6,000 I don't know.
That's just great. Mean, so far this year, the only legal settlement that we had was we were taken to court once over a automobile assessment and we prevailed. So we didn't actually pay the person any, but we did pay attorney's fees litigate or to deal with that.
How do you want to do this Mark do you want to make changes as we go or just discuss, I mean.
I think, let's give Eric a chance to do an overview let's see what the overall impact is and then we let's make notes and come back. Otherwise I think we may get a good too bogged down in some of the new show I want to make sure we hit any significant impacts first. I think that one is an opportunity for reduction. So we can certainly talk about that, but I think let's go through this first.
Okay. So the next big one is based on the Board of Selectmen's decision to re split the treasury departments of the town and the school.
Eric, can you explain that? I'm not sure everybody knows that, is aware of it. Sure.
Last board, at a Board of Selectmen special meeting several weeks ago, the board of selectmen made a decision to split the combined treasury office back into a town treasury office and an AES treasury office. Flip side of that is that the town will maintain Marina to do most of the work in that office, but they are looking for a very part time treasurer to oversee that office. Diane, do you have anything more you want to say about that since you were at the meeting? No,
that's basically in a nutshell. So we have to put a placeholder in for a potential cost for next year. I don't think, you know, once we restructure everything and get everything organized, it shouldn't be a big cost position because it's going to be just a few hours. My only other question is on this spreadsheet now, Eric, it looks very misleading because it doesn't say that there's increase for this, and this is a new item. So I think it's important for people to know when there's something new, cause it's really not a 0% increase, it is an increase there. I mean, it's probably being picked up in the dollars for the total increase at the end, but not on the line. The problem is you get a divide by zero function. It gets easier So to do that. Yeah. It's actually an infinite increase if you think about that.
I mean Yeah. Like that will throw an error. I mean, you could just flag it as you know? Should we just put something in there for that column
for ease of understanding instead of showing 0% just put new NEW?
Yeah, you gotta it means you gotta take a formula out though. That gives me a little bit of a formula on there now, is there? Oh, there is one. There should be.
Can we go back to seeing the line item that we're discussing? I can't see it. It's tiny on my screen just so that I can follow with my papers too. Okay. So it's row one twenty nine,
one twenty eight. Do. Just as we go. I mean, I won't interrupt every time, but just at the beginning, just say row, you know, one thank you. It's actually one twenty eight. Yeah. I'm awful. Yeah. I think
I have this, but I don't. Thank you. I guess I hate to give something to the public that says something to 0% increase when it's not.
Yeah, well, the same can be said for the legal. No, no. Okay, never mind. I mean, right.
And that's gonna show up from things that are like a brand new item on the spreadsheet. Do you know what I mean? Well, let's see what happens if I delete it.
So there's just, you know, that's just up for discussion as far as how to show it. I mean, those have to be resolved right away. But it's misleading to say it's 0%.
Right. I mean, I can leave we can leave those blank if you would like.
Leave it blank and then at least put up some you know, we're going to publish this with the notes column. Right? Yes. So we probably should put an explanation in the notes. I did. I said new part time treasurer. Says part time treasurer. Right. New part time treasurer.
Well, put new then. It says new part time treasurer. Oh, my spreadsheet doesn't say that. So you changed it since you sent it out. Okay.
I This is possible. I don't think so, but maybe I didn't. If I did, I apologize.
Plus it's, Yeah. The one I got says part time. Okay. That's fine. Yeah. Same here.
Just says part time? Yeah. Okay. My error. Okay. So next line item, we had been going back and forth trying to find the actual numbers on this. Edmonds yearly cost is $4,400 for the first, each year for the first three years. So we'll split that evenly with AES. That's $2,200 we had a placeholder before, that's the actual value of that.
So again, we probably need to put an explanation that this is the first year for the Yeah. Yeah.
So you're right. It was just zero in there typed in. So we just put new or something like that. Right. Okay.
So, Eric, why are we why are we splitting that evenly with the school? Because we're both using the software. I know. But same amount of time for each,
basically? I can't tell you exactly how many hours the town and the school use respectively. Yeah, I mean That
was agreed upon, I assume, when you first got it?
Yeah, there was an understanding that we were gonna split the cost of it. Okay. Yes. Yeah, I think that was the agreement. All right. Okay. Is everybody okay with that one? Yeah.
Okay. We dealt with that before. We did change the name per your request to contracted software maintenance as opposed to just software because that's more descriptive of what that line item actually covers. That's number 165. You also asked me about extensive notes about exactly what the bills were for the town clerk, the elections, and the registrar of voters. I'm not going to go through everything, but I went through with both Carol and Wally as to exactly what those line expenditures cover and put that in the notes. So you have that to read at your leisure, what those, you know, what the actual items are that make up that budget. You asked me to review the salary for elections. I did, you know, the, and I went over with Wally what their anticipated number of elections and, you know, need for poll workers. So basically there's two buckets for that. There's the things that we know, and then the unknown things. The known things are the state elections and the local elections. We know how many those are. We know roughly what we need for personnel and hours for those. The unknowns are the number of referendums. Like for instance, we had the RAM referendum. We didn't predict that when we had the last budget. We have no idea how many budget referendums we're going to go through. We don't know how many RAM referendums they're gonna go through. So that's a number that will accomplish,
you know, the majority of years, this will be enough to cover the budget. The $500 increase is just straight cost of the hourly wage increase for those employees. Wally did say there are two poll workers that are or two of the poll workers, based on their job description that get minimum wage, those will go up to $14 an hour. But he thinks that's enough to cover all the wages for the elections this year. So, and then you asked about what, you know, kind of what the training budgets were and what the servicing was. The servicing is for the tabulator machines. Actually have gotten them serviced once. We just have not gotten the billing yet. They're about to get serviced again prior to the referendums. And this, the next line item down, which is the supplies, that's another one of those very variable numbers, because it depends a lot on whether we do a simple paper ballot or an actual machine tabulated ballot. If we do, we have to purchase the ballots. They're fairly expensive. And we also have to get the memory card reprogrammed each time we have an election. And that's a minimum of $500 per pop if we do a machine tabulated election. So, and that decision will be made depending on how many questions and what questions you as a board want to ask
at the referendum. So that is that. Let me just roll back. So you had a question about why we had expended only half of this. The registrars and the assistant registrars get paid twice a year. This is incorrect because they incorrectly assigned the cost to the assistant registrars under the registrar category. We will have that sorted out in the next day or so. That's why this is slightly more than half the total, and this is spent. So, we figured that out. So, you also asked about the cost of PrimePay and whether that is an exact cost or whether that's an estimated cost. In answer to your question, that is an estimated cost because we pay for payroll. Not every month has the same payroll. They charge us extra when they do W-2s. So, looking at it holistically, that seems to be, in a normal year, it should cost about $7,000 if we do our part correctly with now that we have the time card system. Because the time card system does decrease our costs slightly because it decreases the work they had to do on their end. This line right here for furnace maintenance, We went back and forth. There was a lot more than this than what's indicated there. That's been extended in furnace maintenance.
Was, a lot of that was taken out of building maintenance. Which going back and looking at it, because we've had such a problem with the furnaces, I think it makes sense to separate those line items in the actual budget. So I'm going to suggest that we do do that. So, in a normal year, servicing on the furnace is about $180 to $200 and then that gives us one breakage service call. So that's kind of what that is. You had the question of that. If you guys prefer, we can just wrap furnace maintenance into building maintenance and just increase the building maintenance. That's call. The The only reason I like to keep it separated is I think our furnace maintenance costs are high enough we want to kind of track separately.
Again, that's important. Didn't we have a lot of furnace maintenance costs this year? Yes, that's. We don't have a year to date number in there.
Right, because we put that, because we build that as building maintenance, not as furnace maintenance. Okay.
So if we had cost that had to do with the furnace, why would we put under building maintenance, not furnace maintenance? So I don't understand the difference then. Well, because I think in the budget, there is no furnace.
In the actual budget, there was no furnace maintenance line item. So we have to do one of two things. We either have to get rid of the furnace maintenance budget here and put those costs into building maintenance, or we have to put a furnace maintenance line in our regular budget. My suggestion is we put the furnace maintenance line in our actual budget, which is what I've asked them to do. However, that's something that depending on what you wanna do, we could easily go either way on that one.
Well, since we haven't booked any year to date expense on here, we're now budgeting for it. If the expenses were charged to building maintenance this year, then it seems like we should be using the building maintenance account. I mean, if you would like to do that, the only reason But how would someone know what which goes where if we had two accounts? How would someone know where to book the bill?
You know, that is a good point. My only concern in tracking furnace maintenance is think that's, we're spending enough money on that. I feel like we probably should consider tracking that separately. I'm not hard backing. If
you think it's tough, then we should have a year to day expense and we should fix it. Because we put all the furnace maintenance stuff under building maintenance this year, and now we're just gonna pull out $500 That doesn't make sense to me. Yes,
it would be fair to have that. Know my view is you probably keep that separate line item when I think of building maintenance. I think of things like painting patching tile or things like that, not mechanicals, They tend to often be budgeted in a separate line and if it's significant as you say, it probably makes sense to have it on a separate line.
I mean, don't care either way. The $500 basically will cover minimum routine maintenance. Anything more than that, we're not budgeting for anyway, and that comes out of the building maintenance fund or the townwide building maintenance fund if it's bad enough.
So again, we get a bill we had a furnace broke down the repair guy comes out to fix it. Someone gets the bill, how do they know where to put it building maintenance or furnace maintenance.
Well, that's true for every bill, right? I mean, somebody's gotta make a judgment call on where it gets coded.
I know because we had a lot of furnace issues this year and we put it all under building maintenance. So now we don't have a history. Do you know what I mean? What I'm saying, we don't have a history to look at.
Right. But I mean, the other question is like, you know, you have to decide what do you consider under furnace maintenance? Do you consider the boiler also? It's not technically a furnace, but it's a heating apparatus. Do you consider the AC systems part of furnace maintenance? Know, most of that stuff I consider under building maintenance. The only thing I would have considered under furnace maintenance is the annual cost of a boiler, you know, tune up or a furnace tune up. That's, in my mind, that's what I would have charged to furnace maintenance. And everything else I would have put in the regular building maintenance account.
Why don't we keep it right that way? We're not mixing the two accounts, the expenses between the two accounts. It's the consistency.
That's all. Yep, I understand. I understand. Other questions about that? So you wanna keep it separate or do you wanna combine them?
This is Kurt. Like to keep it, you know, combine them. I mean, it's all everything comes under building maintenance, at with us next door, and we've never had a problem. You do keep records of when a furnace has got some extra problems, but I think for our sake, you know, just keeping it single would be the best.
I was gonna suggest the opposite, but I'm I'm open to anything too because I know. Yeah, whatever you all decide. You know more.
I'm neutral. You know, guess I'll probably refer to Eric on that and keep it separate if he wants to track it separate. He's He's one tracking managing the expenses.
I mean, I can say, but I'll just throw a different thought out there. I can say keeping track of it separately. If we think we have an old furnace, we're trying to determine what it's costing us to keep that thing running versus general building maintenance. Do you know what I mean? But if we're not gonna book those expenses there, then what value does it bring to us knowing that the annual maintenance tune up is $500 a year? We were trying to track, you know, this furnace is costing us a lot of money now because it's getting old, you know, we're spending $3,000 a year on repairs and stuff, then I could see tracking it separately, but that's just my 2¢.
Eric, is that furnace gonna be part of the new addition or Diane, is that gonna be part of the new addition? The furnace for the
two separate ones? Well, we should be converting to propane when we do go to the And I think the town has in its future plans to convert to propane. Wouldn't
it be feasible at the time of construction to do them both together and finish it up once and for all? Then you're starting fairly new across the board. School's in good, you know, they're in good shape. The firehouse is in good shape. You get that new community center and town hall in good shape. And you know, what else are we looking at? I'd rather spend the money now than later. It's gonna be probably double the cost later on. Hopefully the committee's looking into that.
We are talking about that and we have gotten some preliminary estimates for converting the town to propane. The only thing we're holding out is the architect had indicated he thought the appropriate solution for the new building was to go to an all ductless split. You know, so I don't want to commit the town to changing over to propane right now until we know definitively whether the new community center, what the fuel source, what the heating source is going to be for that. But yes, those should be done thoughtfully together. Okay, the other question that we had lots of comments on was the software maintenance and why we were so far over. So this will get corrected. You know, we pulled that line item apart today and looked at it. There's kind of two things that push the majority of the overage in it. The first is the fact that we did have to pay for point and pay this year. And we used that line item to cover the cost of the software for point and pay, which I'm not sure that's necessarily the best spot because that's kind of a, in some ways a shared service, even though it is a software service. And the second thing is the finance department has incorrectly booked the cost for Civic and Civic Plus, which is our website in emergency alert system through that line item,
which is a little over $4,000 So when you back those two things out, that budget is about $1,000 over spent this year, which puts the line item in roughly the right spot for software maintenance.
So what is the software maintenance for the town office building?
So there are a bunch of things. We maintain a one copy of an Adobe suite. So it's licensing
then. Yeah, it's mostly licensing. It is majority of that or a large chunk of that is Office three sixty five, but the town does have a bunch of other, you know, small software packages that they purchase.
So they're going to move that point and pay over to the building department then?
Well, I mean, I think that's probably appropriate to reclassify that in the building department. Okay, because it is a building department expense.
Okay. How come there's no year to date expense for website fees?
Because they incorrectly booked it in software maintenance. That's one of the questions I had today. Because I know I signed the bill for Civic Plus already, and I didn't see any expense. So that's when we dug for it, we realized part of the reason that's why that was incorrectly coded with software maintenance. So that will be corrected. That's gonna be corrected. Just not updated here yet. Okay. Okay. We did also, one of the things we did end up changing is we took out the old T911 line item and just left the pollen nine eleven dispatch line just because it was really confusing with two names and two coded numbers. We also changed the number because everywhere else we use dot for the last 3490 for alarm monitoring. So it didn't make sense for us to call in this, in the town office building right here, which was 268, give that the same number as alarm monitoring, and then have to come up with a different number for alarm monitoring. So just to make the chart of accounts more logical and keep the same 490, we left that for alarm monitoring and change dispatch to 493. So hopefully that makes sense to you all. You and does everybody understand that? Got it. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense. All right.
Okay. So question, why do we have alarm monitoring there under town office building? And we have to put a number in there. So that's gonna be another new expense.
So basically what happened is roughly a year ago, up to a year ago, the Holland Dispatch Center acted as our alarm monitoring service. They notified the towns that they would no longer be providing that service. So it was no longer wrapped into the T911 bill that we paid. We had to do a standalone bill for it. So we went out to RFP, we interviewed a whole bunch of different alarm companies, we picked one and we converted the town over to cellular, a cellular monitoring system. And we booked the cost to essentially each department for that. So that's essentially what happened here. It is a new cost, but overall it's not really a total cost because it's part of what's allowing us to reduce our telephone bill really dramatically. Because we're now able to give up the dedicated lines, hard lines that were used for that, because we've converted them to a cellular modem, but we have to pay for the cellular modem and monitoring of that. Got it. Yep. Okay, the other question you had is why did we not have any expenses to date for the admin fee for MRF? So we just got the bill for the admin fee and the new MRF schedule, the new potential schedule for next year, which is not confirmed, but it does list the admin fee. That admin fee is going up to $3,640
And the way it's calculated is they charge us $130 per person for each active and retired member that's in the MRF system. And currently we have 13 active members and 15 retired members in MRF. Therefore, I adjusted that fee number to what the latest bill should be for next year. Okay, anybody? So we pay that once a year, then you're saying? Correct. And we have not paid that yet. Okay. Okay. So
one of the concerns on line three seventy that you had expressed was that we had the same line number for both salary and for things that were, you know, not really salary anymore because they were truly shared services. So we elected to use 105 for shared services. And we're going to change that across the board and use 105 for this line item and for the building official, because that is a shared service and direct expenses for shared service going forward. So, is that change right there. We didn't change any numbers, just designation so that it's clear what salary and what is a shared service. Everybody okay with that? Yep. Okay. The other big question that we had outstanding was diesel costs. So, as you know, the cost of diesel has gone up pretty dramatically, you know, as has our usage of diesel. And the way this works, and this is a little hokey, and I think some point we're going to need to come up with a better mechanism to do this, and I don't know exactly how. But what happens is when we get a bill for diesel, we initially take it out of this account, But then we refund that account for what we charge the school for diesel and what we charge Ram for diesel and what we charge the fire department for diesel. So, at the end of the year, this backs out to only the cost that Public Works has for diesel. So, Works, according to Jay, looking at our usage so far, use approximately
5,400 gallons this year in a full twelve month calendar year. That equates at our new price for diesel somewhere around $13,000 presuming we don't use more diesel next year than we do this year. So, that $14,000 number, if you use exactly the same number of dollars, you know, at our contracted cost would be about 1,000 high. But that accounts for some small amount more diesel usage. So that's what that number represents. So you're paying less than $2.50 for a gallon?
Right now we're paying a dollar 81 a gallon. Wow. Okay. Good deal.
Yep. We negotiate those pretty hard and lock them in early. Next year, we're going to be paying about $2.26 I think, or 7
So it's a 2 big 47 by the, if I calculate it. Oh, no, I'm sorry, $2.41 roughly. Right, you mean the 14,000 number? 13,000 divided by 5,400 is 2.407.
My math is off a little bit. Oh, you had 13,000
in your note, it's 14,000 in the budget. Yeah, it's 2.59.
Yeah, our lock in should be around $2.27. So with all the fees, it should be around $2.35 out the door next year. Okay. So,
it's rounding. Yep. Right. That number may be a little high, but it's not a lot high is what I would say. So, a good price. Gasoline, again, we're still using the assumption of $4 a gallon. Where that's going, I have no idea. I did back out a lot of the lines. I can back out all these lines. Well, I can't because they were in last year's budget. Sorry, that's why I didn't back them out. I did get rid of a lot of the superfluous lines, so it didn't show up. You asked me last time about the overtime for snow removal budget. I just wanted to remind you that that does include the temporary workers. We've never broken out the cost of labor that we use in snow removal. We put all of that in this pocket.
Oh, I have this highlighted as something for us to discuss because year to date we spent $19,000 whether 15,000 is going to be the right number going forward.
Well, if you remember last year you reduced that from 25,000 to 15,000. In the two previous years, we were both under $15,000 You know, this year we haven't had a ton of really big snow events, but we had a lot of icing events. So we spent a lot of time, you know, a lot of man hours, you know, and especially Sunday and holiday hours addressing, you know, conditions. So, I mean, again, I think in an average year, 15,000 will work. But, you know, probably every three or four years, we're going to bust that budget by somewhere between 5 and $10,000 You know, we typically budgeted 25,000,
assuming we wouldn't ever exceed that. Last year, we backed that way off because you wanted to get a more average. So if you feel it's appropriate to put that back up, we certainly That's a call kind of on your part what you wanna do. If we have last year, next year we'll be under $15,000 If we have another this year next year, we'll be over $15,000 I'm just You trying to
mean be over the budget of 15,000? I'm not sure what you're saying.
Yeah, what I'm saying is that $15,000 budget will cover in what has been the last three to five years, an average year over the last three to five years. Right. But it does not cover the snowier winters or the icier windows. So, every three to four years, you're going to get one that exceeds this budget. But by $15,000 double? So we get a 30?
No, we're not at 15. So this year we spent about 19,000. So we went over the budget about $4,000
Yeah. Okay. Thought you said you would go over 15,000. I meant over by 15,000, but you're saying it'll be over that much. Keep it at the average. I don't see any reason we couldn't cover that kind of overage out of contingency. We don't like to do it. Right.
That's my feeling about it. There's a reason we made that decision last year and I think it makes sense.
Yep. I agree with you under as long as you under there is in
there doing want to take the increase out. Keep it up 15.
Well, I guess it would be for the reason of the increase. Is it because we think the average might be a little up or is because costs have increased? The other factor. It's just your operating costs may well increase a little bit. Oh, this is just
salary expense, Hourly wage, right? Well, Well, I mean, first of all, you start off with a baseline 3% increase in salary. And then you also have to factor in the fact that one of the employees is going from maintainer one to maintainer two. So we will be paying, you know, paid more for those hours that he is on the road.
But you're basing the budget on roughly the same amount of hours worked, right? Correct.
Yeah, so I think that that's a reasonable basis to make that slight increase from year to year. Our salary costs are going up right so.
Right. And, you know, the other thing I would say is that it depends very dramatically on when the snow events are. Know, snow events during the day, we don't care about because we deal with them as part of our regular, you know, it's at night and especially on Sundays when we're paying bubble time and holidays that we get hammered. And that's really, that's highly variable. Okay. Any other questions on that? You want me to wait? No, I'm good.
Okay. Again, we talked about this the last time we did increase this a little bit from the original budget because we got the estimates back from both Hebron Parks and Landon Park, which is Richard Cuarko. The only thing we still don't have is we still don't have a number for Andover Landscaping, not because we're not trying because both me and Scott are trying to get ahold of Matt, the owner of Andover landscaping. But, you know, he is just a very difficult guy to actually get ahold of.
I think we have to correct on this is we have to move that income that we booked in there because our year to date expenses are more than that. We credited that rental income off into that account and we should be doing that $7,500 Okay. Correct? Yep. Matt Yep. Cell number. I do not. I'll send it to you. Okay.
Just so the numbers can all jive do you know I mean because it looks like we're way under we're budgeting way high. Right. Yeah. Okay.
You asked me to correct in the actual employee salary spreadsheet, put in the name of the deputy. I did that. I also cleaned up a couple of the things that were in there that were unclear about library employees. That's the other sheet I sent to you and made sure that these two match, at least as far as I know. So again, we talked about this one before and I don't know exactly how to handle it. This is kind of a stupid thing, but we really only need brush pile grinding every second year. Cause it's cheaper to do it every two years and do a bigger bulk than bring them in. Cause the cost to bring them on-site, you know, and set up is high and we don't have enough volume that we need to do it every year unless we get a really bad storm
where we have a super abundance of branches.
Does this say you're going to do brush pile removal?
Yeah, and this upcoming budget we're going to do brush pile removal. One of the possibilities would be to set this back down to $7,000 or $7,500 and just make a decision that we're gonna set up a standing fund for it and fund it at $7,500 each year and then use that to pay for it whenever we grind it like another standing fund. It's essentially a two year budget item. You know, every two years we're going to spend about $14,000 You know, again, you know, if it just depends how you want to handle it as a board.
Well, two ways we can handle it is like you just budget for it every two years. Right.
And just one year it's going to be zero, the next year it's going to go up, and the explanation will be it's the two year cycle. We're on the two year cycle and it goes up. I don't think creating just a separate fund for that small dollar amount is is worth the effort. And the only other place I could think of putting that money is into the tree removal fund. Have it come out of there as a part of.
I tend to agree with the Diana doesn't make sense to to add another fund for it. I understand it does make it easier for us to avoid having to explain that every year. And I think what we did last year is we decided to split the difference right is that why we're at 7,500 we just said, well, look, we'll just do this and some years will be over and some years will be under. You know, it's a $14,000 swing if we don't do it that way. From one year to the next. And I don't really feel strongly about either way.
Yeah, so this year we have no expense. And so, anyway, anyway, we kinda we still have to explain it to people because you're gonna say, well, you only budgeted 7,500 last year. You didn't spend anything. Yeah. Why why are you just spending it this year? Yeah. Why are you spending 14? So, you know, you're still on that. Is where we do the piles. And
Diane, one of the reasons why I didn't wanna move it to the tree budget is because that's a transfer station item. And I think it should remain within the transfer station budget.
Yeah, probably. It's not strictly the trees that are cut and the thing.
Right. And I don't know what the huge difference in cost is, you know, with the way trees are coming down. I don't know if We probably have tons of room to store a big pile of brush, so you probably don't have to do it every year. It's almost better to have it in your expense, but if it doesn't work out right enough, it's not worth it. Right. I mean, thing is the mobilization
cost to bring all that equipment out and set up the device for grinding on-site makes it smarter to do it every two years. You know, we don't really have the storage to go three or four years and then the stuff starting to rot. But two years is perfectly reasonable.
I don't care which way we do it. Either way, we're going to have to explain it.
Any of the other members have strong feelings I mean I tend to I tend to favor budgeting for costs if we know what it's going to be do the budget do it right as close as you can get. Right. Okay. It does mean a more nuanced explanation every year on why we're required to change. But I'm not sure people actually are paying that close attention to the line items here. I mean, if there's a reasonable explanation as we go through.
I'm just thinking somebody when they look through the budget and they get the budget, you know, they scan through the percent increase column and they'll 86%, somebody's gonna hit somebody's eye. Yep. And that's it. As long as we have the have explanatory
notes you can you can include and yeah as long as we have the notes that's fine I'm okay yeah it's worth setting up a separate fund for it's too small of a dollar amount Okay. I
have no So, heartburn either you had some questions about these lines and where they were over and where they weren't. So, think we, I don't think I changed the numbers. I think I added the explanations to, you know, what they actually were. So hopefully that makes more sense to you all as a group. I will say that right now the total increase in the cost of the transfer station you know, is about 10%, which is not insignificant at all. But a lot of that is, or a percentage of that is wage, and a percentage of that is the contractual obligations and the, you know, kind of amount of stuff, you know, we're hauling away. I mean, one of the things we found is that compared to say three years ago, I think you all realize with the advent of Amazon that we are throwing away an enormous amount more cardboard than we have in the past. And, you know, that's a pretty significant cost adder to the town.
Line five sixty nine. Row five sixty nine hazardous waste. So we had expenses in 2021, Nothing got budgeted for twenty one-twenty two. We don't have any year to date expenses. So why are we putting a dollar amount in for this year? I don't understand that. And then it says 0% increase. So it wouldn't be Yeah, your comments
seem to be off by a little row also there. May need to look at that here.
I think that's the problem. That represents our MidNIRAC fees. So, we're part of Midnear Rock, which is a kind of hazardous waste consortium. We're one of about 15 towns that participate in it. And it does two things. One, it allows Andover residents to bring hazardous waste to a hazardous waste facility. And we pay our share of that. And the second thing, and that's based on our population, you know, what they charge us for that. Then the second thing is that organization negotiates all the costs for a lot of the hazardous waste pickup and removal contracts. So, these go out to RFP basically every, you know, every year and we don't have to do that ourselves and we're part of a bigger buying organization.
So, that's basically our cost for that. Oh, this is like an administration fee then?
Well, it's both the administration. So, that covers both the administration fee and also the cost, the portion, how would I say it? So, you're an Andover resident and you bring hazardous waste to the facility, you don't get charged directly and the town doesn't get charged for the cost of that hazardous waste that is built into that fee. So, this is the fee for the cost of running Midnerock essentially. Oh, is this a once a year bill? Yes.
So we didn't budget for it last year then 2,122 budget this year I mean this fiscal year we have nothing in the budget for it. Doesn't look like we budgeted for it. And you have nothing expended either. Right. So, is it in a different line maybe last year.
It's possible. Don't know where that is because I think.
I would find it hard that we would have missed it if there was an expense from the previous fiscal year.
Right. Maybe it sounds like something we have broken out. Right. Right. I can review that.
Only because it's not a 0% increase. It's just misleading.
Right. And just so that you know, part of the increase in fees for Mid NEARAC this year is the fact that a lot of our hazardous waste was shipped to the state of Georgia, and MidNIRAC ended up settling with the state of Georgia because the contractor that handled our waste basically abandoned an enormous amount of hazardous waste in a warehouse and went out of business. And so, Georgia basically turned around and sued every single entity that had used them, because they couldn't prove whose stuff was in what barrel. So, we didn't end up having to really pay them any money, but Midnearack chewed up some legal fees trying to work it all out with the state of Georgia. So they had a, you know, they had a rainy day fund, but they shot most of the rainy day fund dealing with legal issues last year. So part of the increase is just to replenish that rainy day fund so they have enough of an operating account. Questions on that? Comments. Right. Okay.
We did take the contract planner portion and put that into the legal and professional line item. You made the decision to do that last time. So that's still there.
Wait, wait, Your comments say, incorporates you as a planner. Okay.
All right. Yep. Okay. We talked about this one. We finally got the contract. I'm asking the Board of Selectmen for permission to sign this contract. The reason I'm asking them is the contract goes from basically January 1, because we hadn't signed a new spring contract and include next fiscal year too. So I don't feel comfortable signing it because that's assuming a raise that we're budgeting for, but we don't necessarily, you know, we don't have an actual budget yet. Does anybody know what I'm saying?
So this building department is a shared service, right? So this is a shared service. We have a contract.
So this is gonna go to one hundred five also. This is gonna be renamed one hundred five. So it's obvious, and it's gonna be shared service. We're gonna change it to shared service building department,
right? So the new contract, does that include an increase?
So, the new contract increases the total hours individual from five to seven, which the Board of Select approved. And Bolton has said their employees will get a 3% wage. And since that applies to the person that's performing the duties, the contract assumes that. Okay. That makes sense.
Yeah, because I was just trying to figure out who's dictating the increase. It should be in the contract side. Okay. Correct.
This line right here, RAM educational expenses, this number came down from what it was before a little bit. They finally made a final decision to send it to referendum. And this includes the $8,000 of excess from the year before, they're legally obligated to give back to the town. They did not choose to give back any of the 2% of the surplus from last year that they had. They chose to spend that internally, just so that you know.
Eric, quick question on that. Do you know the total of what the 2% would be? They I'm gonna do some math too. I feel like it's I don't know. I'll do the math. It's the it's 2% of their total approved budget from last year, right? Yeah, it would be percent of $5,190,000 Right. But significant chunk of money.
Right. But the 2% of the whole overall budget, right? Between the three towns? Correct.
The number that, know, the number that the public really needs to know that Ram is still keeping. Is a big significant number. I heard it. I just I meant to write it down. But so they're starting their year or they're I think they're using that to fund something with the fields but they are giving back the 8,000 and then keeping the 2% of the over 30,000,000 so
Correct. Okay. Correct. Thank you. So, yeah, it's a big if they gave the whole thing back to Andover, it would lower our cost by about a 100,000 I
mean, they are gonna use it to you know fund some I think field items and capital items. But another reason that you know the public needs to know that they're starting the year off with that. I want to say 600,000. I just don't have a calculator in front of me right now. Mean, I can do it, but it's a big chunk. Yep.
Thanks. Oh, okay. Line number six ninety two, library operations. You asked us to back out the cost of the ARP grant. When we back off the cost of the ARP grant, you can see they've gotten both halves of their allotment at this point. So, they're basically 100% expended on their budget for library operations. Does that make sense?
So, and this is a story that we've never, we have not ever set up the accounting for grants the way we should on our budget side because obviously this ARP grant, you're eligible things you could spend those expenses, you know, should be coming out of that grant money, not out of their out of the town operating budget so to speak. Correct. I was showing here because this $26,000 includes the expenses that they paid that they really were using the grant money for. Correct. No.
So this $26,000 So the library is one of those entities that the town, they maintain their own internal budget and checking account. The town pays them by annually, you know, half of their operating operations budget, and then they have to maintain all their expenses out of that. And then they provide.
Well this year to date expense of $26,200 which is 100% of their budget. Right, is does not include any of the expenses that they bought with the grant money. Correct. So they're over their operation budget. No, their operation budget is. No, they're they've spent 100%
of their budget. Oh yeah, but we have a few months to go so obviously they're gonna have to go over.
Oh, because, because that's what you're not. So we make two payments to the library.
Spent, we gave them one, but they haven't. And we give them one in January.
So, they have all the money they're getting from the town. Right? They never spend over their budget then. Well,
we're not gonna see their book, we're not gonna know that. Right.
Yeah. They have to turn over their books every year because their books get audited also. So it's not like they're hiding anything. The reason, part of the reason that's done is because they also fundraise and they also raise a lot of money that's not coming from taxation, but they also spend on library expenses.
So, and Linda can probably give you a chat. As far as the TAD's concerned, they will never go over their operating budget because it's a fixed budget period for what the town puts in. Right. And they pay beyond that, they have to fundraise themselves. Okay. Right. And the only thing that would not be
part of that is if like significant ongoing maintenance expenses that were paid for out of the town building maintenance fund, like potentially the work to the chimney on the library that would not come out of the operations budget that would come out of the town wide building maintenance fund. But normal routine stuff is library operations and paid for by them. Okay. Okay? Yep. So, we also had been discussing where, so the board of selectmen had taken money out of the Public Works Vehicle Maintenance Fund. And the question was, what did they do with it? This is what they did with it. They added it to Public Works Capital expenditure and added a new column. That's what the board elected to do because they felt that was a capital expense. I actually kind of forgot they did that. I had to go back and do a bunch of research to figure out where that was. So that was the $30,000 difference in the public works vehicle maintenance between what the department requested and what the board of finance or the board of selectmen
approved. And that's represented here. And you can choose to keep that or modify that or do whatever you want, but that's the explanation for it.
No strong feelings here one way or the other. It works, it's fine.
Okay, and then the last thing is kind of what we do. Do we keep the contingency at 75,000 or do we drop it back down to 50,000, which is closer to what we've ordinarily budgeted for that. Know. But you know my concern has always been that $50,000 you know, on a budget the size of ours is a really low percentage and being accurate within that percentage is pretty difficult in an ordinary year.
But that's just me not have a choice about cutting that back, depending on where this comes out, because right now the towns out of 12% increase overall in the budget.
So that is everything in budget. When we go to the revenue column, the only thing I want to talk about is that when we looked at this last fall, you know, we had seen a big year over year increase in the fees for the town clerk from 1920 to 2021. And then the amount that we had gotten in so far early in the year was huge. We were averaging more than 9,000 a month in town clerk fees. Most of that was conveyance fees on a real estate. However, lately, the last couple of three months that has dropped like a rock.
So, I think, you know, if you just summed the trend four months ago, that might have been a reasonable number. But considering the interest rates are probably going up and all the uncertainty, I think that's probably quite a high number in reality. And we ought to knock that down to somewhere around 90,000 is probably a more realistic number.
Right now, really, really probably two components of that Eric right number of transactions and then this is the these fees are based on the value of the home sold. Correct. Exactly. So, so the value of the home sold is not likely to drop the question I think is the churn. Correct.
So year to date, I updated my spreadsheet with the year to date numbers from the last revenue report that we got. So year to date, we've only collected $68,900 for this year. So 105 seems to be a stretch for next year.
Right. Whereas four months ago, we'd collected almost that much already. So lately we've collected very little. There is a seasonality to it. It should pick up again but I don't think we're going to get to we're not going to get anywhere near here. Know, I think 2021, 80,000.
Right. 2021, we collected $80,000 2122, we were on track to collect a lot more than that, but now we're not. So it's dropped off really dramatically now.
Do you have a number in mind that you think is more feasible, Eric?
I mean, I think the number's got to be somewhere between 80,000 and 90,000. But what that should be exactly 80,000 is probably more conservative because that's probably closer to the year before. Because there's definitely, you're right that the average cost of a home has gone up pretty dramatically. But I can't tell you how many homes are going to sell.
What's the average number of homes sold per year? Do you know that? I don't know that. It'd be really easy to see it drop in 25%. Value has also gone up probably 15%. Right.
You take that down 12%, you're at about 90. Doesn't seem unreasonable to me. 105,000 seems a little unreasonable based on what we have. Yep, me too.
If you asked me four months ago based on where we are, we're already in the year, I would have said that was what we would be looking at. But we're definitely not at, you know, the last few months, we sure as heck weren't come bringing in $9,000 a month.
Can we put it at 85? I mean, kind of split the difference? I don't know.
I'm certainly fine with 85. I think it's probably more realistic than 105. You know, I, again, I don't, I can't really tell you where home sales are going next year. You know, interest rates are going up. That should decrease home sales. Does that affect the cost also? I don't know.
Or, you know, people are rushing now, you know, to get out there before they increase further, so you never know. I mean, so that's why we should maybe do something that's Midland or something. I know for my own family members that are trying to buy houses before the rates go up. Right. That's all.
I mean, yeah, we may have a little flush for the remainder of this fiscal year, But it may depending on where interest rates go. And the Fed's gonna increase rates again. They already said that they didn't increase enough. So Right.
No, we're going to get hit with a series of rate increases over the next twelve months,
which I would think would depress home sales but, you know,
people's incomes keep going up they can afford to pay for more.
Are you comfortable with budgeting 85 for that I'm okay with 85 anybody have disagreement with that number. Now I think 85 is good. Yeah, also. All right, so the
top of the revenue thing and look at this interest and taxes can we just run through these numbers really quickly. You're proposing 61,000. And the year to date numbers I have that we've collected so far is $30.33 700. So, I generated that number with 12. It's a half of revenue report, so.
Right. Yeah. Again, there's a seasonality to that. When I looked at those numbers, I set them to what the last twelve months, twelve continuous months of collection were last year.
I mean in 2021 we collected 61,000. This year we're not at that pace of that. The 2122. That's my that's my question. So I don't know the answer to this. Yeah. Prior years taxes. Yeah. I don't know if January is too high. We've collected one twenty seven seven so far. I don't have the data in front of me of how was the backlog on the prior year taxes. But we had a big spring, you know, so we collected a lot in 2021 and '58. So it seems like if we keep going, January should be close. But I'm just saying last year, only budget a 100, but we're we're above that. So We've gotten more than what we budgeted for.
Right. Again, when I set those numbers, I just took from the tax collector what was the closest twelve months to the current fiscal year when I collected that data and said, okay, what did we collect in one twelve month period for interest, for liens and for prior year fees?
And, you know, we should drop into this revenue spreadsheet. We should put a year to date actual column through the same date as we have for year to date actual for expenses for the public to see. You know, put the the proposed budget, but we didn't put where we are year to date. And we should we should have that in there. We have it for all the other years, what we collected and what we got. So I don't know if we're gonna get $61,000 worth of interest if we're only at 33,700 right now next year. And the year before that, we only collected collected actual 61,000. So so I can see So we collected 61.6 in 2021 against a budget of 40,000. So we're over. No 2021 against a budget of 33, so we're over. Then we budgeted 40. And we haven't made our budget yet, but we're not done with the year.
Well, is interest on delinquent taxes. So it depends on as long as people pay their bills, we won't have a lot of interest. But if we have a lot of backlog of overdue taxes, we will have interest because it accrues at a pretty good rate. Eight months. Those numbers that I have in there through February. I do not include March.
I mean, obviously we have better numbers at the end of this month, because this is a collection month, you know.
So you would take that $33.07 and annualize it. That would come out to 50,000 $51,000. It's only 10,000 difference. But I don't know if it runs that way. I don't know how much comes in every month. So what information do you want back from me?
Well, does everyone agree to on the board that we should have the actual numbers to match the actual year to date expenses like we have on the front page. I mean we're presenting the budget of expenditure side with year to date numbers through April 1. We should put the revenue. See other half of the budget, they go together. Okay.
It's not a bad idea. The only thing is if with any kind of seasonality or variability month to month, it's just more explanation we have to make and, you know, if we're making a significant variance, maybe, you know, that probably makes sense. Don't I don't more information is better than not enough. I don't know that, you know, the public is willing to look at that level of detail. Might.
Well, I'm for me, I think it's valuable because for me to look at what we're gonna budget for, is it reasonable? Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. You know? Like, we know 10 plus One zero five. We know we're not gonna make that number. We have all agreed to 85. Transfer station. I know we have 44 in there, but does does that have the increased fee in there or not? Yes.
That's assuming we issue the same number of stickers as last year. We increase the fee. And then building, we put 75,000.
So that was things one overall building is up. That's again also very periodic like we're in a slump now, but we expect to see a lot more building in the next couple of months. And the second thing is we increased the fees pretty dramatically, you know, last year, which is why if you, you know, look at, we're already, I think, think we've already collected more than 55,000 so far this year. This year, 67,000 so far year to date through February.
Yeah, include it right that including the land use department.
So another thing in my notes, I was looking here. We're missing one of the revenue accounts that I've seen that we've gotten on the revenue report consistently. The municipal revenue sharing $20,219 account 120010227. It's not the same account as the municipal online '21 it's a different account number. Down the revenue report and that's why I'm asking. You got me.
We have a municipal revenue sharing that comes in every year at 20,000 to 19 it's in our budget. It's on our budget report now in our revenue. It is called MRSA municipal revenue sharing. We adopted a budget last year of $20,219 year to date revenue is 3,103 thousand $179 So my question is, is this something we get every year? And how does it come in?
I can't answer that right now. Can get back to you. Okay. Because that's on my note. Diane, it's
Maria. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. I think that comes through when we were talking earlier in that meeting from the state. So we get those direct deposits. I think it comes through there. I can double check tomorrow through my emails If it's like a once a year, or how we get it but that does sound familiar. I remember looking at something like that.
Because we have that municipal stabilization grant that we get every year that's a $43,000 number. And then we have this other man. If
you expand the descriptions Road 21 is municipal road or municipal municipal stabilization or something. I wonder if that's it.
No, it's not it's not the same account number. So the account number that I have is is exactly the same account number but instead of zeros in the, in the second set of numbers it's it's 0100. So it's 10. I don't know why there's a two in front of these because it's there's not a two on the report. The report the account number says 100Dash20Dash0100Dash227. And this is. Okay. Yeah, I'll add in my email tomorrow. Yeah, I'm just checking. So we should add that back to that.
I know there was one. Sherry and I reviewed because the state finally put out a list of the funds we were getting. And there is one that's not coming through. I
have to figure That's out some money, so maybe it's not getting funded at the amount that we budgeted for because we budgeted for this last year. Well, no, there's one that we've been getting that we're not going to get.
And I want to say within the $20,000 range, but I'm going to have to review that and get back to you. All right.
Clarity on that. Yep. And then the rentals, we can increase the budget item on that to include the $7,500 from the field, unless we're going to give them a rate, unless we're going to charge them more.
No, I increased that to 8,000. Don't know what the other things we get rental fees for. I can't actually figure out anything else that we rent. I increased that to 8,000, which is I still We'll pay rent. Ah, okay. Yeah. So then you
Probably increase that to, you know, 9,000 to cover cool and the athletic field. Okay. And I don't know what the Board of Selectmen is going to want to charge FC North for rental of the athletic field. You know, that's up to them. Suggestion has been to charge them half the cost of field maintenance, but whether they decide to charge them all of it or part of it. I don't know. No decision has been made. Oh, we should any cost
increase we have we should be passing on to them right so
that would be my passion. So we can set that to 9,000 and account for cool. Thank you Marina. So that's what that works out to. When you put all those collectively together, you run up a total budget increase of about 5.4%.
So when we clean up this spreadsheet, Eric, can you on the first tab at the very beginning, I think it's row 61. Of this page?
No. The first tab. The first tab. Yeah. Budget. Row 61. Is it no. Not 61. Hold on. Hold on. I lost it. Oh, no. I'm in the wrong spreadsheet. That's why I have too many open. What account are you looking at, Diane? Looking for?
No, I just want him to clean this up. So it's a cleanup item on the spreadsheet. Oh, 36. And the department total states you have a header in the middle that says department totals. I think they do that a little bit print out properly. Is kind of annoying, but Well, no, you can repeat header rows on Excel. I don't have to have that in there. So what is it that you wanna do?
Well, 36, I don't know why that header is in there.
So row four and row 36 both say department totals and it's it's saying it's just because the convenience thing when you're probably printing it out, you know, for on paper. The problem with repeating the headers if you did this one it repeat on every page and you really don't want that you'd have to manage it so I'm guessing that's why it's done that way. I don't really look at the printed copy, so I don't really. It's probably not. If you want that out, we can knock it out.
Is that what you want out? Yeah, just so the sheets formatted correctly. I just want the sheet to be nicely formatted and you know, the unused, you know, the useless lines eliminated,
you know, clean it up. It looks like Again, think it was probably there for the purposes of printing the hard copies to go to the public during the meeting, etcetera. I don't think it's necessary but that's I'm sure that's what it was there for. You could tell Excel to print header rows on every page. Now the problem is if you printed that it would print that budget, you know, it would print department budgets on every page and you don't want them at every page because it only applies to the first two, but I don't really think it's necessary I think it's fine to remove it.
Okay, it's gone now. So now given that that's where we're in the budget, is that what you all collectively want to put to the public at the next meeting? Because at this meeting, you're going to have to decide whatever budget you want to put forward to the public hearings.
Well, one obvious thing to look at was the item line item you pointed out the actuarial services that the legal legal support. Sorry for the Sure, the assessors.
Yeah, for the assessors. I said actuarial. Assessors legal counsel line 122, yep. Yep. So I mean, that one seems pretty clear to me that based on what you said if if there doesn't seem to be the likelihood of more than one or two actions against the town, and we budgeted for three or four then let's cut that in half I don't see any reason to leave it at six ks. Anybody disagree with that, or have any other idea.
Okay, so when are we going to go through this budget and talk about what cuts we need to make or want to make before the public? The annual. Right now.
Is Okay, then I want to make a motion to make a change to the school budget.
You can't do that now. That doesn't that can't happen till after the process later in the process.
That's what I just asked. Why don't we go to talk about making changes? Are we going to get the public feedback from our meeting next week, then regroup and make it and talk about changes before it goes to the public.
This school budget we can't we can make whatever changes we want to this budget for goes to the public hearing. When can we make changes to the school budget? Not until at least after the public hearings.
So I will tell you flat out that there are different legal opinions on that as to when based on the ruling in the Charter. You know, if you want to make changes to the school budget prior to the town budget townwide budget meeting, I would suggest you ask the town's attorney for a legal opinion on that straight out.
I think we're going to have to do that based on the things that I've read. I also got an email today from Jerry Creme quoting the Charter and I haven't really even had time to read it out for it to you guys. But I do think that the Charter is written a little less clearly than it could be about this matter. But it does seem pretty clear that.
The budget that we send to the annual town meeting is a budget that the Board of Finance approves and the budget can change the total amount of the school budget. Not asking for a line item change, this is total amount.
Right. No, that's clear, we can't do any line item change.
So I'm not telling you legally you can or you can't. I'm saying if that is your intention, then we ask Dennis O'Brien for a written legal opinion to that effect. Because I'm not going to tell you that you can or you can't because I think the charter is pretty big. You know, and orally, the town's attorney last year told us one thing and the board of eds attorney certainly does not feel that that does not agree with that. So, you know, if you're going to consider that, then you need to get the town attorneys legal opinion on that.
Yeah, my, my personal view is we leave it alone right now to, to, you know, reading in the section eight zero two of the charter right here. It says, the agencies are going to submit the their estimate blah blah blah the duties of Board of Finance and Board of Financial Review all budget estimates for the heads of all towns board departments offices agencies By completion of the review and not later than sixty days prior to the end of the fiscal year the part of financial hold a public hearing is provided for in section eight zero two C of the charter on the proposed budget and preparing the proposed budget Board of Finance may add to delete from or eliminate requests made by the various departments offices and agencies, except that the board may only comment and make recommendations on the budget requests of the local Board of Education. Now that's kind of a, but it doesn't it doesn't say that we can change that budget request. The Board of Financial, including the budget the estimated budget request of the regional school district number eight.
I thought we made a change to the school budget before went to the town meeting last year. I think
that we did. But again, there's two different spots here. This is what I was just stating was the proposed budget to go before the town hearing.
That's all I was going to mention because we're going to have the hearing correct so maybe we can't make any changes before the hearing to the board of Ed budget. That's pretty that's pretty scary.
You guys definitely made changes before it went to the first public meeting.
I'm about the hearing that's like I'm talking about the public meeting, the budget that we as a board say this is the budget we're submitting. Yeah.
Yeah. So then it's in the further down to the board of financial holdings one public hearing the budget which any taxpayer elector may have the opportunity to be heard. Bob Bob Board of Finance may review the budget request of the head of each department board agency and Commission, including the local Board of Education. Subsequent to such hearing and review the Board of Finance shall prepare a final budget that incorporates any recommended changes to be presented to the annual town budget meeting which shall be in the same format and contain the same information as is provided for section eight of the above. Me, that says is the Board of Financial prepare a final budget that incorporates any recommended changes, any recommendations, including you know I gotta say I think that's including the school budget. It's hard for me to think that any recommendation recommended changes doesn't include the school line.
So we can change could go to the town meeting.
It's, it's not as clear as it could be, because I think it should say, including last school budget line item to clarify that that is not to be done before the hearing but could be done after the hearing, if that wasn't the the intent of the charter which it seems to me that it is.
I'm just talking about not the meeting, not our meeting next week for the public.
I'm just talking about the annual town before the town meeting. Yeah, I think it's, it seems to be fairly clear to me. I'm not an attorney, but it seems to be fairly clear to me and I read a lot of contracts but that the, we cannot make changes to the approved to the proposed school budget prior to the hearing, but it seems to imply not quite as clearly that we can make changes to,
you know, we are still charged with putting forth a final budget, a five the final budget that goes before the town meeting yes that's and we have control over that dollar amount total dollar amount. Yeah.
Okay, as long as we can make changes between those two meetings that's fine.
That's, that would be my reading of the chart, but I think that Eric is right before we would take such action. We need to get an opinion of the attorney of the attorney. Well, how do you want to do that, Eric?
If that's something you're contemplating, I will ask the town's attorney for a legal opinion regarding that. And I will ask for it in writing.
I think it would be appropriate and I think we may as well do it now, so that we know kind of where we are I mean, if, if, if the reading isn't what I've proposed that it is, then you know we need to understand that. So we know it's not where we stand. And then it goes to town meeting and then anybody can propose a change. Yes,
so this budget passing first round it's pretty slim so I know we're going be going back and doing something. But there is one reduction I would like to make on the school budget before annual town meeting. Which I think we as a board should consider. I will explain my logic to you guys and then we can vote on it.
We as a board should consider what Diane wasn't clear to me. What my logic is for the change, for the one change I wanna make. Okay. Are you talking about for the school budget? Yeah, okay.
Well, let's maybe wait till we get there and we can we can discuss. Go ahead Joanne.
Yeah, I was just gonna say I'm reverting back to Eric's original question whether we were, know, now that we've gone through this and pretty much I feel like all of our meetings have just been kind of cleaning it up so that we could have a final version, you know, without really having comments on whether we think we should cut or not. I don't know what everyone thinks. Get that we definitely want to hear the public, you know, get their input. I think we know. I think I know which way a lot of people are going to be talking about it. So all of these meetings so far have been cleaning it up and getting questions answered, getting the right totals and all that kind of thing. And so I guess I'd want to see that bottom revenue thing again, where it shows the mill rate and what the percentage, you know, that if we thought we were comfortable with just putting this out to the public, so us not taking any action at all besides cleaning it up and getting the totals right. Well personally I think we ought to.
It's. What were you saying I didn't mean to interrupt you. No, I just wanted to see like the final increase I did we make the changes are we going to wait to see Eric's version, when we get it back again.
Well, I think we should make any changes we think are should should clearly be made, and I agree with the, with reducing the, you know, the one the revenue line that we had right changing that out. I would also suggest that we we change those legal services for the board of assessor. Just because it's an obvious one that are pointed out let's not put it in there if it's pretty clear that it can be reduced without much risk. I don't know that we should make drastic changes unless the boards and clear agreement on anything, something in particular, I think it behooves us to go through the town hearing process before we go through the you know the budget hearing meeting before we actually make significant changes. But if it's, I think we should just budget, you know, if we really think something ought to be increased or something ought to be reduced. Let's do that. Let's do it now. You know, so
no I that's what that's what I was getting to I don't really, again, I'm the type that I have to kind of look at it get some thoughts formulated, and we're just doing this now so, But I know our meeting's next week, so it's going to take a so I'm in agreement. I appreciate getting the public's input as well. So we're saying what we have here. Do we have a total on sorry because I can't read it as good as you guys can. My screen is so far away.
Yeah, it's a 5.4% overall increase of taxation total. Yeah. The, you know, the elementary school is.
Oh, I know the schools part like, so overall increase in dollar amount would be our we're still at the 500,000 yeah $5.26 $7.00 1. Thank you.
I don't I don't know if anyone has any other opinions. I guess the hard work will come once we have the hearing and then that little bit of time in between when we hear from people. Think, you know, eventually a few things are going to have to be cut. I do have opinions, but I agree with you. I'm fine with if this is what we want to do when it's, you know, send it to the hearing and the hearings going to be virtual and
next week, I mean, I would propose that we make any changes that you know if you know we're at a point that I think if any board member wants to make a suggested change to these items. You know, I don't think we want to get too aggressive before we have the public hearing, frankly, but I would like to see that you know any obvious changes made, and I think we did one with that with the revenue line item. I think we should also do the one with the legal support for the assessor's office. I keep forgetting what the heck that account is called.
So we changed the revenue line item that you were talking about for, we just made the change to the rental income. Yeah. We made the change to the town clerk fees. We reduced that 20,000. Those were the only two that it seemed like you had clear agreement on. There were other things
we have find out if we're going to get that $20,000 that other revenue sharing thing, or if that's going away.
Yeah, well that's that's like we're not going have that answer tonight right. Eric what I would suggest on the, on the expense tabs, the budget tabs. 122 that's when we were just talking about. I would suggest we reduce that to $3,000 You know, and again, we don't necessarily think Kevin motion here but I would open it for up for discussion I would suggest we make any suggested changes that everyone's comfortable with. And then we could, we could just vote on it at the end unless there's, you know, there's some disagreement, then we should probably somebody should make a motion to a formal motion and each line item if we, we have clear disagreement on it.
Mark, I agree with you. I think the 6,000 should go down to 3,000. Agree. You said he have a different opinion? Nope. No, I'm good with that.
It seems like low hanging fruit to me. Let's take it. Okay. Is there anything else? I, you know, I think now is fine to any particular line items. If maybe wants to just say, look, I think this this one is can be trimmed or added to or. And you know, here's a reason if you can say this is anything clear now I would, especially if you think it's likely to be a unanimous type vote or something close to it. I personally don't see anything else in here that I would, you know, cut at this point or add to.
I think until we get public feedback. More feedback. Should do that. Mike, I have a question on timing. Next week is our public meeting to get feedback on this budget. So if we need to make changes and update this spreadsheet. When are we going to do that between now and the town meeting.
Well, the first opportunity would be, we actually have a. We actually have a scheduled budget workshop meeting at 07:00 following the hearing. So I sent an email earlier Amanda. Okay,
okay, Amanda has sent around an agenda having with both meetings and I was a little hesitant to have the special workshop meeting afterwards. Eric pointed out that well, you know, it gives us the opportunity if we so choose to make some immediate adjustments after that town meeting. If we decide we're not ready to do that or it's just going to take a lot more consideration that we don't have to have that. You know we just skip that agenda item and have the meeting over quickly, so we really don't have to go into a full blown meeting if there's nothing really to be discussed and analyzed at that time. So that's one option. We probably will need to, you know, we have the following Wednesday, the twentieth.
We have a meeting scheduled there. I think our meetings ended.
Yeah. So I don't think we have a meeting scheduled on the twentieth. Have a regularly scheduled meeting on the twenty seventh.
Right. Which is a little late, right, to do it because the budget meeting is the third. Budget meeting is the fourth. I think. Presumably it will be the fourth. Yeah. Not a Tuesday. It's a Wednesday, the fourth? Yeah. It's Wednesday, the fourth. Sorry.
I lost computer again. I'm back on my other I thought the whole reason we chose the thirteenth was so that we weren't rushed. So I thought we were giving ourselves opportunity
to talk about the budget before. Yes, that's what I meant. Feel like we're in charge of the annual town meeting. So yeah, I
think immediately following the budget hearings is an opportunity. And then we probably need to schedule a special meeting on the twentieth. Yes, definitely tricky for me.
But, and then we have a, we have a regular regularly monthly meeting scheduled on the twenty seventh so there's three potential meetings. Just on those Wednesdays between the hearing. Same night of the hearing, the one following the twentieth would be another which we'd have to schedule because it's not on the schedule right now. And then the twenty seventh is our regular meeting so those would be our three opportunities to come to agreement on the final budget to be presented to the town at the town budget meeting on the fourth.
I would have to check on the twenty seventh mark. And the reason is that's pretty close to, I forget the total number of days people technically need to have the mailer in hand before the budget meeting. I want to say it's five days. So it is possible if we were all ready to go and there were minor last changes, we could get that out on the twenty eighth and meet our legal requirements. What? But it would be pretty close.
What's in the mailer that we would need to be sure of? Why would we just send the mailer out anyway?
Isn't the mailer just the notice that there's an annual budget meeting on this date and Yeah, this
I forget when There's a chair, right? So we are required to post prior to the meeting. I would have to review the charter and find out when we have to have a drop dead budget. We have to have the budget posted and we have to have it available for the public to review in the town clerk's office prior to, but I don't know the number of days that.
I don't think it's stated in the charter, but it might, there might be just the might have to do with the agenda being being there X amount of days like a standard meeting. Yeah, I don't see anything about days that needs to be posted. Just a quick look.
It may be in the annual meeting section on the charter. That's what I'm looking.
So I'm also going to review the timeline because I worked that out with the time town clerk to make sure. Process explanation? No, that's not it. Where is it?
I think it has a specification on when it needs to be posted.
Yeah, okay, here we go. So in my notes, I had the Board of Finance would have to vote to send the budget to town meeting on the twenty sixth so mailers could go out at that time.
Right, but again, I don't really know what the mailer has to do with it. I mean, wouldn't we just send it out anyway, like Diane said, there's nothing that's going to change on the mailer we know we're going to hold it down budget meeting on the fourth.
I agree with that too. Right, but, you know, it seems to me that mailer has the bottom line budget in it too.
I just thought it was a notice of an of a public meeting. It was just a basic. I can't remember. I can't speak. I can't remember what happened yesterday. It's not one of those just one sentence things. Be aware that on such and such a date, the town, you know, all eligible electors of the town are called to this meeting. There's actual budget stuff on there. I don't remember that.
I, you know what? I, I don't want to swear to it. I mean, I know when I worked it out the. It's like it has budget stuff in there, but I'm not sure if it says
that the budget is posted on the town website and available for review. It may say that.
I, you know, I don't know. I mean, it's very possible you could do it on the twenty seventh and be legal. But, you know, I don't want to tell you right now that you can or you can't. Because I would have to review that with the town clerk and the town's attorney to make sure that that's the case. Okay.
So, either way it, you know, we, we if, if that is the case we, we, for some reason we can't do we need to do it prior to the twenty seventh and that gives us the thirteenth. We have a hearing and then a subsequent budget meeting. Would have the twentieth, if we choose to add a special budget meeting then.
There's other days we don't, I mean if we have to we can just pick another day to do a special meeting. There is yeah.
The sixteenth is an option for me that is, you know, holiday weekend, I'm fine with Saturday the sixteenth. And we don't have to decide now we can call a special meeting, you know, on the thirteenth if we think we need it. I'm out of town the weekend as a like the, you know, like the twentieth to the twenty fifth really won't be available. But
I think part of our thing after our meeting on the thirteenth. And we go into a regular meeting, we should then talk about the next date and just get it booked. Is that okay to book it at that point in time? Because then we'll know what how many changes we based on the feedback, we'll know how much work we have to do.
Yeah. I like that. Yep. I think we'll get a good feel to how much work we're gonna have to do.
So Okay. So you're not gonna set a special meeting on the twentieth today. You're gonna wait till the public budget meeting on the thirteenth and then make a decision whether you want to meet on the twentieth. Is that correct?
Well, because Mark is not here for the twentieth for a special meeting. I'm
just asking. I'm not criticizing. I'm just making sure that I got it right because we won't post a special meeting if you're not actually deciding that here.
I can pick one now or we can wait till the thirteenth I don't care. So it works out for everybody.
You know, I would be tempted to post, you know, to schedule the meeting have that in our pocket. And you know I might be able to attend for part of it or something but it's going to be tough for me and then. So why not, we can always cancel.
We do it does anybody have availability for special in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twenty first of the eighteenth, nineteenth, or the fifteenth? Weekend. I gotta
Yeah. After Easter. That's Monday and Tuesday after Easter. That's after Easter. Monday the eighteenth Tuesday the nineteenth. Either one is fine for me. Or we could also
tax day for those of you who are procrastinators so just be aware. I just have to write a check so.
Yeah same here. I already did mine online and and that's the day the checks gonna occur the money's coming out of my account but I've already done it.
So you're asking about Monday the eighteenth, Tuesday the nineteenth? Well, options are the fourteenth or the fifteenth.
So okay. Well, the fourteenth or the fifteenth work for me. The eighteenth and nineteenth are bad for me.
Yeah. Fourteenth. Well, I prefer the eighteenth, nineteenth simply to have a little bit of time to review it, you know, with but that's.
I'm unavailable on the fifteenth. I could do the fourteenth or sixteenth. Sixteenth I
could be available on fifteenth. Wait a minute. I don't know why we're
You can always do a Saturday if you want to. Okay. I'm out of town the fifteenth six Seven six.
Again, I'm going to be very flexible and be very available. I just want to make sure we have, you know, what we need and that we have time to digest it so that we can be really productive at our meeting. You know, we're just going to have the public hearing, then we're going to have the thirteenth to discuss it, which I think we'll have a lot to discuss then. So I'm looking forward to next Wednesday. I think we'll have a better feel. I mean I could be available I think you said the Thursday is the fifteenth I mean sorry the fourteenth or the Monday as well. I just want us to carefully pick our dates so that we like all have a chance to study everything and and come ready to go. I'm saying we always do, but now we're really at that time. So that's my thought.
You know, if it has to be on a Monday or Tuesday, I can show up for court, know, and do it for quorum it's just that I have my kids.
Days. So it makes it harder for me. And yeah, I personally just scheduled one for the twentieth, you know, and if I can attend for part of it I can, you know, I don't know that that's going to be our final final one anyway and my guess is it'll go to the twenty seventh unless there's legal reason we have to have it posted prior to then.
Well, you just wanna stick with wanna do the twentieth then and just have it out there? Yeah. I would. I'm good with that. I'm good with that. Me too. Me too.
Okay, why don't you guys make a formal motion to that Anybody
would like to make a motion to add a special meeting on the twentieth?
I'd make a motion to add a special meeting on the twentieth. At 7PM.
Okay. So, I have a second, we just met motioning to have a special meeting for the budget workshop on April 20 at 7PM. Second, I'll second.
I think I got a Kurt as a second Thank you Kurt. Any discussion that we haven't already have. All those in favor say Aye. Aye. Any opposed. Any abstentions. Okay, the motion passes so we're scheduled that meeting. Thank you guys. I also think we've made a couple of changes on the budget that Erica shared, I think that we should probably have a formal vote on those changes or potentially add some more changes if anybody has any to bring up at this point. Anybody can make a motion that we, we make the changes as indicated in the spreadsheet that Eric's got in front of us now.
Make the motion to approve the changes that Eric made tonight at our Board of Finance budget meeting workshop as presented in front of us right now.
Okay, want to second that I'll second it. Okay, Louise. Any further discussion?
So I do have one thing that I think is incorrect. Give me like two seconds to look at it. Yes. And that is line item 111 can be removed. That was a placeholder that was in there incorrectly. I don't know why it got added to Board of Finance. That was added under the finance department. That was not a board of finance expense. Did that change the bottom line?
Yep. Yeah. Decreased the budget about $2,000 $2,200. So the other thing that you guys had
a tip. I interrupt you Eric is a procedure on motion then probably we still need to vote or, or we could have the motion withdrawn. Before that changes made. Can we just make a motion to make that change as well incorporated into it now you can't want procedurally when we're in the middle of one motion, you really have to be up to vote on that motion. Okay, so what I would suggest is if we have additional changes we should probably decline that motion. If it's the feelings of the board to do so. And then, if we need to make additional changes we we brought another motion and vote.
I'll make a motion then decline that.
Just, we don't we don't make you don't make a motion we just vote. We just don't. Okay. Yeah. So, if there's any further discussion I'll call for a vote. Okay, vote on the motion. All those in favor say aye. Aye. All those opposed say no. No. Any abstentions.
Okay, Linda were you voting yes or no sorry, I was voting for it to go ahead with the budget.
Well, we're, I'm tired, I think we are but we're just going to back off on that, because Eric wants to make additional change.
So, okay, so I do have two suggestions. The first was to get rid of line 111, because that was incorrect. The second thing is, you guys had debated under the Board of Finance, whether you wanted to keep your legal budget or not. You have never used your legal budget. It used to be 5,000. It was reduced to 2,500, but it's been sitting there for years and you've never spent a dime. Do you want to retain that budget?
That's a good question. I would think if we're going to need legal defense at any point last year probably would have been it. Tough to say, or the one before actually when we've just made the decision to. We made the budget for the governor's orders.
So behind that was when the Board of Finance of the border slack men didn't get along, and there was right and I think we just say, anymore.
So, Eric, the request that we just talked about earlier about getting an opinion from the town's attorney on the, on the intention of the charter. That covered by retainer. Yes. So, so that would not be a separate, it would need to be a kind of a separate charitable event for us to need that fee that fund. Yeah you would. We're. To be. Finance.
It would have to be something whereby either I or the board of select men was refusing you the opportunity to use the town's legal counsel for some reason, which may or may not have happened in the past. I mean, I'm not saying under some previous administrations there wasn't that concern.
I would feel more comfortable having it there still, but maybe reducing it down to a thousand just so there's something there. Anyone agree or disagree?
It's kind of an interesting thing. I mean, do we really even have the, you know, the authority to contact an attorney outside of this of the town administration and have them do work independently and authorize expenditures I'm probably getting some esoteric stuff.
I think the chances of us ever using that money in today's makeup of the boards, okay? I'm not going to say about a future election or how things change, but it's pretty slim to know we would have to be at odds with somebody and we don't tend to work that way. Probably with the majority of the board.
Nobody wants to kick off a turf war just for fun.
And I just think this, I just think every penny counts in this budget because it's, you know, where it is right now. That's all. Every little bit helps. It's
de minimis in a way. I mean, every little bit does help. Don't feel strong either way.
I was gonna say that should we keep just a placeholder? You said it's at 2,000 and keep like 500 in there just as I know that we even cover, but just as a token. Whatever I'm.
Feel like what we have in there now is the token. Yeah, mean, thousand 500 I think we get you a lot of legal fees and that's kind of kind of what Louise is suggesting. I'm going to reverse myself and suggest that I do have a preferred strategy around this. My suggestion is just leave it in. Put it in our back pocket and then maybe something we choose to remove post public hearing. I'm there. I'm with you. Yeah. Sounds good. Yeah. Okay.
Okay. Are there other cuts you want to make it this time.
I think we had that conversation, but no, I think we, I don't get to be rude. I appreciate the question because I think we decided we were going to go to the public hearing and then yeah, well, if nobody has any other
recommended changes cuts or increases, then we could entertain a motion again once again to pass the budget as it is in front of us now, or to have to pass the budget but to confirm the budget as it is now as the basis upon which will go to public hearing next week. So easy on to make your motion and it was that Joanne.
No, that was me. I would like to make a motion to accept what we have here and to present that at the meeting. Okay. Anybody like to second that motion? Second. Second,
is there any further discussion. Okay, hearing none let's take a vote all those in favor say Aye. Aye.
Any opposed. Do we have any extensions. Okay, hearing none I think the motion passes, thank you. Any further budget discussions?
I have a question there. Diane might have asked it. Will we be getting this revised copy sent to us once everything is finalized earlier this time? I don't need that really. I know it's a lot of work, but can we get it a few days ahead just so that I can have time to really look at it.
You understand that question Eric Diane or Joanne is just asking if we could get a copy of the budget well in advance the meeting and sounds like you've got most of it covered here.
I mean you voted to send this exact budget to the public budget hearing so I see no reason why I can't hit save and send it all to you right now. Things
to research you adjust the notes, maybe, and those can be done. Don't think that's material to what we're trying to do here. Yeah, agree with it, Eric. There's probably really no reason you can't send that right. So
I appreciate it. No criticism, just a question. Thank you. Yeah, understood.
Any further discussion? Okay, thank you Eric hearing none we'll move on to our next agenda item which again is public speak. Doesn't look like we have any members of the public in attendance. Okay, so we'll move on to agenda item six which is adjourned when anybody like to make a motion to adjourn. I'll make it. I'll make the motion to adjourn.
Okay, think that was Louise making a motion to Second? I'll second it.
Okay, Rob seconds. Thank you. Any discussion? Oh, I skipped. I'm sorry I skipped a skipped an agenda item I'm sorry I'm going to back us up a little bit but agenda item for his correspondence. Anybody have any correspondence that they need to share. I did receive an email from Jerry creme and the Board of Education, with an excerpt of the of the town charter language, and he addresses the question of the Board of Finance making changes to the, to the school line item, I will forward that to everybody for review. I haven't read it closely myself but my interpretation of the town charter is as stated earlier, I believe that it implies the Board of Finance can make changes to the recommended budget for the Board of Education prior to the town budget meeting, but again we're going to get the attorney's opinion on that one. So, sorry to back up on that one. Okay, so again no, no public speak. Have a motion for German I think then that was made by Louise and seconded by Rob. It's still on the table on the floor I should say. Discussion on adjournment? Okay, hearing none we'll take a vote all in favor of adjourning say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, abstentions? Motion passes. The meeting is adjourned. Thank you everybody. We're making some progress here.