Meeting transcript
Board of Finance- Special Meeting
July 19, 2023 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Okay, we're calling this meeting to order. This is the special meeting of the Town of Andover Board of Finance Wednesday, 07/19/2023. We will start by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, Pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the Republic, which stands one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Alright, thank you. We will move on to public speak. Eric, do you want to go around and see if anybody has anything to add? Sure. First up on the list, Val Bruno. All set. Thank you. Chris Bernard? I'm good. Mrs. Smith. I'm all set. Thank you.
That's everybody but staff and Board of Finance members that I see. Okay, there's a Cherry, c h e r y.
It's Cheryl. Oh, it's Cheryl. Okay. Yeah, it just reverted back to the old one.
Yeah, think I figured it out when I first looked at it and forgot. Okay, good. Thank you very much. Okay, I just want to make a point, that since this is a special meeting, we do have a pretty full agenda, but because it's a special meeting rather than a prescheduled meeting, we cannot make additions or deletions, any kind of changes to the agenda. So we will move on to our agenda item three which is the review with the auditor 2022 financial statements. Cheryl, I don't know if you want to lead into that or we'll go ahead and let the auditors present.
I don't see the auditors on the list. Are they with Eric?
The auditor's not here. I don't know where the auditor was. Oh, I wasn't sure who who was
I I don't see them listed here at all, and I know that and I just tried to contact Mike. Okay.
I don't know why Mike's not on. I I really I have no idea. He asked for the meeting so yeah.
If I recall, that's Joanne. We changed it to this date so that we could accommodate the date with the auditor. Yeah, this was the week he was open, Right. That's you know he could be running late you know I I understand that concept but just wanted to note that because I did almost forget that we had it you know I mean I remembered a week ago but still yeah.
Well we'll give it a couple minutes here. Again the promise I think we could probably move on with our agenda the promise I think the members of the Board of Finance and others of our Board of Education enjoyed to listen to the auditor's report as well. It was just an opportunity for them to hear it directly. And to give him the ability to have Mike be able to sign on and sign off quickly without having to stay through the meeting. We scheduled him first.
Mark, are we allowed to ask the question if there's been any contact either through Cheryl or Eric or confirming that they were going to appear tonight with us? Of course, yeah. So I don't know. Does anyone have any when the last time they touched base with the auditor to secure him for probably maybe last month. I'm not sure, but.
Cheryl, did you reach out to him after we scheduled or? Yes, I did. I sent him an email. Yes, I'm trying to get ahold of him now. Okay, my phone. Great.
So I just don't think we were we were being copied necessarily. Well, at the risk of I guess I was going to say at the risk of following protocol, we can move on to the next agenda item. The only real risk would be if he does join late and we jump back to it, and technically we're just taking the agenda items out of order, but I don't really see that as a huge issue. I'm willing to take that risk, I think, but since he's not on, think we should probably go ahead and move on to the next agenda item. This is the review of budget to actual.
Eric or Cheryl don't know if you have any particular comments on this or if anybody from the board has questions.
I can certainly try, but I'm trying to get through Mike's Mike's phone, so I'll I'll try to jump in when I can. Hey Mark,
I just should we? I understand moving on and I understand the importance of not keeping everybody waiting and we've all made a special commitment to be here tonight. I wouldn't mind giving her a couple minutes just to reach him, especially you know, because if we move on Cheryl's kind of involved in all of the questions that we want to ask. Yeah, it's going to be disruptive so.
I'm not trying to overtake what you're saying. I just feel like the whole point of tonight's meeting was the audit. Know, we're all here. I know you get that. So thank you. Just like a couple minutes and then if we Yeah, we can wait. Yeah. I know it's frustrating. Maybe somebody can the Jeopardy song.
We need music, background music. Yeah, because we write our answers on the board. No questions? It's a pretty high bar. If we sit here for much longer without any discussion, this will come off as the most boring Board of Finance meeting ever. I'll give it to 07:10.
I'm sorry, I'm unable to get through to their Glastonbury branch. It just every time I try to get into his extension it won't go through and I'm not getting anything on his cell. I'm sorry.
Thank you for trying Cheryl. That's all we can do. Thank you Mark for the extra time whenever you're ready I guess.
Yeah, well let's go ahead and we'll go again, we'll do the budget to actual and move on with our agenda and then if it turns out that he joins, we can probably go ahead and have the review but otherwise we're gonna have to reschedule. So going back to the budget versus actual, anything specific we should point out? I see tax revenues are down but we expect that because obviously some of the revenues are coming in still. Anything specific Cheryl or any board members that you think you should point out or ask questions about?
So, Mark, real quick, Cheryl gave me a copy today of the profit loss summary for last year. And we are, we did come in under on revenue. So, revenue was down. It looks like a total of about $140,000 but expenses were also down considerably more than that. So, looks like the basic summary at this point is that the budget for last year on the town side was in the black by around $270,000 $275,000 Now that will change as we get some additional bills in, but it's probably not going to change a lot. So, the basic theme should hold through for the year, at least for the town side. That's not nothing to do with school, to do with anything on that end of the spectrum, but from the town side. You know, did have enough of the surplus to cover the decrease.
Okay, so when you say decrease in revenue, I mean the big line is the current year taxes. Correct. This one, right? We're saying that's some of that's still holding. We've got a net of $192 low. Correct. Correct.
It's not quite that bad. I think the net was $1.41 at the end of the year. So but it's still definitely considerable.
Okay. And we were we were a little above in the intergovernment revenues, although some of the line items were kinda whack
little wacky. Yeah. Actually let me restate that. Revenue overall, the total revenue is down about 141,000
compared to what we expected. Okay and that's net of the intergovernmental and the property tax revenue side? Correct. Okay that fits around the number you mentioned, okay. Correct.
Eric you mentioned the expenses are probably down considerably too have you factored in already the purchase of the senior transportation vehicle I'm sure you know and then you mentioned possibly some invoices or bills coming in. Have they tried to include what they're anticipating? More invoices possibly coming in and what you told us?
So, inevitably, there will be some bills that will come in that we're not expecting that will be from the last fiscal year. Right. Right. But it's probably not, unless something really out of the blue comes through, that number should be pretty close to the final. I mean, it may change, you know, in the low thousands of dollars, but it's not going to change, you know.
Thank you. That's what I thought. I figured they probably anticipated what they could. And like you said, there could be a few random things that come in that are gonna make it go up a little bit. Right. Okay, thank you.
Any other questions, any specifics for Eric or Cheryl on this?
Yeah, I'm looking at the miscellaneous and it's like 241% above. What else was included in that? Miscellaneous government revenue? Yeah, it's probably. What's the account number,
Louise? Hang on, I just lost it. 80144867. It's under charges for services? Correct. Okay. So we have intergovernmental, but we also have just a miscellaneous revenue account when stuff comes in that potentially hasn't been budgeted for, we get reimbursements for something. I can absolutely go and double check for you and tell you exactly what's in that line. But right at this very minute, I can't I can't tell you exactly what's in that line. But we don't budget for miscellaneous revenue that could flow in to the town. It's not norm because we never know if we're going to get any any outside revenue other than what would be the normal budgeted items. So that $2.41 is kind of like a normal range that you would see.
Actually is a budget number of 3,000 there with a current amount of 7,251. So that's leading to the 241% figure that Louise is referring to. So basically we've collected about $4,200 in addition to the 3,000 that we budget or over and above the 3,000 that we budgeted.
Certainly will find out exactly what's in that line and I will send out a report to the board. Okay, thank you. Yes. Any other specific questions from the board?
Okay, I'm happy to hear that we're net positive. Brian, did you have a question or? I mean, just I don't know. I just had a question about like office supplies. I know they like fluctuate in cost but and it's not like high. Oh, it's not really a high dollar amount, but like some of them are 406200%. Is there a reason why?
Okay, so the report that you have currently did not have all of the transfers that were approved by the board in June. I finished all of them today. So that that's why you're seeing some of those figures. I was finishing up the transfers as I was starting to close the books and records for the town and working on reconciliation. I will log on to the town tomorrow and I will do updated reports and have them out for you tomorrow also along with a report on what makes up the miscellaneous revenue. It's we made budget transfers in June.
Thank you. Yeah, think in general, I mean this is true and I found in my business life too, is that smaller accounts, things like that, like office supplies are notoriously difficult to budget. Usually not that much that goes in there, but then all of a sudden somebody needs a new chair and it drives it way above for a department, drives it above for some little reason like that. As long as the dollar amount is a very crazy amount, know. Yeah, I don't remember. The one I just looked at, I don't remember what the town hall was, but Yeah, when you see percentages often that are so far out of whack are often smaller, smaller items, you know.
3,000 is probably like you said one or two things but yeah, thank you. Yeah.
To that point, we had gone through the budget probably five years ago. And we literally carved out almost $100,000 of small items like that and then waited to see if they're what would come back in and the only place we really had any issues with it was in public works Because like they may only buy 155 gallon drum of a certain chemical every three years, but they have to budget for it every year because they don't know if it's the year you know. Same thing with like they had like $1,000 at a broom line item that they would never spend within the year they needed brooms. They were short $1,000 So, we had to kind of sort that out a little but we I can tell you, I can tell you from experience. We you know in the past at least the Board of Finance had gone through and really tried to clean a lot of that stuff out so there's not a lot of miscellaneous
stuff that we can pull from what's there is kind of needs to be there and goes to the department.
Thanks, Adria. Any other questions on the budget to actual? Yeah. Oh, go ahead Louise. Oh, sorry.
The permits, was there special permits that went in for this year that were not normal? Because it went from 970 to 4604. That was on 703807. Yes, there were some additional permits that came in. Eric, remember the ones I think they were for DPW, weren't they? It was ones that are was it for the zoning that we weren't planning on? Zoning department.
I'm not sure which line item you're talking about. So let's So, what was the number again? 70380754421 permits under recycling. 8401.
Yeah, so I think we struggle to properly account for what our costs are for the recycling program in general. It's not a lot of dollars total, but, you know, that covers a lot of our fees to mid near rock. And frankly, last couple of years, you know, Midnearoc fees have gone up a fair bit just simply because Midnearoc was dealing with a lawsuit from the state of Georgia, You know that's now fully resolved. But I can't tell you what without digging into it. Can't tell you what specifically, you know, we went over in permits, but we do have a series of permits both for the transfer station and for the hazardous waste stuff that we pay for, as well as dues to Midnear Rock.
Should we continue kind of maybe increase what the budget should be for that? Would this be a continual thing?
You know, to be honest, off the top of my head, I can't tell you. I mean, I can look at it. Mean, I tried to line up what we put in the budget for this year to reflect the the budget that McNair Act had established. That budget, like our tipping fees is dependent on how much actually comes in, how much hazardous waste people from the public actually bring in, which is fairly variable. You know, so there's a fair bit of fluctuation in the costs for those, you know, programs in general. Like, I mean, I've been looking at, for instance, the used tires, we've been way over and way under on that budget,
you know, several times in the last four years. But I mean, the only data point I know going into the year is I know in years past how many tires we've taken in and I know what our fee is per tire. But, you know, how many tires we're going to get in next year? You know, that that's a crapshoot. I mean, I can give you my best estimate, but but I admit that I could be 40% off in that depending on what actually comes in the transfer station. So, I mean, I tried to get it as close as I could, but, you know, a lot of these budgets, you know, we accept the fact that if we're budgeting as close to expenses as we can, a significant fraction of our line items are going to be over in a year. Now, because our charter requires us to level up by line item instead of by department, that definitely makes it more difficult because it means we, you know, we have to do something to account for that at the end of the year or when it actually occurs.
Was it like that last year as well? Or is this kind of a new thing? Is what kind of a new thing?
Was it like this this discrepancy? Was it similar last year?
Know, off the top of my head, I can't tell you. I mean, I'm happy to get back to you on that. I'm just curious.
Yeah, think something to consider next budget season. I mean, we're locked in for twenty three-twenty four. But keep an eye on that. Okay, thanks. Other questions about the budget to actual report?
I do have a question. I just wanted to ask Cheryl a question. I don't know if it's appropriate now, but I don't yeah because I feel like we're going to move on to other items right and we won't be have the treasurer there. Cheryl I was just curious I know Eric mentioned that I'm having estimates for the expenses and the revenue and everything for this year. Do you feel like you are done with a lot of the cleanup that had to be done to get us to the point of moving forward? I know I ran into Chris and I know she's in the meeting as well, which is great to see. Do we feel like we're at a good place now of hopefully moving forward, or is it going to be digging through stuff for a while?
We're we're we will be digging through stuff for a while. Yeah. You know, we go two steps forward, 10 steps back. So, today I was in, you know, looking through things, adjusting the income to where they need to be, making sure things are recorded, doing the transfers, starting reconciliation. I have to reconcile all those other departments before I can bring in the final financial statements. We did first payrolls. We had some issues with the first payroll, so we found some things that need to be corrected. It's going to take a little bit of time.
No, I appreciate the honesty and I just think it's good to. I'm more or less bringing it to the public too. Know, I feel like it's my job if I know some stuff, you know, just so that everyone has the expectation. We're so lucky that we the town signed you on board to come in and clean up everything from the past and it's a lot you know and I know Chris having Chris come into that office you've said yourself in our meeting and me meeting her in the interview panel and everything and since you know she's doing a great job from all you know from everyone that is there and from you yourself saying so it just kind of letting the town know how you know deep you guys are digging to clean it up which is just so sad because we've tried to make amends you know for years and years so kind of bringing it to the public's eyes you know thank you for all you guys are both doing I know you're both on the meeting
and you know continued good luck to you know. I know you're trying to straighten out payroll and get you know adjustments with everything. So thanks again. I just wanted to bring that out there tonight.
Thank you. We we certainly appreciate it. Chris is working very hard and diligent, reading through items and then we address them together. So, I I've already said it. Chris is doing a great job.
Thank you, Cheryl and Chris. Yeah, I just alright. Didn't know how long you guys were going to be on the meeting and I just wanted to get that quick update great.
Alright, thank you. Other questions on the budget actual? We'll move right on to the check register. I'll just note, and I know that Cheryl and others probably realize this is just several items on there without a payee or code number there.
It potentially could be a journal entry, could be an ACH coming through. I will make sure that, I mean, we can make notations. Sometimes a journal entry will not have any name in it. If I've made an entry that's something that needs to be fixed or corrected, it won't necessarily have a name. Got it. Okay.
The ACH has seemed to be indicated by an ACH code in the number column. These just don't have anything in there. Either of them are a payee. Okay.
I don't think it's a big deal. Just, warning it out. Thank you. Other questions? Well hearing none, I guess we'll move on to our next agenda item which is report from the fire truck RFP review. So Eric, this is probably yours to cover.
Okay. I spoke to Sean Govil last week. The committee that the Board of selectmen. Motion to review the rfp for the fire truck met. So that that was Jeff McGuire representing the Board of Selectmen, I believe Robert England representing the Board of Finance, and then the committee that developed the initial proposal for the fire truck. My understanding is that that committee met and agreed that the contract met that criteria and the RFP and recommended to the Board of Finance that we sign the initial contract for the vehicle. Contract does not lock you into financing. Just starts the process of getting a build slot. I had hoped to have something written for either one of those members, since they were both invited to this meeting, to be here to present. I've left Sean a couple messages asking him for it, because although he sent me a copy of the contract, I haven't gotten anything in writing from that committee. So, that's basically what I have for it. I can certainly share the contract with you. I had hoped at this meeting, the Board of Finance would approve it. But I mean, at the same time, I don't have anything in writing from the the committee. So I'm not gonna try to. So all I have is a verbal report from the chair of the committee who is Sean Cope.
Okay. Does anybody have any questions from Eric on that? Hearing none, we'll move on to item 4D, which is the vehicle purchase for senior transportation. I see you have the purchase contract in the packet. Correct. I think I saw the vehicle out from when I was walking my dog the other day. All said and done, we're all good on that, right?
Right. I have a question on that, how many people does that accommodate that car, the SUV? Five if they're friends, it's pretty small. Right?
Yeah. It's probably three people in the back seat and driver and passenger in the front, so it would be four passengers max, I would think, legally.
Okay. The vast majority of medical trips the town provides are a single driver and a single passenger.
Okay. Yeah. Which is really the point of getting a smaller vehicle. Right? So we can reserve larger vehicle for multiple passengers? Correct. School, helping school, etc. Other questions on that? Okay, well we'll move on to item five, which is new business. I'm not aware of any new business to bring before the board. We probably legally need to have it identified here as part of the agenda, but if anybody has anything they want to bring up before the board we can talk about it now.
Mark, I have one. It's Joanne. I have one comment or I don't need to have a discussion, but do you think it would be in our best interest? I see that Valerie and Terry Smith are on the meeting as well. Maybe you and I can pick a date or whoever wants to be present but I'm certainly going to make myself available to be in a meeting with them so we can talk about some of the issues that we've had through our emails. Just nothing big, but maybe we wanted to get together and talk about grant reporting and just a couple issues that have come up.
That's So my interest. I would say we just yeah we have you know we'd have to take that outside the meeting but just to set up the time and set up discuss you know possible meetings should not be a problem to know to do that just it's just an administrative thing.
Again in the summer there's not like there's not a lot of so that's why that's fine we can do that through email and set up a date but I just want to say that I'm willing to go to the meeting with you with Al and Terry and whoever needs to so that we can do that but we'll work around schedules because they have schedules we have schedules I needed a point to be present tonight and you know that's it's all good so just wanted to know that would be great if we could do that soon well not even soon but just get a date on the calendar within a few weeks. Thanks.
Yeah I've got some things at the clock so I'm gonna try to do it tonight but yeah we can certainly do that. Okay, well, we have nothing else, we'll move on to item 6A, which is the approval of the meeting minutes from June 28. If anybody's had a chance to do a quick review. And if anybody would like to, we'd like to go ahead and entertain a motion to approve the meeting minutes. I'll go ahead and
make the motion to approve those minutes. Okay, Louise makes the motion to approve. Do I have a second? I'll second that. Okay, thanks, Brian. Looks like we're all here in that meeting. Any discussion? All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Okay, hearing none. That motion passes. Thank you. Item seven is the administrator's report. Eric, do have anything more for us?
I don't really have anything other than the financial discussion we already have. There hasn't been anything else really major that's occurred.
Anybody have any questions for Eric on the town business? Okay, moving on to agenda item eight, that's liaison reports. Typically that's Rob who would he's got CIP and also the fire truck. Maybe I think he was working on that anybody have anything else. Okay, hearing no nothing. We'll move on to agenda item nine, is board open discussion. Anybody want to bring anything else before the board?
Just one thing are we since the auditor wasn't here tonight and I understand you know the best attempts were made are we going to We won't be like calling another special meeting in a couple of weeks or are we gonna try to make it in? I mean we're right in the middle of summer which I understand you know there were a lot of important people not that people aren't important but you know a lot of people made arrangements to be here because of the auditor so I just want to see what our thoughts are when Cheryl is able maybe we can give her some direction as to how we want that to go whether we want it to go you know, regular meeting.
I guess my comment on that would be, you know, we have a regular meeting scheduled for next week. Think You have Cheryl it, right? I haven't canceled it yet. It's still on the agenda. That was the intention to cancel it, so I would say we can leave that meeting on the calendar because we can cancel it up to the same day. It's not like we have a timeframe by which we have to cancel it. If Cheryl could reach out to Mahoney Sable and then ask if there's a possibility that he could do it at the Wednesday board meeting, I'm okay with leaving it there and then whoever can attend can attend otherwise we can try to reschedule but you know it's going to be at everybody's convenience.
So the answer is okay so we never did I thought that we had flip flopped it, so we called a special meeting. Yeah. I
thought we had changed our regular I thought we took a vote on changing our meeting to the nineteenth. Well, we can't change your regular meeting.
Because it's posted at the beginning of the year and has to either be held or canceled, and then a special meeting is an addition, just the way that the rules I remember that, yeah.
The intention was to cover our full agenda in this special meeting instead of just having one for the auditor so that we could just cancel the next meeting without having to worry about missing anything, but clearly that may not happen. At this point, I still don't plan on holding that meeting next week. My intention would be to cancel it, but I usually wait to just make sure nothing crazy comes up. Are you so aware you could yes? Hello? Yeah.
They're all here. I'm going to reach out to Mike tomorrow. Okay, and as soon just kind of see what happened. And as soon as I hear from him, I will certainly contact the board and let them know what they're saying and ask him what some of his other alternative dates are.
Okay, yeah, and we'll evaluate it at that time. That's a little disappointing, but it is what it is. We appreciate your efforts, Cheryl and everyone else's effort to be on here tonight to try to accommodate that.
And that's thank you Mark so you did answer my question I forgot so we still may have next week's meeting. Well it's important to be there when the auditor's there of course you know but no thanks alright so we'll wait and see what Cheryl finds out number one why they weren't here you know and since we did flip it and then number two like you said what their alternate dates might be alright so thank you Okay,
no problem. Anything else from the board? General discussion, comments? Moving on. We have item 10, which is correspondence. I'm not aware of any correspondence. No one else? Okay, we'll move on to item 11, which is public speak. Eric, we still got some members of the public.
Okay, first up, Chris Bernard. Nothing here, thanks. Val Bruno. All set, thanks. Terry Smith. I'm good. Thank you. That's it.
Okay. Very good. Well, I guess that brings us to the end of our special meeting. Would anybody like to make a motion to adjourn? I'll make the motion to adjourn. And Louise, do you have a second?
I'll second the motion and I want to thank the members of the Board of Ed for being present tonight, thanking that the, you know, thank you for taking time out of your busy schedule. Everyone that came to hear the auditor we do appreciate it and hopefully we'll have an alternate date coming up. No problem Joanne thank you. Of course.
Okay so we'll go ahead if there's no discussion we'll go ahead and vote on the adjournment. All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Hearing none, yeah, I just echo Joanne's comments. Thank you everybody for your attendance. It's unfortunate we didn't get the auditor tonight. That was the main goal of tonight's meeting, but I appreciate you taking time out of your schedule. And if I don't see or talk to you, then I wish you great summer, and enjoy the what's the rest of it. It's been a good one so far. So take care, guys. Good night. Thanks, Mark. Good night.