Meeting transcript
Board of Finance - Regular Meeting
March 24, 2021 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
Yeah, let's go ahead and get started. I'm going to call this meeting of the Board of Finance of the town of Andover to order at 7PM Wednesday, March 24. Will say the Pledge of Allegiance to start. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America, and to the Republic public, which stands
one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Okay.
All right, thank you. Going to our agenda, the second item is public speak. And do we have anybody who would like to speak publicly? We have members of the public or at least non board members attending. Amanda, you want to go around? Okay,
so first non member we have, well, it looks like Adrian is raising his hand. Would you like to go first? You're muted, Adrian. Okay.
Yeah, so I just wanted to take a minute, you know, I, you know, we went through the budget over at the board of selectmen, and I know you guys are going through it now. And I I believe it's important for you guys to have your own process. But I I I do say I'm a little frustrated with some of the things that the school is is putting forward that you guys I don't know if you haven't pushed back on or maybe just weren't aware of, but it's a little frustrating to me watching it. So I just wanna highlight a couple things. First of all, you know, we looked at other schools, regionally and other schools are saying that because they were out of school for quite a bit of time the year before and last year, that their supply closets didn't get used, so they actually needed less money in supply. But I think the biggest thing that I'm seeing, my biggest concern is really this kindergarten situation where we're being told that there's this COVID gap and we need the money for COVID
because of this gap. We reached out to other schools again and nobody else is doing this. This is just an outlier that our school is doing. And I think the biggest frustration is we're not even talking about small class sizes, we're looking at ridiculously small class sizes, 10 kids to a class, they don't want to take kids with a pair, even just if it was 10 kids to a class is too low. And that one line item is a $100,000. And I get that our superintendent wants to curry favor with the teachers by pushing this. I'm not gonna lay anyone off thing and I'm gonna protect the teachers. That's great. I get it. That's her job. But our job is to look at the bottom line numbers and say, is that enough to do the job that you need to do to educate these kids? And unfortunately, it's more than it needs to be. I support the school getting an increase to cover their contractual increases. And I support some of the other things that are in that budget. But I certainly cannot support our town paying for 10 kids to a class, nevermind 10 kids to a class with parents. It's just nuts. So I'm that's a big frustration to me. And I think I was a little concerned when I I hear you guys talking a lot. I don't hear a lot of emotions being made. I wish you guys would sort of move some of this stuff forward. And I think the other thing I would encourage you is that, you know, if you don't believe what I'm saying, please don't call other districts, look at other districts budgets and say, yeah, that really doesn't add up. You know, you don't have to take my word for it. Look and see what's out there, you know.
Last but not least, guys to be are looking at the community center. We supported it from the town of Stockman side. I actually dropped the plans and the prints and unfortunately, I didn't get asked to come on the meeting or would have done it for you. But if you watch the selectman's meeting, and I'm gonna ask Amanda if you could pull out the section where we walked people through, maybe put that as a separate video that might be helpful to people. So they'd have to sift through a two hour meeting to find it. But we did an actual walk through so you can see the space and see what we're proposing. We're trying to build this as as economically as possible, so that we don't need a lot of resources beyond what we've put away. We're we think it's we're more than halfway there with the money that we have put aside.
So, you know, we think this is something that's doable. This has been on the table since 1969. And we think this is something the community does need, you know, so you know, take the 100 ks from the from the, the third class and put it towards the community center, you know, the school has had its run of the budget for way too long. This idea that, you know, the school budget hasn't go down in six years, No one ever says after that, by the way, the population has gone down 36% in those same six years. So no, your budget hasn't gone up when it should have actually been going down. And it didn't do that either. So at any rate, I'll let you guys do your meeting enjoy and, you know, hopefully you guys can make some progress. Have a good day. All right thanks Adrian. Thank you Adrian. Sherry Holmes. I'm good at this time. Thank you. You're welcome. Eds Risley. You're muted.
Okay, am I here? You're here. Okay, thank you. I'm here for two reasons, answer later in the agenda, answer any questions on my committee's work on the community center. And number two, as public speak, I'd like to add on to what Adrian was just saying. My two boys made out just fine and doing well in life. And when we, in the 90s, they went to Andover Elementary, typical student faculty to student, student to faculty ratios were 23, 25 to one. Certainly, if we go back to my dinosaur times, I had 23, 25 people in my elementary school when I went to school, but just as little as twenty years ago, the faculty student ratio 20 to one. And to have 10 to one, half that now, it's just frustrating to me as a taxpayer in this town that we are so unbalanced. We have many community needs, including the building we'll talk about, that's been on our agenda for forty years, or fifty years in five consecutive plans of development. And to see everyone else in the town but the school children not being taken care of from a community standpoint is really sad in my opinion. So I'd like to see, I'd like to thank the Board of Finance for the tough job they do. I know it's all about balancing
issues and balancing needs of the town. And I think it's time we had a reset to be more balanced. And so I'll leave it at that for now. Thank you.
Thanks Ed. Scott Persson, would you like to participate? Yes just
a few short comments. You know I share Adrian's sentiments with the AES budget also. There's been a lot of information shared with the Board of Education, Board of Finance, Board of Selectmen that Jeff has brought, Jeff Murray has brought on board and I think all that information needs shared with the public as well as our board so that we can come up with a good budget this year. That's really all I have to say. Thank you. Thanks Scott. Jay Kamens.
Hello, folks. How are doing? I'm gonna start my video here. Hello. I'm just here to kind of take advantage of the fact that these meetings are on Zoom now. So I have nothing to say other than just here to learn a little bit more about the budget process and the TAM. Thank you. Thanks Jay. Glad you're here. Okay Diane Grineer. No I'm all set. Thank you very much. Good luck. Thanks Diane. Joanne Hebert.
Amanda thank you. I just want to piggyback too. I'll keep it short. I provide a lot of I think I'll send out a lot of emails and information. What we're trying to do with just keeping the educational budgets, you know, to where they should be. Last night, I shared things about RAM. So I'm, you know, I know we're not here to discuss them. This is Andover. But I put my money where my money is I just up wherever I can and try to be fair try to be thoughtful try to be polite just point out a couple facts the one thing that I want to counter that's very important that I hear that the brain brings up a lot. Joanne, we're having a little hard time hearing you.
It keeps going in and out. I hate this computer.
That's telling me. Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay. So one important fact that I hear Valerie bring up a lot that keep the numbers down we'll pay for it in the future. What I want to say from my own experience again, that children are screened early, whether they go to preschool or not, you know, by people in the town. At one point, my daughter was caught for a little speech thing. So again, that was caught when she wasn't even in the school system by services that are provided and it was taken care of. I think she had some speech services, one of my children in kindergarten and she was done. So I just, you know, I kind of wanted to counter that if we don't do this, we're going to pay more down the line. Thank you. Thanks, Joanne. Okay, Jeffrey. I'm all set. Thanks. Okay. Is that everyone?
I think so. Looks like it. Okay, thank you Amanda Thank you everybody for your comments duly noted. And we do have a lot to a lot to consider. I know, just want to point out, I know both. Joanne and Jeff Murray and others have spent some have sent a lot of emails I know I personally haven't had a chance to even review them in almost any level of detail that they will get reviewed. And I think there's a lot of important points there we all know that so we'll continue as we go through this it's a tough situation and we have a job to do we'll get it done. Guys. Okay we're going to move on to item number three additions and deletions of the agenda, do we have any. Any additions or deletions to the agenda. Good. Go ahead and make a motion myself, because I'm aware of one, we should discuss the Board of Finance representative to the capital improvements planning committee. Louise is going to resign her position or her participation in that committee, she feels like it would be better served having somebody a little more. I think she used the word technical than she is. So we'll take it, take it at that. If we could add that to the agenda, I would suggest I would move that we add to the agenda, the item to consider a replacement for Louise goodwin on the capital improvements. Committee. To I guess this would be eight. I'm going to suggest we move it to eight gs. And move the budget discussion to eight
he. But I want to second that motion. Second that.
Okay, I think Rob got it first on my second some motions is there any discussion over making that agenda change. Okay, let's vote on it all in favor aye. Aye. Any opposed. Any abstentions. Okay, motion passes. So we'll add that to the agenda as item HE and move the budget discussion to eight H. Okay, thank you. Any other additions or deletions to the agenda? Okay, hearing none, let's move on to item four, which is the town administrator's report. Eric.
Don't folks Amanda can I share my screen here? I have the power. You've got the power. Excellent.
Okay, can everybody see that? I thought it's I usually start with showing the COVID update. As you know, we had been in town rapidly decreasing our total caseload. We peaked out at around seventy five, and that was cases per day per 100,000 residents averaged over a fourteen day moving window. So by about a week and a half ago or two weeks ago, we had got down to a really low number, you know, and then the last week or so we started creeping back up and we're pretty consistently getting cases every day or two identified within the town. So my suspicion is even though a lot of people are getting vaccinated, people are slacking off a little bit, number one, and number two, we're starting to get bit by some of the variants that are a little bit more transmissible than the original version of COVID. So no time to relax just yet. So again I'm just going to go over like normal the things that have been changed or I really want to highlight. In the finance office I just want to say we're marching along towards completion of the audit. We've had a bunch of discussions between the chair, the finance director, the auditor, and myself, so we're cracking away at that, which is good. We hope to have a final audit in about a month or within a month. So the next thing up on the assessor's office, many of you have probably seen the information that's gone out. We are starting to do the second half of the audit, which is interior
inspections. You can decline if you so desire. You know, COVID concerns over COVID is a perfectly valid reason to say, you know what, I'm really not comfortable with people in my house. But the way it works is that we are, it's our turn to do what's called a full measure and list. And by law we have to ask and we have to try to get into the house and complete the information but people have every right to say no and if the answer is no that's fine we'll do the best job we can with the information we have and move on. So that's what's going on with that. Most of you know at this point that the building department admin person quit suddenly and so that's caused us a little bit of issues temporarily. Amanda is subbing in in the building office, but that is a union position. What the town is negotiating right now with the union to do is to combine that position with the assistant town clerk to make one combined position between the two which will net some pretty significant savings to the town. So we've had a couple meetings with the union to discuss the consolidation. If we're going to do it, we're going to have to at the same time put in an electronic permitting system because we're reducing the total time available and we're going to have to make ourselves more efficient if we're going to make this work without inconveniencing the public. And so we can talk about that a little bit later. I sent everybody on the commission the contract or a proposed contract from Permit Link.
So I have looked at a couple of vendors. You know there's really only two vendors that are commonly used in this area. Permit Link is the El Chipo one and there's a better vendor out there but it's more than double the cost And there's a big initial startup cost for implementation, which Permit Link doesn't have. So my recommendation is we go with Permit Link that will accomplish what we need. And we're also going to turn around and just what permit link will do is allow us to just be billed per the number of permits pulled. And then we simply pay for it by tacking on a fee to each permit. And the other advantage is it'll allow people to pay electronically. So it's much faster on the part of an applicant and it's more convenient in the sense that they can be sitting on their Barco Lounger with a beer at 11:30 at night submitting their permit
to the town. So we're working on updating those two. If we're going to do it, I think the Board of Finance needs to review and be on board with us implementing the software also. And we can talk about that maybe a little bit later.
Mark, how many permits do we issue? What's our volume?
Not a lot. So the building department alone issues in the low 300s per year, So it's not a great deal of permits. But
there's a lot more work than just instant issuing permits. I mean, whoever's in that position still answers an awful lot of questions and has an awful lot of interactions with other departments. So it's not like, you issue one permit a day and then you go take a nap either. I'm not trying to say that by any means. We have done reasonably well. We've had a little bit more than average plowable events lately, but we had a big gap in the middle where we had no plowable events. So far we've spent about $45 in salt, but we have a stockpile right now. We are probably going to spend the remaining 15,000 in the salt budget and stock away as much as we can. There's unfortunately going to be a really big vendor shortage next year because the state of Connecticut just threw out one of the major distributors, threw them off the pier in New London and said they couldn't bring salt in by barge anymore because they want to use that spot to stockpile equipment for an offshore wind project. So all of a sudden, everybody in the state is scrambling to figure out where they're going to get their salt. And we're paying right now low 60s, dollars $64.65 a ton. Most municipalities are getting salt right now. They have one of the vendors that get kicked out are paying over
$100 So we would anticipate next year we're going to end up spending more per ton on salt. We're trying to stockpile now. So F550, we did get the vehicle. It's in with the correct dump body on it and we got the plow installed. They gave us the wrong plow. We had to send it back and get another plow, but you know minor details. Anyway, it's in the shop and functioning and being used now. And the other thing I wanted to talk a little bit about is the alarm monitoring. We are going to have an initial capital expense to get our alarm systems functioning. Depending on how much information you want, I can send you all the quotes and everything from all the vendors, you know, if all of you want to go through it. But our basic problem is that, you know, we've added these systems over the years. Like every system we have came from a different manufacturer, so we have got little to no commonality and several of our systems really don't work. We don't have any system in the museum currently that functions. The alarm system for public works really is not functional or very marginally functional. So we're looking at two buildings we're probably going to replace
almost completely the alarm systems. The rest of the buildings just need monitoring. So I've gotten four quotes at this point. I've gone back to all the vendors and asked them for additional information to fill in and make the quotes as common as possible. One of the advantages we're going to be able to do is get away from using our copper phone lines to monitor and we're either going to go cellular or we're going to go with the VHF relay system because we're paying $35 a month, dollars 36 a month for each copper line and a lot of these systems require a primary and secondary. So right now, though we're getting the monitoring for free, we're paying $70 a month for the phone lines. So in the end, it's not going to be a big long term cost increase to the town. In fact, it may be close to cost neutral to what we're paying now, but we're going to end up spending some capital
to get the systems they actually function. And the other thing I would really like to do is I would like to start building in the cost for annual maintenance because in most of our buildings we haven't really done annual maintenance. I know in this town the last time the system was maintained was five years ago and you know we had some issues with it when I brought the contractor in this year to examine it. So hopefully by next month I will have more information and I'm hoping to present to CIP a completed set of applications as well as a recommendation. I would assume that Board of Finance would want to
look at and confer because it would be a long term contract for the monitoring and then you would also need to approve the capital if you chose to do so. So I'm hoping to have that for you in about a month because we're losing our monitoring by TM, the dispatch center, basically around July 1. So we got to get our act together fairly quickly. And the last thing as many of you have probably seen but the Board of Selectmen made two motions at their last meeting. The first was to support upgrades to Veterans Monument Park to the tune of about 20,000 in funding, and they passed that unanimously but didn't really pick a funding source about where they wanted to take it. We have a couple options but I actually would like to get a little more information before I send it back to you to make a motion on where to take the funds. I can offer up two or three possibilities, but I think I want a little more information from the auditor before I say where I want to actually recommend that we take the money because it's money that's not really budgeted. The second thing is that they move to authorize spending up to $50,000 to move along the process of completing a community center. And the location would be directly behind the town hall. And we've been doing some of the kind of background work for that. We had the septic system completely inspected and marked out so because we didn't really have good as builts for that. So we have that now. We got that done today. We've also located the major drain line there. So we're
chunking away getting information and we've got a request to the surveyor that originally surveyed the property for the last edition of the community room to see whether we can obtain that survey directly from the architect. So what they're asking for is the authorization to spend up to $50,000 for the site survey and eventually full construction drawings for an architectural firm and renderings. But what they would like to do is do it staged, which is initially get the property resurveyed so they know where everything is and get the site engineering done and then a set of preliminary drawings so that's enough to bring back to the community and then say this is what we're proposing do you all agree with it what changes would you make before we go to full you know architectural
construction drawings. So that is what the board of selectmen has recommended doing, but that would also take a motion by the board of finance to push that along if you were in agreement with it. And that is all I have for my report unless you have specific questions for me or general questions I guess.
I'll just point out that the contract for the automated building system is actually going to be that's another agenda item so we'll discuss that separately So as well, if Daniel has asked some questions about the number of building permits, but we can also add more in there. Anything else for Eric? Okay hearing none, thank you we'll move on to the next next item the finance department report. You know I actually don't know that I said this before, on behalf of the board I'd like to welcome Sherry homes as our finance director. We're very happy to have you on board and probably not as happy as Eric is but quite happy to have you join and welcome to the town of Andover. Thank you. So Eric I don't know is this going be you or Sherry gonna go through this?
I think we can kind of both talk about it. What I'm going to suggest is you know, we hold off until next month to do requests for over expenditure because next month will be after April 1 and we can start potentially addressing some of the interdepartmental changes budgets that needed to be adjusted. Currently we're over 21 or 22 line items total for the town which isn't too bad considering we've got you know 500 line items total. Okay, we're doing fairly well financially. We're still under budget overall So I don't foresee any major issues with the budget. There are definitely some areas we're over. I can discuss them with you if you like, if you know, just kind of depends what you want at this point. If I'd had a little more time, I'd have given you all the requests for over expenditures, but frankly I just ran out of time getting
Is there anything that's got the potential to go over by department? I mean, I'm not that worried about the line items as long as the overall budget is coming within that department. Is there anything that's approaching where we may have an issue? Yeah,
that will go over on a department level budget. The tax collector's office will go over the budget line item for tax collector, and that is basically salary driven. We had anticipated reducing the hours of that position earlier in the year, and frankly I got started on that and it's taken me a long time to grind that through and get a memorandum of understanding with the union. So we've done it now and that change will affect the budget permanently from here on out, but we didn't do it as early in the year as we anticipated. So we definitely will go over that department budget because that department budget is you know, 85% of it is the salary line item for one individual. So that one we'll go over. And mowing and ground care we're going to go over. And we're going to go over basically because we had a major problem with the well pump and the electrical to the well pump. And you know, that was like an $18,000 budget that was fairly close to what we were going to actually expend.
But the well pump itself at the end of the day was a $7,500 repair. So that budget in ground care is pretty much just one item, so that one's going to be out of that department too. That as far as I know should be about the only place where we're going to bust a budget department you know the whole department.
How about public works? Can you mention that today with
that? Yeah, we're gonna definitely bust a couple items in public works, but the budget overall should be okay. Okay. You know, we were the, I gave to the Board of Finance a while back an over expenditure request for both overtime for public works, as well as the temporary higher position. So you've already approved it. And I don't think we've, you know we certainly haven't exceeded the new limits. The total salary for public works will probably be a little over if you take the regular salary plus overtime plus what do you call it plus temporary, but it shouldn't be over by more than what we have left in the budget for overtime for snow removal. For salary overall, we should be okay. Close, but okay. So yeah, that should be fine. Good.
Any other questions or anything any of you are really concerned with in terms of the budget?
Not for me. Diane asked the question I was essentially going to ask, I think she put it better. So thank you. Any other questions for Eric? Okay, so we will move on, I guess to then jumping over A, B, C and D are all part of that general detail we normally get into in a budget or a normal board of finance meeting. We'll move on to item six budget transfers. Eric, do you have any or no?
I would like to wait until next month because now we're because we'll be in the last quarter. We have a little bit more flexibility about what we can do in terms of moving money. Right.
Okay, a little more certainty. Okay, so I guess we'll move on to item seven, which is old business. COVID-nineteen update, Eric, I guess you provided that already. Do you have anything more to add? I don't have anything more unless you guys have specific questions
for me. Hopefully you're all in line to get vaccinated at some point.
Let's all hope. And the finance director position, we can probably take this off of the agenda going forward. Yep.
Okay. Software transition this has been on hold me anticipate keeping this on hold for the time being.
I think Sherry can probably give you an update on the status of that. Okay.
Currently, right now, we're contacting Edmonds. I talked to the tech person yesterday from Eastcon. He reached out to Edmonds as well, Brian Adams. And basically what he was told, they're just waiting for a date of implementation. And it's really on there. The ball's in their court right now. I did say that I had some concerns about that because I would like to see this implemented for July 1. I don't want to work with Phoenix one more day than I have to, believe me. And since it should have been done probably a year ago, I mean, let's get it done. So, I express my concerns about that because one of the things they have to work with us on is a chart of accounts for the town. In order to get the both the town and the school into play, we have to create a structure, an account structure that's long enough to compass both of the entities, if you would. And it would be like the town would be a separate fund from the school, as would be a separate fund for the grants and then Kenningtown and school as well. That structure needs to be accommodating enough for both town and school. And they need to work with me on that one. So he did say that that is on his list of things to do. And I said, well, I'm available whenever you want to start working on that. And I'm drafting right now a template
and putting together a chart of accounts that I feel that we can use for the town. The chart of accounts is already in place and it's good shape on the school side. So I'm confident with that one, moving forward the town chart of accounts has to be done. And I think I have a pretty good idea that I just need help implementing. That's all. The chart of accounts is not going to be common between the two or the overall structure? It's common as it can be. Okay. There there are a lot of accounts that the town has that the school doesn't have. Right. So, it's going to be basically where it's going to be commonality is the object codes. Okay. You
know, salaries, benefits, those kind of things. You'll see some common ground but there's other things that the town deals with that the school does not. So, you know, I'm going to try to get it as uniform as I can possibly get it, and we'll create a crosswalk between the two so that everybody's on board with easily identifying all the accounts.
So I have one question. I saw we made some changes in the budget work spreadsheet that Eric did this year to put the benefit costs within the department level so we can actually see what each department's Are we gonna we're gonna continue that practice going forward, correct? Yes, correct. It's a budget one lump sum. Okay. Yeah, that's not a problem. We can continue to do that.
So do we have any so the ball's in their court, they're dragging their feet or anything, do we have any thing in the contract where there's performance deadlines or things like that? Or is it kind of like a wide open contract? It's not, do we have anything to hold their feet to the fire with? Because obviously we want to get this done for July 1. I agree with you. I have
requested a copy of that contract so I could take a look at it. Okay. And see if there's anything capture, like, and call them back and say, hey, you promised us this and X.
It's in your company. So let's get going. They work on the account, chart of accounts with you that gets the ball rolling. And yes yes it does. I
would say in their defense not that I'm defending any vendor but we were the hold up for a long period of time and when we signed the contract and then we basically say you know what we don't have a finance director we don't want to move forward to do a chart of accounts until we had one so you know I admit that we own most of the delay up to this point
from here on out it's on the vendor but up to now. I'm just looking for them to be cooperative with us and to get it going because yes, I'm sure the delay is on our side but we didn't have the people in play to make it happen so. I'm going work with us, you know. Right. So I did email them on the point person
at Edmonds, and I gave him all my information and credentials, and he was supposed to get in touch with me as far as signing up that that date. I'll certainly keep on top of it, and I will also talk with the superintendent as I've talked with Eric today about it as well. Thanks, Jerry.
Thank you. Thank you. Any other questions for Sherry on the software transition? I share Diane's concerns. Anytime I hear somebody say it's on my list of things to do, I'm like, well, I have a list like that too.
That means we're at the bottom of the list. May
or may not but it doesn't mean a whole lot else. So just means you're on the list. Okay thanks. Thank you. Right. I have a pretty long list too.
Yeah. Nobody wants to be number four thirty seven, at least on my list. Okay, item seven, old business audit status 7D. Eric you mentioned this briefly earlier do you want to kind of fill us in on where we are? Yeah we're
trunking away at the audit we've got some preliminary data from back from the audit, but it's still pretty preliminary. So I'm not sure we want to really take much action on it. We did talk to Mike, the auditor today, Sherry and I did, and he seems pretty confident that as long as we get the, was it OPBM?
Yeah, Hoopla and Holcomb, it's a GASB valuation report. Hopefully we've already done it and it's just a matter of getting him a copy. But if we haven't, then we got to, you know, light a fire on the hooker and hulk them to get that to him. It's pretty typical what needs to happen now. So we'll work on that and make sure that he gets what he needs. Yep.
So hopefully in a month or so, we'll have a final audit, to look at. I realize we're running a bit late, but again being honest a big chunk of that delay was ours.
A little positive note to that. I found out today that the point person for the audit is actually a gentleman that I've worked with before in East Grammy. So we do have a relationship and we work well together. So that's, I think a positive note. He's more willing to work with us and to work with me. So he was pretty excited to find out that I was here. So we'll see.
I don't think he liked your predecessor here. I will admit that those two struggled to get along.
Yeah. Well, that's good news. Good. All right. Any other questions on the audit? Okay, hearing none, let's move on to number eight, old business. I'm sorry, new business. The first agenda item under new business is 8A review the fiscal year twenty one-twenty two budget. We did have some discussion about this last meeting. I don't think this has changed, am I correct?
Correct. So I can fill you in. So the question at the last meeting was if the town is increasing their share of the total expense, did it used to be just the town in the elementary school or just the town in RAM or both? And I couldn't answer that. Actually, let me share my screen again.
This is part of the packet too, I'm assuming anyway with the screen probably they're going to show just to make everybody aware that it is in the packet as well as the budget report. So you should have that. We had a meeting today with all the superintendents
and and discussed this. So basically what's the major change, which you guys should have already been aware of is that we've we have started billing for almost completely through the town as opposed to what used to be the town paid one portion, the school paid one portion, RAM paid one portion. Now it's 100% the town other than Andover Elementary School and a couple of the other schools have separate agreements for additional support which they pay for directly. So there will still be some funding for in the school's budget, but the school's budget will be reduced by around $23,000 $24,000 because that portion will be paid for by the town. But the town's portion of the bill is actually going down this year. It was, I think it's about $4,000 cheaper this year than last year, something like that. And that's because we changed the formula for figuring out how much each town respectively contributes. It used to be just based on RAM enrollment. Now it's based on a combination of census profile and secondarily on enrollment for K through 12. So that total number. So the good news is that for us means a reduction. So we pay less this year than last year, but it appears in the town's portion of the budget, not in the town and the school's budget. Does that make sense?
Yeah. Now does that RAM piece that was paid directly by RAM come off the RAM budget now? Is it already out of their budget?
Yes, we had that confusion on the parts of numbers of superintendents, but we've all settled on the fact that all the superintendents will remove that money from all of their budgets. And it goes on all the town's budgets by contract.
So have we adjusted that number in your latest spreadsheet that you sent out? I did, yes. Okay,
so you took that 22,000 Correct. Off the RAM budget amount?
Yeah, correct. And I took it off the town's budget, the budget we had from AES Also, did you take only 22,171. I looked like it was
The school had actually budgeted more like 28,000 so the entire 28,000 ought to come out.
We can work out later. I just have a new number. Yeah, I mean, I did not get new actual numbers from either Ram or from Andover Elementary School. I had a conversation with both. So I took out approximately the right number within a few thousand dollars. But what the exact number is, I don't really know yet. I'm not saying what I sent you is absolute final. There's a bunch of things in here I don't know completely for sure.
I would ask that the school give us that final new number because from what I could see that they had put $50,000 in there for everything. And so I think they over budgeted what the actual expense was. So I just want to make sure we got the right number so we're dealing with the correct numbers. Right.
Yeah, think I think Diane is right, and it's you're right. I said 28,048 thousand something I think that they had budgeted for not realizing as we were the town in in the in the spreadsheet that I sent out some point as a minimum I had taken that out of the town budget but yeah we'll have to get final numbers from down there. That as well. I can do that. Certainly, if I can
say something in the eight the elementary school budget, they do have their own contracted services from In addition to the right 23,000 so
The social worker. Right, that's a separate line item on the budget goes pretty clear. Yeah, and then now you've indicated that one of her males that that that would stay but the other age on budget item would be removed Over to the town side, right? Yeah.
Yeah, if you look on the bottom of what I'm sharing from my screen, it shows that amount, the additional service agreements that the school had with to provide additional services. But that varies from year to year, which is why that's not built into the overall operating budget of because so a school can decide they want more time than that, less time than that, whatever. And then they just assign a contract for that number of hours and go. Does that make sense?
I guess Sherry from your point is just to check that because I'm assuming this twenty one thousand one hundred six is
last year's contract with them. I don't know if our services increased on the social worker. I think that's moving forward what they have in their budget for next year they plan on this contract. I'll double check it. Right.
So does anybody on the board of finance, so we know we're going to have to myself and Linda are both on for lack of a better term, the board of directors for in our roles in the town. Does anybody on the board of Selectman have any heartburn for us? Normally the CEO of the town, which would be me, the, you know, the budget proposal and votes on it. Do any of you have any objection to us agreeing to that at this point? And just so that you know their overall budget is about a 3% increase, but it's a decrease, our percentage of it is decrease so overall our bill is going down.
Right, we're just moving and around where it shows. That's basically how we're doing. Correct.
I don't have any problem with it. We've discussed I think on the third occasion. The budget detail is there. We obviously don't see that much of it, but trust that you guys are working with them and keeping an eye on it from my point of view. Okay. But I don't speak for the entire board. I'd like the board to speak out if anybody feels differently.
I don't have any issue. Mean, 3%. Mean, we saw the presentation about the extra services that they're providing now and how they had to ramp up staff and stuff. 3% in this environment seems reasonable. Wouldn't want to see it be 3% again next year. Would expect it to level off, but.
I think the other thing to keep in mind is that they function as our Youth Services bureau, which we're required legally to have, and they're still getting somewhere around 65 or 70% of their total funding through fundraising and grants. So from my perspective, the town's got a reasonably good bargain. If it was completely a town entity, I doubt we'd have the fundraising capability to bring in the kind of money they bring in. So it seems like it's a relatively good deal for the town.
Okay any other discussion? Okay the characters is asking for input and make sure we're confident I think of the lack of any additional expressed concerns probably reasonably indicates consent, Eric. So I think you could probably move forward. Okay.
All right. Let's move on to item 8B, which is a letter of commitment for budget stabilization program. This is between Kerma or CIRMA and the Town Board of Education. So Eric, you want to tell us about that?
Sure, I'm going to share my screen again. So we get this from KIRMA basically every three years. We typically sign on with our insurance company in three year increments and they guarantee based on our basically past claims what the range of possible, in other words, they're willing to give us a three year commitment and say, our fees will increase no more than X. So that's what I'm showing right there. That's a three year agreement for what their fees are increasing. This year, our total increase for that insurance is basically flat. They've gone down our workers comp has gotten cheaper and the rest of our liability coverage has gotten more expensive but overall our insurance budget for Kerma has stayed completely flat this year. So that's what a three year lock would look like and they basically said, hey if you're willing to agree to take us on for three years, we'll give you a budget stabilization package that says we will not increase your premiums more than this. So, I'm bringing this to you to see whether this is something you want to, I mean we're not obligated to sign it but if we don't sign it they're not willing to guarantee what future rate increases will be. So that's I'm bringing this to you as a board of finance to see what you would like to do.
Eric does the so there's a cap which is good obviously is how are the premium increases calculated and I know that's a loaded question you probably have no clue, but you know I work with vendors who will you know if I sign an agreement for a three year supply agreement, for example. My business and they, and they say hey we're you know we'll limit our year over year increases to three or 4%. Well, you might guess that they're going to be pretty close to that every year right, and so I don't know if there's some kind of mechanism by which this is calculated and if it happens to be higher they just cap it. Or is there you know is there an objective calculation do you have any idea on that how that tends to work?
I do know it's when they're offering the three year lock they do it individually based on towns and based on what their loss history is. So if we were a town that had a big loss history, it would be higher. We are being affected because we just paid off couple $100,000 lawsuit. So that was a little bit of a hit to us. But yeah, that's, I know they adjust it town by town. So not every town gets, gets the same deal but remember they are a nonprofit. So, they're basically, they're passing on premiums
directly to us. So it's basically an underwriting exercise they're not taking necessarily anything on top of that other than to control their operations basically. Correct. That's kind of what I guess but totally
clear from here. Yeah I have a question Eric. What's our past experience been you know if we signed one of these agreements before and it was capped at x with the increases x you know obviously they didn't exceed it because that's the contract says but
So for instance you'll see the twenty one-twenty two what's on there from the policy that year overlaps with the last three year one that they had. And they were, the workers' comp part was not negative. So they could have met their commitment and still given us a 3% or so increase in workers' comp this year. But they're not, they're actually, they've agreed based on their losses or our losses essentially that that number can be lower for this year. So they do seem to be just because they give themselves the opportunity to increase by 3% does not mean they're going to increase by 3%. Let's put it I that
have one question in this contract. If you scroll on the next page, there's a clause in there about our commitment to right here. The town agrees to commit sufficient resources to support and implement the risk management initiatives agreed upon with KIRMA. So is there a formal risk management plan that they work with us on? And does that add cost to us to implement that risk management plan, I guess? Right
now we don't really have an official risk management plan. I've certainly sat down and had face to face meetings with people from their risk management department talking about a number of issues know, talking through some of the projects that some towns do to reduce their or mitigate their risk, but they don't seem to be forcing the towns to do anything, if that answers your question. Contractually,
we're committing to accepting their risk management initiatives and putting a plan in place. I just want to make sure if we don't have a formal one, that is not going to become a issue for us if they ever do. But it says, it says with the, we agree to commit sufficient resources support and implement the risk management
initiatives agreed upon with Karma. So, in other words, there would have to be some kind of agreement, or what I'm guessing is it's some kind of agreement, know, we do this with our risk managers to my work where, you know, they, you know, they'll run through and you know, they may recommend safety training for drivers or they may recommend, you know, the fire marshal doesn't come through, they may recommend COVID, you know, training or you know, so there's things like that to mitigate these. Right. Guess is probably
have to agree to that and it would probably be pretty reasonable, you know.
My guess is it's kind of boilerplate language that's in there so that if we do start to have losses that are hot that are up, we want to come in and say guys you got to change something here. They could put that contract language and say, hey, you gotta listen to us. Right. You know, we're having good loss experience at least in the work comp side. So, that's all running smoothly but if all of a sudden, we start to have injuries in the, you know, road crews, they're going to come in and say, you got a problem. Yeah. That's my guess.
Yeah, would agree. I think part of the reason we're not really getting bothered for this is, basically aside from the one big loss due to the lawsuit, we've had generally a pretty good loss history, both on the workers' comp side. In the last year, I could think of really kind of two, maybe three total reportable accidents, which considering you have a fire department and a public works department is I think actually pretty good. The public works one was very minor. It looked ugly, but it was really actually completely a non issue. The only serious one that I know of in public works was a slip and fall that resulted in a couple of teeth getting knocked out, which that sucks all the way around. But it's not like a $100,000 loss either. So I think, yeah, I think overall,
Karma seems pretty happy with us generally. Have they come back and made any recommendations out of that sexual harassment case that we had that we do additional training or do things differently or question. Yeah.
Kind of thing with all the employees. So, but I mean that's should be easy enough to do if we have to do it there could be computer based online training that you could put people through and stuff like that, if we ever had to do it. Sure. And we do, we are required as an employer
that all employees take mandatory sexual harassment training and that's documented. Perfect. Derek, do you have that scheduled by chance?
It's I don't have the list. My admin assistant has the list of all the employees, but we've been last year we had a timeframe when we had to meet it for all the employees. So we've been pretty much, we pretty much shuffled all the employees through. I have on my list of things to go over that they're to review the new hires and ensure that they have all taken the online training. And Kerma does have a version of it that's available online.
Because with our the ESA policy next door, our supplemental, we're required every January to take take the classes and everybody in the fire station has to take it and pass. So we're on the schedule, you know, yearly at every January. I think I behoove the town to get on a regular schedule for that and do what they have to do just to stay current. Okay.
Good point. One more thing on this wasn't there wasn't there something that went around that talked about how. I'm not sure if it's karma so maybe I'm getting this mixed up but we will lose some potential digital loss prevention coverage.
So yes, I mentioned that to the Board of Finance, a month or two ago. The one thing that karma is doing is KIRMA is dropping its cyber protection policy. And they're doing it because KIRMA has had more than $2,000,000 of losses this year for municipalities, which is four to five times the cost of the policy. And obviously if your losses are five times the cost of a policy in a year, your carrier is no longer going to allow you to do that. We do have a quote for a standalone policy that I brought to the board of selectmen and they felt it was too expensive for coverage. You know, so they declined to consider adding a standalone policy to cover cyber, which you know, And I discussed that with Val because Val had some concerns, Valerie Bruno also. So I know she was talking to East Con about potentially acquiring a standalone cyber policy to cover the school, but the town will be completely uncovered for cyber as of July 1. Okay.
And I don't agree with that by the way, but. Concerns for that too, but.
It may be something we're going to have to look at coming in the next fiscal year, next budget cycle. Mean. We're going to select and put that in. Not sure what else we go before we go beyond that, but. We're in better shape now because we've back everything up, right? And we have a full restore available.
Well I mean you know the point But it takes us hostage we can recreate right? The point from the Board of Selectmen was you're better off spending the money on prevention rather than cure. But obviously my concern is at any given time we do have $3,000,000 dollars in our accounts. I really would hate to figure out find out that somebody figured out some novel way to tap into that money and we have no way to recoup regardless of whose fault it is.
If you have a layer of protection with the banks, so they have to do a lot more regulatory wise than we even have to do. So you do have some comfort level with who you're doing your banking, but you still have your employee risk. Right. And there's just fraud. I mean, we've we've got issues with that. So Which is your in house people if somebody decides to, you know, write a phony check and put it in their own account, you know? Yeah. If Eric, you're signing every check, we're going to just hang you for it.
You know, I'm not actually worried about the physical checks. You know, my concern is still electronic and wire transfers.
Once we have mitigation in place, there's a lot you can do. Yeah, there is a lot more prevention and we've done a lot with our IT systems over the last couple of years to try to get them in a better shape. I agree that prevention, health and prevention is worth a pound of cure. Sure. But I'm also pretty risk averse. So nice knowing you're insured.
Okay anybody have any other questions for Eric on this. Yeah I would say, on the face of it, it probably you know looks like a reasonable position for us to take to take a step towards stabilizing our costs. Things can happen. We're a small town, it wouldn't take more than one or two major losses to drive up costs pretty significantly. I'm no insurance expert, but I don't know if anybody else on the board has any thoughts or comments on this particular proposal.
Well, this is the proposal after their payout of that large liability for the sexual harassment. So this should reflect our additional risk as a town right so. Shouldn't be any surprises.
Correct. Right, but we don't have a large pool of exposure, so we all have employees and all we have to have is one serious injury or something to really drive Providing it as a separate cap to me seems a prudent way to do it and then percentages involved do not seem unreasonable to me. Anybody in the board have a different view or want to add anything or ask any more. Basically agree with you mark I think it's reasonable. Do you guys want to make a motion? We can make authorize
me to sign this and we'll put it to bed. I'll make that motion.
Okay, so if I understand you Kurt, then you are making the motion that the board of finance authorize Eric to sign a letter of commitment for budget stabilization program between Kerma and the town. Eric, does this also require a signature from the board of education?
It does not because the town pays the whole bill for insurance
Okay, for the town and the school. Okay, so this is between the town and Kermit. So that would be the motion. Does anybody want to second that motion? Sure I'll second it. Okay, Bob seconds it, do we have any further discussion. Okay hearing none let's take a vote all in favor of the motion. Aye. Any opposed. Abstentions. Okay, the motion passes, thank you. To move on to item eight see this is the Community Center Community slash senior Center building committee authorization of funds for architectural designs, there is a. A plan in your packet which Eric is showing us today. Eric, I did see one I thought it was an error and maybe Adrian just left that out, I think where it says office in the center, isn't that supposed to say Board of Finance Office?
That's the major word. That's really Board of Finance Office or that storage.
So I think they're gonna they're gonna put us in a basement. Okay, that would probably be more appropriate. Okay, sorry. Eric you want to tell us about this one or do you want invite somebody else to talk about it or just give us on to talk? I would have Ed give the description. Okay. The floor the chairman gives the floor to Ed, you want Ed, you want to tell us what we're looking at here and talk about the plans and your guys thoughts for moving forward on this? Okay. Can
you hear me? Yep. Okay. I did most of the site investigation. I was there today for half a day verifying existing utilities on the site. I give credit to Adrian. He had the CAD program that came up with these architectural drawings. So for all this preliminary work, I'm the preliminary engineer, and Adrian's the the preliminary architect, trying to save the town some money here. Is Adrian still with us? I can't see on my screen if he's still part of the meeting. Adrian, you here? Adrian Manville? Yeah, I don't see that he's on the Doesn't look like he's still on, though. That's fine. Okay. So he came up with this on his CAD program, and with several people inputting from the committee. We have a fairly good committee. We've met since last summer on this. And also got input from not only committee members and their contacts, but also from Kathy Pelosi and the seniors in terms of this would be of course a community senior center. So we got input through them. Basically this drawing you see has a centrally located kitchen, which had been moved. It wasn't there originally, but some of the committee members suggested we centrally locate it, so that we can service up to three meeting functions at once. The large room on the left is a big room that we'll put a divider down that we could break into two smaller rooms. But that big larger room is the main big meeting room. And then on the bottom, see a mid size
meeting room, a storage area, and then a small conference office, and another smaller office with accessible bathrooms. But the idea of having the kitchen in the middle is this to conserve coffee or whatever, two different functions at the same time, and multi purpose. And to orient you then, okay, so, and your drawing here north would be down below, and above this drawing would be the existing town hall and community room. Which is the main entrance, Ed? The main entrance is on the top side there. It would be- The hallway. A large glass door, and with Amanda's input, we're going to put glass on either side and room for a greeting table. So that if we have a function, we could sign people in here. So the main entrance would be on the top side of this, which would be, again, be facing the existing town hall. Okay. In the back of town hall. Okay. So single door then. Okay. Yes.
Single door because it saves money to have a large commercial single door versus a double door. Plus the double door, you never get it to seal properly anyways in terms of weather. So it'd be better to just have a large single door with glass on either side. So you have, you can fully see the inside of the building, of the hallway entrance way there. And so, yeah, so this is a result of several months work. And again, it's just very preliminary. This could end up changing totally with, once we get an architect on board and get additional community input, this could end up looking nothing like this. But this is a starting point to give to an architect, so we're not starting from scratch. It's foundation plan, or a footprint, if you will, of what the town needs for additional community meeting space. Okay, so this morning's site investigation pretty much verified that the drawings we were able to dig out from 2,006 are pretty much accurate terms of where the septic tank is and where the septic field is. So orienting this building to the site, the septic field is 150 feet away from Town Hall. So we've got plenty of room and not have to interfere with the septic field and the leaching galleries and trenches. The only thing that's in the way of this right now is the septic tank that could be moved as it was done to put on the existing town hall addition in 02/2006. So that's not a big deal. It's been done before. We'll have to do it again. If we only had the long term planning committee at work back in 2006, we would have moved the tank a little bit further out to the North.
So the only thing standing in the way here is the septic tank and a storm drain, which is easily moved that would have to be adapted anyways. We would tie the roof drains into the, from this we'd have to tie the roof drains in and attach it to a storm drain, which would be relocated anyways. The gable side of this roof on the south side is perfect application and orientation for solar. So we could eventually with maybe not right at first, but at least consider future putting solar panels on this roof facing South and finally get our town into solar, like many other towns have done with grants and so on. The existing town hall is the Gables is in the East West direction. So it's not conducive. And plus the shade of the trees, it's not conducive for solar panels on existing town hall. But this building, this new building would be. So that would give us a little bit of green environmental incentive to do this. And again, the idea is having it in this location is for two reasons. Number one, it's functional for large functions where you can use, continue to use the existing community room. And then also the townwide survey said that number one, the community center is one of our top priorities. And number two, this was the location that majority of the people said would be good. They're used to coming to the existing town hall and elementary school and having all of our functions in this similar area, would be a good idea. So that was the majority of the vote for location.
Any questions on this?
What, it seems to have a fair amount of space dedicated to the offices and the conference room. Just kind of curious what the intent is for the office space.
Well, the upper right hand corner is an office. And I, again, I wish Adrian were here to defer to him. However, for some examples the committee came up with in that office, you may have a visiting nurse come in and take that office over for a day to be giving shots or to be giving medical counseling in a small, intimate, small setting, one on one from one chair to the other chair. The little bigger room below that is more of a small conference room with a six person sitting at a conference table. But again, talking to the town employees,
we just need more meeting rooms. And so we can see during the day, a lot of these meeting rooms being used for small and mid sized private meetings. In the evening, of course, they could be used for many functions. I mean, having the three bigger rooms, you could have many functions going at the same time and or meetings. We also, by the way, want to put a large projector probably through donations. Kathy Pelosi is talking about people that want to donate to how to equip this building. So furniture, movie projectors, and so on. So we'd want to get a good overhead projector with a dropdown screen for the large room to be able to show movies to families or teenagers, for example, whatever. But again, we have small meeting and large rooms to serve a variety of needs.
Eddie, what's the capacity of the large room, say without the partition?
Well, was going to ask you that Kurt, in terms of square footage for the fire code, it's 23 feet by 40 feet. So that's 800 square feet. What's the maximum? I'll ask you the same question. I'll run it by the fire marshal and let them Yeah. When that room is full, it's 800 square feet. So extrapolate
that from the fire marshal. Do you want know how big the large room is at town hall, for visual or spatial reference?
Let's see. It is 40 feet east and west by about 50 feet north and south. I'm going off of some old drawings here. So real estimate would be 40 by 50, that's 2,000 square feet. Don't think it's Or quite that 40 by 40 Eric, maybe it maybe, I'm sorry, what's 40 squared? 40 times 40. 1,600 square feet. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I think it's 40 feet by 40 feet, but roughly. Okay. My drawing is cut off. I've only got the east west dimension. I know the east west dimension is 40 feet. I don't know what the north south dimension is. So maybe it's 40 by 30. So it's anywhere between 1,200 to 1,600 square feet existing room, so that the existing room is bigger than this room.
I just note that Jeff Murray sent a note in the chat that said the storage is for groups using the building and eventually we'll need an office for our senior services coordinator. That's kind of what I was wondering if that office was designated for. Personally, I like the idea of the solar and I would suggest that that's got to be something one of the specs that you probably provide to the architect once you do get drawings as soon as we move forward. Certainly, because I would, I would guess that you're going to need a storage capacity in that storage area or somewhere else for the storage battery. So that's not an insignificant consideration.
Well, that's if we have a battery, you can go just go tied to the grid without a battery also. Yeah.
And this does have a full walkout basement by the slope. So, you know, it's just really for mechanicals right now. We haven't done anything, you know. Yeah, thank you, Diane. Diane's
on our committee and has been a great asset to the committee. And so the lower right hand corner, again, orienting this footprint to the site, the lower right hand corner of this drawing is the lowest point on the site. We're trying to get this situated to be able to have a walkout basement in the lower right hand corner. And that would be the mechanicals mostly. That makes sense. Mechanicals, but also store again, town storage and drawings and various things. And then be able to go out in the back on the bottom side of this drawing, we have just a beautiful big grass field out there for any kind of outdoor activities or, you know, be able to utilize that lawn as a lawn space for families and to have sports in the field over the nice green grass of the septic field.
You're tying into the existing septic field is the, is that have the capacity to handle this or? Well, that's the, I've been told by John Valenti, it has a lecture capacity,
but that's of course, that's hearsay. So what we got to do, that's why we're going to hire a civil engineer to do the site plan and they would have to study it. And then we'd make that decision as to whether that tank is actually going to be attempted to be moved or maybe we just put it in the next size bigger tank because the tank there was, it looked pretty good. It was in good shape today. It was put in in 2006, so it's only 15 years old. So the skip septic said, we could try to drag it over for you. So we may attempt to drag it to the new location in the trench rather than trying to crane it out or just purchase a new one. But the civil engineer will tell us
in terms of capacity of the septic system.
Eddie, I just heard from the fire marshal. I asked a question regarding a large room. Okay. And he states that if you had tables and chairs, it would hold 53 people. Okay. If chairs only 113. A 100 and what? Fourteen and eight hundred square feet. Okay.
There you go. Thank you. Thank you, Kurt. And I have another
question say for Diane and you and maybe Eric. Are there been any discussion for plans of what to do for the old community room at Town Hall? Would it would it be be incorporated into this into this addition? Maybe more office space for Town Hall or something like that?
Well, do want it, we're trying to balance its location. We want to put it out far. First of all, we want to build this initially as a separate building. There's financial advantage of doing that. We don't want to put it as an addition to the building. So we want to put it out as a separate building. With maybe in several years to come, we might be able to connect with a covered walkway to be able to utilize both spaces. In terms of the existing community room, I know there's been a lot of ideas scattered about that, you know, there's just, I guess, refer to Eric. Eric, you have a lot of ideas on it and we need more space all around. So there's a lot of different things we can do to that. I keep it one big room or start to petition it off a little bit
all the needs we have in terms of troopers and building department and storage. Eric, do you want to pipe in on that?
I think there's lots of possibilities. I mean, the town just basically has to decide what it is it really wants. You know I have two comments the first is that the town of Andover tends to hold buildings for hundreds of years So whatever we build, you know, our great grandkids are either going to be happy with us or they're going to hate us. And so we really need to be thinking about whatever we build that we really build it for the long haul. And I would say today in my world, that means a building that was designed to be net zero and had enough solar on it to make it, know, energy neutral, which is very definitely possible when you've got that much acreage for solar that's south facing. You know, the second thing is there is some validity to using a battery storage system for backup power. The only thing I would say that would make that less amenable is that the town really needs to pursue a better backup system for the town hall itself. And when you think about the loads generated by an elevator, it's tough to meet that on any kind of long term basis with battery storage.
I think the town also ought to be thinking about, using, also incorporating charging stations for electric vehicles at some point. Those would be the two things I would say to my mind makes sense if you're going to really pursue a project like this. We still need to get a bunch of input I feel from the senior community as to exactly what they want in their center. And I think we would do that as part of the process of hiring an architect, because there'll have to be some community engagement, and so we'll have to really kind of refine exactly what we want. What was the other question you had for Going
back to the power, I know it's in capital improvement committee we're on, we talked about the possibility of a need for a better generator or more generation. So we could give to the architectural program that we want to, if we're going solar batteries, that we want it to be integrated with our existing backup generator or a new system that would be totally integrated, right?
Eddie, if I could maybe suggest another thing to look at even prior to the generator and the solar is you have three phase that's probably less than a quarter mile away and and to run run the three phase up the rest of the way up 316 to School Road and and and it just past the school. And then you'd have three phase capability from Eversource to to take care of the school, the new town town hall senior center community center, including the fire station. We're we're wired next door for three phase, but we're operating on single phase. So just an idea for the future. And it's not that far away. It's right down on 316 between Boston Hill and School Road. We should definitely do that. Now, we need a grant to do that or whatever source bring it up on their own if we're gonna utilize? They're not gonna bring it up on their own. They're gonna wanna charge the hell out of you, but I would get that somehow
in the design of the project for, especially if we're talking about the future and what we are.
So again, the engineers and architects we hire need all this data and suggestions be able to integrate backup generation, solar batteries versus not in three phase. Need a system that'll serve our, that's another advantage is putting the building here Curt is that we can get all the buildings integrated.
We've talked a lot about in the committee that you know we wanna get this building up and built as economically as possible. There's a lot of things we want but there's a lot of things we can do in phases too. And so we don't have to outlay all the money out front but we have to be smart about how we do it and plan it out and make sure we just have the future built in and have the phases set up so we know what we're gonna do going ahead. We're not gonna be able to build a super building day one because we won't have the money but
we will get there. Right, but Jeff Murray just made a very good point that, again, we've got a large meeting room for large functions, but we break that with a divider. Now we've got three mid sized meeting rooms and it's a community center. It's not just a senior center. It's a community center. Volunteered a lot for Cub Scouts. Cub Scouts always need a place to meet. So you can see one or two dens meeting in here certain nights of the week. And you could see movies being shown. You could see maybe a small room with seniors playing bingo while teenagers are watching a movie in the other room. So it's for the entire community and an infinite amount of functions that could take place. And we tried to make these rooms as flexible as possible so that many multi use uses could take place here for ages five to 100. Thank you, Jeff Murray for that comment.
I have a question. Is there going to be increased parking for this facility?
Well, again, that's something we could look at. We could extend the parking lot if we have to. If that's a study that would be done in terms of usage and time. We know that the school's parking lot is essentially empty in the evening, most nights. We can utilize that of course, but certainly we could, as part of the site plan, we could add a few more parking spaces if warranted. Schools run, the schools, just remind, sorry, just to remind everybody, the school's running at half capacity right now, less than half capacity. So that means the parking lot is running at less than half capacity.
As you know, I've seen Wednesday nights where there's a drill session going out at the fire station. There's a large meeting or vote going on at town hall and there's basketball running at the school from the rec commission from the three or four various towns. Right. And I've seen cars parked on School Road because there's no parking at the fire station, there's no parking town hall and the school's full. So I have actually seen that and that's happened more than once. We have maybe figure on some extra parking for this facility.
You never designed parking for the absolute worst case scenario. And it's very easy to address because the Planning and Zoning Commission has very well thought out matrix for determining number of parking spaces required for all types of occupations. That would be just maintaining compliance with the zoning commission's requirements.
But if we need them, we can do them. There's only so many we could add to the town hall's parking lot to the north because we're trying to fit a new building plus the existing septic plus maybe a little additional parking. If we need more than a few more spaces on that parking lot, Eric and I have walked several years ago between the Firehouse and Hebron Avenue 316. And the North Side of School Road has many, there's 200, 300 feet there of space where you can, cars can park perpendicular to the road between the Firehouse and 316. So you could add several parking spaces down the street with a walkway coming up. Okay. So remember walking that area, Eric? Yep. So we have the ability to add spaces if we need to. That's why we need to hire the architect engineer. Matter of fact, that parking area between the Firehouse and 316, that could easily be graded and done by the public works department. And then paved with the paving program in town. So we could do that in house. The fill is already there. It's just that there's sand and fill along there. And there's just, nobody wants to park it down in there because they might get stuck in the soft sand, but there's a lot of room there to add parking along School Road.
Personally, like the concept. Looks very usable and it's a great start as far as I'm concerned.
And thanks for your It's Yeah, a good overview there. What do you need? Let's do it.
I'm gonna ask where I was gonna add, what is it that you guys are asking for? So let's put that on the table.
Well, what we got to do is get the ball rolling by hiring an engineering firm. Eric's already pulled out the drawings from 2006. And we're going to ask them and two others to submit a bid for a staged RFP for preliminary site work survey and final site work engineering drawings with septic and preliminary conceptual drawings with an architect to go through some schematics. So it would be staged. So we're not going to spend all 20,000 at first and certainly not all 50,000. The 50,000 would be well enough to do all of the construction drawings to completion. So we want to do it in stages. So Eric could put out requests to do the start off with the site survey, which we started today with volunteers. We've got it all painted and marked out with our public works director and Eric and Skip Septic. So we need a drawing to be done at this point while
it's painted and marked out. And Eric, this money would come out of the existing fund, correct?
This money would come out of the existing, you would be taking out of the community, the multi use multi purpose building fund. Community building, yeah.
And what's the balance of that now? 400 or $4.50? It's like 447,000. Yeah. That
may not be enough to certainly complete the building and furnish it, and especially with solar, but it should be enough to at least build the building proper. And it should be enough to build an empty building and utility tie ins.
To move this along, I'll make a motion to allocate $50,000 from the seniorcommunity center fund for your design and the rest of the criteria involved. Design. Stage design, there you go. That's a motion. Mr. Chairman. You're on mute, Mark.
Thank you for letting me spacebar. Do we have a second. I'll
second it. Okay, Diane seconds it. You know, Diane you'd originally add us that we added this to the, to the agenda item and I think it was 20,000 at that point now it's 50,000 just wondering kind of what we're trying to cover here. So this is the stage thing we're looking for
50,000 to do all the drawings but we're going to do in a stage so we're only going to go out there for the conceptual drawings, and we want the approved and we're going to stage the RFP that way. So we will spend the money only for them doing what we need to do to get the town concept going and getting participation and conceptual drawings. And we won't move to the full 50,000 until everybody's on board. So we wanna spend the money in stages. So we want authorization for all of the drawings to be up to 50, but we're gonna start with just the beginning stages.
Because we feel we'll get better prices if we put that out there. An architectural firm, and secondly, an engineering, civil engineering firm feels that if they know that money's there for the final design, then we'll get a better price for the final design as a package, but we're going to do it in stages. So the initial outlay is for probably two different firms, a site surveyor and civil engineer and septic design, and then an architectural firm. That's what the 20 is for. But we want to put the whole thing out there so that we get a better price for everything as a package deal.
So we'll do it staged. Yeah, that makes sense. And what's the process for making the selection? So Dan said, we'll wait till everyone's on board until we spend the rest of the money.
Well, figure after we get the very nice architectural draw, all we got here is a floor plan. By the way, there is a nice three d walkthrough that Adrian does. All you got to do is put a look at YouTube of the Board of Selectmen meeting like we had last week, Amanda could help you find that, where you go through halfway through the meeting and it takes about ten minutes with a three d walkthrough. And that's all good bells and whistles, but we need professional architectural drawings based off of these preliminaries to go to a town meeting and have everybody look at it, we believe. So then we'll get some good cost estimates. Do you know I Yeah, we'll have better candles on costing and so on.
What I was asking was kind of internally, is this the committee making the decision when to go on to spend the next 30,000? Is it Eric? What's the mechanism here?
Suggested that we get the architectural drawings and the site survey done and the architectural drawings. And at that stage, once it's stamped by a licensed architect and we have good drawings, we go to a town meeting at that point for
is that what you said, Eric? I believe your suggestion was? Yeah, my goal is to bring this to the public as soon as we have good visuals to present to the public. Right. You know, if you think about it in terms of like a bridge project, it would be the 30% design stage where you're far enough along that you have cost estimates, you have a preliminary design so you know what it's gonna look like and how it's gonna blend into the site. And then you go to the public and say, hey, this is what we're proposing. This is roughly what it's going to cost. Are you on board? Are you not on board? What changes do you want? Prior to, you know, I certainly don't want to get all the way up through a fully
designed architecturally designed building and then have the public say, you know what, nah, why waste the money? So, the goal is to get to the point where we have enough information to bring to the public as inexpensively as
And we'll make sure they show solar panels on the south side of the roof. Adrian software didn't show that at this point, but we have a lot of extra good input to give to the architect.
If you can, I would also suggest you might at least whether you present this to the town once we get there or not is another question but, you know, look for options, if the budget allows right so you know hey, we have this level of finish with this level of finish with this level of finish, you know, is it worth the $10.15 grand to go up to the next thing you know, or could we do we, you know, it doesn't cost that much more to expand the footprint sometimes, you know, you know, that's that's something to consider you ask any real estate agent that's why houses are getting so that our doesn't cost a lot more to add a little square footage? It's an impressive, potentially useful thing at least in this project.
Okay, yeah. And I think also in the meantime, we get our board of selectmen to get it on to our, our state Senator, Mr. Casano and the rest of the state legislators that maybe some grant money for us for our little town to assist the professional to building.
It's out there, you know, and they thought about that a lot and especially with respect to maybe the solar and the green building, you know, having having a I like your Eric's idea of having a net zero building again, forward thinking, I understand trying to get this done as inexpensively as possible is is admirable, but you know what is it that we're trying to get done and if it's a. And if it's something for the long haul that's obviously should be really a strong consideration of the design so. It's been a long time if if if if ever that we've gotten any any type of grant
you know, money or sort of things like that from this from the state for a, large project like this. And I think we're I think we're due. So personal personal opinion. Understood. Any other questions? Okay.
Any other discussion on the motion? Okay hearing none let's take a vote all in favor. Aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed. No abstentions? Remember to hit your mute key if you if you're muted, you'll never get your voice heard. Now all right. Hearing all positive votes, all yay votes, the motion passes. Thank you. Okay. Very good. Thank you, Ed. Thank you, Diane. Okay, let's move on to the next agenda item which is the 8D the Veterans Monument Park updates. Eric did you want to share your screen again and go through that? Think you have something right there. Yep. No, okay.
Okay, so again, the board of selectmen motioned at their last minute or the last meeting to support some upgrades at Veterans Monument Park and to allocate up to $20,000 in funding. And that was to do a series of things. The first is put in a new well that will feed both potential upgrades to the old town hall and also to allow a sprinkler system at the monument that will also require an in ground vault to hold the pressure tank and the equipment for the sprinkler system and the drain back system. And also that will fund electrical upgrades. The Board of Selectmen has preferred instead of a standalone meter fed directly from the utility in a transformer to tie in directly to the museum's electrical system. So basically that will mean trenching from the museum down to wherever the location of you know a sub panel out in in the field somewhere. So that's what they've asked for and they left it up to the Board of Finance to figure out where to take the money out of the existing budget. So there are a bunch of possibilities, but I would also say that all of the stuff, none of the things we're talking about doing right now will occur before the June dedication. They're all things that are going to be done in say the, you know, August timeframe. So I don't think we actually need to identify the location of where we're taking the money yet. The question is just simply is the Board of Finance in agreement with that or not, if that makes sense. If you want to talk about where we could potentially take the money, we can talk about that too.
But we do have places
available where you think Eric we can weedle this money out of. Well, so I think we're going to end up with a little bit of a surplus this year not a great deal but there's three things. One we really haven't touched most of the second allotment of money we got from the federal government for COVID relief. So, know, we have somewhere around $20,000 there we could basically tap the whole thing and do it. That's one. The other possibility is that in last year's budget, because we didn't know exactly how it was going to work, we had budgeted for about $30,000 on the town side to do the software transition and we did not end up spending that money. So in after April 1, you could reallocate that budget and agree to spend that if you would like. And the third obvious place is you know you could just tap the contingency fund. So those are really the three you could take fairly readily to do that that I know of anyway.
I guess the other piece of information that maybe everybody doesn't have but there's also a lot of private fundraising going on to finish this whole project from Jerry's so this is just really a small seed stake for the town. Correct.
Yeah, to put in perspective, Jerry's fundraised for the monument itself and the initial stonework, which is somewhere around $30,000 And he's got more than that saved or more than that donated so far. Honestly, between him and Ron's professional lawn care, the vast majority of the money spent on this project will donations. So there, he's basically fundraising for the cost of the new monument, the cost of the site work, and the cost of the irrigation system and the cost of seeding and the cost of fill and what the town and you know and the site work itself and potentially two new flagpoles.
What the town is kicking in is the well and the vault and the electrical. So we're the town is is you know certainly the town's portion is not in can you know it's not inconsequential but it's certainly not the majority of the funding for this project. Utilities infrastructure really.
Correct, correct. And if we so chose, we could with the Board of Finance's approval, we could also pay for this out of LOSIP funding. We have enough money in our LOSIP account certainly to pay for this. It would take a little bit of work. There's a bunch of background that would have to be done to tap LOCIP but it's very definitely possible if we choose to do that.
Back to that COVID funding option is, I know that there were still some questions about what's allowed, what's, I mean, that going to be an issue you think at all or?
So I don't think we could do it with the money. Well, let me back up. We don't we really have no idea what we're allowed to do with the money we're going to get in the future from the COVID fund. Nobody knows that at this point because nobody's decided. What I'm talking about is money that was already given to the town And this is going to sound kind of stupid, but what happened is they didn't spend most of the money they had planned to give the towns because they changed the rules initially on what was rebatable. So they asked the towns how much do you think you're going to need we based on this criteria. So we gave that to them and then they came back and said oh well we're not going to cover that that that or that.
So in the end, we could get like 6 or $7,000 back when we asked for 30. And then later, just before the end of the fiscal year, when they had to give the money to the towns or give it back to the federal government, they said, okay, here's what we do. We're going to give you the money in one lump sum, but you got to spend it on one of these very narrow categories and you've got to agree to that within the next three days. So basically what we did as a town is we applied all of the COVID relief money on paper to pay for a to offset the cost for the resident state trooper. And then we took the money right back out of the resident state troopers money and put it in a general fund, you know, that we could spend out of, which is really a stupid accounting trick but that's what the state essentially asked us to do. So as far as I know we have no restrictions on that money you know at this point. I hope that makes sense to you. Didn't make I'm
not sure it's the way I would have done it but that's at the town level it's fine. I mean, I think, you know, did but it did under the timeframe. That answers that question I know I'm personally not it wouldn't be a fan of. Hitting the contingency fund for an expense like this, although I would say in general I'm in favor of authorizing the funding To me, it makes sense and it's appropriate, but that's my point of view. Other questions, comments, input from the board?
Mark, if I may. Eric, following all the plans in total, is there any plans to upgrade the original part of the Veterans Monument along with new section that Jerry's working on?
Well, they're going to reshape, move some of the stones that are in the back and kind of elongate it a little bit and fill in behind it so it's level, you know, and it's kind of handicap accessible. So that's one of the goals of it. I'm not sure that really answers your question. Yeah, I just,
I'd like to keep it taxpayer neutral. I don't really want it. I would not like to use any of the taxpayers money to make the improvements because I don't know how many people know the history of that monument, but it was a brainchild. His name was Bruce Goulet. I don't know if anybody knows him besides myself and maybe Eddie. I'm not sure if you ever met Bruce. Bruce Gallet was a Vietnam veteran, grew up in town. He passed away from cancer a few years ago, very active member of the fire department, so on and so forth. But he came up with the idea when the State of Connecticut was doing the intersection project at 316 and
Route 6 there. And those stones in the memorial that the stones sit on with all the names and things like that came from the old trestle when they took the trestle down where the bridge is going across now, things like that. I got at that time Northeast Utilities and Connecticut Light and Power Company subsidiary to donate the service that has been up in discussion about having to put up a new underground service, there's an existing one there originally that was lighting the flagpole, that was all donated by Connego Light and Power. My labor, I had guys that worked for me at the power company donating their time. The power company donated vehicles, crane trucks to move those stones into place. But this entire brain brainchild of the Vietnam or the the Veterans Monument Park was was bruised away. So that's the cornerstone of the monument itself. What Jerry's doing, everything else, it just adds to the nice piece of property that it is. But everything was done with donations of both in kind donations and labor and vehicles and everything else.
It would be nice to keep it that way. And if we can get a low SIP funds, we wouldn't touch the tax. If we're talking any cuts to this budget and things like that, we definitely, I don't feel can take any money, taxpayers money at this time to make the improvements there. Just my thoughts. Anybody else have any input there?
I'm not sure I completely agree. I feel this the town, you know, it is the town's park. And I feel like the town should have some skin in the game and we're certainly Jerry has certainly taken on the majority of the task in doing the fundraising for it but I think it's appropriate for the town to contribute a portion of that, but that's just me too.
But isn't the incentive, correct me if I'm wrong, because I didn't listen to all the meetings that the towns buy into doing the well and the electrical off of the old town hall is so in the future we have the ability to do something more with that if we wanted to put in permanent bathrooms in the old town hall or to create a visitor center or something like that. Was more of a long term kind of futuristic looking forward kind of thing. It would be
done in such a way that the town would have more flexibility going forward. And it would end it would end up the town would end up with a reliable water supply that could be used as a public water supply if the town chose to put in an outdoor fountain and also to feed bathrooms potentially if the town chose to do that.
Eric, correct me if I'm wrong. You're talking about taking the power from the meter at the museum? That is what their goal is.
And and and it's it's gonna stay at a 100 amp and
and come down the hill and feed everything that's gonna have to be fed there? I mean, the very first thing I have to do is I gotta figure out exactly exactly where the board intends to put a pedestal with breakers in the field and once I have that I will address that with LENCO and see whether it's even possible to do without doing a service upgrade.
Not being an electrical engineer, but being in the field for the last forty four years of my life, a 100 amp is not gonna cut it. Coming off the building just to save the cost of a meter in Stanton versus paying, Eversource Energy to put a whole new drop into that area. Unless you're gonna be running a well pump, you're gonna be running lights, you're gonna be running irrigation, things like that. I I just don't see how that's gonna work personally.
I originally planned on a standalone service with a standalone meter, but,
my suggestions were overruled. So I I just don't see the cost savings in there versus just paying Eversource to put in a new drop to say to Lenco's new stanchion.
Well, it's not the cost of the drop in the initial work. It's the fact that every meter costs you $30 a month forevermore. But
you're talking a 200 amp service, I mean, right off the bat. I mean, every house today is 200 amp. 100 amp house services are long gone. Just look around. To take a 100 amp, existing 100 amp box, I think it is, but it even be a 60 on a museum and and run down the hill to the all you know, to the well, to the lighting, to irrigation pumps, and everything else there. It's it's no way it's gonna work.
Can I chime in? I was just wondering, I don't want to, don't want to butt in, I'm an electrical engineer. I've done electrical work for years. 100 amps would be, I mean, don't want to jump on jump over curve but 100 amps would be sufficient for a 50 amp sub panel. And what we're talking about is we're not talking to continuous loads, we're talking intermittent loads. So the loads that would be, let's just say for the sprinkler system and the pump at one time may not be the lighting loads in the museum. Mean, a 100 amps is a lot of, it's a lot of current. So I mean, the well would probably draw maybe 20 to 30 amps at the most, probably continuously we're looking at maybe like a 17 to 20 amp load. Lighting, if we go to LEDs it's going to be minuscule probably three to five amps. So we're not talking about huge electrical loads here. We don't have any huge loads in the museum at the moment. So I really don't see currently any issues. I mean, like Eric said, we should reach out to the electrical contractor and see if they do. But if a more modern 100 amp service, we really shouldn't have any problems. But to upgrade to 200, we'd be talking two to three thousand dollars to upgrade to 200 amp service. True.
So it's not a heavy hitter. And Adrian's whole point with this is we don't wanna get stuck into a $60 bill every year for a meter service. If we can combine that and somehow benefit the town, I don't know what we're gonna have going forward as far as rail trail grants. We may be able to put bathrooms in there. We may be able to put water fountains in there but if we have the well, it just gives us another option if we have water service to that building. So that was our thought process when we approved this.
Okay, thanks. Think we, we probably don't want to get too far into design particulars here although I think you guys are bringing up some important points. Just have a lot to cover and ultimately I think we ended up relying on Eric and the Board of Selecting to kind of direct the best approach here. Presumably we budgeted for you this amount you're requesting is appropriate for the task at hand. Any other questions or comments on the board, part of the board about the expenditure? Would anybody like to make a motion that we approve the expenditure in advance, not knowing how much it is, of course, or where we may draw it from, which I do think it's appropriate for us to ask about sources. I never want to say go ahead and spend the money without having an idea where it's coming from. Appreciate that Diane asked the question and Eric responded. Somebody want to make a motion about this particular request?
I would make the motion to spend up to $20,000 in town contribute into the, is it called Monument Park? Correct. Monument Park for the well and the electrical. I'm not going to see 20,000. And I don't know how you weave in where the money is coming from. Mean, we want to say funding out of the current budget year, right?
Yeah, I think that sounds appropriate and accurate what you're trying to say. Probably sufficient. Somebody want to second that motion.
You could also say source, you know, to bring it back to the board of finance for approval of the funding source before the money spent. That way you get a final view of where the money is actually taken, which is appropriate.
So I will amend my motion to add that piece in.
Retract your motion and I think we do it that way. Yeah. Okay. Alright so you're, you're voting to authorize the town to spend up to $20,000 on the set improvements for the Monument Park. Pending an approval of where to where to fund that expenditure at further meeting later meeting. That sound right. Okay. And Rob you still want to second that. Sure. Okay.
Any discussion further discussion of the board members on this topic? Mean Kurt made an interesting point that this has always been a voluntary funded project. I tend to agree with Eric that I think the town it's appropriate for the town to have skin in this game, if you will, and and support Community Park. That's that's just kind of my take on it anybody else any more input. Okay hearing none I guess let's take a vote all those in favor say aye. Aye. The opposed. Okay, any abstentions. Okay, hearing none motion passes Thank you guys. All right, let's move on to our next agenda item this is item eight he, which is the building and land use department online permitting system. Eric spoke a little bit about this earlier. This is the online service that would allow us to sensibly cut down the amount of
hours of talent employee time to do the permitting. So Eric, you want to kind of give us an overview?
Sure. So what this is, is basically an online permitting service for the building department and land use agents. And what it does is it provides a streamlined way for applicants to put in a zoning permit, or a building permit or wetlands permit, And then to be able to track it electronically in a fairly easy, consistent manner, each individual that has to approve these things, because depending on what it is, it might require wetlands approval, might require zoning approval, it might require fire marshal, it might require, well, generally it'll always require the building official. So all of those would get streamlined electronic notifications. You would be able to upload all your plans, all your information in one shot. It will automatically calculate the fees for you. You can pay right there online and we can interface it with the people's basically electronic banking option that we use now currently for the tax collector's office. So what it allows us is to reduce the hours available where a human will be in the building department, but at the same time, put the functionality back in the department so that, know, somebody who needs to file a building permit can go online,
download information, fill out the application right there, upload everything that's needed and pay for it right then and there and it will automatically be in the system. You know, the next time the admin is in working, it just gets approved and it gets sent directly to the building official and everybody who needs it. So it's basically a streamlined method for, you know, modernizing the building department. And the second thing is that our intention to is to basically not pay for it ourselves. And that is to simply sign an agreement with them so that they charge us per building application or per wetlands application or per zoning application. And then we build that cost right into the fee structure that we charge the applicant. So it will be cost neutral for the town. But it is, we are actually going to be paying this company, you know, some 4,000 to $6,000 a year depending on how many applications we have and exactly how many licenses we decide. So since that's an ongoing expense, I felt that was appropriate to bring to the Board of Finance.
I have a question. Today, is this an all paper process? Is this like somebody comes to the town hall gets an application fills it out and hands you paper.
You can email it in with a picture of your hand. Recently did it so I'm familiar with the process. You know I haven't heard it. Yeah.
Yeah, so, so we're pretty far in the stone age right now. Know, just uploaded an Excel spreadsheet that people can use to fill out to you know so they don't they can figure out how much it's going to cost them by just going down the spreadsheet and we're just going to incorporate that straight into the program as we input it. But yeah, currently, you know, we've kind of half tried to move away from allowing people to submit electronically, but basically all they're doing is just emailing you all the forms, they're making PDFs and sending that in. Whereas having a true online form, you know, will hopefully cut down on a lot of the confusion that we're dealing with now. It's like So this software has enough Copy some of the stuff. Yeah. So this software has,
is proven and has enough information that we need to gather, and has the functionality we need to electronically take this information. There's nothing deficient in it, I mean has it gives us what we need is what I'm asking.
Yeah, it's it's a little more bare bones than than the other common option in this area. So we're fortunate in that are the building officials that we use use permit link already in one of the towns they deal with. So we have a building official that's used to this system anyway. The competitor system to this has a yearly cost of somewhere for us between 11,000 and $12,000 a year and an initial upfront cost of about $20,000 to institute it. It's a better system. This is not the best system we can bring in, but it's the best system we're willing to pay for. And I think I've seen demonstrations, you know, both from the vendor and our building official Randy has sat down with me and said, okay,
here's what I see as a building official, here's how I approve, here's what the building admin would have to do, here's how we track everything, here's how we document. So I'm pretty happy with it. And when we had the meeting, I sat down myself, Amanda and our wetlands agent and our zoning agent all sat down and reviewed the software because we want one thing that works for the whole building office, not just for the building department for for building and land use. And I think we have that frankly, we've needed to go to electronic permitting forever. We just haven't done it. So now's the time. Now we're going to be kind of forced to because of we're going to have less. In other words, we're not going to be able to throw manpower at an inefficient system. You know, we're going to have to streamline our processes because we're going to have a streamlined work staff there available.
And I agree with the whole efficiency things and streamlining things. It's just for us to implement this. Want to make sure that we do it and do you know what mean? And don't consider old practice. I don't want to say, oh, somebody puts half of it in the system and then I'm going to email you the other half. We're not really getting anywhere with our efficiencies if we kind of keep the old ways of doing things. So as long as we're kind of committed to making the switch, think we have to. What if we have people who don't want to pay online? Are we going to accommodate anything else? So this, yeah, that's a common question.
What you would do is you would fill out an application, you would go through the software, you would still use the program to submit all the information and you would be required to give us a paper check. We have the ability to do that, You know, and we're also talking with the vendor, probably what we will do is we will also put a computer in the public side of the building department in the hallway so that an applicant, if by some chance they have zero computer or smartphone or anything else or tablet, they can come into the building department and they can fill it out right there on the town's computer and it will be in the system.
So they will have the ability to hand the check-in directly. The only difference is there's going to be for an applicant, there's a delay if you hand in a paper check because you know the town's got to cash the check before you're going to get a building permit. Whereas if you've paid online, as soon as you submit the paperwork, know the town can process it and you basically cut the time to process a permit down to very little.
The key to the cost savings on the person, because we're gonna eliminate that position is to have this process fully automated. Otherwise, it won't work, right? I mean, it's
not that so I think actually we're still gonna devote enough hours to it that we could physically get the workload done. But what would happen is without it, then it would be much more difficult because somebody is not going to have that same amount of time. In other words, we're making it less convenient because they can't walk into the building anytime they want and fill out an application because we're only going to have somebody on staff fifteen hours or so a week for them to interact with. So this is a way to be able to still have the majority of people submit their stuff normally. Like any electrician, any plumber, any HVAC company, most towns have online permitting. So most of these companies, most, in fact, for instance, for our building officials, we are the only town they cover out of the five towns that they don't do all their permitting and approvals online. We're the only town they actually pass paper back and forth for. So we're not asking, we're not reinventing the wheel here. We're doing something our existing officials are already used to, just implementing it in our town.
Eric, is this the same system like Lebanon's using? I just pulled a permit for there. It was so easy.
I don't know whether There's kind of two common ones used here in Connecticut. I don't I can't tell you what Lebanon has. We're using the same system that Ashford's using. There's a bunch of bigger towns actually that uses it because surprisingly enough I could give you a list of towns the vendor gave me a list of all the towns in Connecticut. You know they're not the biggest one in the state but there's probably 30 towns in Connecticut 20 five-thirty towns that use their software.
Yeah I don't really care which one I just was commenting I think it works fantastic. I think the DynaTox technology are aging out, so I don't think that's going to be longer. Based on my own personal experience recently with the towns it's confusing because the forums are out, you know they're just not clear anymore and so you know I would have welcomed this opportunity. There will be a soon some kind of impact there in terms of the fees and over for self. If this is a self funding project, then is the building permit fees are going to be raised to cover this or how does it right that we talked a little bit about that at different points. So there's two things and that's ultimately I think going to be a board of selectmen
decision because we just changed our fee schedule like as of March 1 because we hadn't changed it in about fifteen years. And we had just gotten way out of line with our valuations for construction and our estimates of construction costs. So we have changed our fees already. That should more than double the revenue that we bring in based on our previous fee structure. So the question I'm going to have for the Board of Selectmen is, since we're already increasing our fees way more than the cost of the software, they want to just take that $10 per out of the fees we're charging now or do they want to add $10 per application to cover 10 or 12 somewhere in there. And that's going to be a board of selection question.
Okay. Fair enough. Eric, I just looked it up as Viewpoint.
Okay. Amanda put that in the chat too. Thanks. Yeah, that's the other one we looked at. Viewpoint is really cool. That's I think nicer than Permit Link. I've demoed them both, but it's not, you know, it's not an extra 6,000 or $7,000 a year nicer is how I would look at it. It's fine. Permit links got all the functionality we need.
I know I personally read through the proposed contract here. Cancellation terms look pretty generous actually. Doesn't look like there's any couches in terms of the fees and cancellation they cap their data export if we need it in different forms. Their fees at the end is pretty reasonably, you know, you know, I do supply.
Contract is it's a one way contract it's in their favor not ours. So because there's no liability for them if they screw up. So, you know, but that's neither here nor because it's going be cost neutral to us but it's just us to make sure that we ever have to separate our ways we're able to get our data and recreate what we need to recreate that's going be the biggest hassle for us.
Yeah, and we're already, you know, I would say that's one of the things we need to evaluate internally because we have a separate essentially setup for archiving this data. And we got to kind of talk through as a town, you know, how we go in and so currently, it is possible for you to look up online because we basically scanned in all the old permits. So you can look up old information. We used to have a computer in the lobby that allowed you to do that, but nobody ever used it. I mean, had it there for years and it just never got used. I mean, so we do need to think through how we're going to continue to archive our material and whether we consider this our, I mean, we're not going to consider this our sole archive of building permits. We're probably gonna make, because we're a small enough town, we only have 1,200 houses.
We maintain hard copy files of all of them. And right now we scan all that in. So we already have duplicate backups of this data. And we're definitely gonna maintain some archive of this data locally is what I would say.
The only downside I see is just us being able to make sure we have our records.
I think they actually require us for FOIA purpose to retain stuff, although I'm not exactly sure where it's retained. At least I haven't clear to me in the contract.
We're not buying the Ritz here with this software. So it just serves our needs to get us where we need to be. Yeah.
Yeah, I think the only thing we have to agree to is we got to agree to use the software for like it was a ridiculously small time period. Six months. Yeah. Yeah, we agree to, you know, to use it for at least six months. So I guess that means they could recoup, you know, 150 permits worth of fees from us if we decided we didn't like it. We're not on the hook a ton of, you know, we don't have a ton of exposure from a cost basis
for signing. There are minimum number of permits we have to process with them? Is it a time frame plus a number of permits or I can't remember.
We're gonna have to come to So there's kind of two things here that are We have to agree that Basically what they want is if they're going to do it on their common deal is $10 per application and that's their sole fee. But it also depends on exactly how many licenses we have and depends on how frugal we want to be. Like, you know, we could give the fire marshal his own so he has he can do his approvals directly or we can have him share one with somebody else and save us one license, because that saves us money. So we think we're going to end up probably needing five licenses and be able to get away with five licenses, which means we're going to have a total cost of around $5,000 a year. So what we talked about doing with them is, and remember this we're talking solely about building permits now, but we can also include because we're doing zoning permits and wetlands permits also, those also count towards the total number. So I think we're going to be okay.
He seemed to think we were going to run somewhere about $10 and $12 a permit in terms of cost. And we just have to decide whether we want to up our fees another $12 an application or whether we want to absorb it. And we'll probably choose to up our fees another $12 an application as we implement this. But the other thing I would say is that we're structuring that department right now by reducing the cost in the admin and with the updated permit fees anyway, that department will be more than cost neutral. I mean, even instituting the software, that department won't cost us anything other than heat and electricity.
We'll have absorbed all the cost, the employee cost. Other
questions for Eric on this system? Again, Eric, I think you're correct. It's probably appropriate for us to have reviewed it. I don't know that again, we would need to necessarily approve it per se based on what you're doing here. But we certainly could have a vote of confidence or a vote of approval if somebody wanted to entertain a motion or we could probably move on. Erica, do you want us to take a vote on it or are you comfortable not hearing a negative?
I mean, it would be better for you to vote on it, but if you don't vote on it, it doesn't mean I'm not going to institute it. If you tell me no, I certainly wouldn't. But it would be cleaner if you approved it. Yeah, I suppose that's true. I mean,
it's essentially a year contract that will go ever it's basically evergreen unless we cancel it within a ninety day period so. You know I. Anybody want to make a motion in terms of supporting the. Move to this online permitting system. I'll make a motion. Like a motion to approve the online permitting system for the building department. Okay, anybody second that.
Sure, last second. Okay, I'm just waiting. Anybody else want to do the second degree I'll just take care of that tonight. Kind of like a Jeopardy thing who's gonna. I feel like it's my designated role today.
Everyone needs the best supporting actor Rob so that's that may be your role tonight. There you go. Okay, do we have any further discussion on this. Okay hearing none let's have a vote all in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed. Any abstentions. Okay motion passes, thank you. Okay, let's move on to our next agenda item, which is 8F, the COVID funding update. Eric, you've got something in the packet about this?
Sure, I gave you some information. But what I would say is that right now it's, I mean, I can tell you what we're going to get. And the information that I've gotten is that we're gonna get it over a two year period. So sometime in the next sixty days, we'll get an initial allotment of funding, which is great, but we really don't have any rules for how we can spend it at this point. If you take the literal definition of what they put out for rules, it doesn't seem like we can spend it on much of anything. The only infrastructure we're allowed to spend it on is sewer projects, water projects, and broadband infrastructure, none of which we really have. So the question then becomes how broad When you say broadband, what does that mean? Is that Wi Fi in the building or is it rewiring an entire town with fiber? When you say sewer projects, does that mean a new septic system for building? Or is that just main line sewer problems? Same thing with water. Is water infrastructure, does that cover culverts? Cause we could certainly spend it all on culverts, that would be no problem.
But if it just means providing water to residents through some sort of municipal water supply, we don't do that. So the long and the short of it is, really have no idea nor does the state. In fact, they basically sent a message out today and said, quit bugging us and asking us questions. We don't really know either. When we know what the rules are, we'll tell you. So we're going to get money but we don't know what we can spend it on at this point. That's all I can really tell you. Did you want to name that number?
Sure. We're supposed to get 319,000, but in two allotments twelve months apart. So we're going to get half of 320,000 now. How many that we can't spend?
Well, we might be able to spend it. We have no idea.
Need further guidance. Super or first responders. Need further guidance, I guess. $160,000 sure would help us for this So
here's what we can't do. We cannot absolutely can't use it Right. For all So it's gotta be for something, kind of completely outside the budget we're dealing with now. Specific effect of some sort.
The only way we could offset it for taxation is if we somehow proved that we made a lot less money last year in town taxes because of COVID,
but that's not the case. Not the case, yeah. So we haven't had a problem collecting taxes or we don't have any delinquent roles that because of COVID, right? Correct, correct.
We relocate the septic system before we build a new building.
I mean, no, I mean, honestly, is one of the things I've been looking at and saying, maybe part of what we can do is maybe we can knock off some of that, you know? New well.
New well, yep. Very definitely. Hell, maybe an irrigation system that's water related right? You know we just don't know frankly. Do you have any idea? Firehouse
doesn't need a new bus. You need a new what? A new bus.
Our bus is getting to be ten years old. Not not water, sewer, broadband unless you put a heck of a Wi Fi system on the bus. Mobile Wi Fi.
It into anything to do with first respondings, you know, people, sick people. Do you know what I mean? You Yeah. Did a lot of, you transported a lot of people, sick people. Do you know what I mean?
So mean, does seem like we can potentially use it to up our services to senior service, for instance. And maybe, you know, so we have one grant in right now to provide some help to people, family members suffering from Alzheimer's, you know, we could potentially use that for the town's match. So, I mean, it's, I mean, there are probably things legitimate things that we can spend the money on, but we just don't know the rules yet. So it makes it hard to say definitively make any recommendations.
And Eric I assume you'll just kind of stay in touch with similarly situated towns and see what they're going to try to do.
Yeah totally and we're just kind of waiting on federal guidance. Yeah wait for the guidance. Okay.
And they'll write the guidance so you'll have 100 other questions after they write the guidance.
There's no way to write it to cover everything. There's always that. Okay.
Okay, any more questions for Eric on the covert funding. Okay, hearing none. Let's move to our revised agenda item eight gs. That's the Board of Finance representative of capital improvements planning committee. As I mentioned earlier, Louise is going to resign from that position. So we have a couple of options here, like to have some member from the Board of Finance representative on that capital improvements planning committee. Kurt is currently a representative to that committee as a member of the fire department so he has offered to also represent the Board of Finance. I personally wouldn't mind seeing additional representation so we would also we would benefit I think if somebody else wants to volunteer to be the Board of Finance representative to that capital improvements planning committee as well, so we
kind of have a broad and deep representation over there. But I don't think there's any reason Kurt couldn't represent both the fire department and the board of finance. So that's where we are. Is anybody interested in serving as the board of finance representative to the capital improvements planning committee?
If you need to, I will be the person of last resort because I don't have a job. I do have time to volunteer, but I'm not as qualified as other people for that. Do know I mean? I'm intelligent enough to figure it out but I'm not in the trades. I'm not built, so. Yeah,
don't have to be. Don't have to be? Okay. I mean that all applies to me and then some Diane. I'm just an insurance guy.
Actually Diane, I do feel like having a couple for lack of a better term lay people on the committee is not a bad thing. Not at all. I mean, yeah.
So you would be a fine fit if you chose I to would mention I would serve in the other capacity also if no one else wanted to. But trust me, if you want to, I'm all for it. Can you remind me when they meet? The last Thursday of every month.
07:00? So this sort of time? Yeah. Right around seven.
So I'm already doing the community center thing. So but if you need somebody.
Well, the reality is Thursdays are actually one of my good days. I can Rob could do it. Perfect.
Well, two volunteers, sort of fine. All right. So, so Rob is saying he may be available and Diana may be available or you, are you.
I'm not sure exactly what you're on available if you're desperate and nobody else wants to do it. So it's pretty clear.
And you know you'd already said it so I couldn't come in and say the same thing. Well done. Two possibilities. Want to make a motion.
I'll make a motion for Rob to be our representative for CIP. Second.
Okay, we have a motion and a second. Does anybody have any further discussion? Rob, I think you do a fine job and I appreciate you being willing to do so. If you have to miss a night for some reason, Diane sounds like she'd be a pretty good second.
And from a liaison standpoint we do have Kurt but yeah yeah yeah
yeah that's actually really good to have that backup so all right good okay any more discussion?
So the next one is is the next one tomorrow Kurt? Last Thursday of the month? Yep. Was it the race result?
Yes. Me check that out. Fact. CFT was the eighteenth. It's actually the third Thursday. Third. Alright.
I have a I have a third. Okay. Sorry. Just want to put something in my phone so I don't forget that I did this in my moment of altruism.
Yeah we had we had the 18 you know. Yeah and Amanda can you just make sure to CC Robert England on the the CIP announcements.
Well let's not get ahead of ourselves we haven't voted. Sorry sorry.
I'm going down in flames here with all the enthusiasm I'm showing.
Just kidding. Sense that we may have a vote. If any more discussion. Okay, let's have a vote all in favor of Robert presenting the Board of Finance at the CIA be. Aye. Any opposed. Any abstentions. Glad to hear it, thank you, Rob appreciate your. Step it up and I'm also appreciate you guys offering so okay, so the motion passes very good Thank you guys. All right now we'll move on to our item eight H, which is our budget discussion. So there's a couple things I think you know we. We obviously have budget workshops, up and coming. We've covered a lot of territory tonight. Do think we should probably talk a little bit about the budget, even if we don't go in-depth. Eric did present a document. I don't think it's actually part of the packet that has, I don't know what did you have about 143 options here, Eric to reduce the budget at the town. You've got actually just joking aside, it looks like you've got 11 items totaling a total of $75,000 that could be trimmed. There's some significant downsides. Eric, this is kind of exactly how I think we would want to see that. I can't be a spreadsheet guy, but this is very well structured. It's actually well done. I don't know if we want to kind of go through each of these but that wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing to do either.
I'd also just kind of want to clarify you talked a little bit about your budget spreadsheet earlier, talk about the status of that. You was there anything else that you changed in here that you had not that we haven't talked about we know you took the money for out of the both the RAM and the AES budget. Anything else there that we would want to take a look at?
No, not at this point. The only thing I would say is I didn't update. So the main budget sheet and the revenue sheet are correct. I would ignore the last page, the graphs Okay. Because that has not been, I haven't updated the column information. So that is not gonna be correct. But the first, the revenue sheet should be correct and the budget sheet should be correct.
Know your number does not include the rebate to the towns correct?
So the RAM number in the M column, which is the one, colored column, has included with that money in the money coming back to the town from billing the town and not the school. So the reduction from that, and it also has in it the reduction from the money they're returning to the town from last year's unexpended fund balance. Well, the $77,000 credit is in there, so to speak. Correct. Correct. Right.
Okay. Yeah. And you could see that differential. Our contribution dropped. Okay, all right good.
Now I will tell you that that's my calculation of the numbers. That was the original, the last budget they've actually put out, which is the March budget. Plus we know how much the contribution is. And also what I don't know is how much they actually budgeted for So I just subtracted out last year's money. And then the second part of that is I just basically subtracted the amount they said our percentage back that we're getting out of that total pool that they're returning to the towns. So I think that number is if not perfectly accurate, it's practically accurate.
It's going to be in the ballpark I think for the purposes of our thing. Appreciate you doing that. Yeah, so I was very pleased to see that the RAM Board of Education voted to return that money to the town. Had talked to Lori Blake last week to clarify that that's actually what it was that it was the amount potentially be returned to the town and the way she was talking made it sound like that was not necessarily the direction that they're moving in and I, you know, said I thought that he should strongly consider returning a good portion of it. Apparently Marlboro's in a tough tax situation this year as well, even maybe not so much. At any rate I'm glad we didn't we didn't have to. We didn't have to take that. Battle up, if you will, I think that it was the appropriate thing to do on their part so I'm glad we handle that. All right, good. All right, so thanks for the clarification on the spreadsheet. We've obviously got some things to take a look at here. I do think that if everyone is amenable it would make sense to kind of go through Eric's
proposed or not proposed cuts but, you know, the options that he's presented to the to the budget. There aren't that many of them. It's pretty straightforward. He's listed the benefits and he's listed the downsides for each. Eric, have that? Can you wanna share that on your screen? I have it up if you want me to do that too, we can. Sure. Okay. Just while we're waiting for that, I'll also mention that we had we talked to Valerie about potentially off, you know, asking to offer the same type of thing are there. Are there some savings that they could potentially look at and you know if it's got an impact negatively, if they can identify with that impact is so that we're not flying blind if we make adjustments to their budget. We want to know and present a rationale to the to the town residents when you go to vote is actually why that would make sense or what the downsides would be if if we do. Eliminate some money from their budget, so we haven't heard anything back from them, so if we haven't I would propose that I'll write a note. To to the board of Ed and also to Valerie just kind of restating what we'd like to see seeing if they can come up with something internally. Even if it's something you want to do, but identifying what the downsides would be along with that, so we all know that it increases a big one to swallow. Okay, Eric, I'll turn it over to you.
Okay, item number one is combining the building department administrative position with the assistant town clerk. Currently, we have a twenty six hour a week position and a thirty hour a week position. Both of them offer benefits. We would be combining down to a single individual that works forty hours a week and has basically twenty hours in each office. It would still be a union position that offered benefits, but your total costs go down pretty significantly. So that's probably the biggest single thing from the operating budget that you can potentially do without, I guess, laying off another employee. There's really not all that much. The Board of Finance has its own legal budget that was put in there because prior boards of finance didn't feel like they had enough autonomy to be able to seek legal advice if they had questions. So it's a budget that hasn't really been used from year to year. It used to be higher. It used to be 4,000. And I recommended they cut it down to 2,500. But that's never been tapped. So if you have the confidence in the Board of Selectmen and myself as the town administrator, you can agree to give up that budget and spend out of the town's general legal fund if you have legal questions. So it just simply depends on what your comfort level is in doing that. Previous boards had lobbied for it strongly. You may or may not agree. So that's number two.
Eric, let's pause after each one just to see if anybody has any specific questions. Don't want to drag it on, but I just want to make sure that we kind of give everybody the opportunity. I mean, number one, we kind of talked about and I think it was pretty clear, there's probably isn't any.
Number one, today the person who had that job has resigned. So we don't have that position at all. So is there a potential that the union will say no, you can't put those duties into that other job?
Isn't that odd? Specifically, we don't fill a position. So basically, I mean, there's a question of how hardball you want to play. So I am under no legal obligation to fill that position. I am because it is technically a union position. The duties of that position have to be filled by a member of that same union. And they've sought fit to legally remind me today that I'm not doing that at the moment, and I'm about to be grieved if I don't stop doing that. But that's neither here nor there. So what I'm saying is legally I cannot fill that position. Legally I can assign those duties to the assistant town clerk. I can just do that. What I can't do is adjust the town clerk's hours and increase her hours so there's enough time to actually cover both. That has to be bargained with the union. And the union also has the right to force me to bargain over the wage for the person doing that. Because if you're assigning somebody additional duties,
you know they're pretty much always going to ask you to pay them more. So the long and the short of it is the union's going to let me do it. You know, they're gonna horse trade a little bit, but we're gonna be able to do it. I have no question about that. Number one, would say is pretty close to a given at this point. Okay. I've met with the union a couple of times, we've talked it out, they're broadly in agreement, we're gonna go back and forth a bunch of times to get an MOU that we can both agree with, but that will probably happen. Okay. Thanks Eric. Yep.
My question on number two, the thought process behind this was having an independent budget because there were disagreements between the Board of Selectmen and the Board of Finance and who's right?
Yes, that's exactly what it is. And the Board of Selectmen not thinking it was appropriate that Anybody's done board of finance spent legal money trying to prove the board of selectmen was wrong.
Basically. I mean, I don't have a problem giving up a legal budget as long as we have access to legal funds if we need it. You know what I mean? I'd also note that, you know, some of the driving forces behind that idea are now on the board of selectmen.
I was having the same problem. You know, I think I seem to remember that. This is a different era I think and there was a lot of, you know, there was more discord and concern about the way the town was being operated so you know that's something to take into account, I mean in theory it's not a bad idea but in reality I think we all have to look at that and say is that something really likely to have happened. If it's not something that's happened it's just going to be an under expenditure each year, you know, so, and as Eric said, do we trust the board of selectmen and the top manager to allow us legal representation when and if we feel it's needed? It's different times now. Think that has gone away. Right. So I
think we can dispense with it. We haven't used it, as Eric said so
you know in this context I'm I too am comfortable letting it go yeah but we can make decisions on all these things later but yeah right now I would agree with that so in this so Eric number three then if you wanna Yeah number three is tougher.
Obviously you can't control union contracts but a significant fraction of the total number of employees are non union. A lot of them frankly need a 3% raise to stay above the new state minimum wage requirement, which is going up to $13 an hour in the new fiscal year. And we have a lot of our employees that make less than that. So those have to stay at 3% because we have to make minimum wage. But a lot of employees make enough that they don't technically need that. And the Board of Selectmen made a decision to recommend a 3% raise but ultimately that is your final decision. It's not a big savings. The only place where there would be significant savings is if you reduced either the town clerk or the registrars because those both got much larger than 3% raises. But that was due to frankly both those groups made an argument that their workload had increased fairly considerably. And therefore, given the number of hours they were ending up working, that that was appropriate.
And the Board of Selectmen agreed to that. But again, ultimately, they are elected officials and that's your decision. So I mean, in total, you're looking at somewhere around $4,500.4600 dollars in savings if you elected to do all of that. You're going to piss people off, but you know, I hate to say it, but that is life. If we have to, we have to. And the other thing to note is that the Board of Selectmen elected not to build in any raises to the budget for members of the MEIU bargaining units, which are up for negotiation this year. I had originally built in a 3% raise for them, but the Board of Selectmen decided to zero out that raise. So more than likely after we're done with collective bargaining,
our employee costs are going to go up somewhat because we're going to have three employees that are probably not going to go end up with a zero raise. So the maximum you could potentially save is $4,600 if you do that. But again, that comes with some downsides.
Number four department is in the MEIU employee? Say again? What department is in the MEIU
employee? So the MEIU is the assessor, the assistant assessor, and the tax collector.
I look at three, this is my opinion, so everybody can have their own opinion, but for we have so few town employees and employee turnover is an expensive proposition of getting a new body and new training and you know it's not easy. Know with the town comes the longevity. The longevity brings some value to us because people know how things have been done and things like that. So for the cost savings, I don't think we get a lot out of it. And we make potentially more problems down the road. Motivated employees do a good job for our townspeople so to speak. Disgruntled employees just make things harder.
You know what I agree and I'm sure that you know the meaner we get with employees that affects retention you know, and if you look at it objectively, the town of Andover has had an awful lot of turnover, you know, and some of that's inevitable, but, know, some of that is basically due to decisions we're making or the boards are making. So that's that. Number four
is the Board of Selectmen do get a Does anybody else have a different take on the number three than what I do? So I mean I just Diane,
I agree with you 100%. I think the town, the Boris Lechman and Eric have worked on, know, reducing or overhauling the town employees jobs are ready. And then to basically the amount of savings, like you said, 4,616 and gonna have some very disgruntled employees that we just probably just brought them out of being disgruntled. And now we're gonna throw them right back into being disgruntled by a minimal cut as far as I'm concerned. I agree with you 100%. I would just like to leave it all alone as far as the town employees go.
Nobody's living high in the hog of these jobs. Not at all. No. They're buying lottery tickets every week. Right.
Yeah, so same thing with the Board of Selectmen does get a small stipend. The first selectman has elected to zero out his stipend. So he's given that back. But the Board of Selectmen do get a stipend a number of years ago because they were pissed at the Board of Selectmen. The Board of Finance did reduce the salary stipend for the Board of Selectmen. So this is actually already starting lower than it used to be. But you have it is a budget light item. Do I think it's a good idea to knock it down? No, I think you'll just you'll get a few people pissed off, it's probably not worth it, but you asked me to examine everything. So that's examining everything.
So what would it be if we like zeroed it out entirely? $4,800 Thank you. Right.
Leave it alone. Just tweak it. All right. Go ahead. Item
number five, there is a legal line specifically for the assessor's assessor's office. And the reason is that the assessor's office gets sued from time to time over their property valuations. Typically, you get the most suits in revaluation years because that's when people see the biggest changes and when they get the maddest. So the budget is increased because we're coming into the next fiscal year is the year in which reval and we have the most likelihood of getting sued. You can kind of roll the dice. I can't tell you whether we are or not. I mean, got sued two or three times the last reval year. So it's very definitely a possibility. You could trim that budget a little bit but you're rolling the dice and hoping that you're not using your full regular legal budget budget so you have some slack to transfer money into that legal budget. So that's really the downside. It's risky.
Like we're actually increasing the budget for next year because it's reval and then we would decrease it the year after when it's not a reval year. So every fifth year that budget gets bumped up for a year. So number six, we do currently have an alarm in the old firehouse, but since we're only storing vehicles in there, I'm not going to pay to it's kind of broken at the moment, So I'm not going to plan on fixing it. And I think we can get away with not heating the building at all if we have to. Right now, we're only heating the garage and only minimal enough to keep it warm enough for the vehicles to start. And so the senior drivers don't complain that the vehicles are ice cold when they get in. I mean, one option is simply to, we have a diesel vehicle that plugs in, we can just plug the vehicle in and eliminate heating the garage, not a huge savings but it is some savings, they already equipped with block heaters. I think I
they're not, that's going to wipe out any savings you got there. Think it's selling those.
Yeah, I think I actually I saw a plug coming out of the front. So I think it does have a block heater. I don't know whether it has a tank heater also. But the other thing is if it's enclosed in the building, even if it's not heated, because three sides of the building are, you know, it's an underground structure and only one side is exposed to the weather, it will stay probably above freezing. So you'll probably be able to start the vehicles anyway. You'll have a bigger mold problem going forward, definitely. So I wouldn't want it for a long term solution, but for a couple of years, you can probably get away with it without anybody. Mean, they'll be unhappy, but they can deal with it. Eric,
as long as you leave those vehicles in that building, they're actually dying a slow death from rot because the building is so damp. And that's been an issue before with our senior vans. What's the timeline of getting those things moved out of there and just parked somewhere down in the public works facility? I went by the Columbia Public Works facility today and they have, one or two of their senior vans parked in their salt shed just to get it out of the weather. Yeah. I think that's My my my point is, I mean, we have a lot of room down down at Public Works. Yeah. I know you we we talked about you were working at CIP that you're working on that what what I think Jay and, the guys call the Cold Storage Building. But like I said, that that building is so damn, and and and and there the the vehicles are riding from the frame underneath underneath up, and you're gonna have issues with that later on whether you can plug them in or not. I think the sooner we get those vehicles out of that building and shut that building down and knock it down or burn it down, I don't know, whatever we gotta do,
I think the better off we're gonna be. It's it's disgusting. I I even if I was a driver, I wouldn't wanna walk in there just because of the mold. Yeah,
and I think I would be happy with going back to parking them outdoors all summer, all spring, summer, and fall. The only reason we've really parked them inside, you know, more than anything else, because it's a pain in the butt to clean the snow off them, you know, most of our drivers historically have been pretty old. And the last thing I wanted to do was make George, who was 83 years old, you know, try to climb up on a ladder with a brush, you know, trying to clean his vehicle off before he, you know, took somebody for senior transportation. But you're right, we do need an alternative. And I mean, I think really what we're talking about doing is putting up a metal pole barn somewhere on Public Works facility that just has an electrical connection so the vehicles can get plugged That's
all you need. And lighting. Yeah. And I'm sure the guys down there are available to clean the snow off the vehicles. The bus drivers do their buses. I mean, you know, come on. It's just it's been terrible since they've been in there.
I agree. It's it's not a good situation. I I mean, it's a crappy building. It was a crappy building when the fire department got it in, you know, 1927
or whenever, and it hasn't gotten better since. There's a there's a question for Eddie and as far as the seniorcommunity center, is there any item is gonna be made to park the buses close by?
If it's not available, I can chime in on that. Go ahead, Jeff.
We actually, I talked to somebody today, last Friday about building a pole barn for my house. And I talked to him about possibly getting a quote. I invited Eric and Scott Person to come but they couldn't make it to the meeting. But that's what we're kind of looking for is a four bay, high bay pole barn to store the vehicles in probably down at the town garage as part of our overall plan. There you go.
Yeah. Okay, so moving on, the one that's most years we could probably get away with it is you could probably take some money out of the overtime snow removal budget. Right now it seems like we're going over budget. I don't have enough historical data to tell you how often we've done it. It's been mild for a while. This year, we'll use a little over half of our overtime budget, but we're actually probably, that's an underestimate by a couple thousand dollars because some of the money got stuck in the regular overtime, not the snowplow overtime. We can reduce that budget somewhat, but if you kind of take a look at the historical average of how many plowable events you have in Connecticut, even this year, we're well under that number. So it's clear that if we have more than the average historical events for plowable events, we're gonna go over in the budget. So it's just a question of what your risk tolerance is for overspending that budget in a snowier year. I look at our current budget and say probably every fifth year, we'll be over budget because we're plowing more than average and we're using more salt than average because of conditions. But that is a potential area where you could cut overtime costs for snow removal. The other thing is you could decide that we as a town were willing to accept lower expectations for the road surface. I mean, certainly if you go to a lot of northern areas,
there's not an expectation that you're going to be back down to bare surface as soon as we are, and that they'll accept an icier average road condition. So it's a trade off we can make. I suspect you're going to piss off a lot of people. I mean, I'll share here about it if we decide to do it, but that is an option. And I put kind of street lighting in the same category. I mean, I hate street lighting because I'm a big dark sky guy. I want to see the Milky Way. So, I mean, we could cut out every last little bit of street lighting, parking lot lighting, name it, and I would be in favor of it. But most people wouldn't. And part of our streetlight budget is the lights out here in front of the town hall, because those are on the streetlight program, as well as the lighting for our athletic field. I mean, potentially if we whacked it all, we could save about $6,000 But I would also say we're already running a lot less street lighting than we used to because the previous first selectmen
had about half the street lighting the town had torn out. So, again, it's a question of what you're willing to do. I do think there's some safety aspect to providing lighting in key areas, but it is a possible reduction.
Eric, what kind of percentage you're talking about? Because frankly, if every street light, little street light went away, I, I wouldn't have any problem with that I don't particularly like them and I'm guessing a lot of the residents that they've got a streetlight sitting on their corner, you know, 100 feet away from their house probably don't care for much either if it's always on Parking lots at the school in town, it's a little different story. So I'm just wondering kind of what the if there's you have a breakout just ballpark or idea what that.
I think ballpark the lighting at the town hall and at the ball field is like a third of the total bill something like that like a thousand yeah something in that range what other street lights do we have
There are some corners and things, know, I think it's Like intersections
and things like that? Yeah, there's a few spots. We don't have a ton of street lighting, but we do have some that we're paying for on an ongoing basis. I can't tell you what all the locations are. I would have to look that up. Past years, Eric,
in past years, and you know the previous administration chopped, like you said, over half of the streetlights we had. But it was a recommendation that every intersection have a streetlight. And along with the school, the town office building, the fire station, who has our own built in streetlights. But mainly it was every intersection had a light for safety safety reasons. And then they took out probably two thirds of them as a cost saving measure. I recall that people were actually complaining that they lost their lights just for security reasons. So that's another side that we have to look at. But I'm going back a few years, but every intersection in town was lit up.
Do we pay for the lights at intersections up to state roads? Like when you get down to 316 and Boston Hills is straight state roadway? I don't think so. I think I think the state does their own.
Okay. You know, in that type of thing, but I'm talking about the town roads. Right, the town roads. Yeah. And I mean I can remember growing up in the Andover Lake when I was a young kid there, you know, they put a street light in front of our house because it was a somewhat dangerous corner. Know, people parked on both sides of the road and you know because it's around the lake and but that street light actually lit it up so they could see the cars parked and so on and so forth. So it seemed to make it a lot safer and the people like it. That's
just my little little dip for I have to compromise with safety. Do know what mean? So
that's what they're used for. And like I said, the previous administration cut those probably almost either in half or two thirds just to save whatever amount of money you saved. It wasn't much.
Yeah, we certainly have had an awful lot of complaining by the school bus drivers because there's no longer a street light that illuminates where the bus parking area is. Right.
And we've gone back and forth with them trying to get that code to pay for it. That actually is one that one that's been removed. That was that was removed by the previous administration.
Yeah, I've believe me I've heard all about that. Oh yeah. So that's one. It is possible, I did have a conversation today with Wally and I asked him for what would happen if we gave them an across the board cut in their fire commission budget of 3%, which would be around $4,200 in savings. And he grumbled a lot and said, you know what, if they absolutely had to do it, they could do it. But he couldn't give me any idea about what exactly they would cut for.
Eric, if I can. And I was going to speak on it when you were complete, when you were done. We meet Monday night, this upcoming Monday night, and I was going to recommend to the, to the other board. We have a zero increase budget to begin with on our operating budget. The, capital improvements committee basically originally gave said, well, put in for a $100,000 of capital equipment, which which would have purchased three of our five priority capital pieces of equipment. We did that based on their recommendation, and then the Board of Selectmen cut that by 50,000. So now we're down to $50,000 in capital. That's our only increase of our fire commission budget over last year. And basically, our original request was for the, the, battery operated jaws of life tools because our hydraulic tools are becoming obsolete,
and we can't get parts for them and things like that. And I had a discussion with with with Chief Mike today, and he said no no matter what, we need we we do need those, you know, that that set of jaws, which was, I think, 36 or $37,000 total. So I was gonna recommend that we give back maybe the 10 or $12,000 in capital that we had requested and just purchase those those those jaws of life fuel. So, how do you how do you cut a zero increase budget? And and we we we spend a budget right down to the I think we gave back $2 this past year or something. I mean, with an increase in training and increase in everything else and increase in calls that we've had due to COVID, plus everything else, we have a major influx of new members that we could probably get some young people that that we're going to have to outfit and train, you know, eventually. So there's not a lot of room for us to cut a zero increase budget. And that's and then I'm speaking operating other than the the capital and just cut it right down to this that one item, which we originally requested. Right, Eric? I mean, you wouldn't
you're you're a part of that on CIP and recommended we do the up to a 100,000 and then it got cut. Right. What do you what do you want us to do?
Yeah and like I said, I mean you know none of these cuts come without consequences real consequences to real programs. You bet. And the library is the same way. If you cut the library budget, you know, the library is, you know, about 75% salary and it's, you know, the majority of the rest of their budget is the cost of books. So if you cut their budget, they're going to buy less books because they won't have the money to buy the books and they're going to be open less hours and that's really you know what you're looking at. You know, same thing with the rec commission budget. I mean, you can cut the rec commission budget. I mean, it's not a given that we have to supply a porta potty to the athletic fields. And it's not a given that we have to supply a porta potty to the rail trail slash Andover Museum. You know, they're really nice amenities. It's a great thing to have, but that can be cut. And you can also cut their programming and just tell them to do less concerts, cancel their Easter egg hunt or whatever. Make them live with a tighter budget. Would they be happy about it? No, they'd be pissed at me, but you can do that. So what I'm saying is if you did all of that, you can get down to what we talked about, which is a $75,000
budget reduction, you know, without cutting into capital or doing major service impacts. Know, beyond that, you know, if you want to leave capital in place, you know, your only real options are getting rid of the resident state trooper or, you know, going after the library in a big way, neither of which I'm in favor of, because I think those are both public amenities we really ought to be providing to the community. But I also understand that not everybody's in agreement with that. You know, your mileage may vary. The other question is can we preload expenses from this year into next year? The two pockets of money that we know we're going to have are the money allocated for the software transition, that's $30,000 and what's left for the COVID relief funding, which is about 20,000 ballpark. Probably one of those two we're going to tap to pay for the improvement to the Veterans Monument. I don't want to necessarily talk about it now because it's still preliminary, but we will have the ability to apply some money from the unexpended fund balance to offset our capital expenses. From the original capital plans that were presented and approved by CIP, the Board of Selectmen already cut $25,000 from the Fire Department Equipment Fund, dollars 25,000 from the Tree Removal Fund, and $15,000 from the building maintenance fund. So let's talk about what would have to happen if you wanted to pursue cuts to capital. I mean, the first thing is the town agreed to lease, not lease, but lease to purchase the loader two years ago. So we're still paying that off. I mean, you could potentially decide that that should come out of the public works equipment fund now, which it didn't in the past,
and put that $32,000 lease payment in the public works capital equipment fund, which would decrease the capital equipment fund basically by $32,005 You could choose not to fund the multi building fund, which is what we're paying for the new community centresenior center. You could take some money out of the tree trimming budget. You know, I hate to advocate that because we've had so many trees come down on town roads this year and we've had so many resulting closures. But I mean, you know, we certainly don't have enough money in our budget to do all the tree trimming we need. You know, I look at it and I say, whatever you give me for the tree trimming budget, that's what we'll use.
So you can't cut that radically, but you could cut that a little bit. You could cut some more money from the fire department equipment fund, but we're not going to be able to the cuts the board of selectmen put in there still left it just enough money to fund the three capital items that CIP approved. If you cut it further, you're basically telling the fire department, you know, you're only going to get one or you're only going to get two of the items that CIP approved. But again, you can do it. You can cut money from the road improvement fund. Dollars 20,000 off of that basically reduces about a half mile of shim crack seal chip seal. And you could cut money from the building maintenance fund. The Board of Selectmen cut that from 60,000 to 45. You could cut some additional money, and that just means we do less. We've got a couple $100,000 in projects that we practically need to do. So we simply knock them off at the rate at which we're funded. And if you cut $5,000 from that fund, you're still probably above your building You're still probably able to put enough into the buildings that they're not continuing to decline. You're just not making things better. So that's pretty much what I've got in terms of recommendation.
Obviously, I don't want to cut the town budget at all. I think I've actually kind of given you a pretty reasonable, pretty fair budget to begin with. But I get that where you're looking at a pretty significant budget increase, and you may decide as a board that we need to make those cuts. So that's what I'm presenting to you.
I think the town budget has been pretty lean coming into this year. I think we've done a really good job taking a lot of the fat out and everybody's been very proactive and only asking for what they need and not inflating the numbers. I mean, I think that we can get the savings from maybe reducing that position and combining some duties with the building, but a lot of the other stuff is really gonna hurt a lot of things. It may not be worth it in the end. Don't I see a lot of opportunities here. I think we can maybe get $50,000 but that's it. I don't think you're going to get any more out of the town. You know, we actually increased the town budget by adding that AHM stuff back into the town, which it didn't have last year. So we kind of like, you know, had something that came up unexpected that we didn't anticipate, you know, so. And we save it on the school side.
Right. But we're sticking it in the town side side, you know. Yeah. So.
All right, I appreciate the work here, I can think it's. Looks like a reasonable you know. Ways to look at this. I'm curious about the fire department capital fund maybe Kurt would know, so Eric you mentioned three pieces of equipment that had been approved by the CAPC. And Board of Selectmen already reduced the capital across by 25. Did that still allow enough to cover those three pieces? Yeah, barely. Okay. Yes. What were the three, what are the three pieces that we're talking about? The first was the jaws of life. Right, which
The second was a commercial washer because there's a requirement that after fires your turnout gear is washed. We don't really have a washing machine capable of doing that. Dryer. And for the life of me, I can't think of what the third thing was.
The '27 going on twenty eight year old air compressor for SCBA. Right. Right. The the device they use to repressurize
the Oh, you you refill your Scotty there with that. Okay. Yes. Yes. That
was the company Shipman's who got the, they were the low bidder on that, on that part. They are taking the older one in trade. So they gave us a pretty decent trade in towards the, the new one. So they were a little bitter out of three.
Okay. And I would remind you that, you know, budget for the fire department, the capital budget was again looking at what the fire department presented for a longer term, a ten year, like this is all the equipment, this is all the stuff we need in the ten years, and divide it out and say each year's chunk of that is roughly $100,000 So that was the original, the value that we stuck in there originally was essentially what our long term replacement cost for their equipment was broken down into years. Eric, correct me if I'm wrong.
What was the balance that we had after the trailer was purchased the UTV? What was the balance of the, of the equipment fund?
I, I can't tell you off the top of my head. I think it's right around 30,000.
That's, that's what I thought now. And then it was recommended CIP to put $100,000 into the account this year, right? And I get 125 or 150 into the town equipment fund. Correct. But didn't the Selectman cut that cut our fund by 50?
No, they cut your fund by 25 this year. Last year they cut it by 50.
Year they only cut it by 25. And I'm mistaken, I thought they cut at this at one of their budget workshops, cut the allocation to 50 instead of a 100.
No, they cut it to 75 instead of a 100. All right, well that's even worse.
That's No, they cut it to 75, not they cut it 75. Oh, okay, okay, okay.
That's fair. Was a little confused on that because I we were told it was chopped by $50 so.
No, no it was only chopped by 25 And it was chopped by 25 because they did the math on the stuff that you had the bids for. And they said if they basically zeroed that fund out and spent every dime in it, you could still buy all three of those items this year. You would just have zero in your fund when they were done.
Well, of course it would be up to the board on Monday night, but I think we can get by with that the one purchase for this year you know and whatever savings that would be but that that'll be up to Wally and rest of the board on
Monday night but that doesn't take it away from still having a legitimate need and we're gonna have to buy it next year, right? So I Correct. Mean It's not like it's luxury items that we're buying.
And Diane, that is why I kind of put operating cuts first. As much as I hate to do it, town has tended to always balance the budget by just cutting capital, which works, but you just keep running up a bigger deficit in capital. So you're not in the long run, you're not saving anything.
You're just pushing that expense off to future tax payers from Rather have a plan and live by a plan and say, you know, in ten years, we're gonna need x. As long as we're conservative in our planning, we need to put aside the money every year so we can do what we have to do. Because we're never going to be able to come up with a chunk of money unless we bond. That's pretty
much what the CIP has been doing, Diane, is actually devising that plan for all departments in town. But here we are looking at a 7.5%, you know, tax increase and we're just looking for every penny we can to try to save.
I mean, we're trying to look at our means, do know what I mean? Just, and just by the necessities and I think we're kind of there. Yeah.
Can I just mention the poor little library 75% of their budget is benefits and wages 25% is operating cost, you gave them 3% raises? And you want us to cut 3% which means we have to cut the raises plus more. Right. Well, actually, Linda, we can't cut your ways and wages because most of you we've got to make you can't cut it but we've got to make up the difference out of our budget for the wages. So, no, look I'm being very blunt that cut would hurt. Yeah, it's over 3% off just the operating it would be easier than because like 75% of the budget is salaries,
I don't know where the would come from. Right, you'd be open less hours. You're right, I mean that would hurt. Right. There's no question. I'm not trying to sugarcoat it and saying it would be easy for the library to absorb that. You're not, it's gonna hurt. It's going to be less hours and less stuff you know for the public. I'm not saying I'm in favor of it but you asked me to say what what are the possibilities so that's what I'm trying to present to you. Okay so now
are we asking the elementary board of ed for 3% cut too or anything like that? Yeah we asked the elementary board of, mean we asked Valerie, I asked Valerie at our last meeting to do an exercise like this. I didn't I don't think I requested a specific figure I said can you oh no we did actually we said can you go and do something I thought we asked for $75,101 125.
And along the lines of what we got from our past superintendent in the past when we were facing a crunch. Right. I remember that. We haven't gotten a response yet but we did ask. And Mark was talking earlier about following up on that. Yeah, these are just options. We haven't decided we're at any reductions yet. The whole point was to lay it out. And so we could look at it and say, we're not going to ask the library for that, you know, that that's the point. We're not this isn't like gonna
happen necessarily we're working through it. Yeah, this was good for me because it showed me how lean we are on the operating, know, on the town side.
Really, we are pretty. We have been for years now. There's not a lot there.
I mean, it's really that first option is great and then after that it quickly gets into diminishing returns.
Right, I mean, you know, if you think about it, you know we're largely a salary driven organization you know much of our much of that is already basically part of a union contract so other than laying off employees and you know we will have by the time we do that you know we will have reduced by three the number of people you know with full benefits at the town hall which that already comes as a cost. I mean, you know, it comes as a cost in retention, know, and it comes as a cost in, you know, labor hours you have available. And some of it we can absorb, some of it, you know, but
it's not free either, you know.
The only other thing is to say the town hall is only open three days a week. Do that, I mean.
Yeah, you know, no, I understand and you know and I've said that to the board because you know one of the things that's almost problematic is we're kind of trying to make individual deals with individual departments and right size them all but you can't do that. Now pretty much every office in the town hall is going to have different hours they're open. So before you used to be able to walk into town hall and the majority of employees would be there And now it's like, oh, well this person's here, but that person's not. And we don't have coverage in this office, but we did this morning. And that's an inconvenience to the public. But unfortunately I think that's something we have to do. We can't, maybe we're at the point where we can't afford to have the office fully staffed all the time we're open, and maybe in the future we do start talking about going down to three days a week being open as a town hall or two days or one day you know.
There's a lot of things to consider now. No, it's not. I think ultimately when get some feedback or make some decisions about the school we're going to have to go through the town in addition line by line with these concepts of these options and start and basically finalize that know that that budget. There's a lot a lot to consider here. I think we're probably good with this unless anybody else has any more questions. Gary, Sherry.
Yeah, I just want to let you know that I know that the superintendent is working on that list for you. And she has been over the past few days. So
I'm fairly confident that you'll get something soon. Okay, good. Thank you. She may need to go with the board of Ed on that too and talk really stuff a little bit. Yeah, it's not a trivial task and we know that either on Eric or on the part of the school district to dig back in and try to figure out what the impacts are all the time, it's unfortunately it's got to be Yeah, I know she's
working with the board chair too on a lot of it.
That's kind of what we figured out. Thank you. That's good to know. You're welcome. No problem. Okay, anybody else have anything for Eric on this or my thinking is that once we kind of get some more feedback from the school, have to put the rubber to the road and start looking at this. We've gotten a lot of feedback from members of the Board of Selectmen's office. We've got some digesting to do where the RAM budget is going to end up being. We haven't got firm numbers from them yet, but that's going to have to happen. Does anybody want to have any more discussion either on the town budget or any anything specific to the schools or or Ram at this point.
Ram did say RAM today that they were going to take all the fees out of their budget.
Yeah. So the budget spreadsheet you had for me today already has that taken out of their budget. Now it's my calculation for taking it out, not theirs, but that's going to be pretty close to what their budget as they've agreed to so far. Will they make further changes? I don't know. But that should be
practically correct. Yeah, he might be a couple thousand off but yeah. Okay, well we do have, obviously, several more budget workshops scheduled. And we are going to have to, you know, really put the rubber to the road I think at the next, next couple. Hopefully we'll have the feedback from the school then we've got some pretty solid feedback from Eric we're going to have to go department by department line by line I think really and just, you know, say yes we're good, you know, let's make an adjustment here we move down. It's going to be, it's going to be fairly complex really difficult. Hearing no more discussion on the budget regarding this, I'll just review we do have upcoming budget workshops scheduled over the next three Wednesdays, the thirty first, the seventh and the fourteenth. So a lot of work to do and we'll, we'll try to get this all lined up. And in that I think really. Anything else from the board, I do want to say that they're there the weekend of the week of the fourteenth and it probably doesn't. Really need to be said now, but just as a heads up companies trying like heck to get me over to Germany for two weeks and I really doubt whether that's going to happen due to the COVID restrictions, but I may not be available for that meeting or it's going to be tough for me to potentially meet it but I'll do everything I can to make sure I do it remotely if I am in fact
over there. But anything else from the board on the budget?
No, I just think we have a hard job and I thank everybody for their hard work.
I think I think it would behoove us all to kind of do everything we can over the next seven days I know I'll be spending time this weekend to really try to digest all of the input we've gotten from various sources, the updated budget information from the schools and really kind of understand where we are and what we what we think can can be done. So coming down to it here really, I think.
Is there anything the board wants from me specifically for the next meeting? Anything I can provide you to make your lives easier? The only dream couple million dollars. Buy a lottery ticket. No.
You know the only thing I would say is that if we do get updated information from RAM, you know with the final number then, then I would plug that in the AES one, you know we may want to do a little what ifs, but if they if they come back with a full blown budget revision then obviously we can plug that in, But I, know, I suspect we'll probably get something more along the line of what you did so let's, you know, we'll kind of wait and see. Other than updating that Excel file with an updated version. Can't think of anything, Eric. Okay.
My goal when we get to the end where we're making the final decision is to have a final, like you said, Excel file with the correct numbers in it so we can see how everything lies. I don't want to have 10 versions of something and trying to piece and stuff together.
Yeah, it gets complicated and I'll try to make sure I work with Eric to take that task on to make sure we've got as clean a file and as updated information as possible in advance the meetings.
Sure and then the only other thing I think may change from the town side is in a week you know we it's possible we'll have a memorandum of understanding in place for the combined position, in which case I will build that cost reduction into the budget so you can see exactly what it looks like. And the other thing is as soon as we have the updated information on the actual healthcare costs, we will adjust the line items for that also. We just don't have the final numbers and I know about what they're going to be. It's not a big total reduction. But I don't want to do it and then go back in a week later and have to change it again by a few $100 each. So I'm waiting until we have the actual numbers.
Okay, makes sense. Okay, so hearing no further topics brought to the fore for the budget. Let's move on to agenda item nine, which is approval of the meeting minutes. Nine A is the approval of meeting minutes for Wednesday, February 24. Regular meeting minutes, anybody want to make a motion to approve those? Do all three in one motion? Sorry.
I'll make a motion to approve those minutes. Yeah, we probably could actually I'm not sure exactly on the rules. Don't know if we can or not.
Let's do them one by one. The Diane moves to approve the meeting minutes from Wednesday February 24 Kurt seconds any discussion. Okay, all in favor, aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Okay, motion passes. Item 9B, Wednesday, March 3, meeting minutes. Motion to approve or amend. Approve. Motion.
Kurt moves to approve the meeting minutes. Any seconds? Second. Diane second, thank you. Any discussion? Okay, all in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? Motion passes, thank you. And the last but not least, the Wednesday, March 17, special meeting minutes. Do I have a motion to approve those? I'm looking at you Linda. Okay. Everybody got to take a turn.
Top of my screen. All right. Linda moves to approve those. I have a second. I think it's my turn. Supporting actor Rob England second. Any discussion? All
in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Any abstentions? I hearing none motion passes. Thank you everybody. Agenda item 10 is the liaison reports do we have any we've already discussed some of the CIPC activity. Better talk about the Community Center so. Right yeah talked about yeah.
I'm good and if this drags on much longer I'm just gonna have to duck off, I have to get my mother to the airport in the early morning, I gotta be out of the house for 6AM. I'm dragging here.
Understood. Yeah. Okay, well I think we'll move on to agenda item number 11. Thanks Rob. If you do, we still have a quorum. So board open. Anything else have to go to the to the front of the board anybody have any topics to bring forth. Hearing none we'll move on to agenda item 12 which is public speak. Amanda, do you want to go around the horn. Sure. I'm sure it homes.
So I don't have anything right now. I'm fading fast so I gotta move on.
Thank you. Ed Serizli? Ed seriously, are you still with us? Wake up Ed. All right moving on, Joanne Hebert. Oh, I'm almost done, thank you. Thank you, Jeff Murray.
I won't keep this long, but I want us to comment not as a selectman, but as a private citizen. I've sat through this meeting tonight and I've sat through many meetings, many board ed meetings and Eric's proposals tonight, cutting staffing, cutting our fire equipment, limiting concerts, removing the bathrooms from the ball fields in the rail trail impacts to our snow plowing, senior transportation impacts by moving the vehicles out and cutting the heat from the old senior center cuts to roadwork. To me, it's just very minor things that we can do but it's going to impact so many people negatively. As a selectman, I do see the need that we need to do for road work. I mean, I am a cyclist and when you travel these roads in town and a car, you're kind of isolated and you don't really get to see the condition of the roads, but when you're on a bike and you're looking and you see what dire situation some of our roads are in,
we can't let this stuff go any longer. It's got to get fixed. I mean, it just can't keep continuing and we need to put some attention to that. So, I I know you guys have a hard job. I know everybody on the board of finance has a hard job, but we really need to concentrate on the school budget. I mean, even the board of some board of education members have even admitted it's significantly padded. I mean, I've had a couple of people coming to me with concerns about we have certified teachers. They're certified with master's degrees teaching at the preschool level where we only need state requirements only are associate's degrees and some classes that need to be taken. I was actually mocked at a board education meeting for my request for snacks. I mean, the request of why the snacks cost was so high and the supplies costs were so high at $35,000 The cost for a liaison were so high. And if you check your emails that I sent you, I mean, have a proposal right now for three kindergarten classes with 10 students in Paris. And if you look around at adjoining districts, I mean, it's not happening in any other district right now. We're the only district that's proposing that in the COVID gap. The school needs to come in with some sensible cuts.
And I don't think 150,000 or I don't think 200,000 is going to do it. I think at a minimum, they need to come in at a zero budget. That just needs to happen. That's the only way we're ever going to get anything passed in this town and get the infrastructure improvements that we need. I'm just asking you to please, let's not settle on 150,000. Let's not sell it 200,000. We need to make the hard decisions. The town has gone to the limits of, we've caught everything that we possibly can And the school board really hasn't done that. And we need to really push them to make sure that they examine every line item and make everything sure that we're spending is equitable to the taxpayers because the things that I found they really aren't, and we really need to do something. And that is your power to do that. Send a message to the of education to please go back and come in with a zero based budget. And that's all I got to say. Thank you very much for your time. Thanks, Jeff. Thank you, Jeff. Leanne Hutchinson. Hi. Hi, Leanne. Go ahead.
Hi. No, I just this minute signed in. So if you're in public speak, it's just a coincidence. So I don't have anything to comment on right now. Okay thank you. Thanks. Scott Persson.
Yeah all I want to say is that Jeff has said everything that I would was going to say you know I would mimic him so I feel the same way that Jeff does about this budget this year. Thank you. Thanks Scott. Thanks Scott. I believe that's it. Yeah,
it looks like it. Okay, thank you everybody. I know it's been a long one and it doesn't, we've gone through a lot of detail. Haven't really, may not seem like we're making some that much traction, but we are getting there I think. So we'll move on to item 13, which is adjournment. Do I have a motion to adjourn? Motion.
Diane, motion to adjourn? Can she get it up there? Rob seconds. Discussion? Okay. In favor, aye. Aye. Any opposed, nay? Aye. No abstention? Good night. You. Appreciate it. Bye everybody. Good night. Thanks.