January 5, 2026 – Finance Committee – Video & Transcript
January 5, 2026 - Finance Committee
seven o'clock council of the the former council of aging meeting room pursuant to chapter two
meeting is will be conducted both in person and via remote access and with the remote access one
may watch or participate remotely with the meeting that's found on the town website and required by
law or allowed by the chair persons wishing to make public comment or otherwise participate in
the meeting are welcome to do so and we would like public comments to be two minutes or less
seeing none online or it's pretty straightforward okay rob's on now so we'll do votes uh with roll
call welcome rob uh we have carl and me bill april and iris in the meeting first order of business
is uh vote to review and approve the uh minutes for the december one meeting which i april sent
around a few days ago i think it was awesome how was the lesson all blends together a couple little nits
was that the dates kind of got different formats in the first one there book to approve minutes 11 17
slash 25. and i don't know if you want to go to spelling out november or nov or something it gets a
little bit confusing sometimes for folks as to which is the month or the the date but i don't know if
there's a template that the guidelines weren't very specific one of the things i did add to the minutes
because i noticed everybody else is doing it is the call to order and the time okay so i added that um
at seven o'clock um but there is not a lot of guidelines on the minutes and requirements okay
only other thing i had from my standpoint was the last sentence of the kind of first paragraph that begins our second third paragraph against the committee explored evaluated the demand versus supply of developments i'm not sure i understand that phrase you're getting out there with it it might be something more like they also discuss strategies to educate the public is it the first under follow-up discussion again in the june number 17th meeting yes just the first like actual the second sentence of the of the kind of body of the explanation they also discuss strategies to educate the public
demand versus supply yeah i think the demand versus supply was a phrasing that i introduced basically that idea of like is the problem is the development limited by the number of people who want to develop here um or by the town's tolerance for the developments that people are are trying to put up if that was kind of my intent with that supply versus demand because we talked a lot about how to make the town more open to um proposed developments but if no one's proposing developments it doesn't necessarily matter how open the town is to it if that makes sense it makes more i do recall it now uh when i read it i wasn't i just wasn't understanding it yeah for sure for sure i my my confusing wording sorry about that so would you like to change it to um evaluate the demand versus supply and proposed developments or um i was trying to like just like real estate developments because i think when you read it you're not sure if it's like developments like something new versus a development something to build okay that sounds better yeah and then on the last um the next meetings again just to be consistent with whatever gig format you use you know one five twenty six one twenty twenty six and five and change and then we accept the minutes as amended second around carl yes yes phil yes phil yes phil yes and iris yes rob you okay yep works for me okay second item is communications yeah so i just forwarded everyone an email with an attachment um rob and i have been trying to find a time where we are going to get together to discuss i think a more overarching strategy which we had discussed last time in terms of who's our audience what are we trying to communicate the means and methodology for that communication we have not yet had a chance to do that but i did over the break have a chance to put together a preliminary infographic that i would love to get some eyes on and reactions to um does everyone see it have you are you opening it okay so i do let me explain what's going on and sort of again what our intention was we had talked at a high level about this idea of whalen by the numbers right um essentially perhaps a preliminary view of getting um the option for people to consume some of the data that we do have available but we all know data can be heavy statistical data can be heavy so the idea here is what is on people's minds what's a way to help them um contextualize the information that we previously put together um and build a nice job what i took here and so if i walk you through it right so there is some demographic information the demographic information i feel like is important to conceptualize what we're talking about here um and then there are like some really high level things right high level things for people who may or may not be involved really with the town now if you are at all really involved this information is not necessarily going to be that new so think about it this way this is really for i think perhaps the less well-informed consumer in the town who's looking to just understand again a little bit of wayland and a little bit of how we stack up so we're looking at how our taxes split again in these really big high ideas of the town the school the unclassified how our tax bills stack up here against general massachusetts general peer towns and then if you look what i did sorry sorry what i did in that also how we stack up i took just a couple of the metrics bill that you had put together and did box and whisker plots now this part i'll be honest i this is my third iteration on this i did a couple different iterations and trying to figure out the best and i am like super open to feedback here in terms of the best way to demonstrate this was really hard this was really hard for me personally to be like statistically i believe this is the correct way to demonstrate quartiles median where we where we stand however i am like the first to admit that like i have not thought about a box and whisker plot probably since 10th grade right and and do people actually understand what this means do they actually conceptualize like if you actually look and see where i put the wayland i actually tried to put us where we actually are in relation to the box and whisker and again super open to feedback on like this is not the right way to demonstrate this data because it feels a little tough um feels a little tough for me even knowing what i'm trying to represent to actually say that this is a good representation of it so if others have thoughts on like different charts or different visuals to help illustrate sort of where we stand i would be super open to going back and redoing this this is again just the first pass of like here's one way of showing that and then for our peer towns because i feel like we get that question a lot yeah and so again i also just did a visualization of that as well so open to feedback open to thoughts open to this was not the ask iris by all means no no i'll give some more thoughts in the box and which it's really tough right you know the the objective is to show how we stack up against other towns so if we can show it as a range rather than as a box and whiskers or something you know like almost like a thermometer of where we are but anyway i'll give it some thought i don't want to i'm open but there are ways in which the general public could probably understand that this is a box right right yeah but i think sorry go ahead rob that's okay sorry i think maybe so i think jalen had sent us uh some data from sudbury um and i think what they uh what they did that is kind of the the deceptively simple approach right they just gave everybody a bar right um and they just showed a series of bars and i uh so for all the you know all the peter towns and their their number for each kind of and just a stacked up list of bars i found that kind of helpful because i think i was kind of surprised how large the list of peter towns is and i think
yeah just the number right there were quite a few peter towns it felt like um and it feels like they kind of do cover a bit of a range so having some idea kind of within that not just we're in the you know we're in the top quartile but for specific towns right how do you compare to sudbury specifically as opposed to this broader basket of peter towns um was helpful for me so that was just from a visualization perspective just kind of seeing seeing the raw numbers for each town which is admittedly a lot more numbers right and the sudbury document was like 170 pages long or something and that that immediately struck me as perhaps too many pages yeah yeah i was gonna say i do think that's more instructive i i think it i think sometimes a little bit more transparency i understand it's more you know you want to make it yeah concise right but i think just being clear and naming every town is people like that information too okay i did it also i don't know the structure but i did bar charts do that right can you guys see it on the i can absolutely just do a bar chart and do like a highlight of you know robert has also really over complicated so yeah i really like what you did okay but but but i'm sure the technical life i believe the technology exists so that if somebody goes to one of these charts and clicks on it you can get all the detail so you don't have to have it on the front page we could we could do a hyperlink yeah yeah absolutely absolutely absolutely we're kind of you know designing it in real time but you know if we didn't if we didn't want to do all 13 towns or whatever you know you could do the triple bars like you have and what it would be you know first quartile lay on third quartile so those would be your three bars so you could see how do we compare with the the first and the third quarter and that's interesting to whiskers but it's a three bar way of yeah and we could maybe list who's in who's in which quartile kind of separately so you don't have so you could get that information of you know how we compare sort of time by time yeah i don't think about and and again i we will meet in a couple weeks and i implore you all to give this some thought and and sit with it and let me know what you think the thing about an infographic and the way one of the reasons why i started this was the first pet project right was we had that we liked the edc's infographic and the thing about an infographic right is it's compelling because it's simple and easy to read right it's compelling because it takes these little tidbits of information and does a visualization if i put 10 bar charts on here we've sort of lost that ease and that that like compelling element of it so again we we will need to balance but i am absolutely open to feedback this is nothing but my 10th iteration but your first pass um and again one thing i wanted to just sort of ground set uh for all of us to me this is going to serve particularly fiscal year 28 when we start talking about what could be even harder sort of financial choices so right it's not like a one shot thing i want to sort of think about it and i'm not saying i know but maybe quarterly or some period to go out with you know another way of looking at oil and by the numbers and sort of gradually sort of educating everyone ourselves included as to kind of where it all stands so i wouldn't i don't feel the need to make it like this is the one shot got it got it okay i appreciate that and i think you might be right because if it's a more an iterative document where what we're doing here is setting up an approach and a document that can act as a template then then can be more of a living document that we can adjust as we see a need and then adjust it as a tool more to it right exactly add add take some stuff away and you know it's not always wailing by numbers could be wailing by numbers with this with now we're going to look at these numbers now we're going to look at this right whatever but again i think the intention and the goal is like with infographics generally it's like we're looking to use that visualization but but also maybe have the hyperlinks sort of like the appendix behind it that everybody's not going to go to but maybe some people and then they'd be able to see the full bar charts or whatever makes sense what were you able to connect with jaylen at all over the break no i'm not no yeah i encourage you or rob rob i think reached out to her and we we both were on that email chain but i don't yeah she was supposed to be here tonight just uh her title i don't remember what it is but it includes communications and i think her passion is to sort of think about these kinds of problems and and participate and i welcome that she uh she's ill today so she wasn't able to participate but um there's also sort of an iterative what is the message i mean for example if i look at your bar chart this looks like our taxes are way higher than everybody else's whereas if you look at it we're like at the third quartile we're actually not at the top right and and so it sends very two different messages if you want us you know we can make it seem like we're not that far off or we can show this and it's like wow we're way high yeah it's the same number well it's just that it's compared to right one of the other things where you have your map because it's like it's a lot of work that you did this and i appreciate it but because it's not where they really are you might want to kill the map and just do it as bullets and have the isolates in there sure and then i would actually put those up here at the top and then do the bills stack up after that bar chart and it's like you're flowing into your information in my first iteration i had like little needles like like pinpoints that dropped where all the towns were and um in a hilarious i showed it to my husband and he was like everyone who looks at this knows where all these towns are so you know i'm newer to massachusetts i think it might help you condense a little bit more sure and give us that real estate back for something else absolutely let me just check are you guys wanting to be in the finance committee meeting oh great oh yeah yeah yeah thank you come around the table okay just in the um the first one the 5 000 households yeah median household income is 21 000. so some of the 53 some of it what is with 50 53 percent of households okay
i think that uh might have been maybe like 53 percent i i moved some stuff and how i had sorry so i need to probably double check that some of the data you know there's also a question of what data source some of the data is census data right and then some of the data is massachusetts state data so part of this too is like the demographic data i've pulled census data so you know if anyone has any thoughts around we don't prefer that data like i think i'll just put the source on there too yep i will source everything out i don't have any view one way or the other it in some ways keeping it once uh data stores might make it easier um unless it's telling us different stories um sometimes you find depending on it's not that it's different i will say like one thing here and math major we can parse it out right like the bar chart looks slightly different than the box of whiskers because we're talking about averages versus medians right and so they paint different pictures yeah no that's the median that that is what i would also say but you know if i go to massachusetts state the averages is what they readily publish and sort of is front of center i have to dig for to get the actual data set and so it's like one of those interesting things of i would hate to remove the average and then we all of a sudden get communication from the town of like well i went on to the massachusetts website and the first thing that's published is the average and here's what it is and how dare you the uh division local services which is part of department of revenue is where i go to for the town numbers i used your link what's that yeah okay okay and i thought that was actually meetings nope i'm just that data set is median yeah but if you go to the website to get to that link so like just if i google massachusetts like tax bills or like state revenue the website that they publish the like readily available data is like averages so it's like it's just a little you have to go hunting yeah but by the way i think there might be any error in your um there's inconsistency between your bar chart which is our average tax bill and your box of whisker right the 17 858 54 matches but if you look at the blue line that's around 12 000 and that's at the very bottom of your box of whiskers so that's not the the average for the other anyway we can talk offline but there's i think it's because the average versus median though could be yeah right so like that's the thing again but your whisk but your the bottom of your whisker isn't a medium that's the low point so it says the the lowest town is 12 000 and up here it says the average town is 12 000. so i guess just before we go kind of too into the weeds on the exact numbers um i and i have said we didn't quite be connected on this i had been thinking about this a little differently and i guess maybe my first question um is just like what what's our intention with this document right like i i think i and maybe this is just me kind of having taken something else out of the last meeting i i think this is all interesting data is the intent of this document and phil maybe you were kind of saying we envision this as something we're going to publish and it's going to be the first in a series and it's it's building up to educating people for how they should think about potential overrides in the future or is the intent that this in and of itself helps people understand how to think about kind of overrides in near-term budget questions so i i don't think of this as overrides specific at all i think of it as completely i think that myself included have a very modest understanding of our town and the economics and so helping to educate that over some period of time you know and how do we stack up against others i think is useful for any kind of financial decisions we're going to be making yeah no for sure right and i guess i'm just trying to think like they're part of what i thought was trying to think through in my head is there are obviously a million different numbers we could put on this chart and just kind of trying to think about like what what we need people to understand by when right and the series of data points we give them over time that that lead them to that understanding yeah the quest i don't think i have a good answer for it um and that's why i do think that it's sort of in my mind quarterly will come up with a new one um and it may not even be like comprehensive it might be let's you know drill into whatever dpw and yeah that area stacks up against others and you know whatever that dimensions that could be useful i do think it goes live on our website um as a possibility and that you know gets archived and then others get added
all to be determined i really like the beginning and i thank you this is amazing for getting it started yeah i love the infographic and just having the concise and i think you know hopefully fosters some discussion i think in the past we also have and i just pulled it up from a few years ago when we had done just the average tax bills i think that will be relevant i think if we just have that as part of our website and that's more static i mean once we get yeah we've got information for 23 once we get 24 and 25 i don't know when that's actually released for everybody um you know we should update that just to have more in the detail but i love kind of this notion of doing a high level and do you feel stronger because you said average textbook well oh yeah on that one i i don't that had been average and i think we had the data going back to 2019 yeah yeah that's part of going back you know as far as you want so i it doesn't have to be we just have to recreate you know what's been done it's not a normal distribution though right i mean the average no well they the spectrum of how much skewed is it one way or the other so that that sort of gives you a sense of if median and average are really different they kind of are right and i think that's where i haven't graphed them together but i do think if you do it based on quartile honestly we look pretty good we look in the mix if you take a look at the historical averages we look first of all the historical average document was a different peer set so we really look a little bit skewed right we that that's actually probably what's going on with this is probably the old i took the average from that document because that's what fincom was previously using and it's a different that's probably the difference yeah so like there was an attempt as it's been explained to me not completely to choose a peer set that would make us look really expensive yeah it was literally looking at towns to because that was the intention okay as it was explained to me yeah it makes sense yeah that's probably that's why so you know again we can continue to refine this i think in my mind ideally maybe before we really get too into the warrant we would have some iteration of this that we go comment and publish yes yeah um and that could be for this quarter and then we can talk more about maybe after the one it's all done doing another one yeah i know we're talking a lot about how it's spent but i'm curious if there's um should we also say how our taxes are collected right like what percentage is coming from like before you get to spent should you be saying like this is where our tax revenues are coming from can i ask you a question april i love that thought do you care more as a taxpayer how your money's spent or where it's coming from i think it's both because okay so many people complain uh commercial yeah and that's been going so heavy i think that they have presented that annually and what brian has and the town manager presented annually so that's like i think that's relevant you know in and then it kind of flows into like this is where it's coming from this is and i think it helps i couldn't help understand one to each other because i'm going to get so much okay every time and the reality is it's three percent right no it's non-residential right yeah i'm not sure it's a pie chart because yeah what does it show thank you for the feedback thank you for the reaction i appreciate that i'll give it some more thought yeah thank you anything else uh and rob and i will again i think hopefully meet soon to talk through like a broader strategy and approach um you know again i think the goal is that this isn't the first thing or the end-all be-all um but rather again being thoughtful as to we have different um different kinds of personas in town right different kinds of consumers of information so i think ideally we would put together a communication strategy that thinks through both people who are less well informed than those who maybe are slightly more informed and lean on some of the uh communication outlets that exist thinking about the way we post and other things like that um and certainly the website and so i think hopefully the next time we will have had a chance to talk yeah and i encourage us to get together at the right state time with michael as well because this could go into his newsletter and a page in there that sort of helps that context especially as it gets further along the budgeting process and do we know what the timeline on that newsletter is uh it came out today i think it comes out once a month i believe so it's my recollection
and we don't have to wait for it yeah no just just help yep yeah anything else communication wise this time is there anything else anyone wants to share with us as a matter of priority regarding communication
if you think of something let us know i do encourage you to sort of think through what a list of other quarterly updates not even flushed out but just sort of placeholders yeah i think eric when you and i connect on that i i did some of that and the other thing i did is i just started thinking like we said about some of the channels but we can cover that in the next session thank you thank you for doing this it's fun to see progress and that said we'll turn to edc a few minutes before uh 7 30. excellent um thanks so much for having us uh we have a few folks who are virtual that will need to be elevated to panelists how will the chosen one even get in there i can slip through the corner but i don't see anybody they're in the audience so well there's becky for sure um rebecca mattson allowed to talk that's the only one i see good evening can you guys hear me yes we can hear you excellent excellent um so i'm gonna call our meeting to order um we do have quorum uh becky though not as many as we uh assumed so um calling easy meeting to order um at 7 29 p.m um in person we have karen kelly katie harris and david volari and remotely we have becky studies thank you welcome i'm sharing today's meeting but of course you know everybody's voices we we want her today um especially becky's but we would love to hear any more uh off the cuff feedback um we got some nice feedback from william thank you for that um any other off-cuff feedback from the data we presented but also um i think in our first kind of slice of getting together on how we move forward with this information um thinking about uh growth targets from you guys yeah we can start to think about how to craft some solutions and work together on that the question was clear and reasonable um and it's not easy to answer yeah yeah the uh idea of you know if we collectively the town had growth targets that sort of said okay with this amount of growth we can cover all of our expenses you know with our current sort of tax circumstances and you know without that amount of growth then it's two and a half overrides or or cutting expenses and with even more growth it's sort of like hey now we can do more things i don't have good model for giving sort of what those benchmarks are i thought about it becky sent a an email that i wasn't able to respond to earlier basically laying out that question um and as i thought about it it's sort of based on my knowledge but pam's been here longest in april maybe have other sense if we had new growth at 500 000 a year uh sort of a ongoing basis that's sort of like kind of status quo i mean it's better than some years that we've had but that sort of like probably keeps us with level services being able to sort of uh you know drive the town the way we want um if we get it to three quarters of million dollars a year that sort of like gives us a cushion but the swing factors are so significant you know state support um you know special expenditures special ed in particular but other special expenditures that come up that become you know really significant are there anything is there anything in the next three to five that you is on the horizon that will be particularly impactful i can see now so the the there's two things one we're going to go through a massive investment in infrastructure for the water system right um that may or may not go into taxes it's not clear exactly maybe significant or much of what will be funded through wire rates which will still come out of everybody's pockets so that's going to be difficult but that process is ongoing so that's one variable the other big variable which is i just don't have my arms completely around and maybe others have better sense is pension fund liabilities particularly the unfunded liabilities from prior years which has projected now based on actuarial tables and based on assessments um in 2037 if i remember 32 32 no was that far away i think it's 37 maybe it's 36 but it's on that order that's that will be a significant step down in expenditures for the town step down yeah so it's on the order of six or seven million dollars a year and that basically gets covered at that point so that becomes a cushion but you you know that's a long way to win other perspectives from fincom i think it's good to have the historical growth i haven't seen those numbers and that that's helpful because then you could pick the highest that we've had and said that's a good goal i think it's yeah i agree i think it's helpful to see and we've had that sort of regular kind of average new growth and then when we've done a project and when you can see that jump because i think it helps in the way the whole story yeah kind of like to demonstrate like okay here's how that helped our new growth and so that helps our um we're the our levy and so we have more capacity and i think you know we just the capital we just formed a capital verb to do capital planning focused on that i wonder if just having sort of a plan kind of if we set out a five or a ten year plan on what might be prospective projects and i know it's like there's so many variables it's going to be really hard to predict but to have a sense of okay if we believe x project might you know create this much a new growth versus the other the projects that we've sort of cited um yeah i think it to kind of have sort of a yeah i think that we have options just to kind of see things visually and yeah heading heading on to that with the thought of like a capital review one thing that struck me from what becky presented is um we've had many conversations about this come right about the capital expenditure right which is seven million dollars for this building right and and what i recollect from those conversations is those conversations are tough because if i think of traditional metrics what's the valuation on the building does that represent a 20 you know capital investment in building that needs to be maintained or not and it's tough to i think everyone sees the need but it's tough to figure out from a data standpoint of like is that um permissible is that really like solid um a solid approach and i think what struck me was a review of the capital things coming up to see if there's the opportunity to reuse the strategy that's been successful for you all of trying to get an outside builder to own that and then take that off the books for the town to me seems like that would be i would be interested in seeing that that to me seems like that would be potentially useful right like to see is there an opportunity and again i i don't know that these actually exist but is there an opportunity to do something similar with some of the spaces that we want to reuse some of the projects that are ongoing like we know we have these buildings that have to be maintained is there an opportunity to say to a builder you come in and do this for us and there's something there for you as well we're putting money into our buildings and and so there's an opportunity to get that funded a different more creative way i would be open to that does it make sense what i'm saying or do you feel i'm not sure same point the the i mean this building for if this was to be developable for housing um in addition to whatever is the town purpose for it then maybe there's a developer's interest in that um that they would sort of say if we get an opportunity to do that we can give you a town building in the in the process i'm not saying that's a good idea or not but but then i'm shocked and becky reconfirmed um the a thousand dollars a square foot for the town to build the building and not just our town right for towns to build a building versus 250 dollars a square foot for so that that's a separate issue that's not one that i would see edc necessarily being involved in it's sort of like getting figuring out how better to do capital projects is sort of a a town issue michael issue dpw issue or whatever but but to the degree that there's developable property in the and that the you know independent third party would want to develop it and could in the course of that also do something for the town that might be and i would just note from the from the audience i did reach out to kelly lapin who clearly is an old fincom alum who's on cipc and so they're just getting their sea legs um so ultimately as they get their whole plan together which will take them a little bit more time then we can definitely plug in with them and talk with them but it'll that will really be as phyllis to your point it's a little bit different than generating revenue but at the same time a dollar is a dollar right so how do we figure out how to how to kind of approach this from different directions and those will be catch as catch can it'll be hard to do a real plan for that unless i mean maybe cipc will have a very definitive plan about what what buildings to tackle first what needs to be done and we can kind of plug in in that regard so that will be more sort of opportunistic um so we'll definitely keep that on our radar um in as much as we focus on growth um again you know we're sort of looking for some kind of guidance and you know phil we're on the email trail with with brian keveney and it's interesting that other towns you know typical triple a rated bond towns have two and two to two to two and a half percent of growth every year so for us that would mean 110 to 140 million dollars worth of growth to our tax base every year or 1.7 to 2 million dollars of growth every year that's how far behind the eight ball we are and so it's a question of as we look at all of our goals is that 500 000 enough do we look at 500 and maybe a little bit higher look at maybe two or three scenarios where we kind of look out and say what if it's low medium or high uh goal setting in terms of economic growth and part of that is just understanding how it can offset people's tax obligations because at the end of the day it really is about keeping taxpayers actual tax burden lower than what you know in this curve that we've been on for a long time we kind of bent the curve for a little bit with alta oxbow but it was you know it's a one-time thing we've got to kind of do things continually and so you know i was looking to fill for a good goal and that 500 that's a question like is the 500 enough or is it a good starting pot or it's so part of it is looking to fincom and asking you guys knowing everything you know and nobody has perfect knowledge um but maybe how best to set our goals based on everything that you guys know and there may not be perfect answers but welcome your input i will follow up with brian uh this week hopefully uh to get more clarity around you know what is possible um to be clear fiscal year 27 projections i think dor initially said our new growth was going to be 400 000 um and and um it's currently shown in the preliminary budget as 500 000 i've seen other numbers that go as high as 900 000 um which is amazing because there's no new big project that has gone ahead and when i asked brian about this a little while ago my understanding of what i heard was that the assessor's office actually hadn't been pursuing um the backlog of projects that have already gotten approved and and residential you know uh people's um and so new assessments are going out for folks that have actually are expecting them because they've come up but it hasn't gone into our tax base yet and it will now i mean there's a little bit of a chicken or egg because i think i understand that you know you'd like to have a goal from us and i'm thinking well tell us what's possible and if you said well you know we think that two million a year is possible i'd say how let's do it so so i think there's a back and forth you know we we can set some goals based on our history and what we've done before but you can also sort of help us and say well this is what we think is possible if we could get this through becky when you mentioned that some other towns uh comparable towns uh would be doing one or one and a half million um yeah um is that data that you can circulate um what for the data that that brian provided yeah well no that's two and a half percent growth which is typical yes that that data yeah yeah so all that was just based on what is typical for triple a rated rated towns and with our tax base being 5.7 billion right so two to two and a half percent of that is just those metrics yeah but i wonder how comparable that is if it's you know if those towns are commercial growth towns which we are not exactly exactly so i don't know if there's better data based on towns that are you know like us are so heavily residential and not as much commercial so the data we looked at was that we're in the lower part but there's towns behind us so i mean we were we were in with sudbury and lincoln and you know so you know one of the other big swings that i think is happening right now right is collective bargaining oh yeah yeah that will swing us a lot right now where it's really unknown as to where those rates will be set as far as the cost of growth for future growth right along with the capital budget like those are big things that we're waiting on right now in order to understand what the growth expectations of budgets are that will be so if we think like some shorter term things that might be potentially lower hanging fruit which may be lower impact but we could start to think about now is we have talked a little bit about the neils tax revenue and so um wanted to understand from all of you as well our thought is so it's uh it's epic it's at the max right now i believe that can be oh it is yeah becky is that correct yes the 0.75 is your maximum yep so but the question being you know could that be something that we start to think about using differently perhaps for the corridor or to support our to target the revenues that are there correct and that's like two or three hundred thousand dollars a year or something think about yeah it's yeah it's about 300 yeah going up though yeah yeah i understand yeah yeah yeah the uh um the idea of uh focusing funds to specific purposes it reduces the flexibility obviously of the select board in terms of saying wait a minute we really have this other priority and we have to address that so uh it's the few times there's been i think there's an energy fund that's a sort of dedicated fund but it's but it's only you know if there's no other priorities uh kind of language um so i'm not sure what has been tried around that um but to the degree that it's not completely constraining and maybe something we could be supportive of yeah you have no it's tricky but a lot i mean many many towns use this no in a targeted fashion so um with anticipation that it is going to grow uh in 2026 and really probably see it fully bloom in 2027 um it's something to consider that might be an easy way would would some amount of revenue help well i mean we haven't reversed engineered what would 200 000 do for the corridor but we could i'm not like an engineering study but even just bullets it'd probably be helpful i think if we were going to go in that direction for sure that would need to get done um did you did you all have any reaction around you know thinking about some of the town land like orchard lane for residential condos it's really not a role for fincom standpoint yeah yeah the overall nature of new growth that is a role and that's really helpful but you know how we best spend town resources is really you know how we allocate time i don't know that's one that we would weigh in if you came to us and said wait a minute we've got some possibility of putting something significant together here oh by the way would be another oxpo alta oxpo kind of thing that'd be interesting to know that and be able to weigh in on that from that standpoint but i'd like a dog park but um roller coaster could be nice uh becky yes yeah so phil i would say hearing what everybody's been saying the historical growth would be really helpful to know um just to see what we've been over the last 10 years just to see what that is um and i'm sure this data is somewhere but we just you try to find it i have no idea where to begin to look and you know if you guys can help or with brian can that would be great to know historical growth to take some stab at what the next 10 years i know that brian had a slide in his fiscal year 27 looking ahead for 10 years i don't know where the numbers came from should we use those should we not use those but you just have to start somewhere right it's never going to be perfect but at least take a best stab at where we look like we're going to be over the next 10 years and then you know we can then i think maybe overlay since you guys don't seem to have a magic answer and why we don't either right if there's no there's no perfect answer so maybe if you know knowing where other towns are but they have a much bigger commercial tax base then maybe we do something like okay what does 250 000 of new revenues 50 and 750 per year average it's never going to go perfectly like that but you'll have ebbs and flows and then just look and see how it bends the tax curve right it does you know and we can see does it make even 750 doesn't make enough of a difference because part of it is you know whether or not we use what karen just brought up with the orchard lane land if it's you know we really need to do that to move the needle then maybe that's something we do maybe if we don't need it to move the needle it just kind of puts everything in perspective um so if we could get that data from brian again the historical growth and then that 10-year horizon and if we can interpolate maybe you know brian or phil you and i can talk about it but the 250 500 750 maybe and just see what that does i think that would help inform because we're all stabbing around in the dark but i think that data might show us something um and you can't you can't guess and what you know disaster is going to happen three years from now but you know the best you can do is make some uh reasonable assumptions and then we kind of take that and settle into what the plans might look like for that low medium and high does that sound like a good good next step i'll report back to everyone after my conversations with brian perfect perfect and i'm just thinking about a lot of like just thinking about parsing out new growth relative to revenue producing just to i mean a lot of this is new growth but then we get fees and stuff as we you know as a one-time building benefit the permits and that sort of thing but or like you said if there's anything else to do with meals tax if that you know like even little things that we can it might be able to do on the margin or just to consider um i think it'd be helpful just to kind of see that menu of kind of new growth areas and then what the how you know a particular project might occur new growth and then also if there's revenue i'm not sure the request well just looking at you've looked at you've shown us a number of options that you're considering or that you've looked at just to get a sense of what new growth might be added with those and also if there are revenue fees okay fees fee enhancements yeah like that like like that that that helps with the tax bill but um you know new growth gives us levy capacity one is levy capacity and one is sort of offsetting tax
and phil just wrapping up you had asked the question or it was on the agenda was you know how do other towns approach this and again we're unique in that we don't have a huge commercial tax base so um not having a lot of great data but using my friend chat gbt i asked you know the question with some of these towns with lesser commercial tax bases how do they boost their tax bases and what came back were similar things we've seen in concord like we've been looking at the route 20 master plan looking at west concord the state basically said create targeted areas for growth kind of like a route 20 corridor focus on those very specific spots revise zoning for growth support businesses and treat them as an economic asset so that's something that we've been talking about at edc really do programming and events and working with town center and getting it to be you know really valuing the businesses that are there supporting them so that they in turn create more value um they said utilize excess town land they said particularly uh once in a lifetime opportunities they mentioned the prison for example in concord mci concord right for us it was you know the the alta oxbow site um it said be realistic about limitations particularly sewer um streetscape um and parking and then potentially collaborate on corridor plans route 20 something larger than your own town so it's kind of interesting a lot of the things that it popped out are things that we are pursuing um but ultimately phil you'd ask that question but that's what popped through one of the quickest things that we can do is get this route 20 master plan task force going i know the select board is contemplating it um but some of the fastest things that we can get going is changing some of the zoning that is holding back or creating for example not having village criteria things like that some simple things that we could do um but we just need to get started right we just need to to get that moving so are those hung up in planning board discussions so right now the select board is contemplating putting together a task force which typically towns and cities do um west concord set up a task force um lincoln around the train station set up a task force to specifically that is their sole purpose and focus is to look at that and so otherwise if you're part of it's part of another committee like the planning board just has gotten socked with two huge projects you know what's going on on rice road and what's happening over in the the um carroll school so it just keeps it very focused um and that's kind of what we need to do because otherwise it always kinds of kinds of get shunted around to the back and you know we just need to get that front and center and getting some of these things moving so i weigh in accordingly on discussions with select board perfect thank you thank you thanks for joining i think happy somebody has joined you we'll talk to you soon thank you thank you very much look forward to continuing working with you all right thanks good night our new uh land or tenant or uh owner at the town center it should be fun to be working with too have you had a chance to meet him i have not but it sounds i've heard lots of positive comments like you think you're in a dream yeah that is terrific moving on next topic warrants how do we do with these yes i did a quick review um so i just sent around oh did i yeah sent around powerpoint um
the article write-up process so we will have the article workshop scheduled for january 28th is that still yes so um i kind of just started with the article workshop and just kind of went these are a lot of thoughts off the top of my head so if people have other questions as we go through or other additions please add because i'm certain there are things that i did not include here um so starting with your article workshop we'll meet on january 28th and review review all the articles so it's all the proposed articles that will go into the 2026 warrant um look at the packet in advance so you can kind of read through and what the articles are a lot of them will be standard articles that were in last year's warrant and are in pretty much every um that goes out each year maybe just for context there will be three dozen four dozen articles total typically yeah i feel like we usually get to typically we start them if we alphabetize them a through z and then we usually get to get further yeah we usually get to maybe double i so yeah so 35 i think last year we each had six to seven with the exception of michael because he had the big one so i think he only had four right yeah that's usually it's the move to the charity yes one or none um it's it's usually that there's there is the budget article so they take that one um so yeah divides out typically to six or seven five six or seven per person depending upon the year um and some of them are standard articles so they're really pretty quick um so you'll receive that packet uh those at that article workshop uh the proposers present them it's usually a select board we just sort of talk through what the article is standard article and we go through it sometimes people will ask questions at the time you know off the top of their head if it's a new um article new content um you know just and these are things that should be considered as you're writing it up um every article is assigned to a income member and that person is responsible you own that article you're if you're assigned to that article you write it up um and you work with your select board liaison and also with the proposer sometimes it is one in the same um and sometimes you'll have an outside proposer what does it mean to write it up because doesn't the proposer write it they write the article so we'll go into a little bit of this so um they do the article language and then there are finance committee comments and then articles or arguments for and arguments against fincom does those latter three okay that's what we call fincom arguments and pros we call them pros and cons sorry to jump in too but i think that that if it's a public petitioner which i'm defining is not the town we're not a town you know a resident don't they have an opportunity to submit some minimal number they have 250 words or something like that yes so they can do so they can write that up as well um so we'll go into a little bit of that so here you know if you look at that first page i don't know yeah um you can just see what they what they look like when you first get it so it's a little bit rough when you first get you know the first draft um and then usually we are sent let's go to the next page sort of in process everyone is this is last year's tracking um slide three everyone you can see who's assigned which article and on this one there's 19-3 and i'll get into that in a middle in a minute um so we track who's assigned on fincom um who the sponsor is this one we didn't include the select board liaison but then we also keep track of the votes so as we go through and discuss um each article fincom votes on each article and also the select board votes on each article and then ultimately you will submit it once it's finished we'll get into that in a minute and our votes become record on the articles as they're drafted up as to what the vote was yes and the vote can be taking no position yes and i'll get into that one next so chapter 19 3 with the detailed write-up sometimes this was a new edition about three or four years ago i think carol martin um brought this up so fincom is not required to include a summary of arguments in favor and in opposition um for articles blah blah blah blah blah when there is negligible financial impact on the town so we review as a committee with brian keveney or with the finance director um all of the articles if we agree that there's an article that does not have any financial impact impact or negligible financial impact um we don't have to write that up in which case you go to the next slide five what we did last year and i think last year was the first year we really used it for a number of articles um following consultation with the finance director the finance committee has deemed this article to have negligible financial impact on the on the town pursuant to town code 19 3 detailed comments together with a summary of arguments in favor of and in opposition to this article are not required so we just include that language once we voted and then we just include the vote that we decided to take no position on the article um and as you can see that in this this i just pulled this from last year the article language on this example article language always stands as it was submitted as a fincom um member even if you're assigned to that you you do not change any of that article language even if there are spelling texts or spelling mistakes or whatever that's not our prerogative to make any changes there just let it stand but just to be clear i did i mean the proposer changed with my consultation some of the language right sometimes the proposer may change their language in in proposer's comments yeah um so that might change yeah so but but it's not it's not you might it's not your responsibility to change it you might have a discussion with the proposer to say oh look you know it's a little unclear or you know there's something it's actually stated here but it's up to them to to make the changes and submit that to you you wouldn't just do that as the is the fincom um write-up person a quick question sorry going back to the 1903 thing is there kind of a general rule for what negligible is dollar amount under or something you know it when you see it yeah fair enough yeah i think we had one where thank you like april there was a something about a town flag do you remember the state flag or something that had right someone had proposed that we change the state flag or we support changing the state flag because we can't do it um but so there probably is very little if any financial impact on wayland to doing that so the example i think of rob is last year i had one that was for a green burial at a private residence there's no impact to the town specifically in terms of finances for that petitioner's request but by bylaw requirements it had to go to the town for a vote and i guess i was thinking like i mean when you mentioned the state flag like you know a petition that we start flying the state flag in addition to the american flag at certain facilities right that's going to cost the town 500 bucks a year or something in in flag related maintenance like i guess that's kind of i was wondering in terms of like is there some level of like is there a a general level of dollar cost of town is less than x or is it dollar cost of town is kind of strictly zero or is it just like you say you know when you see it yeah i think it's sort of you know when you see it and and negligible i don't know if you could say it cost you 20 extra because someone had to spend i mean i i think it's just you know okay yeah fair enough we'll discuss case by case yeah and all of us can we'll weigh in as we are right if someone thinks like there may there could be an implication looking forward that would be a discussion point yeah yeah makes sense i wrote up a uh article on uh rodenticides and whether or not that the town should ban using in town facilities and it really seemed like very trivial economic impact but and nonetheless it was the judgment of the committee to go ahead and write it up i did so slide six sort of this these are the basics and and and and what we're writing up um the article language i just no actually this is the whole article um found a short one so the top piece is the actual article article language the finance committee comments you know sometimes you got this in the initial draft of the article and sometimes there's very little there and you kind of have to flush it out um and that's it's a write-up and it's sort of come it's the finance committee pretty much drafts all most of it sometimes select board will will come in and make additions but um once you as the finance committee person who um has sort of written your article you feel like it's in good shape um you would present that or send it to your select board liaison person have them review it once they think it looks good you would and as well as the arguments in favor and opposed um you're both in agreement and if there's another outside proposer you want to make sure that that person is on board as well um often they will where where do your data source obviously one data source is the proposal so you're going to talk to the proposer at some point what other data sources who else do you talk to in general um it depends on what it is and obviously yeah obviously and sometimes we talk to brian keveney like the finance director or sometimes a point of contact within the town so like i had to do the car sales right car sales i did reach out to dbw to understand the nature of the car sales i like because i thought it was pertinent information that a so generally somebody in the town and then the petitioner you're not necessarily going to general public or something not general public but um open like minutes okay and brian he was a big fan of the whelan town cam or whelan cam like all the meetings and viewing them so if you have an article that's related to a development looking at past meetings of where they discuss that to get further information unless there's some sort of sorting mechanism you can look at other committees minutes and if you were really interested you could go back to a way cam meeting and some of the more complex ones i did do a lot of looking into that to hear what the what it was kind of the um rebuttals or the where is the the resistance coming from and you can kind of get that for your opposing and then look you hear the open um i think it was the recreation committee when they were trying to do the fields you heard a lot of that because that meeting was really long but when you listen to it's not all going to be in the minutes you listen to it you can hear do you get it from the workshops at all in other words there's a point at which the petitioner proposes and that's so much the workshop is pretty quick it's because you're going through all 35 or however many there are so it's kind of a quick review it when you're assigned your article um and if it's if it's something new that's not a standard article you need to flesh it out a little bit more and i think you kind of do some digging you'll find some people in town you can figure out which you know if there's a department or or committee that it's because the opposition would be the tougher part i would think because you have to ask people right do you know anybody who's against this straightforward yeah and you can just it's sort of like to think the cost like what why might people be even if you haven't heard it directly and most of them have gone through meetings to get to that part so that's what that's why it's like the way in town camp as grueling as it is listen to some of those four-hour meetings it is beneficial it was and we'll see if that's finding it that's a good use case for you can ask chat to be to your source and then i'm not i'm not all that technical now it's pretty easy you can ask it and then and then you know what to actually go listen to instead of need to come through i'd say chat uh chat tvt will be it was a big benefit last year it was the first time i used it when i was writing it i'm just anticipating i didn't use it last year i did the best i could but it's probably not up to your standard you know level so well we'll send it back then we'll see we'll see yeah well honestly the proposers um yeah we'll tell you if you're off pace that's what i'm hoping i would work a lot with them i worked on the adu article last year and one of the thing one of the arguments that i decided i thought was real was that p that there was some discretion you know given to um to um i guess the planning board whoever moves these things sorry it's been more than a year i can't remember um but and that that might that some people might not want to give that board that discretion and once your statute says x right right um and so um um listed that as an argument against uh gave it to um this was tom hold who said i never heard that i don't think it's an issue and we talked about it and you know there's those sort of thing okay
i have a curious one of the things and i don't know if you have this in there too sure um sometimes they'll consolidate articles late not only yet so when we're assigned just as an fyi like when you start going to dig in you they could change and become consolidated so now you're combining two articles and everything changes and how you have to present yeah a lot of those are with like uh conservation i believe right right yeah the cpc that's right that that did happen last year and the year before in the year before yeah and usually like in the past those were the cpc articles were ones that we'd assigned to sort of the newer members because they're usually pretty well laid out and they're flushed out and you know there's details because the committee has done them year in year out um you know i assume we operate a little bit as a team too oh yeah we have questions we ask each other hey how have you handled this right and you can and a lot of times it's helpful to go back and look at prior prior warrants and similar articles just to see like what are the arguments in favor and opposed it gives you kind of an idea of where to start if you're looking at a new article um and yes once so once you've written everything up i think it's good slide six so you've reviewed all this um you've got it all written up you've reviewed it with the select board liaison you'll present it to fincom oftentimes people will have questions some of them you'll be able to answer and some of them you'll say oh i never actually thought about that i'll have to go back and do a little research or and then he'll kind of revamp your write-up um incorporate suggestions edits changes new information um and you may need to present it again or sometimes we'll say you know what i've got the information i need i just make sure you include a sentence on this or that or change something around um once that's all done you'll run it by the your select board liaison one more time and then you can submit it for final you've got the fincom vote we'll vote on each article you record that vote that also goes on that tracking sheet that you showed before um and once it's in final form you make sure that this is the final page it's times new roman font 11 point um no bullets no bullets on the pros sort of arguments for or against we try to do them in sort of concise little paragraphs um what else once the article's been reviewed and voted by fincom all edits to the final accounts incorporated you'll send it we have one designated income person who collects all the final reports so you just make sure that you save as you know article x xd whatever it is final okay um and submit it to that person and then it goes to that person does a final review and then sends it to the town whoever's the town representative and it goes to town council um so you don't need to worry about like quantum of vote some of the other that's one of the other lines on the bottom um it's it's your writing of the fincom comments arguments in favor arguments opposed um the select board vote and the fincom vote so that's the process other questions observations i have one other question just because it was my favorite and my biggest nightmare last year capital yeah how is that um managed this year since they have the cipc i don't know is the short answer and that like kelly has her spreadsheet back so i'm hoping she'll be able to help with the graphs and all that kind of stuff so yes i don't have an answer i'm kind of what the five year is going to look like my sense is that the five years probably going to be similar to last year's because they haven't had time to it i just spoke to kelly right there but to address but she has that spreadsheet that creates all the graphs right and all the analysis with everything so that's where like if we're not managing that well we are the submitter of it right so we'll have to figure out how to work with kelly to get what we're going to need because you're still the capital expert kelly's always been the capital expert well i was just the liaison why don't you check in with kelly and let her know that you're likely to be the person to do this in the middle um as you may have seen michael's note on december 31st indicated that the capo plan hasn't come together particularly yet um so i don't know what the specifics timing or substance are or if there's any hang-ups and stuff but i think i going back to the edc conversation i think that that's one of the things that will really swing to the outlook right for like the 10 years is because they haven't done that whole 10 years well and especially you throw in water infrastructure investments um which you know in michael's note at least i didn't see water infrastructure investments in that so i think that we're in stage right now it isn't all coming together so roughly we would get our assignments in the beginning of february after the workshop at the workshop at the workshop yeah it's assigned at the workshop the schedule is january 15th all petitioners articles are submitted and at the workshop they will be allocated okay so so i'll know my assignment at the workshop and then then they generally do when well let's turn to calendar for a second just hopefully this is you know we're going to kind of share the topics i guess um we're going to see these all of them on by the 21st okay so that our chair would be nice to me and also between now and then express to her if there's any topics if you really want the capital you can have it i'm happy to work on it because i did it last year and thank you but yeah so once you see them um and you might even take a look at last year's mark because half the articles are going to be similar and more similar if there's anything that um there are a couple of things that look like they're coming down the pipeline but we don't know that for sure so i might have you might as well wait until the 21st but if you reach out to me and say i'm really interested in this or for the lovable things only i don't want to do that let me know and and uh take it as input won't guarantee you anything no no i can't guarantee anything um and between the 21st and 28th i'm going to share with phil so it's his his responsibility again um but actually seriously when you get to the 28th um you'll feel more straight you know among yourselves yeah and so roughly how long do we have to get this process done i'm just going to say in march so it's about late march yeah march 30th everything goes in printer okay well because there's a prior deadline yeah there's uh there's deadlines before uh no december 16th is the deadline just submitting the uh fincom article comments and the uh report that's where in that month and a half we'll be meeting maybe twice a week um to to go through drafts meeting in may this year the meeting is first week of may and we're pushing we're having the right of us by march 16th yeah that's really early it feels way too early i mean it says they're going to the printer by the end of the month right so i look back at the calendar from last year last year we had a really close last year we were doing all of this work we're describing now in january because april was april was the meeting we wouldn't the actual workshop was never they don't do until january i probably started january 21st or something like that and we probably started the end of february because yeah i went to aruba in the first week of march and and the meeting was april like april 6th i believe so it was a whole month earlier yes you know than this year is so we might have more time i guess is what i'm curious about with your calendar if you're if you're backing it up it's probably no no i'm not backing anything up i'm taking it directly off of the calendar prepared by the select board i'm not making those dates that was circular yeah that feels um very it's usually it's about a few weeks because like it goes to the printer i don't know how it takes that long in the printer but it's due it's reviewed it's put into the whole packet into the you know the warrant book and format and everything goes to town review by town council i would think maybe like there's probably there's probably really a little bit more room in there but um i know last year they have a lot of it's usually at least time stuff too and the what's that the addendum or whatever the changes that would the erotic there are thank you the erotic there's a lot of erotic issues but it does have to go i mean it goes to the printer and then it they should be sort of delivered and you sit at each household so people have time to review them at least two weeks you know it's time in the mail at least two weeks for people to review it prior to town meeting so there's at least probably three weeks there so you know you kind of start under the yellow you see monday mark 16th i'm just looking oh it got stapled yes i see it now that's it's page three because it got stapled long so you're right okay there were questions for pan or comments no thank you yeah that was very helpful really kind of been laid in the process language for town council usually it's a matter of space last year i was on standoff almost everything they didn't want to take that out i guess who actually if somebody will need to do the dates that i want you may know this but we're we're gonna see the actual town budget can i i i um i feel strongly on this we rewrote code last year and department budgets are due to the town manager on december 15th i mean a preliminary budget operating budget due to the finance committee by the end of the calendar year i know we talked about this and brian you know with our always numbers we have never gone state since i've done this we don't get state aid until late january early february there's still health care insurance figures or we don't know have a definitive number until february we know that we did get it on december 31st from michael i saw that that just came out the other day yeah i feel like this is usually what we start working on because if we're not reviewing it till the end of january i mean it's it's the beginning of february and then we have questions and that's it's usually a process i mean fincom is charged with presenting a budget and if we're not doing our work to review and vet that budget and have you know awesome q a and really feel comfortable with the numbers and the department numbers if we're getting pushed if we're into february and then we've got a month and a half to do all these articles and complete the budget and then sometimes we ask for we have a lot of questions and they don't get answered at the next meeting and it goes to meetings and we still don't get all those questions answered or new questions come up and there's not time to do the next round of questions we haven't really done our job effectively so that's my concern um i'm not a huge proponent i don't love to have more meetings but i feel like we probably should have another at least one another january meeting before um before the article workshop to start reviewing so it's sort of an outsider an interesting comment because you're right you can't kind of focus on both you know we haven't really done much budgeting yet and and if the budgeting is being discussed at the same time we're doing the articles yeah well i mean and and we do we have we do we have done that in the past you're kind of balancing it out part of the re part of a meeting is focused on budget and some of it and then you get on to articles um but i feel like typically we are starting the whole budget review in january and if we're losing january we're just shortening our the window one of the questions that i have is i understand state aid i understand insurance i'm curious on why the school department hasn't given they have given budget okay and they're asked they're asking for an increase that doesn't feel low enough yet so there's some conversation so some of the i guess the land the budget that the preliminary budget includes this school budget and it's a five and a half percent number in there the town budget is one and a half percent and so there's work between and in all fairness or in the way i look at it too damn and maybe i'm wrong but i think my first year it was kind of like everybody submits what they want and we have to go through with a fine-tooth comb because it was a significant increase where i feel like the last year and this year it's like this is what you are being this is your parameters michael's direction to the department's right because i think before there were no parameters before i agree and i think we've done more work that more work has been done up front and we've had the task force that worked sort of from the summer through um yeah this is the first time we're seeing kind of the line by line department budgets and we typically do it so carl it will be who you and team to come up with a date and get brian in or brian and michael in to kind of do a line item there's a handy of course michael's schedule was tonight this is martin luther king for wednesdays wednesdays are also you know wednesdays are also going forward
i may miss that the the one of the challenges and for my recollection of last year is we were dealing with so many preliminary budgets and every time we would meet the spreadsheet would be um and maybe it was just because it was a crunched year but it felt like we were spending time going through line ends that became irrelevant in the next meeting because other things changed so it was i i appreciate it yeah yeah that shouldn't be that much changing i mean it felt like it to me but maybe i was doing it at all and i was like what you know spreadsheet are we working now so in some ways i was wanting michael and brian to have numbers that are solid uh from their standpoint i mean i don't even if we did an interim meeting between now and the 28th my sense would maybe we don't need them there but we have questions prepared for the meeting when they are i actually would want them there i mean just i i think it's a lot richer to have them i agree than just trying to read off the spreadsheet why is this two and a half percent right i don't know about scheduling should we tackle it i'm just curious because school's such a big portion of it if that hasn't been settled then it's like to even look at that part should we tackle it as like town first where that's more final even though you know the variables on that part of it i think that that that would make sense we really we don't have anything for school except a number which isn't and that's where we usually try to get more detail i feel like that's always the biggest if that budget had budget hasn't yeah i don't know hasn't presented to a school committee or anyone else i don't know this i know that in the past we've we've attended that meeting where we weren't right where the school budget is presented but i if we could start i think i feel like we should start on something which is the town budget is talent on some of the unclassified um the other thing we did last year and probably in years prior to collect our own comments on the budget and put them into a spreadsheet and send it back to brian you don't always get the answers right away and sometimes they're a little cryptic which is why having an actual meeting is a good idea but that might be another way to start because you can find time in let's say the next week to take a look of what we've got start there if you get those questions and i can consolidate them if you'd like that or so we're sending them one document what what do we at what point do they give presentations to us because i always figured that was the last meeting in or the first meeting in february was the plan okay okay so each department head makes no uh brian and or michael but then the school board the school committee will do there separately as a joint meeting that we'll invite a think on to okay in years past i understand every department did come to fincom and that was seems not value added
i do feel like this the process has been streamlined from like you guys have done a lot of work on streamlining the process of amas to get it to a point where it's not fincom asking all the questions on the budget and there's more ownership of the time yes town manager and finance director digging in more to making sure that there's a a number that is digestible i would think it's important to have michael here it was very much different this year when they came in with a one and a half percent escalation from last year that that there was the mindset was very much of let's not
in some ways it's like it helps yeah already had a better starting point carl do you want to take scheduling offline or do you want to take a date if people can send out an email tomorrow if it's monday or wednesday night that's fine i did monday the 26th i'm equally pretty oh i'm sorry i couldn't hear what you said oh sorry i said i'm also pretty open in terms of dates the 12th would be tough i just have to figure something i can't do the 20th tuesday after the but i can do wednesdays
13th or 14. 14 is on the 14th is the wednesday yeah on the table 12 14 21st i'm not sure yet it's the only one i'm not sure about it if we're going to make this useful so it's going to see questions i'm not sure it's going to be that much different on the 29th from what's there now i don't know it might be something to check in with brian on next topic on tonight's agenda was just uh suggestions on streamlining the warrant and uh carl on the agenda identifying them as phil's suggestions which they are not but i did concur with yeah uh carol i think or carol and others came up with these and you'll see they feel modest to me uh the 2025 warrant was 139 pages the target for this year is to be 105 pages like double digits i don't want to go into triple digits but nonetheless and then various elements to simplify the finance committee right up from 15 pages to either 10 pages so and and throughout um i don't think there's any magic here the uh this goes back to communication i think of the warrant is a really hard document for people for the lots of people to get value out of i think there is a cadre people who don't want any changes to it and they want exactly what they're familiar with um so some of these may be hard these are all goals they're not like requirements but i want all of us to be thinking ways to make it easier to consume last year what i did with a lot of my part of the write-up actually what i did with many of the warrants because i dropped them in the hemingway app if anyone's familiar with that oh yeah it's a website and it essentially helps you make sure you're using active voice make sure right like just provides implication one of the interesting things that also tells you the grade level that the person reading what you've written needs to have in order to actually conceptualize for most of the warrant articles it was a post-secondary graduate level and that like spoke a lot of volumes to me of like what are we really writing here and so um obviously i would take out then i would have to take out the meat of the article because i can't touch that um but i did run a lot of my pro and con arguments through that and just again the the it's just a website the application just um provides you an opportunity to simplify your language and also just like reflect on like what level of education should someone have in order to be able to read and understand it yeah it's kind of a fun tool have we ever i mean this wouldn't you know we talk about benchmarking a lot we should benchmark the warrant versus some of the other towns how do they it has been done yeah it's like there are some really long warrants out there because lincoln doesn't have any comments at all it's just the warrant yeah it's just the language yeah so um i just didn't mention when we were going through calendar the other date to put in folks of mind is february 23rd which we will be presenting to the select board on the topics of if there would be a two and a half override but also excluded debt recommendations there will be related to the water infrastructure we'll see that but yeah so just to keep it in people's mind this budget yes so the last topic is our omnibus budget bar which we've got circulated around which is just a placeholder but we need to vote on that tonight to submit it drafted by brian keveney it's got mostly xx for her numbers will go eventually
when did that come out did you send around i think carl did you send around with the it's two pages a page substantively exactly as i understand prior years so could i have a motion to submit this i move that we submit the omnibus budget article seconded carl yes phil yes bill yes april yeah iris yes rob yes seven zero any other topics to discuss tonight the only thing you touched on this a second ago but i want to make sure people understand the select board voted to raise the 38 million dollars for the um for the water project through that subject to the ballot box and that was their vote by the box will this be a town i believe there's a town why i believe they're okay i'm not positive about that okay yeah i had to listen to the select board meeting twice and i'm still not 100 percent sure i understand that they voted on okay but that that came up um they're they tend to put into this all the debt would exist still working on the next without some kind of a change so these select board is not in charge of water prices definitely going to have that some others that they're getting two million dollars into this building and that might be excluded that it doesn't part of the master plan it just struck me as that the gymnasium roof somehow needs to be rebuilt and here high school or what here here and then i don't i haven't seen any specific but it was like under what strategy you know and there may be others so that's just a heads up i know when we talk about the water infrastructure investment i think the sense of the group was probably some in rates and some in taxes and for various reasons select board has come out with it if that's a vote then that's not for the year it will be a warrant article i think i think they've recommended it but it is subject to the town i'm not sure it requires a balance plus a warrant so there will be a warrant article for this excluded debt there will absolutely be a warrant article i think they i think i heard them say something about it's not wasn't clear and then the other option may be in subsequent years they could actually change how their some of this debt could go into is that why they actually need the ballot that's not what they're but they're not talking about i know they're saying they don't want that power oh okay okay so traditional debt exclusion except no because we just learned that you can read that right through a vote like right we just learned you can do that so there's an opportunity i think the excluded debt is it's it's an article and town meeting and at the ballot okay so all three have to pass the ballot comes first right that should be there is a schedule yeah there is a scheduled date for an election so many yeah time frame from the from the warrant yeah sounds good so select board decided to put all expenses into water rates yes other topics for this evening hearing none have a motion to approve the adjourn it so moved second you're in favor yes philson figure bill april yes iris yes rob yes we are adjourned
only other thing i had from my standpoint was the last sentence of the kind of first paragraph that begins our second third paragraph against the committee explored evaluated the demand versus supply of developments i'm not sure i understand that phrase you're getting out there with it it might be something more like they also discuss strategies to educate the public is it the first under follow-up discussion again in the june number 17th meeting yes just the first like actual the second sentence of the of the kind of body of the explanation they also discuss strategies to educate the public
demand versus supply yeah i think the demand versus supply was a phrasing that i introduced basically that idea of like is the problem is the development limited by the number of people who want to develop here um or by the town's tolerance for the developments that people are are trying to put up if that was kind of my intent with that supply versus demand because we talked a lot about how to make the town more open to um proposed developments but if no one's proposing developments it doesn't necessarily matter how open the town is to it if that makes sense it makes more i do recall it now uh when i read it i wasn't i just wasn't understanding it yeah for sure for sure i my my confusing wording sorry about that so would you like to change it to um evaluate the demand versus supply and proposed developments or um i was trying to like just like real estate developments because i think when you read it you're not sure if it's like developments like something new versus a development something to build okay that sounds better yeah and then on the last um the next meetings again just to be consistent with whatever gig format you use you know one five twenty six one twenty twenty six and five and change and then we accept the minutes as amended second around carl yes yes phil yes phil yes phil yes and iris yes rob you okay yep works for me okay second item is communications yeah so i just forwarded everyone an email with an attachment um rob and i have been trying to find a time where we are going to get together to discuss i think a more overarching strategy which we had discussed last time in terms of who's our audience what are we trying to communicate the means and methodology for that communication we have not yet had a chance to do that but i did over the break have a chance to put together a preliminary infographic that i would love to get some eyes on and reactions to um does everyone see it have you are you opening it okay so i do let me explain what's going on and sort of again what our intention was we had talked at a high level about this idea of whalen by the numbers right um essentially perhaps a preliminary view of getting um the option for people to consume some of the data that we do have available but we all know data can be heavy statistical data can be heavy so the idea here is what is on people's minds what's a way to help them um contextualize the information that we previously put together um and build a nice job what i took here and so if i walk you through it right so there is some demographic information the demographic information i feel like is important to conceptualize what we're talking about here um and then there are like some really high level things right high level things for people who may or may not be involved really with the town now if you are at all really involved this information is not necessarily going to be that new so think about it this way this is really for i think perhaps the less well-informed consumer in the town who's looking to just understand again a little bit of wayland and a little bit of how we stack up so we're looking at how our taxes split again in these really big high ideas of the town the school the unclassified how our tax bills stack up here against general massachusetts general peer towns and then if you look what i did sorry sorry what i did in that also how we stack up i took just a couple of the metrics bill that you had put together and did box and whisker plots now this part i'll be honest i this is my third iteration on this i did a couple different iterations and trying to figure out the best and i am like super open to feedback here in terms of the best way to demonstrate this was really hard this was really hard for me personally to be like statistically i believe this is the correct way to demonstrate quartiles median where we where we stand however i am like the first to admit that like i have not thought about a box and whisker plot probably since 10th grade right and and do people actually understand what this means do they actually conceptualize like if you actually look and see where i put the wayland i actually tried to put us where we actually are in relation to the box and whisker and again super open to feedback on like this is not the right way to demonstrate this data because it feels a little tough um feels a little tough for me even knowing what i'm trying to represent to actually say that this is a good representation of it so if others have thoughts on like different charts or different visuals to help illustrate sort of where we stand i would be super open to going back and redoing this this is again just the first pass of like here's one way of showing that and then for our peer towns because i feel like we get that question a lot yeah and so again i also just did a visualization of that as well so open to feedback open to thoughts open to this was not the ask iris by all means no no i'll give some more thoughts in the box and which it's really tough right you know the the objective is to show how we stack up against other towns so if we can show it as a range rather than as a box and whiskers or something you know like almost like a thermometer of where we are but anyway i'll give it some thought i don't want to i'm open but there are ways in which the general public could probably understand that this is a box right right yeah but i think sorry go ahead rob that's okay sorry i think maybe so i think jalen had sent us uh some data from sudbury um and i think what they uh what they did that is kind of the the deceptively simple approach right they just gave everybody a bar right um and they just showed a series of bars and i uh so for all the you know all the peter towns and their their number for each kind of and just a stacked up list of bars i found that kind of helpful because i think i was kind of surprised how large the list of peter towns is and i think
yeah just the number right there were quite a few peter towns it felt like um and it feels like they kind of do cover a bit of a range so having some idea kind of within that not just we're in the you know we're in the top quartile but for specific towns right how do you compare to sudbury specifically as opposed to this broader basket of peter towns um was helpful for me so that was just from a visualization perspective just kind of seeing seeing the raw numbers for each town which is admittedly a lot more numbers right and the sudbury document was like 170 pages long or something and that that immediately struck me as perhaps too many pages yeah yeah i was gonna say i do think that's more instructive i i think it i think sometimes a little bit more transparency i understand it's more you know you want to make it yeah concise right but i think just being clear and naming every town is people like that information too okay i did it also i don't know the structure but i did bar charts do that right can you guys see it on the i can absolutely just do a bar chart and do like a highlight of you know robert has also really over complicated so yeah i really like what you did okay but but but i'm sure the technical life i believe the technology exists so that if somebody goes to one of these charts and clicks on it you can get all the detail so you don't have to have it on the front page we could we could do a hyperlink yeah yeah absolutely absolutely absolutely we're kind of you know designing it in real time but you know if we didn't if we didn't want to do all 13 towns or whatever you know you could do the triple bars like you have and what it would be you know first quartile lay on third quartile so those would be your three bars so you could see how do we compare with the the first and the third quarter and that's interesting to whiskers but it's a three bar way of yeah and we could maybe list who's in who's in which quartile kind of separately so you don't have so you could get that information of you know how we compare sort of time by time yeah i don't think about and and again i we will meet in a couple weeks and i implore you all to give this some thought and and sit with it and let me know what you think the thing about an infographic and the way one of the reasons why i started this was the first pet project right was we had that we liked the edc's infographic and the thing about an infographic right is it's compelling because it's simple and easy to read right it's compelling because it takes these little tidbits of information and does a visualization if i put 10 bar charts on here we've sort of lost that ease and that that like compelling element of it so again we we will need to balance but i am absolutely open to feedback this is nothing but my 10th iteration but your first pass um and again one thing i wanted to just sort of ground set uh for all of us to me this is going to serve particularly fiscal year 28 when we start talking about what could be even harder sort of financial choices so right it's not like a one shot thing i want to sort of think about it and i'm not saying i know but maybe quarterly or some period to go out with you know another way of looking at oil and by the numbers and sort of gradually sort of educating everyone ourselves included as to kind of where it all stands so i wouldn't i don't feel the need to make it like this is the one shot got it got it okay i appreciate that and i think you might be right because if it's a more an iterative document where what we're doing here is setting up an approach and a document that can act as a template then then can be more of a living document that we can adjust as we see a need and then adjust it as a tool more to it right exactly add add take some stuff away and you know it's not always wailing by numbers could be wailing by numbers with this with now we're going to look at these numbers now we're going to look at this right whatever but again i think the intention and the goal is like with infographics generally it's like we're looking to use that visualization but but also maybe have the hyperlinks sort of like the appendix behind it that everybody's not going to go to but maybe some people and then they'd be able to see the full bar charts or whatever makes sense what were you able to connect with jaylen at all over the break no i'm not no yeah i encourage you or rob rob i think reached out to her and we we both were on that email chain but i don't yeah she was supposed to be here tonight just uh her title i don't remember what it is but it includes communications and i think her passion is to sort of think about these kinds of problems and and participate and i welcome that she uh she's ill today so she wasn't able to participate but um there's also sort of an iterative what is the message i mean for example if i look at your bar chart this looks like our taxes are way higher than everybody else's whereas if you look at it we're like at the third quartile we're actually not at the top right and and so it sends very two different messages if you want us you know we can make it seem like we're not that far off or we can show this and it's like wow we're way high yeah it's the same number well it's just that it's compared to right one of the other things where you have your map because it's like it's a lot of work that you did this and i appreciate it but because it's not where they really are you might want to kill the map and just do it as bullets and have the isolates in there sure and then i would actually put those up here at the top and then do the bills stack up after that bar chart and it's like you're flowing into your information in my first iteration i had like little needles like like pinpoints that dropped where all the towns were and um in a hilarious i showed it to my husband and he was like everyone who looks at this knows where all these towns are so you know i'm newer to massachusetts i think it might help you condense a little bit more sure and give us that real estate back for something else absolutely let me just check are you guys wanting to be in the finance committee meeting oh great oh yeah yeah yeah thank you come around the table okay just in the um the first one the 5 000 households yeah median household income is 21 000. so some of the 53 some of it what is with 50 53 percent of households okay
i think that uh might have been maybe like 53 percent i i moved some stuff and how i had sorry so i need to probably double check that some of the data you know there's also a question of what data source some of the data is census data right and then some of the data is massachusetts state data so part of this too is like the demographic data i've pulled census data so you know if anyone has any thoughts around we don't prefer that data like i think i'll just put the source on there too yep i will source everything out i don't have any view one way or the other it in some ways keeping it once uh data stores might make it easier um unless it's telling us different stories um sometimes you find depending on it's not that it's different i will say like one thing here and math major we can parse it out right like the bar chart looks slightly different than the box of whiskers because we're talking about averages versus medians right and so they paint different pictures yeah no that's the median that that is what i would also say but you know if i go to massachusetts state the averages is what they readily publish and sort of is front of center i have to dig for to get the actual data set and so it's like one of those interesting things of i would hate to remove the average and then we all of a sudden get communication from the town of like well i went on to the massachusetts website and the first thing that's published is the average and here's what it is and how dare you the uh division local services which is part of department of revenue is where i go to for the town numbers i used your link what's that yeah okay okay and i thought that was actually meetings nope i'm just that data set is median yeah but if you go to the website to get to that link so like just if i google massachusetts like tax bills or like state revenue the website that they publish the like readily available data is like averages so it's like it's just a little you have to go hunting yeah but by the way i think there might be any error in your um there's inconsistency between your bar chart which is our average tax bill and your box of whisker right the 17 858 54 matches but if you look at the blue line that's around 12 000 and that's at the very bottom of your box of whiskers so that's not the the average for the other anyway we can talk offline but there's i think it's because the average versus median though could be yeah right so like that's the thing again but your whisk but your the bottom of your whisker isn't a medium that's the low point so it says the the lowest town is 12 000 and up here it says the average town is 12 000. so i guess just before we go kind of too into the weeds on the exact numbers um i and i have said we didn't quite be connected on this i had been thinking about this a little differently and i guess maybe my first question um is just like what what's our intention with this document right like i i think i and maybe this is just me kind of having taken something else out of the last meeting i i think this is all interesting data is the intent of this document and phil maybe you were kind of saying we envision this as something we're going to publish and it's going to be the first in a series and it's it's building up to educating people for how they should think about potential overrides in the future or is the intent that this in and of itself helps people understand how to think about kind of overrides in near-term budget questions so i i don't think of this as overrides specific at all i think of it as completely i think that myself included have a very modest understanding of our town and the economics and so helping to educate that over some period of time you know and how do we stack up against others i think is useful for any kind of financial decisions we're going to be making yeah no for sure right and i guess i'm just trying to think like they're part of what i thought was trying to think through in my head is there are obviously a million different numbers we could put on this chart and just kind of trying to think about like what what we need people to understand by when right and the series of data points we give them over time that that lead them to that understanding yeah the quest i don't think i have a good answer for it um and that's why i do think that it's sort of in my mind quarterly will come up with a new one um and it may not even be like comprehensive it might be let's you know drill into whatever dpw and yeah that area stacks up against others and you know whatever that dimensions that could be useful i do think it goes live on our website um as a possibility and that you know gets archived and then others get added
all to be determined i really like the beginning and i thank you this is amazing for getting it started yeah i love the infographic and just having the concise and i think you know hopefully fosters some discussion i think in the past we also have and i just pulled it up from a few years ago when we had done just the average tax bills i think that will be relevant i think if we just have that as part of our website and that's more static i mean once we get yeah we've got information for 23 once we get 24 and 25 i don't know when that's actually released for everybody um you know we should update that just to have more in the detail but i love kind of this notion of doing a high level and do you feel stronger because you said average textbook well oh yeah on that one i i don't that had been average and i think we had the data going back to 2019 yeah yeah that's part of going back you know as far as you want so i it doesn't have to be we just have to recreate you know what's been done it's not a normal distribution though right i mean the average no well they the spectrum of how much skewed is it one way or the other so that that sort of gives you a sense of if median and average are really different they kind of are right and i think that's where i haven't graphed them together but i do think if you do it based on quartile honestly we look pretty good we look in the mix if you take a look at the historical averages we look first of all the historical average document was a different peer set so we really look a little bit skewed right we that that's actually probably what's going on with this is probably the old i took the average from that document because that's what fincom was previously using and it's a different that's probably the difference yeah so like there was an attempt as it's been explained to me not completely to choose a peer set that would make us look really expensive yeah it was literally looking at towns to because that was the intention okay as it was explained to me yeah it makes sense yeah that's probably that's why so you know again we can continue to refine this i think in my mind ideally maybe before we really get too into the warrant we would have some iteration of this that we go comment and publish yes yeah um and that could be for this quarter and then we can talk more about maybe after the one it's all done doing another one yeah i know we're talking a lot about how it's spent but i'm curious if there's um should we also say how our taxes are collected right like what percentage is coming from like before you get to spent should you be saying like this is where our tax revenues are coming from can i ask you a question april i love that thought do you care more as a taxpayer how your money's spent or where it's coming from i think it's both because okay so many people complain uh commercial yeah and that's been going so heavy i think that they have presented that annually and what brian has and the town manager presented annually so that's like i think that's relevant you know in and then it kind of flows into like this is where it's coming from this is and i think it helps i couldn't help understand one to each other because i'm going to get so much okay every time and the reality is it's three percent right no it's non-residential right yeah i'm not sure it's a pie chart because yeah what does it show thank you for the feedback thank you for the reaction i appreciate that i'll give it some more thought yeah thank you anything else uh and rob and i will again i think hopefully meet soon to talk through like a broader strategy and approach um you know again i think the goal is that this isn't the first thing or the end-all be-all um but rather again being thoughtful as to we have different um different kinds of personas in town right different kinds of consumers of information so i think ideally we would put together a communication strategy that thinks through both people who are less well informed than those who maybe are slightly more informed and lean on some of the uh communication outlets that exist thinking about the way we post and other things like that um and certainly the website and so i think hopefully the next time we will have had a chance to talk yeah and i encourage us to get together at the right state time with michael as well because this could go into his newsletter and a page in there that sort of helps that context especially as it gets further along the budgeting process and do we know what the timeline on that newsletter is uh it came out today i think it comes out once a month i believe so it's my recollection
and we don't have to wait for it yeah no just just help yep yeah anything else communication wise this time is there anything else anyone wants to share with us as a matter of priority regarding communication
if you think of something let us know i do encourage you to sort of think through what a list of other quarterly updates not even flushed out but just sort of placeholders yeah i think eric when you and i connect on that i i did some of that and the other thing i did is i just started thinking like we said about some of the channels but we can cover that in the next session thank you thank you for doing this it's fun to see progress and that said we'll turn to edc a few minutes before uh 7 30. excellent um thanks so much for having us uh we have a few folks who are virtual that will need to be elevated to panelists how will the chosen one even get in there i can slip through the corner but i don't see anybody they're in the audience so well there's becky for sure um rebecca mattson allowed to talk that's the only one i see good evening can you guys hear me yes we can hear you excellent excellent um so i'm gonna call our meeting to order um we do have quorum uh becky though not as many as we uh assumed so um calling easy meeting to order um at 7 29 p.m um in person we have karen kelly katie harris and david volari and remotely we have becky studies thank you welcome i'm sharing today's meeting but of course you know everybody's voices we we want her today um especially becky's but we would love to hear any more uh off the cuff feedback um we got some nice feedback from william thank you for that um any other off-cuff feedback from the data we presented but also um i think in our first kind of slice of getting together on how we move forward with this information um thinking about uh growth targets from you guys yeah we can start to think about how to craft some solutions and work together on that the question was clear and reasonable um and it's not easy to answer yeah yeah the uh idea of you know if we collectively the town had growth targets that sort of said okay with this amount of growth we can cover all of our expenses you know with our current sort of tax circumstances and you know without that amount of growth then it's two and a half overrides or or cutting expenses and with even more growth it's sort of like hey now we can do more things i don't have good model for giving sort of what those benchmarks are i thought about it becky sent a an email that i wasn't able to respond to earlier basically laying out that question um and as i thought about it it's sort of based on my knowledge but pam's been here longest in april maybe have other sense if we had new growth at 500 000 a year uh sort of a ongoing basis that's sort of like kind of status quo i mean it's better than some years that we've had but that sort of like probably keeps us with level services being able to sort of uh you know drive the town the way we want um if we get it to three quarters of million dollars a year that sort of like gives us a cushion but the swing factors are so significant you know state support um you know special expenditures special ed in particular but other special expenditures that come up that become you know really significant are there anything is there anything in the next three to five that you is on the horizon that will be particularly impactful i can see now so the the there's two things one we're going to go through a massive investment in infrastructure for the water system right um that may or may not go into taxes it's not clear exactly maybe significant or much of what will be funded through wire rates which will still come out of everybody's pockets so that's going to be difficult but that process is ongoing so that's one variable the other big variable which is i just don't have my arms completely around and maybe others have better sense is pension fund liabilities particularly the unfunded liabilities from prior years which has projected now based on actuarial tables and based on assessments um in 2037 if i remember 32 32 no was that far away i think it's 37 maybe it's 36 but it's on that order that's that will be a significant step down in expenditures for the town step down yeah so it's on the order of six or seven million dollars a year and that basically gets covered at that point so that becomes a cushion but you you know that's a long way to win other perspectives from fincom i think it's good to have the historical growth i haven't seen those numbers and that that's helpful because then you could pick the highest that we've had and said that's a good goal i think it's yeah i agree i think it's helpful to see and we've had that sort of regular kind of average new growth and then when we've done a project and when you can see that jump because i think it helps in the way the whole story yeah kind of like to demonstrate like okay here's how that helped our new growth and so that helps our um we're the our levy and so we have more capacity and i think you know we just the capital we just formed a capital verb to do capital planning focused on that i wonder if just having sort of a plan kind of if we set out a five or a ten year plan on what might be prospective projects and i know it's like there's so many variables it's going to be really hard to predict but to have a sense of okay if we believe x project might you know create this much a new growth versus the other the projects that we've sort of cited um yeah i think it to kind of have sort of a yeah i think that we have options just to kind of see things visually and yeah heading heading on to that with the thought of like a capital review one thing that struck me from what becky presented is um we've had many conversations about this come right about the capital expenditure right which is seven million dollars for this building right and and what i recollect from those conversations is those conversations are tough because if i think of traditional metrics what's the valuation on the building does that represent a 20 you know capital investment in building that needs to be maintained or not and it's tough to i think everyone sees the need but it's tough to figure out from a data standpoint of like is that um permissible is that really like solid um a solid approach and i think what struck me was a review of the capital things coming up to see if there's the opportunity to reuse the strategy that's been successful for you all of trying to get an outside builder to own that and then take that off the books for the town to me seems like that would be i would be interested in seeing that that to me seems like that would be potentially useful right like to see is there an opportunity and again i i don't know that these actually exist but is there an opportunity to do something similar with some of the spaces that we want to reuse some of the projects that are ongoing like we know we have these buildings that have to be maintained is there an opportunity to say to a builder you come in and do this for us and there's something there for you as well we're putting money into our buildings and and so there's an opportunity to get that funded a different more creative way i would be open to that does it make sense what i'm saying or do you feel i'm not sure same point the the i mean this building for if this was to be developable for housing um in addition to whatever is the town purpose for it then maybe there's a developer's interest in that um that they would sort of say if we get an opportunity to do that we can give you a town building in the in the process i'm not saying that's a good idea or not but but then i'm shocked and becky reconfirmed um the a thousand dollars a square foot for the town to build the building and not just our town right for towns to build a building versus 250 dollars a square foot for so that that's a separate issue that's not one that i would see edc necessarily being involved in it's sort of like getting figuring out how better to do capital projects is sort of a a town issue michael issue dpw issue or whatever but but to the degree that there's developable property in the and that the you know independent third party would want to develop it and could in the course of that also do something for the town that might be and i would just note from the from the audience i did reach out to kelly lapin who clearly is an old fincom alum who's on cipc and so they're just getting their sea legs um so ultimately as they get their whole plan together which will take them a little bit more time then we can definitely plug in with them and talk with them but it'll that will really be as phyllis to your point it's a little bit different than generating revenue but at the same time a dollar is a dollar right so how do we figure out how to how to kind of approach this from different directions and those will be catch as catch can it'll be hard to do a real plan for that unless i mean maybe cipc will have a very definitive plan about what what buildings to tackle first what needs to be done and we can kind of plug in in that regard so that will be more sort of opportunistic um so we'll definitely keep that on our radar um in as much as we focus on growth um again you know we're sort of looking for some kind of guidance and you know phil we're on the email trail with with brian keveney and it's interesting that other towns you know typical triple a rated bond towns have two and two to two to two and a half percent of growth every year so for us that would mean 110 to 140 million dollars worth of growth to our tax base every year or 1.7 to 2 million dollars of growth every year that's how far behind the eight ball we are and so it's a question of as we look at all of our goals is that 500 000 enough do we look at 500 and maybe a little bit higher look at maybe two or three scenarios where we kind of look out and say what if it's low medium or high uh goal setting in terms of economic growth and part of that is just understanding how it can offset people's tax obligations because at the end of the day it really is about keeping taxpayers actual tax burden lower than what you know in this curve that we've been on for a long time we kind of bent the curve for a little bit with alta oxbow but it was you know it's a one-time thing we've got to kind of do things continually and so you know i was looking to fill for a good goal and that 500 that's a question like is the 500 enough or is it a good starting pot or it's so part of it is looking to fincom and asking you guys knowing everything you know and nobody has perfect knowledge um but maybe how best to set our goals based on everything that you guys know and there may not be perfect answers but welcome your input i will follow up with brian uh this week hopefully uh to get more clarity around you know what is possible um to be clear fiscal year 27 projections i think dor initially said our new growth was going to be 400 000 um and and um it's currently shown in the preliminary budget as 500 000 i've seen other numbers that go as high as 900 000 um which is amazing because there's no new big project that has gone ahead and when i asked brian about this a little while ago my understanding of what i heard was that the assessor's office actually hadn't been pursuing um the backlog of projects that have already gotten approved and and residential you know uh people's um and so new assessments are going out for folks that have actually are expecting them because they've come up but it hasn't gone into our tax base yet and it will now i mean there's a little bit of a chicken or egg because i think i understand that you know you'd like to have a goal from us and i'm thinking well tell us what's possible and if you said well you know we think that two million a year is possible i'd say how let's do it so so i think there's a back and forth you know we we can set some goals based on our history and what we've done before but you can also sort of help us and say well this is what we think is possible if we could get this through becky when you mentioned that some other towns uh comparable towns uh would be doing one or one and a half million um yeah um is that data that you can circulate um what for the data that that brian provided yeah well no that's two and a half percent growth which is typical yes that that data yeah yeah so all that was just based on what is typical for triple a rated rated towns and with our tax base being 5.7 billion right so two to two and a half percent of that is just those metrics yeah but i wonder how comparable that is if it's you know if those towns are commercial growth towns which we are not exactly exactly so i don't know if there's better data based on towns that are you know like us are so heavily residential and not as much commercial so the data we looked at was that we're in the lower part but there's towns behind us so i mean we were we were in with sudbury and lincoln and you know so you know one of the other big swings that i think is happening right now right is collective bargaining oh yeah yeah that will swing us a lot right now where it's really unknown as to where those rates will be set as far as the cost of growth for future growth right along with the capital budget like those are big things that we're waiting on right now in order to understand what the growth expectations of budgets are that will be so if we think like some shorter term things that might be potentially lower hanging fruit which may be lower impact but we could start to think about now is we have talked a little bit about the neils tax revenue and so um wanted to understand from all of you as well our thought is so it's uh it's epic it's at the max right now i believe that can be oh it is yeah becky is that correct yes the 0.75 is your maximum yep so but the question being you know could that be something that we start to think about using differently perhaps for the corridor or to support our to target the revenues that are there correct and that's like two or three hundred thousand dollars a year or something think about yeah it's yeah it's about 300 yeah going up though yeah yeah i understand yeah yeah yeah the uh um the idea of uh focusing funds to specific purposes it reduces the flexibility obviously of the select board in terms of saying wait a minute we really have this other priority and we have to address that so uh it's the few times there's been i think there's an energy fund that's a sort of dedicated fund but it's but it's only you know if there's no other priorities uh kind of language um so i'm not sure what has been tried around that um but to the degree that it's not completely constraining and maybe something we could be supportive of yeah you have no it's tricky but a lot i mean many many towns use this no in a targeted fashion so um with anticipation that it is going to grow uh in 2026 and really probably see it fully bloom in 2027 um it's something to consider that might be an easy way would would some amount of revenue help well i mean we haven't reversed engineered what would 200 000 do for the corridor but we could i'm not like an engineering study but even just bullets it'd probably be helpful i think if we were going to go in that direction for sure that would need to get done um did you did you all have any reaction around you know thinking about some of the town land like orchard lane for residential condos it's really not a role for fincom standpoint yeah yeah the overall nature of new growth that is a role and that's really helpful but you know how we best spend town resources is really you know how we allocate time i don't know that's one that we would weigh in if you came to us and said wait a minute we've got some possibility of putting something significant together here oh by the way would be another oxpo alta oxpo kind of thing that'd be interesting to know that and be able to weigh in on that from that standpoint but i'd like a dog park but um roller coaster could be nice uh becky yes yeah so phil i would say hearing what everybody's been saying the historical growth would be really helpful to know um just to see what we've been over the last 10 years just to see what that is um and i'm sure this data is somewhere but we just you try to find it i have no idea where to begin to look and you know if you guys can help or with brian can that would be great to know historical growth to take some stab at what the next 10 years i know that brian had a slide in his fiscal year 27 looking ahead for 10 years i don't know where the numbers came from should we use those should we not use those but you just have to start somewhere right it's never going to be perfect but at least take a best stab at where we look like we're going to be over the next 10 years and then you know we can then i think maybe overlay since you guys don't seem to have a magic answer and why we don't either right if there's no there's no perfect answer so maybe if you know knowing where other towns are but they have a much bigger commercial tax base then maybe we do something like okay what does 250 000 of new revenues 50 and 750 per year average it's never going to go perfectly like that but you'll have ebbs and flows and then just look and see how it bends the tax curve right it does you know and we can see does it make even 750 doesn't make enough of a difference because part of it is you know whether or not we use what karen just brought up with the orchard lane land if it's you know we really need to do that to move the needle then maybe that's something we do maybe if we don't need it to move the needle it just kind of puts everything in perspective um so if we could get that data from brian again the historical growth and then that 10-year horizon and if we can interpolate maybe you know brian or phil you and i can talk about it but the 250 500 750 maybe and just see what that does i think that would help inform because we're all stabbing around in the dark but i think that data might show us something um and you can't you can't guess and what you know disaster is going to happen three years from now but you know the best you can do is make some uh reasonable assumptions and then we kind of take that and settle into what the plans might look like for that low medium and high does that sound like a good good next step i'll report back to everyone after my conversations with brian perfect perfect and i'm just thinking about a lot of like just thinking about parsing out new growth relative to revenue producing just to i mean a lot of this is new growth but then we get fees and stuff as we you know as a one-time building benefit the permits and that sort of thing but or like you said if there's anything else to do with meals tax if that you know like even little things that we can it might be able to do on the margin or just to consider um i think it'd be helpful just to kind of see that menu of kind of new growth areas and then what the how you know a particular project might occur new growth and then also if there's revenue i'm not sure the request well just looking at you've looked at you've shown us a number of options that you're considering or that you've looked at just to get a sense of what new growth might be added with those and also if there are revenue fees okay fees fee enhancements yeah like that like like that that that helps with the tax bill but um you know new growth gives us levy capacity one is levy capacity and one is sort of offsetting tax
and phil just wrapping up you had asked the question or it was on the agenda was you know how do other towns approach this and again we're unique in that we don't have a huge commercial tax base so um not having a lot of great data but using my friend chat gbt i asked you know the question with some of these towns with lesser commercial tax bases how do they boost their tax bases and what came back were similar things we've seen in concord like we've been looking at the route 20 master plan looking at west concord the state basically said create targeted areas for growth kind of like a route 20 corridor focus on those very specific spots revise zoning for growth support businesses and treat them as an economic asset so that's something that we've been talking about at edc really do programming and events and working with town center and getting it to be you know really valuing the businesses that are there supporting them so that they in turn create more value um they said utilize excess town land they said particularly uh once in a lifetime opportunities they mentioned the prison for example in concord mci concord right for us it was you know the the alta oxbow site um it said be realistic about limitations particularly sewer um streetscape um and parking and then potentially collaborate on corridor plans route 20 something larger than your own town so it's kind of interesting a lot of the things that it popped out are things that we are pursuing um but ultimately phil you'd ask that question but that's what popped through one of the quickest things that we can do is get this route 20 master plan task force going i know the select board is contemplating it um but some of the fastest things that we can get going is changing some of the zoning that is holding back or creating for example not having village criteria things like that some simple things that we could do um but we just need to get started right we just need to to get that moving so are those hung up in planning board discussions so right now the select board is contemplating putting together a task force which typically towns and cities do um west concord set up a task force um lincoln around the train station set up a task force to specifically that is their sole purpose and focus is to look at that and so otherwise if you're part of it's part of another committee like the planning board just has gotten socked with two huge projects you know what's going on on rice road and what's happening over in the the um carroll school so it just keeps it very focused um and that's kind of what we need to do because otherwise it always kinds of kinds of get shunted around to the back and you know we just need to get that front and center and getting some of these things moving so i weigh in accordingly on discussions with select board perfect thank you thank you thanks for joining i think happy somebody has joined you we'll talk to you soon thank you thank you very much look forward to continuing working with you all right thanks good night our new uh land or tenant or uh owner at the town center it should be fun to be working with too have you had a chance to meet him i have not but it sounds i've heard lots of positive comments like you think you're in a dream yeah that is terrific moving on next topic warrants how do we do with these yes i did a quick review um so i just sent around oh did i yeah sent around powerpoint um
the article write-up process so we will have the article workshop scheduled for january 28th is that still yes so um i kind of just started with the article workshop and just kind of went these are a lot of thoughts off the top of my head so if people have other questions as we go through or other additions please add because i'm certain there are things that i did not include here um so starting with your article workshop we'll meet on january 28th and review review all the articles so it's all the proposed articles that will go into the 2026 warrant um look at the packet in advance so you can kind of read through and what the articles are a lot of them will be standard articles that were in last year's warrant and are in pretty much every um that goes out each year maybe just for context there will be three dozen four dozen articles total typically yeah i feel like we usually get to typically we start them if we alphabetize them a through z and then we usually get to get further yeah we usually get to maybe double i so yeah so 35 i think last year we each had six to seven with the exception of michael because he had the big one so i think he only had four right yeah that's usually it's the move to the charity yes one or none um it's it's usually that there's there is the budget article so they take that one um so yeah divides out typically to six or seven five six or seven per person depending upon the year um and some of them are standard articles so they're really pretty quick um so you'll receive that packet uh those at that article workshop uh the proposers present them it's usually a select board we just sort of talk through what the article is standard article and we go through it sometimes people will ask questions at the time you know off the top of their head if it's a new um article new content um you know just and these are things that should be considered as you're writing it up um every article is assigned to a income member and that person is responsible you own that article you're if you're assigned to that article you write it up um and you work with your select board liaison and also with the proposer sometimes it is one in the same um and sometimes you'll have an outside proposer what does it mean to write it up because doesn't the proposer write it they write the article so we'll go into a little bit of this so um they do the article language and then there are finance committee comments and then articles or arguments for and arguments against fincom does those latter three okay that's what we call fincom arguments and pros we call them pros and cons sorry to jump in too but i think that that if it's a public petitioner which i'm defining is not the town we're not a town you know a resident don't they have an opportunity to submit some minimal number they have 250 words or something like that yes so they can do so they can write that up as well um so we'll go into a little bit of that so here you know if you look at that first page i don't know yeah um you can just see what they what they look like when you first get it so it's a little bit rough when you first get you know the first draft um and then usually we are sent let's go to the next page sort of in process everyone is this is last year's tracking um slide three everyone you can see who's assigned which article and on this one there's 19-3 and i'll get into that in a middle in a minute um so we track who's assigned on fincom um who the sponsor is this one we didn't include the select board liaison but then we also keep track of the votes so as we go through and discuss um each article fincom votes on each article and also the select board votes on each article and then ultimately you will submit it once it's finished we'll get into that in a minute and our votes become record on the articles as they're drafted up as to what the vote was yes and the vote can be taking no position yes and i'll get into that one next so chapter 19 3 with the detailed write-up sometimes this was a new edition about three or four years ago i think carol martin um brought this up so fincom is not required to include a summary of arguments in favor and in opposition um for articles blah blah blah blah blah when there is negligible financial impact on the town so we review as a committee with brian keveney or with the finance director um all of the articles if we agree that there's an article that does not have any financial impact impact or negligible financial impact um we don't have to write that up in which case you go to the next slide five what we did last year and i think last year was the first year we really used it for a number of articles um following consultation with the finance director the finance committee has deemed this article to have negligible financial impact on the on the town pursuant to town code 19 3 detailed comments together with a summary of arguments in favor of and in opposition to this article are not required so we just include that language once we voted and then we just include the vote that we decided to take no position on the article um and as you can see that in this this i just pulled this from last year the article language on this example article language always stands as it was submitted as a fincom um member even if you're assigned to that you you do not change any of that article language even if there are spelling texts or spelling mistakes or whatever that's not our prerogative to make any changes there just let it stand but just to be clear i did i mean the proposer changed with my consultation some of the language right sometimes the proposer may change their language in in proposer's comments yeah um so that might change yeah so but but it's not it's not you might it's not your responsibility to change it you might have a discussion with the proposer to say oh look you know it's a little unclear or you know there's something it's actually stated here but it's up to them to to make the changes and submit that to you you wouldn't just do that as the is the fincom um write-up person a quick question sorry going back to the 1903 thing is there kind of a general rule for what negligible is dollar amount under or something you know it when you see it yeah fair enough yeah i think we had one where thank you like april there was a something about a town flag do you remember the state flag or something that had right someone had proposed that we change the state flag or we support changing the state flag because we can't do it um but so there probably is very little if any financial impact on wayland to doing that so the example i think of rob is last year i had one that was for a green burial at a private residence there's no impact to the town specifically in terms of finances for that petitioner's request but by bylaw requirements it had to go to the town for a vote and i guess i was thinking like i mean when you mentioned the state flag like you know a petition that we start flying the state flag in addition to the american flag at certain facilities right that's going to cost the town 500 bucks a year or something in in flag related maintenance like i guess that's kind of i was wondering in terms of like is there some level of like is there a a general level of dollar cost of town is less than x or is it dollar cost of town is kind of strictly zero or is it just like you say you know when you see it yeah i think it's sort of you know when you see it and and negligible i don't know if you could say it cost you 20 extra because someone had to spend i mean i i think it's just you know okay yeah fair enough we'll discuss case by case yeah and all of us can we'll weigh in as we are right if someone thinks like there may there could be an implication looking forward that would be a discussion point yeah yeah makes sense i wrote up a uh article on uh rodenticides and whether or not that the town should ban using in town facilities and it really seemed like very trivial economic impact but and nonetheless it was the judgment of the committee to go ahead and write it up i did so slide six sort of this these are the basics and and and and what we're writing up um the article language i just no actually this is the whole article um found a short one so the top piece is the actual article article language the finance committee comments you know sometimes you got this in the initial draft of the article and sometimes there's very little there and you kind of have to flush it out um and that's it's a write-up and it's sort of come it's the finance committee pretty much drafts all most of it sometimes select board will will come in and make additions but um once you as the finance committee person who um has sort of written your article you feel like it's in good shape um you would present that or send it to your select board liaison person have them review it once they think it looks good you would and as well as the arguments in favor and opposed um you're both in agreement and if there's another outside proposer you want to make sure that that person is on board as well um often they will where where do your data source obviously one data source is the proposal so you're going to talk to the proposer at some point what other data sources who else do you talk to in general um it depends on what it is and obviously yeah obviously and sometimes we talk to brian keveney like the finance director or sometimes a point of contact within the town so like i had to do the car sales right car sales i did reach out to dbw to understand the nature of the car sales i like because i thought it was pertinent information that a so generally somebody in the town and then the petitioner you're not necessarily going to general public or something not general public but um open like minutes okay and brian he was a big fan of the whelan town cam or whelan cam like all the meetings and viewing them so if you have an article that's related to a development looking at past meetings of where they discuss that to get further information unless there's some sort of sorting mechanism you can look at other committees minutes and if you were really interested you could go back to a way cam meeting and some of the more complex ones i did do a lot of looking into that to hear what the what it was kind of the um rebuttals or the where is the the resistance coming from and you can kind of get that for your opposing and then look you hear the open um i think it was the recreation committee when they were trying to do the fields you heard a lot of that because that meeting was really long but when you listen to it's not all going to be in the minutes you listen to it you can hear do you get it from the workshops at all in other words there's a point at which the petitioner proposes and that's so much the workshop is pretty quick it's because you're going through all 35 or however many there are so it's kind of a quick review it when you're assigned your article um and if it's if it's something new that's not a standard article you need to flesh it out a little bit more and i think you kind of do some digging you'll find some people in town you can figure out which you know if there's a department or or committee that it's because the opposition would be the tougher part i would think because you have to ask people right do you know anybody who's against this straightforward yeah and you can just it's sort of like to think the cost like what why might people be even if you haven't heard it directly and most of them have gone through meetings to get to that part so that's what that's why it's like the way in town camp as grueling as it is listen to some of those four-hour meetings it is beneficial it was and we'll see if that's finding it that's a good use case for you can ask chat to be to your source and then i'm not i'm not all that technical now it's pretty easy you can ask it and then and then you know what to actually go listen to instead of need to come through i'd say chat uh chat tvt will be it was a big benefit last year it was the first time i used it when i was writing it i'm just anticipating i didn't use it last year i did the best i could but it's probably not up to your standard you know level so well we'll send it back then we'll see we'll see yeah well honestly the proposers um yeah we'll tell you if you're off pace that's what i'm hoping i would work a lot with them i worked on the adu article last year and one of the thing one of the arguments that i decided i thought was real was that p that there was some discretion you know given to um to um i guess the planning board whoever moves these things sorry it's been more than a year i can't remember um but and that that might that some people might not want to give that board that discretion and once your statute says x right right um and so um um listed that as an argument against uh gave it to um this was tom hold who said i never heard that i don't think it's an issue and we talked about it and you know there's those sort of thing okay
i have a curious one of the things and i don't know if you have this in there too sure um sometimes they'll consolidate articles late not only yet so when we're assigned just as an fyi like when you start going to dig in you they could change and become consolidated so now you're combining two articles and everything changes and how you have to present yeah a lot of those are with like uh conservation i believe right right yeah the cpc that's right that that did happen last year and the year before in the year before yeah and usually like in the past those were the cpc articles were ones that we'd assigned to sort of the newer members because they're usually pretty well laid out and they're flushed out and you know there's details because the committee has done them year in year out um you know i assume we operate a little bit as a team too oh yeah we have questions we ask each other hey how have you handled this right and you can and a lot of times it's helpful to go back and look at prior prior warrants and similar articles just to see like what are the arguments in favor and opposed it gives you kind of an idea of where to start if you're looking at a new article um and yes once so once you've written everything up i think it's good slide six so you've reviewed all this um you've got it all written up you've reviewed it with the select board liaison you'll present it to fincom oftentimes people will have questions some of them you'll be able to answer and some of them you'll say oh i never actually thought about that i'll have to go back and do a little research or and then he'll kind of revamp your write-up um incorporate suggestions edits changes new information um and you may need to present it again or sometimes we'll say you know what i've got the information i need i just make sure you include a sentence on this or that or change something around um once that's all done you'll run it by the your select board liaison one more time and then you can submit it for final you've got the fincom vote we'll vote on each article you record that vote that also goes on that tracking sheet that you showed before um and once it's in final form you make sure that this is the final page it's times new roman font 11 point um no bullets no bullets on the pros sort of arguments for or against we try to do them in sort of concise little paragraphs um what else once the article's been reviewed and voted by fincom all edits to the final accounts incorporated you'll send it we have one designated income person who collects all the final reports so you just make sure that you save as you know article x xd whatever it is final okay um and submit it to that person and then it goes to that person does a final review and then sends it to the town whoever's the town representative and it goes to town council um so you don't need to worry about like quantum of vote some of the other that's one of the other lines on the bottom um it's it's your writing of the fincom comments arguments in favor arguments opposed um the select board vote and the fincom vote so that's the process other questions observations i have one other question just because it was my favorite and my biggest nightmare last year capital yeah how is that um managed this year since they have the cipc i don't know is the short answer and that like kelly has her spreadsheet back so i'm hoping she'll be able to help with the graphs and all that kind of stuff so yes i don't have an answer i'm kind of what the five year is going to look like my sense is that the five years probably going to be similar to last year's because they haven't had time to it i just spoke to kelly right there but to address but she has that spreadsheet that creates all the graphs right and all the analysis with everything so that's where like if we're not managing that well we are the submitter of it right so we'll have to figure out how to work with kelly to get what we're going to need because you're still the capital expert kelly's always been the capital expert well i was just the liaison why don't you check in with kelly and let her know that you're likely to be the person to do this in the middle um as you may have seen michael's note on december 31st indicated that the capo plan hasn't come together particularly yet um so i don't know what the specifics timing or substance are or if there's any hang-ups and stuff but i think i going back to the edc conversation i think that that's one of the things that will really swing to the outlook right for like the 10 years is because they haven't done that whole 10 years well and especially you throw in water infrastructure investments um which you know in michael's note at least i didn't see water infrastructure investments in that so i think that we're in stage right now it isn't all coming together so roughly we would get our assignments in the beginning of february after the workshop at the workshop at the workshop yeah it's assigned at the workshop the schedule is january 15th all petitioners articles are submitted and at the workshop they will be allocated okay so so i'll know my assignment at the workshop and then then they generally do when well let's turn to calendar for a second just hopefully this is you know we're going to kind of share the topics i guess um we're going to see these all of them on by the 21st okay so that our chair would be nice to me and also between now and then express to her if there's any topics if you really want the capital you can have it i'm happy to work on it because i did it last year and thank you but yeah so once you see them um and you might even take a look at last year's mark because half the articles are going to be similar and more similar if there's anything that um there are a couple of things that look like they're coming down the pipeline but we don't know that for sure so i might have you might as well wait until the 21st but if you reach out to me and say i'm really interested in this or for the lovable things only i don't want to do that let me know and and uh take it as input won't guarantee you anything no no i can't guarantee anything um and between the 21st and 28th i'm going to share with phil so it's his his responsibility again um but actually seriously when you get to the 28th um you'll feel more straight you know among yourselves yeah and so roughly how long do we have to get this process done i'm just going to say in march so it's about late march yeah march 30th everything goes in printer okay well because there's a prior deadline yeah there's uh there's deadlines before uh no december 16th is the deadline just submitting the uh fincom article comments and the uh report that's where in that month and a half we'll be meeting maybe twice a week um to to go through drafts meeting in may this year the meeting is first week of may and we're pushing we're having the right of us by march 16th yeah that's really early it feels way too early i mean it says they're going to the printer by the end of the month right so i look back at the calendar from last year last year we had a really close last year we were doing all of this work we're describing now in january because april was april was the meeting we wouldn't the actual workshop was never they don't do until january i probably started january 21st or something like that and we probably started the end of february because yeah i went to aruba in the first week of march and and the meeting was april like april 6th i believe so it was a whole month earlier yes you know than this year is so we might have more time i guess is what i'm curious about with your calendar if you're if you're backing it up it's probably no no i'm not backing anything up i'm taking it directly off of the calendar prepared by the select board i'm not making those dates that was circular yeah that feels um very it's usually it's about a few weeks because like it goes to the printer i don't know how it takes that long in the printer but it's due it's reviewed it's put into the whole packet into the you know the warrant book and format and everything goes to town review by town council i would think maybe like there's probably there's probably really a little bit more room in there but um i know last year they have a lot of it's usually at least time stuff too and the what's that the addendum or whatever the changes that would the erotic there are thank you the erotic there's a lot of erotic issues but it does have to go i mean it goes to the printer and then it they should be sort of delivered and you sit at each household so people have time to review them at least two weeks you know it's time in the mail at least two weeks for people to review it prior to town meeting so there's at least probably three weeks there so you know you kind of start under the yellow you see monday mark 16th i'm just looking oh it got stapled yes i see it now that's it's page three because it got stapled long so you're right okay there were questions for pan or comments no thank you yeah that was very helpful really kind of been laid in the process language for town council usually it's a matter of space last year i was on standoff almost everything they didn't want to take that out i guess who actually if somebody will need to do the dates that i want you may know this but we're we're gonna see the actual town budget can i i i um i feel strongly on this we rewrote code last year and department budgets are due to the town manager on december 15th i mean a preliminary budget operating budget due to the finance committee by the end of the calendar year i know we talked about this and brian you know with our always numbers we have never gone state since i've done this we don't get state aid until late january early february there's still health care insurance figures or we don't know have a definitive number until february we know that we did get it on december 31st from michael i saw that that just came out the other day yeah i feel like this is usually what we start working on because if we're not reviewing it till the end of january i mean it's it's the beginning of february and then we have questions and that's it's usually a process i mean fincom is charged with presenting a budget and if we're not doing our work to review and vet that budget and have you know awesome q a and really feel comfortable with the numbers and the department numbers if we're getting pushed if we're into february and then we've got a month and a half to do all these articles and complete the budget and then sometimes we ask for we have a lot of questions and they don't get answered at the next meeting and it goes to meetings and we still don't get all those questions answered or new questions come up and there's not time to do the next round of questions we haven't really done our job effectively so that's my concern um i'm not a huge proponent i don't love to have more meetings but i feel like we probably should have another at least one another january meeting before um before the article workshop to start reviewing so it's sort of an outsider an interesting comment because you're right you can't kind of focus on both you know we haven't really done much budgeting yet and and if the budgeting is being discussed at the same time we're doing the articles yeah well i mean and and we do we have we do we have done that in the past you're kind of balancing it out part of the re part of a meeting is focused on budget and some of it and then you get on to articles um but i feel like typically we are starting the whole budget review in january and if we're losing january we're just shortening our the window one of the questions that i have is i understand state aid i understand insurance i'm curious on why the school department hasn't given they have given budget okay and they're asked they're asking for an increase that doesn't feel low enough yet so there's some conversation so some of the i guess the land the budget that the preliminary budget includes this school budget and it's a five and a half percent number in there the town budget is one and a half percent and so there's work between and in all fairness or in the way i look at it too damn and maybe i'm wrong but i think my first year it was kind of like everybody submits what they want and we have to go through with a fine-tooth comb because it was a significant increase where i feel like the last year and this year it's like this is what you are being this is your parameters michael's direction to the department's right because i think before there were no parameters before i agree and i think we've done more work that more work has been done up front and we've had the task force that worked sort of from the summer through um yeah this is the first time we're seeing kind of the line by line department budgets and we typically do it so carl it will be who you and team to come up with a date and get brian in or brian and michael in to kind of do a line item there's a handy of course michael's schedule was tonight this is martin luther king for wednesdays wednesdays are also you know wednesdays are also going forward
i may miss that the the one of the challenges and for my recollection of last year is we were dealing with so many preliminary budgets and every time we would meet the spreadsheet would be um and maybe it was just because it was a crunched year but it felt like we were spending time going through line ends that became irrelevant in the next meeting because other things changed so it was i i appreciate it yeah yeah that shouldn't be that much changing i mean it felt like it to me but maybe i was doing it at all and i was like what you know spreadsheet are we working now so in some ways i was wanting michael and brian to have numbers that are solid uh from their standpoint i mean i don't even if we did an interim meeting between now and the 28th my sense would maybe we don't need them there but we have questions prepared for the meeting when they are i actually would want them there i mean just i i think it's a lot richer to have them i agree than just trying to read off the spreadsheet why is this two and a half percent right i don't know about scheduling should we tackle it i'm just curious because school's such a big portion of it if that hasn't been settled then it's like to even look at that part should we tackle it as like town first where that's more final even though you know the variables on that part of it i think that that that would make sense we really we don't have anything for school except a number which isn't and that's where we usually try to get more detail i feel like that's always the biggest if that budget had budget hasn't yeah i don't know hasn't presented to a school committee or anyone else i don't know this i know that in the past we've we've attended that meeting where we weren't right where the school budget is presented but i if we could start i think i feel like we should start on something which is the town budget is talent on some of the unclassified um the other thing we did last year and probably in years prior to collect our own comments on the budget and put them into a spreadsheet and send it back to brian you don't always get the answers right away and sometimes they're a little cryptic which is why having an actual meeting is a good idea but that might be another way to start because you can find time in let's say the next week to take a look of what we've got start there if you get those questions and i can consolidate them if you'd like that or so we're sending them one document what what do we at what point do they give presentations to us because i always figured that was the last meeting in or the first meeting in february was the plan okay okay so each department head makes no uh brian and or michael but then the school board the school committee will do there separately as a joint meeting that we'll invite a think on to okay in years past i understand every department did come to fincom and that was seems not value added
i do feel like this the process has been streamlined from like you guys have done a lot of work on streamlining the process of amas to get it to a point where it's not fincom asking all the questions on the budget and there's more ownership of the time yes town manager and finance director digging in more to making sure that there's a a number that is digestible i would think it's important to have michael here it was very much different this year when they came in with a one and a half percent escalation from last year that that there was the mindset was very much of let's not
in some ways it's like it helps yeah already had a better starting point carl do you want to take scheduling offline or do you want to take a date if people can send out an email tomorrow if it's monday or wednesday night that's fine i did monday the 26th i'm equally pretty oh i'm sorry i couldn't hear what you said oh sorry i said i'm also pretty open in terms of dates the 12th would be tough i just have to figure something i can't do the 20th tuesday after the but i can do wednesdays
13th or 14. 14 is on the 14th is the wednesday yeah on the table 12 14 21st i'm not sure yet it's the only one i'm not sure about it if we're going to make this useful so it's going to see questions i'm not sure it's going to be that much different on the 29th from what's there now i don't know it might be something to check in with brian on next topic on tonight's agenda was just uh suggestions on streamlining the warrant and uh carl on the agenda identifying them as phil's suggestions which they are not but i did concur with yeah uh carol i think or carol and others came up with these and you'll see they feel modest to me uh the 2025 warrant was 139 pages the target for this year is to be 105 pages like double digits i don't want to go into triple digits but nonetheless and then various elements to simplify the finance committee right up from 15 pages to either 10 pages so and and throughout um i don't think there's any magic here the uh this goes back to communication i think of the warrant is a really hard document for people for the lots of people to get value out of i think there is a cadre people who don't want any changes to it and they want exactly what they're familiar with um so some of these may be hard these are all goals they're not like requirements but i want all of us to be thinking ways to make it easier to consume last year what i did with a lot of my part of the write-up actually what i did with many of the warrants because i dropped them in the hemingway app if anyone's familiar with that oh yeah it's a website and it essentially helps you make sure you're using active voice make sure right like just provides implication one of the interesting things that also tells you the grade level that the person reading what you've written needs to have in order to actually conceptualize for most of the warrant articles it was a post-secondary graduate level and that like spoke a lot of volumes to me of like what are we really writing here and so um obviously i would take out then i would have to take out the meat of the article because i can't touch that um but i did run a lot of my pro and con arguments through that and just again the the it's just a website the application just um provides you an opportunity to simplify your language and also just like reflect on like what level of education should someone have in order to be able to read and understand it yeah it's kind of a fun tool have we ever i mean this wouldn't you know we talk about benchmarking a lot we should benchmark the warrant versus some of the other towns how do they it has been done yeah it's like there are some really long warrants out there because lincoln doesn't have any comments at all it's just the warrant yeah it's just the language yeah so um i just didn't mention when we were going through calendar the other date to put in folks of mind is february 23rd which we will be presenting to the select board on the topics of if there would be a two and a half override but also excluded debt recommendations there will be related to the water infrastructure we'll see that but yeah so just to keep it in people's mind this budget yes so the last topic is our omnibus budget bar which we've got circulated around which is just a placeholder but we need to vote on that tonight to submit it drafted by brian keveney it's got mostly xx for her numbers will go eventually
when did that come out did you send around i think carl did you send around with the it's two pages a page substantively exactly as i understand prior years so could i have a motion to submit this i move that we submit the omnibus budget article seconded carl yes phil yes bill yes april yeah iris yes rob yes seven zero any other topics to discuss tonight the only thing you touched on this a second ago but i want to make sure people understand the select board voted to raise the 38 million dollars for the um for the water project through that subject to the ballot box and that was their vote by the box will this be a town i believe there's a town why i believe they're okay i'm not positive about that okay yeah i had to listen to the select board meeting twice and i'm still not 100 percent sure i understand that they voted on okay but that that came up um they're they tend to put into this all the debt would exist still working on the next without some kind of a change so these select board is not in charge of water prices definitely going to have that some others that they're getting two million dollars into this building and that might be excluded that it doesn't part of the master plan it just struck me as that the gymnasium roof somehow needs to be rebuilt and here high school or what here here and then i don't i haven't seen any specific but it was like under what strategy you know and there may be others so that's just a heads up i know when we talk about the water infrastructure investment i think the sense of the group was probably some in rates and some in taxes and for various reasons select board has come out with it if that's a vote then that's not for the year it will be a warrant article i think i think they've recommended it but it is subject to the town i'm not sure it requires a balance plus a warrant so there will be a warrant article for this excluded debt there will absolutely be a warrant article i think they i think i heard them say something about it's not wasn't clear and then the other option may be in subsequent years they could actually change how their some of this debt could go into is that why they actually need the ballot that's not what they're but they're not talking about i know they're saying they don't want that power oh okay okay so traditional debt exclusion except no because we just learned that you can read that right through a vote like right we just learned you can do that so there's an opportunity i think the excluded debt is it's it's an article and town meeting and at the ballot okay so all three have to pass the ballot comes first right that should be there is a schedule yeah there is a scheduled date for an election so many yeah time frame from the from the warrant yeah sounds good so select board decided to put all expenses into water rates yes other topics for this evening hearing none have a motion to approve the adjourn it so moved second you're in favor yes philson figure bill april yes iris yes rob yes we are adjourned