August 24, 2026 – Finance Committee – Video & Transcript

August 24, 2026 - Finance Committee

Autoscroll:

recording in progress thank you uh good evening to all uh this is the whaling finance committee um we have a forum available so I will call in meeting to order the meeting is being recorded and will be made available to the public on Lake ham as soon as possible after the meeting pursuant to chapter 2 of the acts of 2025 this meeting will be conducted in person and via remote access in accordance with applicable law on the watch or participate remotely with the meeting link that can be found on the board slash committee zoom links tab on the town's home page when required by law or allowed by the chair persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting may do so at the meeting location that is in person or through remote access people uh excuse me public comment should be limited to two minutes per person um can somebody access the town website while Carl's speaking and just see if there is a link there for this meeting we had a problem um the links hadn't been sent out the numbers I didn't get one but it's been coming but obviously yeah I got one did you okay maybe they realized that was an issue it was late it was like an hour was it late yeah all right sorry I don't know appreciate it I don't know we our agenda for the night is um pretty straightforward we'll take a look at the minutes of the uh of last week's meeting um we'll continue to review the finance director's multi-year budget model we will um continue our own discussion of the possibility of proposition two and a half override in fiscal 2028. um we will review and discuss our goals and agendas um our goals and timelines for this year and then we will continue with our discussion of the 2027 warrant articles um the agenda says 2026 but we're really talking about the future here um including our review process and identify any warrant articles that we might be able to to get too early after that we'll set the dates for the next meeting or two and hopefully adjourn about nine o'clock um in the room um on my left we have bill huss and brian o'hurley to my right iris haxa and um krishnakonda on um on zoom we have uh satish raj and is that the is satish the only member in common yeah that's one member i see okay um thank you um
i have a quick announcement to make concerning next week's um select board meeting the select board and the school committee will have a joint meeting um a week from tonight um because of the number of people on those two committees um we have been asked uh we're going to buy that there will not be a three-way joint meeting but they have invited us obviously to participate as members of the public um and have suggested that we appoint one of our own members to collect and then ask any questions that we may want to ask during the meeting certainly we can follow up with them afterwards as well um i'm not going to be available that evening although i will watch the link cam video as soon as possible if anybody is planning to go and would like to uh to take that on and be our mouthpiece and our ears in real time that would be great um i am unable to have a sipsi meeting that night i'll watch the tape okay we're probably gonna say
is that 30 plus 31st i'll be trying to get us cool yeah we want to get it so if um the world changes and somebody finds themselves yeah that's available please let me know i might reach out to um to um rob as well just to see if he's available um okay um still nobody no members in the public correct enough okay so um no public comment no members response um can we take a look please at the minutes of august 17th um brian once again thank you for preparing those welcome i sent out a revised version today minor edits in the first page happy day kind of red line so you know what i changed but i didn't take any other edits i had...
go right i have the redline version but i'd accepted all the changes so i could read it clean i'm not sure if i'm this is the precise language you already amended but right before our roman numeral three you're on about the sixth line of the paragraph under underset meetings meeting dates and times
yeah um um i think i We've got Roman 1 and 2 and then and 3 on that line. And then at the end of the next line, I think we'll insert the numeral 4. The words are end, timeline for completion, semicolon, and then I would put the Roman numeral there. I don't want to spend a lot of time. The only reason I did it is the lead-in to 1, 2, and 3 is the words continued discussions of. And the last item in that sentence is the first discussion. Okay. I will withdraw the comment. Thank you. I should know better.
Anybody else have any edits? No.
And if I move to accept minutes, it's redlined. Seconded.
Okay. We have a motion. And a second. All in favor, we have to have a roll call vote. So, Bill? Brian? Yes.
Iris? Yes.
Satish? Yes. So, I was not there in the second half of the meeting. So, I can't comment on that. But otherwise, it looks good. Abstain or vote yes? Abstain. Okay. And Carl votes yes. Satish, abstain? Yeah. Abstain. Abstain. 5-0-1.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Next topic is continuation of the discussion of multi-year budget model. I know it's late today, but there is some new information on retiree costs. And so, Brian has... Has revised the model to include that. Looks to me as though it reduces the projected deficit by about $360,000. Am I reading that right, Brian? For fiscal 28? Okay.
$363,361. $363,361. $363,361. $363,361. $363,361. $363,361. $363,361. $363,361. $363,361. $363,361. $363,361. $363,361. $363,362. $363,361. $363,362. Yeah. Net production. Mm-hmm. And now that that report has been published, is that number baked in? It's my understanding. So, for fiscal 28 and fiscal 29, those are the town's assessments. And for those of you that looked at the tab, the retirement tab. Mm-hmm. updated that tab for all of the fiscal year showing there using numbers from the updated 2026 actuarial report following the same methodology that I used for that together last year for forecasting purposes so anything beyond 29 are not fixed in stone but are used more to scope for forecasting purposes but I think it's important to see the net impact and effectively what occurred is we got reductions in the front of the of those years and and build up in the back of the years so you still have to get to zero by 2036 on the unfunded liability but it's certainly went in the helpful direction for fiscal 28 yes just one comment Brian had sent me a question this afternoon after I ran my probabilistic simulations and he did find a discrepancy from what happened sound yesterday or before and the new version and that discrepancy was I was using yesterday a assumption of five point five percent increase in school payroll and this really should be four and a half percent so what I set out today was in fact correct so whatever you have the latest is the correct order yesterday uh was off by about 250. I'm still looking at I'm sorry I was still looking yesterday's version of that yesterday's version I don't know whether I or maybe an earlier version of the model had five percent for the school uh payroll increase and uh maybe it was running the sensitivity and never changed it back uh Brian noticed there was about a 250 000 difference between all of my scenarios from yesterday and today and I looked at it and that is because I should have assumed the four and a half percent increase in this people all along okay because that's what's in your current model that you sent out so anyway it's probably an inside discussion between me and Brian but yeah as long as as long as so is the last so the last email is it has the four and a half right yeah I think for the benefit of the rest of you um when we first looked at this model which was the version five model um there were a series of assumptions that I had plugged in not randomly but based on
based on inputs that I had seen while I was on the budget working group of last going in the last fall um if you look at Brian keveny's presentation that he made um the select board uh he changed his health care assumption from 14 year over year to 12 percent and he increased the school personnel cost from four and a half percent to five percent I didn't change those in version six but if you in fact change those to match with Brian assumed in his it it pretty well nets each other out that the overhead the override number changes by less than twenty thousand dollars I think so anybody that wants to try changing those two inputs and see where the over for the override number goes to you'll see that it doesn't change that much and um I don't know for sure but I thought 14 percent for health care that was in Brian's original model was on the heavy side and my instinct is that he was probably carrying a little bit of cushion there because he didn't want to advertise what he thought school would be personnel cost increase would be which is we learned less the time with the select board when I was asked the question that's not only cost of living increase that steps and lanes and my understanding is one Brian probably has inside information on where that contract is but my understanding is they may have at least a semblance of an agreement so he may have made that shift in anticipation because I think 12 is generally what he was carrying um last year um on the budget working group so but the net effect of those two assumptions so they don't change the results about seven thousand dollars yeah yeah so I didn't I didn't want to change them just because I needed to isolate the retirement to make sure that all the numbers were flowing through the black box correctly and um but it may be in the next iteration I'll either change them to what Brian's now using or um maybe we won't need to be using these assumptions anymore um and the only thing that I've added in my discussion is that I put a probability distribution around the point estimates and I basically define it as giving me the low point the most likely in the high point in using distributions almost like a normal distribution but not quite it's triangular around those and what it then allows me to do is a thousand random simulations of what Vielen eulogy and I can get the whole distribution of those outputs so it just adds a probabilistic why would you use a triangular distribution as opposed to like a normal distribution well it's you know normal I would have to one figure out a standard deviation which would guess normal runs infinite high infinite which type and normal is centered I can't skew it one way or the other so triangular isn't easy for everybody to understand it has a definite high indefinite though can move the middle point back and forth in the middle it's roughly no i had i was just curious it seemed to be the easiest but i had like 100 different choices for distributions i figured out i mean they're all that's fine we can talk about distribution but we can you know if anybody has like hey i'd like to run a different distribution i was just curious how you came to that these things take me 30 seconds to run so i'm happy to provide more data actually what i would like is a little bit of background for those of us and i may be the only one who did not take statistics in school um um i think i understand what you just said but we you have low points and high points and then most likely and most likely how did you decide what those are to the extent possible i based it on brian's presentation because he would give in some cases he gave a range uh you know in other cases it was based on things maybe that brian really had mentioned about hey you know the insurance you know is could be as high as 14 last year it was eight so i tried to use a combination of brian kevin's presentation what i've heard in this meeting and actual historical values uh but there's no magic so that's why i sent the assumptions around and if at some point somebody wants to say hey i don't like this assumption can you change it and it's five minutes i can do it and i understand it to the degree i need to understand it but um the um it's more of a black box than the excel model which for the recipe probably looks like a black box but at least i can trace numbers to cells right try to figure out if they're they're mechanically operating correctly but uh if it's appropriate i do want to talk about a couple other assumptions which may or may not affect okay what bill has done as well um so during the presentation brian mentioned that through the middle of august the assessor had quantified new growth thus far at three hundred seventy thousand dollars um i think i mentioned this before but um early last summer
when brian and the budget workers were going through the model he was using a half million dollars for new growth assumption and we had the assessor in the office and the assessor said geez here it is you know the beginning of the summer and it's kind of looking like it's coming in closer to four hundred thousand after which brian changed this model and reduced it to four hundred thousand more conservative that four hundred thousand found its way all the way through up and including in your finance committee report if you look at the levy table in your report to see new growth at four hundred thousand um brian has since then point increased it to six hundred thousand and he did that in part because uh on the tax recap that was filed with the dor last december the actual new growth for fiscal 25 which the assessor told us earlier last summer it was looking closer to four hundred thousand to five hundred thousand actually turned out to be nine hundred and twenty thousand hello so um i sent an email which i may have gotten response i haven't checked since i've been in meetings um i sent a question the assessor late this afternoon just saying hey brian davis you're assuming it came from the assessor your estimate through middle of august of 370 basically just recounted the history of this last cycle and i said are how comfortable or uncomfortable are you with brian using 600 000 for fiscal 26 which then the way brian operates this that becomes his baseline going forward unless and until information changes um i believe brian attempted to explain to me how we went from the assessor thinking it was going to be 400 000 to 925 000 but i don't remember but there was a rational explanation i just don't know if it's repeatable and so one of the at least as as to the unused levy one of the numbers is significant is that if if it if it really is going to trend closer to 400 than 600 or 700 right that's just going to change your mean it's going to increase your mean level right and and that's a great example when you said how did you choose the numbers we're at 370 so far this year i think you said so i chose my low point is 500 i chose the most likely is 600 and i chose the high point of 900 which is what we had last year so you can argue with those but that's it wasn't just out of thin air 900 was last year 600 was his current estimate was so that's what's plugged in into my model yeah so all i'm saying is if it can change yeah as information clearly we'll know the answer is um november and they're preparing the tax recap so as to all these assumptions i think we have started this discussion last week unless unless there's a reason you have to
get more comfort today than simply waiting until some of these things become more known that's an example of one that is not that far in the distance but could move the needle in this case it could go the wrong way in terms of being too optimistic that maybe you don't need an override right um obviously the longest one out is health care um we might know some things anecdotally in december or january as they're discussing this at um at the health board but i just want to point that out and then the the question amount that brian includes um again
you know it's not it's not a real expense he's simply saying even though i've built in his model he's built in his assumptions he's built in some conservative assumptions which should leave some room and that's proven out over the years would be the case and so when you hear about you know surprises this one gets toward town meeting it's just that he's been pretty conservative and and things some years have gone the wrong way this year the retirement number is a surprise to the good side right um but two years ago that went the other way and we were expecting six percent well up 11 percent um so so but the the contingency um to me it doesn't necessarily mean should that into how much of an override that you think you need to ask or it if you need the positive late but you think you need to ask or if you need the positive ask for one because if you have surprises and you didn't take that in there's other ways you can address it and you could use 200 000 of free cash to plug the hole in the budget right and so that's i just want to point that out so i don't think it's inappropriate for us the viewers at least so far in your modeling and at least one scenario um the more optimistic scenario and i've left it in the workbook for now but as we go forward and start talking about this i don't think it'd be inappropriate to talk about ignoring it just because it could be addressed else elsewhere um yeah it can also be covered in the probabilistic instead of saying let's you know add two hundred thousand dollars to the mean you basically take the 80th or 90th percentile of your distribution and you built it you build in a comfort level that way um the other item that's not in the list of the assumptions uh because it's baked into the work into the model at the moment um and you know i don't know how uncomfortable we will be but you heard brian explain local receipts and uh local receipts uh again if you look at the finance committee table in the last spring warrant um local receipts were a million dollars plus or minus less than what is currently in this model and what's currently in this model is fiscal 26 actual local receipts brian's closed the books tallied up fees and excise taxes and and investment income and lo and behold it's a million dollars higher well that's a million dollars less tax revenue you have to raise and uh i think you've heard him say that the department of revenue won't an investment income and particular, they won't let you, even if you anticipate, even if we thought investment was going to be twice as big, because we have a lot more reserves or interest rates doubled, because I had this conversation with them three or four years ago, when interest rates took off. And I said, Why can't we, you know, we were, we were assuming investment income based on, you know, 1% or less interest rates from the prior year, that why can't we factor in, you know, half of the increase in the interest rate, which would have been multiple hundreds of thousands, that DOR won't let you do that you need to prove to them what the prior year actual was, and then they'll maybe let you increase that two and a half percent. So it's been a slow crawl up the curve on investment income, on the building fees, the town revamped its building fee schedule. And that that goes up or down depending on obviously the amount of building. That goes on in town. And and then automobile taxes, I think, are built in there as well. And so my question is, it's been building. Now what it's like, we're going to be the highest number in some time. And if I just focus on investment income, maybe not in fiscal 28. But as we go forward in the forecast, certainly the Federal Reserve is looking to push down, if they can do it eventually short term rates, which is going to drive the town's investment income sort of back down, I don't think it's ever going to get back, you know, as low as where we were before. But I asked myself the question of what happens if you're basing your budgeting, and we do this, if you look at the budget, albeit the way we present the motion to town meeting. We show other sources of revenue not in including local receipts, state aid, and taxation. And we basically asked the town to approve taxation for the bulk of it, even though we know we're going to get state aid and have local receipts. And that just allows them once they go through all actual results to the tax recap, it's really until November, December, you actually know how much tax revenue is needed to balance the budget. And in fact, this year's tax recap is likely going to be showing you on the warrant, it showed a 4.89% year over year tax increase, it's likely going to be, you know, low threes, because of that spike in those items, right. And if you look at the prior year, same thing we were we had, I just want to pause, I just want to make sure I understand what you just said. We put together the budget, we exclude those numbers in terms of local receipts. Because even though we're an estimation, we have to make sure we have enough revenue and get approval to generate all the revenue needed. So everyone approves that everyone sees that 4.89% number, it passes. And then basically, we all proceed forward. And the end of the fiscal year, essentially six months after everyone's voted, the town can actually look at all the money that they have collected and say, we don't actually need 4.89. We'll just take it. So that's why you get two preliminary bills until the tax recap is done. And then you get your first final new bill, which shows the new tax rate. And when you do the math on that in January, when you get your bill, when you do the math on that, you will see last year this time and you'll see again this year, a year over year tax increase is less than what's in the warrant. Because all these other numbers went in our favor. What I'm concerned about is what happened in the last year, the tax rate increase. What happens when it goes the other way? Sure. So you're budgeting right based on local receipts, and let's pick on investment income of this now higher level. What happens if those start coming in less than as you're tracking through the year? The answer is, we still have to balance the budget by the end of the year, which that means you have to start cutting expenses during the year, or seeking other sources of revenue, which means you got to go to town meeting or a special town meeting. So there's many things that happen when it goes the other way. So I'm not saying that I'm uncomfortable at the moment with fiscal 28. All I'm drawing attention to is that local receipt number is somewhat elevated at the moment. And historical. And it may stay there. But yeah, but I thought it was still conservative because I asked that question on on the investment income and seems like it's still a conservative number compared to the current interest rates and projected interest rates. Well, I think the number that's in there is actual investment income for fiscal year ended June 30 25. Yeah, escalated by two and a half percent on that aggregate dollar amount. Yeah, though it is what it is now that number was driven by the town's cash balances throughout the fiscal year. And the town's cash balances throughout the year is somewhat the same. But it's not the same. But it's not the same. But it's not the same. But the rate for the year has kind of ended on when they borrow money, and holding excess proceeds, etc. And obviously, the rates during last fiscal year were kind of up and down during the year. But that's going to move around. And so my only concern is that if that investment return starts to fall the other way, and you're doing this one year lag, you know, we could find during a fiscal year, we're starting to trail what we estimated. Right. for local receipts and so if you've built your budget assuming that the town when you do your motion to town meeting they're not seeing they're not clipping out local receipts and state aid so they're they're saying you know we're fully appropriating what you need to balance the budget that's what i was just going to say like at the end of the day at town meeting we all essentially are green to cover the total cost regardless of local receipt in fact to be very honest up until this exact moment i didn't realize what you had just said that that my tax goal is actually the rate of increases will actually be less than what we had agreed on i think so maybe i'm not appreciating them but if you look at the table in the fincom report there you do present the sources of revenue you get the taxation the local season and and you'll see if you look at last year's warrant and and or two years ago and you look at what was in there for fiscal 20 26 and then you look at the the most recent warrant and what's in there for fiscal 26 brian will have substituted the actual year-over-year increase with what was in there as the budgeted amount now again in some prior years it's gone the other way where things haven't you know all worked out as he had budgeted but um usually it's it's not too significant but it's just you know again i apologize for harping on this i'm just trying to make sure that you're understanding what i'm trying to make sure that you're understanding what i'm trying to make sure i appreciate the impact
the sources of revenue be wrong right that that revenue instead of ending up from the local receipts would end up just coming from real estate tax right because we would have to maintain that shortfall that's a problem ideally because that's not what you want but there's no actual shortfall in total funding like dollars because you're just going to get it from the public there shouldn't be based on the mechanics of how that works out that's what i want to make sure like because to me those are and and maybe this is just a personal thought to me those are two different risks right one is an actual shortfall in cash that's needed which i think is like a sub five highest level of problem as opposed to in an ideal world to your point and i think i'm getting i think what i'm hearing you say is look it's a risk because we're assuming the source of the funds and it could be that those source of the funds i think you're just cautioning all of us that the source of those funds are not guaranteed yeah well when the tax recap is done in november december over some steps the tax rate and the first two bills of the last two quarters of the fiscal year february and may bills are based on whatever's in the tax recap for local receipts etc if those actual collections in the following six months start lagging you've already set your tax rate that's where you got to then start cutting the budget or finding other sources of funding for the budget so there's a timing issue there um there's certain there's certain items like snow and ice as an example where even if the town has happened this past year the town didn't appropriate enough money because of the number of events we had there's a state statute that requires that that be funded and so it goes right onto the tax bill even though the town might not have approved the taxing authority for that and there's two or three categories that that generally fall on that but otherwise if if you set the tax rate based on estimates and those estimates by the time you're getting into the second half of the fiscal year or running behind you have to start trimming your budget and so my only concern is if if we're getting possibly to a high point on these other sources of revenue which are then suggesting that you have enough to support possibly higher year over year budget expenses then you might otherwise feel comfortable budgeting and then some of those revenues don't come to pass you could have a problem and then then the cuts have to be made and the question is do you that's do you make them some upfront or the backs over i don't have a particular view right now i think what brian's done is consistent with what he's done certainly the last number of years it just it just when something moves like that a million dollars um um from your you know springtime budget to the summer um you know i look at that and say is that you know is that repeatable um yeah i think that's what i was saying i think for the short term right for the next fiscal year it should not be very conservative but future years yes you know the longer outlook you have you rely on those interest rates as much so it has to be more conservative but the very immediate one should not be so there is a little bit of uh variability there um but it sounds like yeah i was just going to say that it sounds like the worst case is is inconvenient to somewhat painful but not catastrophic in other words you can do some cuts and you can go back and have a special town meeting and then of course if that happens once you'll probably be more concerned over the next time so it doesn't happen twice you survive and i'm i'm sorry maybe we need to take this offline because i don't think i'm still appreciating why we would get to that point because effectively if the town at town meeting okay we need a hundred million dollars everyone's agreeing we will give you a hundred million dollars
and they're agreeing at town meeting to give that through property taxes and effectively we come behind and actually end up and you don't actually need to give us that we actually found some other sources we found some pocket change in our in our pocket right so you no longer have to give us that other than the actual mechanics of well we said it would be five percent in order to cover that shortfall it actually the percentage needs to rise but the total amount what i'm not appreciating is if we told you in the beginning we needed a hundred million we still need the 100 million so i don't understand why i think we have to confirm it i think the tax rate hopefully is is something that the state has to
approve and i believe once it's set i'm not sure there's a mechanic to go back and and say in march of the following fiscal year change the tax rate to your point you might technically have the authority through the way the appropriation was done at town meeting but i believe once the tax rate gets set there's no mechanism to go back to the state to reset it to be able to collect the extra revenue you can't just increase tax bills to cover it i see but we need to confirm that with brian and i think that's why the only other mechanism is you now have a fixed amount of of tax revenue that you can collect because you've set the rate and the only other way to balance the budget is to either cut back on some expenses right um okay or use free cash what about rate reduction so you had mentioned we're not going to actually see that 4.8 percent on our bill we're actually going to see it come in the low threes because of the lower receipts how are they able to do that without needing to put that through a re-vote because again we've appropriated the full amount doesn't mean you have to bill people for that and we don't ever bill people for the full amount right because that full amount doesn't reflect the fact we're going to get stated right right so so i would say so so the law permits you to move in the other direction below but it does not permit you okay thank you yeah you have to have a special meeting now
i think when all of you have time it'll be available probably early november you can look at last year's tax recap it's tough to fight through it but it's probably a worthwhile exercise uh to just to familiarize yourself with it um i have my own i saved my tax estimates and when i go back and try to see the estimating the real bills yeah let's figure it out yeah one question i had on the expense side um you know we there was some conversation on the insurance side that it could be 10 12 in you know in bills model as well uh but i didn't see much about the school expenses uh seems like it's it says five percent in the current model uh but fiscal 26 and 27 has been much higher and there was a word of caution on um the increased uh spend because of the spread out of district tuition and transportation and that seems to be continuing to rise so is there a logic reasoning behind why we think or or the town thinks it's will be five percent uh that seems to be a risk to me it it is it is that um that's a placeholder and what brian has said in the past he said to us i believe it's happening that he's been pressing the school to give him a three-year budget with obviously more focus on fiscal 28 um so that rather than using just you know macro percentages some things uh we can get more precision as i said last week and i re-looked at it um you know the bus contract uh i think we have at least one more if not two more one-year extensions with just cost of living increases but when that contract ultimately expires i think the last time it expired that contract increased i'm going to say it went up 40 50 percent year over year and that's a big number um and so you know just because you have five percent um you know either special education you know might you know you could push that number up to ten percent uh uh if you're applying it to all of their expenses but what we've found in the past is specialized might go up 10 15 20 and then when you average that in with you know all the other expenses that are going up at inflation um you know maybe it is closer to five to seven in total but um you know we could find when the schools if they're able to in the next and maybe they're going to be doing this carl on the 31st i don't know what what their plan is but i think what brian's attempting to do and has attempted to do thus far is basically share this scoping exercise forecasting exercise with the school saying you know at these levels here's what the town's overall budget is going up here's what the tax rates tax revenues is going up overall here's what we may or may not need an override and the schools could come in and say hey by the way we need you know half a million dollars more than what you're showing in that forecast right um yeah and yeah that's what i'm saying like the school expenses from the past two years has been much higher increase and unless the conditions for those have changed you know there's not much control right i mean if you have more students going out of district and transportation and all that is beyond the control of anyone
yeah i think it was if you're looking at um and carl i think i mentioned this to you if you're looking at the finance committee report uh from last year uh there was a there was a um i think you you were reconciling the largest budget drivers and i think there was a school related special education item that i think referred to the school budget and i think we're going to be looking at that in a little bit but uh the school budget has been um you know reflected a 60 or something like that year over year increase i don't know if that's something that you saw but um there was an issue with where that number where that percentage came from uh which i don't spend a lot of time on tonight because i'm sure we will get to it at some point but the town town as all communities do get reimbursed from the state amount of money each year to help offset special special education costs the budget got prepared by the schools over the years where either they would show those expenses gross and then show a separate line item with a credit representing the reimbursement from the state and last year i think they netted the reimbursement um or maybe it's the other way around i forget maybe the prior year they netted it and this year they pulled out but when you looked at a year-over-year analysis it showed an exorbitant increase which just had to do with that issue so but but i your point is is a valid point we we won't know until we know and again this is this is a question of you know brian i think is trying to in some ways set limits on where he thinks the budget in total should go and he's kind of backing into a number for the schools and basically saying we really don't want to see a budget request from you that except what you see in this forecast it doesn't mean that they won't show up with one that exceeds what's in this forecast because their contract settlement requires them to do so for example or they discover that they have twice as they're in it's too early for them to know how many special education students will have for fiscal 28 they actually won't know that for probably at least a year yeah but if tuitions have been spiking as they did a few years ago they'll they'll likely be conservative in whatever they present so yeah i think there could be more expenses on the school side than you're seeing i i would say it's more likely that would be the case unless they live within the forecast brian gave them than them coming in under budget yeah
yeah because if i look at your summary sheet right where the cost drivers and you have the variable assumptions and looking at past year percentages you know most of the assumptions are sort of within that range of past years or about except this one the school expenses. Yeah I mean if you put a higher percentage I guess the only good news is I think a higher percentage on that line item unlike the payroll line item doesn't move the needle here as much. So if you double it to 10% I don't know I don't have it in front of me but if you double the 5% expenses to 10% for schools how much does that move the override? Yeah that's increases by almost half a million. Okay well yeah maybe I can share the screen let's see. My apologies for the retirement number what did that number come in at? What's the retirement number what did what did that number come in at? Well this next slide well for fiscal 2018 assume we're prepaying you get a little bit of a discount 7.4 million and the forecast version 5 had ád $360,000 higher than number so it was 7.76 million. Great. the next year was about 400 000 less 455 and then as you get a little further turns the other way and you'll see it higher in the last three or five years that number is for the next two years right it's fixed for the next two years and then they go through the same actuarial review and um so um my only point to talk about these three four five six items is that that there um there's just still it's not all variability to the positive side there there is some exposure and that all means and it gives you a sense why brian keveny has tended to be you know rightly so a bit more conservative particularly at this point in the year and i think it's important to note that um and so i think it really comes down to
if if if ultimately select board is asked i remember to go forward with a operating road ride early like in the next month or so um and we're left having to make our assessments based on this level of variability now it's going to be difficult i mean i think with your analysis bill you could make statistical arguments that don't sweat the small stuff we're not you know we probably should be looking at how we can avoid it right um although even with the probabilities you know there's say i'm making it up a 10 chance that it will be over a million yeah so if you want to be really conservative you build that in yeah so what can we do in december we all know until december things will change right so wait until december for the override well i think that's that's there's no point in making this a nominee we know that it's not going to be stick so it's it's not actually our decision right the select board will make the decision based on whether they're asked by the school committee or anybody else or their own on their own motion right it's their decision they will look to us for our recommendation and there is no we have no obligation to recommend an override yeah um but honestly i mean we were going down this road you know two weeks ago or i guess it was a week whatever it was um we just may not feel comfortable we may not know enough to make a recommendation or to feel comfortable making one in october
i guess my question for the rest of you last week was um either you don't feel comfortable or
again based on things like bill's analysis or just what i know about certain items not to say that we can't be wrong in a lot of right but um sitting here today it seems like there could be an opportunity if there is a rationale to avoid asking for an operating override to do so and then to me the question is if if if at least the majority of the finance committee felt that way or or is the town better served for us to express that in advance of somebody asking for an override to try to control where the direction is right now i know a number of you have expressed um you know concern that this seems like a fate of complete or at least it seemed like a fate complete i think i think the higher rent number i think has put a slight positive variability in that and that it may get the town manager and the finance director rethinking their strategy and this is just for fiscal 28 then you get the question of multiple years but i just wonder how the rest of you feel about do we serve the our constituency town meeting residents better by saying it's better to wait and not push forward and if an override is needed we'll still be able to do one at the annual election in april or may as opposed to accelerating this when we think there's sufficient variability that could cut in our favor again the flip side of that argument is if you know you're going to need something for the next six or seven years and you're likely thinking therefore you're going to do something in multiple years fiscal 29 30 31 strategically is it better to ask for something for fiscal 28 combined with some budget cuts because if you look at if you cut the budget and then look at the effect of that out over the next six or seven years it's meaningful yeah or if you ask for an override in this year it's meaningful as to the impact on kind of future years versus if you wait or you know alternatively if you consider things like carl aspect question he wasn't advocating for doing what the town did last year for the reasons that it wanted to give some space to negotiate the union contracts it deferred long-term borrowing well it's coming back to roost this year because i think i mentioned last meeting 100 basis points of the year-over-year tax increase is attributable to last year's debt service that's occurring for the first time in fiscal 28 we're getting double debt service and the only reason you wouldn't is if you do that again deferring one year now and make the decision you're going to do that at least in your first override year or you just keep doing it out until 2037. um so there's just there's a lot of things that hopefully people have been trying to understand thinking about and i just come back to we want to be out in front uh or coming from behind saying okay we can always say we don't recommend or we're not in position to give you an answer one way or the other but i'm just not sure how is that is that more helpful than
are you looking for feedback i think i've had a chance to get my thoughts together i'm not sure if others have i have but go for it
generally i think i'm in alignment um brian that especially looking at the models and looking at the numbers recognizing that there still is obviously the potential for there to be a gap that has to be accommodated but the amount of that gap and as far as i can tell seems to be reasonably small especially when compared to the actual budget number um i think looking ahead it is very clear that we will need an override
but i think to the argument that you made and again when i think of just a household a typical person i know we're going to talk about the budget government but nonetheless like for a typical household when they're sure enough and preparing i think for tough moments right they're they're being thoughtful they're making cuts they're preparing for what they need um and i think it ends up moving us to the point that you made right you're going to make cuts if you make them in the beginning or if you try to reduce expenses in the beginning that has a wave effect to the downstream of the budget as well in terms of cost savings so in my mind i think i'm in alignment that based on the scope if you will of the shortfall i would be in favor of not requesting an override this year and rather preparing for the fact that we will try to essentially eat that cost and then ask for an override moving forward but having known that essentially we can propose to the public look we've really brought the budget to the point that we can yeah i i think i tend to be in the same position is that you know we hear a lot from the town leaders uh we don't actually hear a lot from the general public for paying the taxes and if i had some of my neighbors here and they turn to me and say bill now why why did you or why did the town recommend an override say well we were trying to be really conservative in our numbers and we really didn't look seriously at doing much cuts or doing much you know financial you know borrowing but we really want to be safe we wouldn't want to run short that would be a really hard argument i mean they would sort of say look you know come on you know we're tight you know you know at least try to tighten your belt first at least take a little bit of risk uh i i just would have trouble sitting across the table from somebody says why why are you doing this now you're right two or three years from now i think and say hey look we have a five million dollar deficit and uh you know we're going to have to lay off 20 of our teachers and you know your housing prices are going to go down and we're going to really change the dynamic of the town i think i can make that argument if there's five million deficit but to the numbers we're talking about i think it's a really hard argument to make i think i think it's especially hard to make today right yeah i might feel very different in three months when these numbers are known um but that would give us a chance and the town a chance or rather they're holding the election in november or whatever january i guess we're talking about as as brian says do it in may yes it's right before the town meeting or right after town meeting or i guess probably before um there's risk in them i get it but i think it would make more sense there's always going to be risk in whatever we visit um i think to do two things our next meeting one of which is come in armed with a better understanding i think this is applies to all of us what are our our levers what can we do or what can we request the town to do because it's one thing to say hey i want you to cut a million dollars out of the budget but you know well how right um
we apparently added a 802 000 to the 20 fiscal 27 tax levy by by issuing the bans these bond anticipation notes instead of long-term debt um we now have to refinance those but i'm not sure it's at all a bad idea to do the same thing for this year's yes it's kicking the can down the road but that alone i think autumn that what are we down to now we're if everything else is static looks like it looks like we're looking at an 817 000 deficit i don't know how much that they're planning to issue but last year that difference was 802 000 that alone i think yeah that service and brian's debt scheduled for fiscal 27 projects that were approved is in the range of 800 000 okay again it's all assumption-based but you know under my optimistic assumptions you have a one third chance of having a surplus so you know it's not necessarily eight hundred thousand dollars you know there is a significant percentage that you don't need anything again it's all based on assumptions so we can argue that um but there's a lot of uncertainty about that i think we're going to there isn't necessarily a well yeah i think for for the next fiscal year it probably is possible but i think there is a huge risk because you now will need much bigger increases in the future years if you keep kicking the can right so i think there has to be some balance in my view about yes you know we have to recommend some reduction somewhere but at the same time get the public opinion as well because if if if let's say it is required right even if it's a small amount this this time and bigger amount next two years if it doesn't pass then it's better to be known now and cut that you know expense gradually rather than having to do something immediately so we have to keep that in mind right so it certainly is looking like a bigger number as the year's role that's true satish but i think it's important to note that if if it doesn't pass right if the vote doesn't pass on a bigger number there's an immediate impact oh yeah yeah that's what i i think yeah the budget has to get balanced and get balanced immediately i totally agree there has to be an effort to reduce the expenses or or or not having to need a bigger number right now you know there has to be okay yes i'm in alignment with that yeah and you know not not to wordsmith too much but i have some issues with just the term kicking the can down the road because it implies irresponsible or we're just delaying the inevitable and it's like i don't think that's the case of people any of us who say let's not do it this year i use a different term that particular and i was involved and actually was part of the team that recommended that i would refer to that more as financial financial engineering yeah um it actually cost the town 170 000 and in van interest that it would not have had to pay i haven't yet and i won't know until brian floats the bonds how much it cost us if anything it could could be some savings but the way long-term rates have gone it probably will end up having cost us something on a little higher interest rate versus having floated the bonds but again there's a reason the reason i felt comfortable using financial engineering was that the school superintendent in particular made the argument that
he would much prefer to be able to address overall budget planning and overrides and all that stuff with the union contract settlements done and obviously they were hopeful that they would have reached settlement with most of the unions particularly the schools but that was the rationale that it was made sense to me as a budget committee member to say okay we needed to figure out a way to move you know move this into the next year and and we came up with two financial engineering ways to do that converting levy debt to excluded debt which had previously been recommended by the prior fincom and the secular didn't follow that recommendation and then this deferral again there's nothing that says it can't be done again my view is what's the rationale for doing it now other than avoiding a small override response or possibly no need for an override versus again and i'm not not i'm not a hundred percent of myself sold against going for an override if one could show me that it fit in a strategic way because you're looking at its effect on the next two years after that so that you know you can you can pencil out say well if we go ask for whatever the number and present a three-year approach that that is helpful to the town's overall financial planning i just don't think we're anywhere close to addressing fiscal 28 and yeah we know nothing other than these you know macro percentage year-over-year increases for fiscal 29 and 30. um but i think once we get some information from the schools i mean i'd love to know whether or not they think they can stay within brian's you know estimates of five percent four and a half percent um you know if i was a betting person it'll come in higher and then begrudgingly they'll go down to right true so we probably won't really know so you can't go any further than what's in brian's model yeah um i say that somewhat facetiously but somewhat based on prior experience and again i get it i mean they they're they have to advocate for their their what they're responsible for and um and they have at this point in time the town's moving parts are not nearly as substantial as the schools are moving parts are and i think that's something that's being debated but i think that's a really important part of the reason why i think that's important is because if you literally just take sped as i said they really won't know how much money they're going to need for their sped budget until september august of 2027 right and so sitting here today and if and if they're wrong if i was overseeing that budget i want to go back to brian you mentioned that last year 2027 override was 800 and 800k and this year 4028 is 817k so it's the difference is 17 000 increasing overhead amount but not doing anything am i right it was 800k there was no override last year yeah if you haven't done anything yeah without the financial engineering i think he's saying without the financial have we not have we issued the long-term bonds yeah uh that debt service would have shown up in the fiscal 27 budget okay and that as it turns out both that and the levy debt to excluded that in hindsight weren't actually needed because again if you look at the uh financial engineering i think he's saying without the financial engineering i think he's saying income's report in the table that shows the unused levy i think it showed an unused levy of 1.2 million when we came up with those suggestions we were negative 1.2 or 3. our negative 1.6 and those two items were getting us close to break even by the time that all got accepted and rolled through and state aid came out and it was higher than we thought and health cut our way not 12 to 10 we ended up with an excess levy of 1.2 million okay that excess levy of 1.2 million if you look at it now coming out of fiscal 26 is now 2.5 million okay so things that to bill's point things have at least seemingly kept going in a positive way um you you made an interesting comment on the schools that if august to september the expenses for special ed are unusually high they have to find the money somewhere else in the future i think we're going to have to change that into the future else i guess the question i would have and i'm not sure that they would be able to give us the answer is well i'd like to know now where you would find that money because there is you know places in your budget where you can make sacrifices yeah my experience in the last couple years is far less than there had been in prior years and the town moved the energy school energy for example out of their budget um they had to put a hiring freeze in or not hiring a um expense freeze in at least halfway if not sooner last year and because again most of their costs are personal applies and i don't know necessarily that they um you know held off hiring positions that became vacant they may have so i think you know they could find it another place which i mentioned last week that they've tended to have to rob is the portion of operating budget that deals with the cost of the building and the cost of the building and the cost of the housing and the cost of the housing and the cost of the housing and the cost of the housing and the cost of the repairing buildings and again you do that as a superintendent as you said the last four years in this presentation you do that year after year now you've got much bigger problems that you have to address in the capital budget so um so i'm not i'm not um of the view that um yeah one of the areas that has the last year in particular that it's got at least um more positives that the state's circuit breaker funding has been a little bit higher than they were anticipating but again any anything from the state is um i mean you could easily go flat or you know go the other way so i i just don't know how um you know you can give a direction and well you know when we i think back three years ago it got all the way to the fincom with the at that time the acting town manager acting administrator presented this budget and the fincom said we just can't accept the year-over-year tax increase which is really actually where my focus is more now than the override piece of it and so the fincom pushed back and said that the acting town manager and the school superintendent you got to find six hundred thousand dollars and so the school committee you know got their share they came back and said you know we're going to have to and the school committee discussed it they said we're going to have to cut you know we're going to have to cut you know we're going to have you know these two or three positions or not fill these two or three positions and then the meeting following them putting that out there we went as a fincom from having no attendance from the public at our meetings to you know 30 people sitting in the audience saying you know we don't want whatever the program that was going to suffer you know one or two personnel change
so you know i think there's a way that and we mentioned this before i think there's a way you can if if if the thing i've decided to march down that path whether now or whatever it's presented with the budget um there's a way and you still have these variables that could cut in a positive way you know there's still a way that you could you know let people know that i'll be on paper you say you might have to cut and do your best not to identify human beings but you know positions because if state aid's higher than we budgeted or if new growth not new growth that's not a good one but the health insurance is lower than what we budgeted you know we as a fincom might be willing to allow some of that savings to be utilized and we in fact did that three years ago we allowed them to restore a position that was slated to be cut um but we were talking minor things relative to the point that irish made was that you go out for an override of a million million and a half two million and it fails i mean you get them at that point you have to give them an a b budget you have to tell them again not human beings but here's the impact where we would have to make the cuts and
services so but i agree with you carl that um even just coalescing ourselves around a proactive approach um probably is best served to hold off or at least a couple more weeks until if you point out the schools leave the psych board my only concern in their meeting tonight which i'll watch the tape my only concern is they're going to show up on that meeting and request an override i don't know that to be the case um i believe that is the case but if they're going to show up and ask for an override i just thought it might be i'm not advocating this tonight but i thought it might be helpful for the fincom to at least be in a position to weigh in pretty quickly thereafter If we have a contrary view, if we don't, that's fine. We just see how it plays out. But in some sense, when you get into these things, I was in three of them as a Board of Selectmen member. Everybody's looking for cover, right? And somebody's got to step out in front if it deals with holding the budget in line. And I was not afraid to speak my mind as a member of the Board of Selectmen, and I was the only one. Everybody else was, you know, do the override. And I'm not afraid to be somebody on the Finance Committee, even though I told you that I'm not sure yet that I wouldn't support an override if it was presented in the construct of a three-year strategic plan that made sense to me, that there was a reason to do it. I'm just not there yet.
It'll be interesting as they, you know, request. And override, you know, in October or October, the meeting on the 31st, August 31st, what backup they have. Are they saying, well, we think our budget's going to go up by 10%? So in other words, they have to have some rationale for it, not just, hey, we'd like more money. But I don't know. They must have some backup. Well, I'm sure they've seen Brian Kebney's model, and they've seen now the presentation he just made, if they haven't seen the model. But I'm pretty sure that... The model is way too low. Well, at the moment, at least, subject to not having seen the retirement number yet going down, they would have said, you know, if we're coming up 1.2 million short, assuming you have Brian's contingency, and you're going to tell us that 60 or 65, 70% of that has to be found in the school budget, we just, we're not willing to do that. We would prefer you go for an override. So we're unconditional on sort of assumptions. Now, it's possible that they have advanced... An actual forecast that is a number higher than what's in Brian's model, and therefore, they could walk in and say, we see what's in Brian's model, but we're here to tell you that knowing what we know about the union contract and other things, we're not even sure we can live within that number. And that already is telling us that we need an override, so we're here to tell you or ask you. I don't know. But again, my only concern with that is, you know, once that's... Starts the ball rolling, then it is now in the court of the select board.
And we're on that path right now, so we'll see what happens. And then... Yeah, it's a week now. We're meeting two weeks from now.
I think... I mean, it's their... It's going to be the school committee's best shot, right? And they have their own... Constituencies. But I think we owe them the courtesy of listening to what they have to say.
And frankly, you know, my reaction is going to be different if it's 1.5% versus 1.7. Just like a number out of the air. Or, you know, do I think they're likely to come in below that estimate? No. But I just want to hear what they have to say. But I... I liked your idea last week, Brian, about... And to summarize it, basically, if there's not going to be an override, make the cuts you have to do, or at least plan for them. And if things do break positively, we'll give you the money back. I think that's fair. They might be able to re-share some of the money. I still think it's important where possible. That's an important distinction. I appreciate that. Just from an override presentation and selling standpoint, Yeah. I think you have to be able to say... There was a little bit of pain felt to get to where we're now asking you to go any further. I don't know what the pain point is other than if you just take around numbers, if we're $800,000 or $900,000 short. If you could say half of what we're short needs to be found in budget cuts or other revenue. Can I say, if we look at the budget, though, the thought process was to ask for a three-year override. But just so we're... We're all on the same page. That's not because in year four, we all of a sudden don't need an override. Correct. It's because they're going to ask for overrides, essentially. I just want to make sure we're all saying the same thing, right? Essentially, until it's 2038. 2037. 2037. Okay. Until 2037, in order to move forward with, we'll call it local service funding, Wayland will require an override every single year. And the amount of that override is just going to progressively get bigger. The delta progressively gets bigger until we hit 2037 and we actually have a break. And so the reason why I point that out is because, to your point about strategic planning, right? If the school board comes in and says, we want an override for next year, essentially, they're really saying, we want an override for the next decade. Because to your point, they're going to have to. That's what they're essentially committing to. We want to try to continue sort of level service and the funding required for that for the next decade plus, because nothing's changing, with the exception of the public changes their mind in three years around whether they want to continue sort of funding overrides. But fundamentally, and I think the reason why I bring this up, because in my head, pushing off for a year is another year we don't need an override and then helps reduce the deltas that we would then still have. But fundamentally, and I think the reason why I bring this up, because in my head, pushing off for a year is another year we don't need an override and then helps reduce the deltas that we would then still have. For the following nine years. No? Like from a math standpoint, that is what would happen. Not if it's financial engineering, right? If it's just financial engineering without expense card, then it just balloons. You are paying more, actually. Okay, fair enough. Fair enough. Depends how we get there. Fair enough. But I think that's also like an interesting point of, unless someone wants to make an argument otherwise. In my mind, anyone who's requesting override this year is requesting the override. I mean, they're not formally doing that, but effectively they're saying that's the path, right? Like that's the path that they see. Yeah, I mean, I think you all can speak for yourself. I'd personally be hard pressed. I was on this finance committee for the next seven years, right? To vote against an override in all those seven years, because that will be gutting both school and town services, right? Yes. So with the level of where you're at, different question, right? And again, the willingness to do some spade work now. Personally, we should have been doing this last year, the year before, right? And because of financial engineering last year, we didn't, right? It really cut the budget. Two years ago, it was a bit more push to get some concessions, particularly from the schools. And they agreed at the time, as I think I mentioned at a prior meeting, to largely not fill, it was seven or eight positions that had teachers retiring, senior level teachers. And it saved $600,000 or $700,000. The school committee said, we can't afford to do that again. And that was done also in the same year that full-day kindergarten got brought into their budget, which was supposed to be paid by the state. Which I mentioned at a prior meeting, which turned out wasn't upshored, right? We knew that. But it turned out Wayland wasn't going to get the reimbursement we were hoping for. And so basically, the savings of not pulling those positions got gobbled up by pulling the full-day K where parents had to pay part of the cost. And that's fine. Wayland was an outlier. And I got that rationale. But to your point, Alex. I think, yeah. And I think asking for three years now, I think I heard the town manager describe override. It's like Chase calls me up and says your credit line has been increased from $12,500 to $100,000, good for the next three years. I mean, it doesn't give this committee all that much control. Other than it still brings. It still has to. It still has to bring the town meeting its recommended budget, so. Well, I just also, I know that the history of Wayland and their overrides is that they've passed. I find asking for four overrides in a decade, a decade ago, different from a decade plus of overrides. Maybe others disagree, but that is, that's a.
The town manager has said this, and I guess, fundamentally, when I think of voter override, that's what I think of, is do people get override fatigue at some point? Does the public start to feel that? I know that hasn't historically been the case, but when we look back, I don't think we've had a period where the length of time that needed to cover from the overrides was so lengthy. Maybe I'm wrong on that. Well, I think the world has fundamentally changed, and not just for Wayland.
You know, we've only been in the proposition two and a half world since sometime in the 1980s, and although I haven't looked back that far lately, I did, you know, sometime last year, I don't think we we had anything, anything remotely like this in the past. Yeah, we would have to some degree. I mean, the retirement. It's really been the issue, even with the state giving communities a reprieve and pushing out the date by which the unfunded liability has to be retired, but those numbers have been actually growing, but, you know, the town relied heavily on free cash funding the operating budget for a bunch of years, so that was masking what would have been a need for an override. I see. Okay. Thank you for that. And the town, through fiscal prudence and other positive factors. Due growth, in some cases, and other things, managed to work itself off that. A lot of communities didn't, and particularly through COVID, a lot of communities started relying on COVID funding, and they were hiring positions, and then that funding went away, but you still have the positions. And to your point about, is there a benefit to trying to start to rein in the spending sooner than later, yeah, because each year, if you look at, not to pick on the schools, but if you look at how they present the budget, okay, what was last year's budget? And less inflated by X percent or whatever, and that's our level service budget, as opposed to, you know, what I would call zero-based budgeting. What do we really need from the ground up? And so, if you aren't ever tamping down that number, in fact, the year that they did tamp it down, there was an issue with how they were presenting it, and I have to point out that you can't start with the number that wasn't already reduced. You have to kind of reduce it. So, it's just... But I get there is utility in doing multiple-year, the number of committees have done them successfully, and I'm not saying I'd be opposed to it. I just think if we're struggling here, trying to get our arms around fiscal 28, how do you greenlight 29 or 30? But my point, Brian, is, regardless, and maybe it just dawned on me, my point in saying all that is just that, effectively, anyone who, and you might all disagree, but in my mind, if you're an alignment that you want an override now, you hopefully are doing that with the appreciation that an override now starts our 10-year march of overrides. And that's what's going to be coming down the pipeline, unless you change your mind halfway through. I'm not sure how much of the talent is, at large, is... Appreciating that fact. And... I mean, I've been saying this is coming for three years. And other than financial engineering last year, it would have come already. And the year before that, we had a couple other surprises. Healthcare came in at 2%, 2.5% year-over-year, because they used a trust fund to buy down the rate. But for that, we might have come close, right? But, you know, I also worry, and I'm feeling this myself, having been involved in this process, that you cry wolf too many times. That overrides are coming. And yet, miraculously, the powers that be figure out how to not have to ask for an override. I mean, my guess is over a 10-year period, you're going to see cycles. So you're going to see an override pass. And then, you know, then there'll be fatigue the second time. And people will say, no, let's not pass it and see what happens. And then there'll be pain, because we're cutting programs. But I think the point, I guess I'm saying that is... As with many things fiscally, the least amount of pain is felt to do it the first time, as opposed to later down the path, right? And so that's my point in all this of anyone watching this, right, to sort of believe that we don't want an override because we just don't want it. I think my point is you actually have the opportunity to recognize both that in the future an override will absolutely become a fiscal necessity. But also, we can reduce the pain felt by all by trying to avoid some of that up front. As opposed to going down this course and changing course halfway through. Well, again, I'm less... If you look at the year-over-year tax increases based on version 6, we're looking at 6.5%, 6.48% for fiscal 28, 6.12, 5.55, 6.63. I mean, those are big numbers relative to the 20-plus-year 4.6% year-over-year increase. That shows up on that slide I gave you guys. And I mean, I just don't know how you sustain that level of year-over-year tax increase. Yeah. Switching gears here. So we're focusing so much on like, you know, so I'm looking at the local receipt components, right? Is there any way to increase the local receipt, you know, whatever the line items are? Not increase the property tax, but increase those things to offset? Yeah. So if you look two years ago at permits and fees, they're probably half what they were in the budget. So the town went through all of it, hadn't done it for a bunch of years. Yeah. It went through and said... So like 5 million and all of a sudden 7.5 million now. Maybe... So property tax, we go from 7.5 to 9 or 10. So that, you know... I'm just thinking the other way. Increase the local receipts versus increase the property tax and, you know... Yeah. No, that's clearly that. And obviously advocating for more state aid. Yeah. But it's tough for towns like Wayland to advocate versus cities and things like that. And, you know, there are things that could happen. You know, I have no doubt that if every other community is staring at the same thing that Wayland is, which I'm sure they are. They are. That there will be building pressure on the legislature, for example, to either further push out the date by which the unfunded liability for the retirement fund has to be paid off for another, you know, 5 years, 10 years.
You know, but the costs still have to be paid. And, you know, we're paying into open... We have the other post-employment benefits. At least that one's voluntary. I think it's good financial management to do so. And Wayland is actually... If you saw Wayland at Brian's chart showing us a new growth being 300 and whatever it was, 20th out of 351 communities. I think Wayland's probably in the top 10%, 5% in terms of its funded balance for... Other post-employment benefits. Yeah, but we're losing ground on that. I mean, I mean, we can take that offline. But, so, you know, those types of things. And now the flip side is I just sat in a CIPSE meeting before I came here. And if I look out the fiscal 31 and 32 based on the request coming in, there's some larger size capital expenses, which ultimately likely will be done with excluded debt. But it's still going to be in the tax bill, right? Mm-hmm. Which is why I tend to also focus on tax rate. Because even though excluded debt's not going to drive the need for an operating override, you still have to go to the ballot to get your excluded debt passed. So, you just multiply the, you know, 6% and then we're all the way out for the eight years. And we get about a 66% increase over the eight-year period. So, it's significant. Yeah, it's meaningful. No, no, it's meaningful. I... And, yes, property values have been out, clearly outrunning that increase. And tax bill, but for some taxpayers, they're, you know, verbally house-rich, cash-poor. Mm-hmm. So, we represent all constituencies. So, there's no right or wrong answer to any of this stuff. There's just... Yeah. I think this is healthy discussion and... Yeah, most of the, from what I hear, options of avoiding an override are mostly financial engineering or differing something for future. And all that. I guess, somehow, we have to convey that there has to be more effort to reduce expenses or figure new ways of generating more revenue, right? New growth, or whatever it is, as a town, as a whole, as a community, instead of just relying on one thing, or financial engineering, and so on. And I don't know... Yeah. I don't know if we... Yeah. I don't know if we... don't know if we can put that pressure by just saying you know uh no right or by just saying cut expenses i think there needs to be both probably in some ways because as iris was saying it looks like it's a decade we would need all right if we don't do anything are you able to pivot so is that okay on the agenda to what so the next item i think was actually rob's but he's not here so i was hoping we could pivot to mile on the um the warrant article process it's fine um we talked to this before um i really would have urged people to think through take a look at the report from last year take a look at at these models and those assumptions and and think about you know the numbers will fall where they fall but but we do have some tools and you know i would i would like to have a discussion at our next meeting about how we can actually uh try to affect a lower budget um it's not our job to but i think it's it's incumbent upon us to be able to say if we think that there need to be cuts um or or financial engineering you know here are the options tell us why they won't work right so um
and then i think you know we'll hear what the school has to say and i think i'd like to take up in a more formal way you know the suggestion about okay really what what do we think they want to do you know are we going to go along with the with what i think will be a request and override uh with a vote from january or do we have a different view
so two weeks from now
yeah i mean it might i'll let it be two weeks from however well that's when we're meeting right but at some point whether it be a couple weeks after that or whatever but at some point we should start talking to people who are actually involved in the budget in other words you know in the school committee or um you know the head of the schools uh david fleischman and uh you know because right now we're just talking among ourselves and it's a very you know they're they're meaning they're meeting a week from tonight right you just said you couldn't be there and i understand that but i mean a meeting at our finance committee in other words if david or michael would come to one of our meetings and we could have this discussion with them here
i can invite well we've just had again um brian keveny was here um i don't know if we need to have him back yet i don't know there's brian i mean brian is the guy working the numbers but i don't know that he's the one who would be deciding what if any cuts were possible in other words to answer your question about hey you know are there potential cuts that are possible we could talk about it but it's much better to have a discussion with the people who are actually managing the operation at some point i can't disagree with that but right now i would be more interested in in having dave fleischman or you know kirsten or somebody do that because we've heard something from brian nothing for the same reason are we great schools are the biggest thing so that would be a good one yep okay um so that's two weeks for now in the meantime virus we're back on track excellent all right i'm in the i'm going to go ahead and share um and i'm actually going to just reorient us with the article process that we had discussed a couple weeks back i'm not going to spend too much time on this i'm actually going to pivot i had taken a look at the articles from last year into the first pass of thought ones that i thought could be drafts and therefore then we could talk about do those drafts then become first passes actually like on the town side possibly with a draft that we actually provide them and they basically are just putting in the so if you recollect what we talked about is there's an article sponsor or they're including background details it makes its way to the town um we had a suggestion that town council reviews to confirm legality prior to sort of continuing on with these um because there were a number of articles last year that ended up getting pulled because by the time town council reviewed them it turns out that they did not meet um legality requirements um don't we also talked about how we would need estimated costs and sources funding updated and then essentially background details um just a reminder to proposers that we are not responsible for representing their perspective we are responsible for matching the finance Canada report and then we had talked about as an open item with this idea which i'm going to pivot us into shortly that these yearly articles we get we create a draft of them and then say this article for public law not the content of public forum shall have been better overlooked so i'll just go ahead and review a couple years um with every prior comment people comment that this was good but it's about how we bring the planning and señor all the other instructions around before we'm done with the public and civil development that i think that fact aparece just the past that's not the purview of it not often this is what's going to happen so the public organization will not receive spending money ты that is up as a state deficit so you'll just have different and therefore they're able to be offloaded and hopefully updated by the town and then sent to us updated so we can essentially just review them and vote on them and move on and um in my preliminary review that would reduce our yearly warrant article by about like nine or maybe ten um which i think is like pretty substantial that's a reduction at least one article per income number um and then we had talked about essentially what standard articles versus um non-standard articles so again this is what happens today with standard articles again i i think those standard articles potentially could have the drafts and they could get done by the town um and then non-standard articles essentially we're saying these are sort of those ones that come where sort of fleshing out our process we had talked about really want to reach out to the sponsor and the proponent of that article understand sort of their perspective write your fincom report um
send it to them and i think that's where we had had some discussions last time about how much feedback how many drafts are really required what does that really look like for an efficient use of everyone's time and making sure that we're not losing sort of income's voice um in large report writing so that's what we talked about last time i took one second
so this was last year's um list of articles can you send that flowchart to the members yes i will resend it out yep um so last year if everyone recollects we had 52 articles that came in many of them were sold um before the end was through but 52 across seven of us effectively really across six of us um because the chair typically manages the fincom report which is lengthy in its own right um and then this doesn't yeah so for those of you who are new it's a lot of articles yeah it's a lot of articles now what i've done here is not every article has financial impact so there's that we're not in any way like a um so historically we or someone carl do you want to speak to i think there was some um flushing out of that sort of prior brian kevening will uh the finance director will um kind of take a first cut at that and i think we read with him on 95 of them and maybe added one and took one off and um but yeah um we used it in those wise ways um but i think that's it for this And the talent code requires, as was said, that we make that call in consultation with the finance director. I think anything, I think it generally was, we added some back that he, I think, he was, he was, I think, more aggressive in saying these don't have financial impact. I think we added a bunch back, or at least several. Yeah, I mean, I think there were some, so part of it, and we can talk about this as well, around more process. There are many that we chose to do write-ups for that you could argue did have some financial impact, but in their, in their nature were not financial articles. And we did that, I think, to ensure that we felt that there was ample explanation. And I think in the end, I think we learned that. I think that that, for many reasons, perhaps was not the best course, but. I think my recollection is the intent was financial, budgetary financial impact, as opposed to it necessarily being a financial article. And if we have a financial article dealing with, you know, internal controls or something, that's no. It's a cost association with the next fashion thing. But if it's immaterial. Yeah, so that's the problem. $1,000. $1,000 a year or something, and Brian Cummings would say that that's inconsequential. But, but there are, there likely were some, and there were a couple of years I was on that we first used this. I know Pam Roman was particularly vocal about, even though there was zero, included financial impact on the budget, people just felt it warranted a more thorough presentation to help out. Not require. But, and that, that was at the judgment of the finance committee, the finance director didn't make that decision, which I think is what you just said, right? Right. Yep. So I had a question, Carl, for you as I was going through this. The here reports, because I was less familiar with article K, the here reports. That, I believe, isn't a yearly article, right? The here reports. We have it every year. Oh, I believe it is, yeah. And there was financial impact. Do you think that would be a good candidate for a draft? Yeah.
Let me show you the ones, do you? Okay. I think it's going to look the same every year. Okay. Amazing. No, the reason why, the reason why I say is because now I'll filter basically on the ones that I thought could be good candidates. So essentially where you end up is with series here that I'm just proposing, be our candidate for drafts. And I think that ends up being 10, which is, I think, a meaningful impact. Pay previous fiscal year's unpaid bills if needed. That would be one of my suggestions.
Current year transfers if needed. The OPEB funding, I wrote this one. Generally, frankly, the only thing that's changing is the amount potentially, right? And actually that one, the amount's pretty set. We've funded the exact same amount every year for the last six years with one exception. So the real piece here that's changing fundamentally is some of the numbers have to change. Okay. Within the draft. But the funding amount doesn't typically change. Sometimes the source of the funding could change.
I had made a suggestion here for the enterprise fund budgets. I mean, I'm happy to hear, hey, no, that can't be. The revolving fund expenditure limits, the capitalization fund appropriation. So you sort of get a sense here, right? These funds that we're funding every year that were effectively. In my mind, it's the funded. So the fund itself has had a couple of years running and people and we're sort of followed a general flow. These might be good articles that we create a draft that comes from Fincom for what we expect the report to say. But we let the town make the updates and then send it to us to try to reduce the amount of effort on our part. Peer reports, seller trade vehicles, the SPED reserve fund, and then rescind unissued debt. Those were my suggestions. And having drafted the enterprise fund article before, most of it's variance analysis. So you really can't draft it until you have the numbers. Yeah. You could set up a template. But I think, I guess my point is, is that like what Fincom should be doing? Like, doesn't it make sense to set up a template? By draft, you mean how the town. Input then the numbers. Like I'm saying for OPEB, I took what I wrote for OPEB last year. And highlighted in red. Because to your point, OPEB does the same thing, right? It's variance. It's just, here was the OPEB numbers for last year. Here's the latest in the report. Here's where we stand. Here's where it's going.
All I'm doing is plugging in numbers. Why can't we have someone on the part of the town plug in those numbers for us? Yeah, no, I don't disagree with that. Okay. I'm just saying, in fact, when I did the enterprise fund draft, I pre-set it up based on my prior year draft. Right. And did what you just said. I highlighted the numbers. And then, but ultimately, the guts of it are dependent on what the variances are. So the text from last year goes out the window. But don't you think there's a way? Like if the text is, obviously it depends, right? If that service goes up one year and down the other year, it's going to change the word from increase to decrease, right? Sure. But we definitely have drafts of some of these articles where we literally have it in red. And it says increase. No, no, you could do that. I did that. Yeah. Yeah. So that's my point of like, why don't we do that? Ask the town to take over actually making those updates and then sending it to us. They can even keep it in red for the purposes of our review to make sure it all looks good. But then we are like, all we're doing is reviewing it and sending it off. On capital stabilization, I just note, I'm not sure how it's going to happen. I can't remember if I want to go back to budget. But I briefly. Briefly, if you'd indulge me. Yeah, please. Did I mention that the $2 million that was approved for the high school septic system last year, which I think I mentioned this last meeting. You did. As an exempt debt, Cypher didn't take any action. In the model, that's being funded through transfers. And the particular transfer is coming out of, supposed to be coming out of the capital. Stabilization fund, facing an annual withdrawal to pay off the debt service each year doesn't match up right now because Brian doesn't have the right numbers in the withdrawal amount, but to be able to withdraw from that, to put money into that account, it takes a majority vote. I think it's been funded generally lately out of free cash, take money out of that account requires a two thirds vote, and I'm just not sure where they're going to. I think it's been funded generally lately out of free cash, take money out of that account requires a two thirds vote, and I'm just not sure where they're going to. I think it's been funded generally lately out of free cash, take money out of that account requires a two thirds vote, and I'm just not sure where they're going to. Seek that approval. Other communities have a separate article that deals with withdrawing money from the clear capital stabilization fund. Because you don't want to. The operating budget only requires a majority vote. You don't want to. Tie up your whole operating budget. You know, by sticking this as a funding source. So. I agree. All we're doing is putting money in. And once this starts coming out, if that's something we agree, because we have to deal with funding sources at some point. We agree. Then. Once. that happens it'll either be a separate article or maybe this becomes a two motion article kind of like the enterprise fund became and you have that was my thought one vote a majority and withdrawal it's going to look kind of weird putting money in at least initially taking it out of more or less the same amount but it's coming out it's going to go down each year so anyway um we might have to hold on to that one i'm on or we could draft it and anticipate you know i just don't know what yeah yeah i mean i mean my thought that we can get into the weeds each little thing is that one i'm really glad that you've picked up the ball to run with this that it's something that is really important to do it's going to save us a lot of time it's going to make it more efficient and i'm reluctant to get into the details because it will slow you down and make more work for you i just want alignment part of me that wants go for it okay great that's what i'm looking for is do we agree because if if we're on alignment that these are the ones that are worth taking a first pass at getting a meaningful draft together then i will do that i will grab them from last year's warrant and start effectively putting together exactly exactly what i said right a word doc the parts that i think every year are going to change in red we can start sharing them everyone can give their feedback and then the part that will need buy-in is to then say we're going to ask you guys to update these and here's how they work and then you still have to get them to us because fundamentally i think i will stop the information data comes from the talent that's right it comes from there you know i don't think that would be an issue i'm all for that as you know your first year on the committee i drafted yes 13 or 15 articles doing exactly what you described exactly so this is just getting us the 10 you selected i mean maybe there's 11 maybe well there's that it's like somewhere right right it's a start it's a start exactly the idea is to get that and i knew that the 52 this year was a a high right i think that's what's up was hopefully a bit high well the previous year we only had like four that matter the omnibus budget article was
the language gets tweaked here or there but it's basically the same article and then in the past brian kevin he had drafted it um and then gave it to the fincom and then we tweaked it as need be but certainly if you're just looking to start on something that was all i think we're in the bucket of articles okay so to make sure that again that we're on the same page now using opeb as an example um basically there were six tiny transfers from other funds and a five hundred thousand dollar contribution um funded by taxation last year it took fincom a page and a half the warrant to explain that so if you read really what i wrote around opec though
it wasn't so much the transfers as much as the details in my mind if you were looking at them at the what was going on the details provided are really what's going on with the actual funding if you look at that for the first time say what's this 500 000 for right and that's the part that also changes every year so if you actually look at some of the paragraphs that i wrote the paragraphs have very little to do with the 500 000 as much as what's our total obligation right and how has that total obligation changed from last year's obligation because it does change every year what does that actually mean in terms of where our funding actually sits as a matter of what we're obligated to provide but even that again it's a matter of what we're obligated to provide but even that again so in my mind it's really just getting the graph together does is are these is this the meaningful story that we would tell in a write-up around we think this is the right explanation and then making sure that the numbers that are going to change every year are highlighted so someone can i think that works are you asking so like why why do we need to understand all that information my good instinct is we don't need all that information but it actually may be faster to keep it right and just change the numbers but it might be an opportunity especially if we're doing a off cycle and early to i mean i think this is really hard to read and i don't think people do fair enough i mean one approach would be i think it's important to have something somewhere for town residents to if they so choose to understand where's this half million dollars going every year then if you're just a magnet on the town side their warrant in the first place and i further doubt that very many people spend their time reviewing most of these articles in any great detail so that's more of a conceptual question in terms of something like this where a lot of that is important if you're trying to actually understand what's going on but if someone really wants to understand they're going to have to click the link and go read it somewhere else so i just throw that out of the concept because that that might apply to a number of articles where we have a similar situation where we're giving them some amount of background that i don't know sure yeah it's a good thought all right so thank you i think i'm hearing get after it
thank you i will start as i get these drafts going followed slogans for entrepreneurship action from everything there you go try try something and you can always adjust thank you um probably a tough time to be asking the account manager's office for this type of a sit and you're not i mean sound like we'll be doing it this year because you're drafting them and then i'm gonna have them ready this fall that's my goal my goal is like for this next upcoming cycle they take these so it is to be clear yeah is the plan to distribute these among ourselves and then we work on those drafts or i i mean certainly i'm happy to have your guys's help i was going to take them myself and take what was in last year's warrant article and essentially turn them into drafts and then with those drafts um okay yeah the drafts to you all for feedback and then once you all hopefully approve those drafts then we expectably send them to yeah i would say yeah i would say you know because especially because at least i'm new so would be good for me to also try it out right so maybe you don't do all of them and just tell us how to do it and sure sure you're that small then i'm like trying to so here's an example sorry i know we only have five minutes but like here here's an example of this ended up so here's the opeb right like this is where it ended up uh uh sorry no i'm not let me share yeah you see the opeb funding article now so this is where the article essentially ended up when it was quote unquote final um we can't change anything up here but here's our finance committee comments right so my point is this because this happens every year well guess what every year the purpose of the article does not change so we write this right we write it one time and it and that should be it but the stuff that does change every year is down here so this recommended amount can be subject to change that's why it's in red the totaling is subject to change and then if you get here okay things like as of the date right i would put the date in red because it's subject to change and then the tol which is established this number actually changes and and you see that i opted to include this detail around the fact that this was up our actual total determined liability went up last year and so this number changes every year right so this number changes every year so the idea here is the stuff in between doesn't generally have to change too much but the numbers definitely do and so if you see this is this is carl's point of picking on me because this is a page and a half um but you can see my point here right in that you should use it you should not have to rewrite this every year but we should have to be able to call out what we expect to change and ideally reduce this draft right make it more readable but yeah putting us on my link concept of most of this information comes from the town's audited financial statement footnote on opeb so another approach would be to simply say come up with a very short paragraph and say for those interested in learning more about opeb go read footnote flip and the town's financial statements which are posted on the finance director's website yeah makes sense because that's where all the numbers came from but that's that's the idea right is i essentially turn this into a working doc where everything that probably has to get changed year over years and read and everything in between is is just at least
yeah great thank you all thank you
satish and christian i would gladly take your guys's help if you if you want some experience with looking at these and reading and understanding i would gladly take them out iris also if you would maybe you already said you would do this but if you could just take that sub list one and just circle like that against the world thank you
all right by the way i can report that um the select board well two members of the select board to be more accurate have said that in the future all petitioner articles will go directly to town council before we see them amazing and part of the reason for doing that is to decide whether they're in fact article goals or whether the resolutions and there's a at first I didn't understand why I cared about the distinction but if we are not required to comment at all on resolutions so think about how much time that would have saved last year yeah good point so that's that's going to happen at least I'm pretty confident it's going to happen um and I've also got buy-in and Iris you and I should probably talk about this offline too this buy-in for um you know shorting things up for not even commenting I mean sometimes we have adopted the proposer's comments turn them into pincom comments we we can't do that we're not required to if the if the description is rational and says what we think it ought to say we don't have to add our own comments we only have to provide a recommendation which is what you said in the one sentence so you know that's something we can look at and not so much on these articles but on the new you know the non-standard articles okay well thank you again what are we meeting next both well funny you should ask that's the next agenda topic uh we are meeting two weeks uh from now um two weeks and a day and a day thank God I was going to say that night happens Labor Day so it's actually Tuesday and thereafter for the next couple months at least we'll be meeting weekly on Mondays weekly not bi-weekly with the possible exception of a of another Monday holiday okay but then we meet weekly starting December so I think we have I mean I'm aligned to that I think if part of that was to give us time because we anticipated an override
because there's quite a bit of work associated with preparing ourselves for that I think I
yeah we'll see well right now I don't think we can say we don't anticipate an override yeah exactly right that's what I said so I'll be the first to say if we don't need to meet you we shouldn't right I I anticipate because we're making headway on the capital budget at Sipsy for the capital plan if it wasn't on tonight's agenda maybe next agenda you'd be able to take your back capital item back on okay and address the variances and give you an update of where we are but the hope is in October
absent an override bunch of work hopefully we can make headway on Monday goal would be to set up a the capital budget before the account manager actually presents the capital budget because i'll have a sense of where sipsi ended up after the report by october 15th great thank you
all right may i hear a motion to adjourn so roll call vote bill hi ryan yes iris yes sadish yes and carl's yes unanimous thank you all recording stop