February 11, 2026 – Finance Committee – Video & Transcript
February 11, 2026 - Finance Committee
At 6.58 on February 11th, 2026, I'd like to call the Finance Committee meeting to order.
Attending from the Finance Committee are all members.
And pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, this meeting is being recorded,
is being conducted in person and via remote access.
The meeting is being recorded and will be made available afterwards on WACAM.
Anyone may watch or participate remotely with the meeting link that is found on the town's website.
And anyone wishing to make public comments may do so.
Please limit public comments to two minutes per person.
Anybody want to make public comments?
Seeing none, the agenda for today is really, after we are going to review, I'm sorry, the minutes and approve them, hopefully, if they're all good with it,
The town manager will be able to present the capital budget and I'm expecting the Finance Director, Brian Keveney, to be online for that conversation.
At day 10, we'll continue to review and discuss the omnibus and school budgets or thereabouts.
The town manager will need to be off at that point, but perhaps Brian Keveney can stay with us.
And then afterwards, we'll get to any warrant articles that are ready for action,
as well as a discussion to confirm that we have understanding what to do with the non-material financial articles.
The approximate time of adjourning will be 9.30.
And with that, let's turn to the edited version of the minutes, which April sent out just an hour ago or something.
If I got the timing right, it's a five-ish page document, so it's one of the more meaty minutes.
Thank you, April, for making that.
Yeah, it came out at 6.25 p.m.
Oh, and I weighed in with, uh, I haven't seen it yet, I'm trying to pull it up.
I encourage folks to read the modified little Jim VanSkyver, you're referring to that last name.
Thank you.
It's probably my typo when I was changing it.
Iris, do you bring the laptop just for extra weight to carry around? It's really just in case I need anything, like, to see something larger, but generally... The phone, you got it all working? Yeah, I just observed you working on the phone, and it's impressive to me. This is for reading, this is like, if I need to... Okay. So are you attaching the slides to it as well, or how does that work? The slides are an attachment that is available. Not in the minutes, but it's kept separate. Okay, so it's referenced? Yeah. Okay. Folks want more time, or...? It probably looks okay in the name. Okay. Okay.
Motion to approve the minutes. Second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Thank you, April. The minutes approved as modified, or actually not modified now, as revised. And now, let's grab Michael and go to capital budget. Sorry, can you guys repeat? Iris does on the divine. So, Iris... Iris moved, Bill seconded, and everyone voted in favor. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Robbie, do you see Brian Kevney on the... Yeah, he's already on. Okay, great. You can make him by the panelist. The black void that is Brian. Inquisitorial, right? He's in a box, can you? He can't get out. Yep. Questions from all sides. Welcome, Michael. Michael, you sit there. I got your plug.
I knew I should have broke.
Oh, no, I said I got it. Robbie? Yes? What can I unplug? The three things plugged in here. If any. You can plug one on the power for itself.
You are plugged in, Michael. Just in case.
I think what I'm going to have to do, Mr. Chair, is to log into the meeting. Brian Kevney is on. No, he doesn't have his laptop. Okay.
You're logging on. There's a question about the $907,000 is what made up. Yeah, yeah. I saw the response. I think ties that down pretty well. Yep.
Yeah. Allspent.
Tiny bit of other things. Allspent.
I came in as a Zoom manager. Yeah, he came in the palace area. Good evening, Mr. Chair and members of the Finance Committee. Thank you, again, for having me and Mr. Kevin, who's online here this evening. Just before we walk through the presentation, Brian and I, just like the other night, give some introductory remarks, and then Brian and I will comment as we go through the slides. As you know, this year was a different year. In that last year at town meeting, we added a new Section 20 to the Article 19, forming our Capital Improvement Planning Committee. And under ideal situation, they would have been able to start early in the season, make their recommendations, get them to me, so that we can incorporate them in their plan. This being inaugural year, how it played out by the time that the committee assembled, they were already challenged with time. They made some recommendations and got them to us, and we're getting them to you this evening. They did yeoman's work looking at the five-year plan that we had presented last year, and they came up with their methodology, ranking some of these by priority, and the recommendations that came to us, and we understand why they came to us, looked radically different than what our five-year plan would have been for this fiscal year, had you moved, just if you shifted over the fiscal years. And I think what has been spawned out of that, and all of us began to recognize that one of the big things that the town has to grapple with is this particular building we're sitting in this evening. It's an old high school from 1935 that we've been using as the town office building, and when we put together the five-year plan last year, what we were looking at doing was multiple upgrades to this building using excluded debt, and as you know, the Capital Improvement Planning Committee, they looked at taking some of that out of this year, addressing things that they felt were of critical importance, and having a longer, a separate discussion along looking at the long-term plan for this building. When we received their plan and some of their drafts, we were having a similar conversation in-house with Mr. Fayah, Mr. Holder, some public safety about what we should do, and we were talking informally, we should start putting together a working group. And I had conversations with Select Board Member Fayah about this, and as you may well know, he recommended that the town should have a visioning committee for a town hall. And I think there's four real things we need to consider, whether we stay in this building and make some of these critical repairs, whether we lease, whether we try and put together a private-public partnership, let's say, with the town center on some of their land and develop over there, or look at some of the few parcels we have here in town to build a new town hall. But that will be something that we will put this visioning group together and look at that. So working with the spirit of the recommendations that came in from the Capital Planning Committee, Mr. Kevin and I got together, talked about them, brought in some of the department heads, primarily Mr. Holder from DPW, Mr. Fayah from Facilities, we brought in REC, and we talked about how to integrate some of the projects that weren't previously slated for this fiscal year into this fiscal year's capital plan, and then how do we then move and reshift things to the outer years and re-examine the funding plan. So it wasn't so simple as, oh, we'll just swap these new projects in that they identified and some of our new staff have identified. For instance, you'll see some here from IT, we have a new IT director. He realized that we, you know, needed some critical IT infrastructure updates. Some of those are in this plan. So now we had, we were pulling things from outer years in, pushing things we had originally slotted for F-127 out and trying again to do this in recognizing the effort put in by the CIPC and trying to accommodate everything. And so with that, I will start going through what we've done and what we've attempted to do, recognizing the hard work of that committee, trying to balance it with the existing five-year plan. And we know they're still working, Ms. Chairman, Chairwoman Lappin is, I know, in the audience here, and we, again, appreciate the work that they've done, and trying to develop something, again, that is mindful of the taxpayers' dollars, realizing where we are with our omnibus budget, where we may be in the next couple of years, and we'll talk about levy debt, excluded debt, and our rationale as we get to those sections. Brian, if you're ready, I'm going to start moving through the slides. You all set? Yes. I'm ready to go. Michael, just for context, you haven't been able to get with CIPC once you've now got your new thoughts together on what the plan is, just for context. Correct. We've received the recommendations. We've tried to incorporate as many of them. We didn't get a formal meeting back with them, just the timing of so many meetings going on. Public Board, FinCom, their meetings. That is why we invited Chair Lappin to be here this evening, and she has some comments. Okay. Good dive of the context. As you go through, you'll talk about sort of high level, the differences between what you ended up with and what they had recommended. So we have the PowerPoint, and we also have an Excel spreadsheet, and I asked Mr. Kevin, he'll walk through some of those changes. We had one we were working off, but it was in the red, and, you know, there's changes. So I'll have Brian highlight those. So, Brian, I'm on slide number two of the deck. Okay. Okay. So we can begin. Just a note for the new members on the Finance Committee, you have said it before. The capital budget is an important piece of the overall financial forecast. All of the debt service and the taxation comes out of the capital plan that goes into the long-term plan. The capital budget also creates models for free cash, capital stabilization, and the ambulance fund. So the capital budget is an important piece in forecasting out, you know, five, ten years, our override situation. What's problematic is when we have mass changes within the five-year capital plan where we're constantly updating and changing our forecast related to levy debt or excluded debt. So it's important that a capital plan, if it's working properly, only has minor adjustments to the first year and you're bringing in the fifth year. So this is the seventh year of myself and other members of staff compiling a true capital budget. So I can't emphasize enough the importance of a capital budget within working with a forecast. So the specific challenges for 27 and 31, as Michael said, we have town building improvements that we need to address. The public safety HVA system needed an upgrade and I'll get to that in a bit. We need to complete open capital appropriations. We still have a lot of capital appropriations and I'll get to what we were able to close out in just a bit. The town building, we have the future of the town building and the necessary short-term building improvements are evident in the fiscal 27 capital omnibus budget. They're also labeled as a fiscal 28 exclusion debt. So the town building is in this capital plan. The finance committee is only responsible for the omnibus budget. We are constantly reacting to unanticipated building needs within all buildings. We've seen that recently in the last couple of years with the school buildings where the boilers became defective and we had them get appropriations to fix them. Within the fields, we have in the plan to complete the final stage of the high school improvement. We also have a field, a turf field moratorium still in existence. So right now we can't put any synthetic fields. So having a synthetic field in a five-year capital plan is not doable right now because of this restriction. School facilities. The school is still working on the elementary school feasibility study with a possible new construction or a major renovation. Right now there is no large renovation in the five-year capital plan for any school buildings, including the high school and the middle school. We need to, at some point, determine the next significant building project because there's a lot going on in the town, you know, the MWRA. So we really need to determine if the next school building is really, is it the sixth year out or the seventh year? At some point it is on the horizon because the three elementary school buildings have not been renovated. I know the high school was and I believe that middle school was before the high school was renovated. But the middle schools are certainly in need of either a major renovation or possibly a new construction. So you want to flip it, Michael? And Brian, not on that chart is the wastewater at the high school. Yeah, it's upcoming. So we also have the water suppliers. So the MWRA connection is moving forward with a $38 million appropriation. The Water Department and the Board of Public Works are currently working on a complete plan with the MWRA to implement that. In developing a long-term financing plan, they need to, you know, obviously do adequate rate raisings to meet their expenses. Water rate ratings. The Abrams Group and Kleinfeld have been hired to assist the DPW and the Board of Public Works in doing this MWRA connection. This year we've had unexpected fiscal 26 Happy Hollow repairs. So we've had to actually purchase water for the MWRA. We don't know if this is going to continue, but it's an old facility. And because things are breaking down at its cost in the Water Department, unanticipated expenses in purchasing water directly from the MWRA. So if we move forward into the fiscal 27 capital budget. Brian, approximately how much have we spent on the MWRA? I believe it's around $200,000 so far. Okay. Thanks for the context. Okay, so we get into fiscal 27 budget. So here are the largest appropriations. We have the high school treatment plant. We have it in the plan as excluded debt at $2 million. You have the high school varsity JV baseball field. That's also in the plan at $2.7 million as excluded debt. You have the public safety HVA system in there at $225,000. That was actually slotted in at $750,000, and it was three years out. But because only one of the four compressors at the public safety building is working right now, Michael Feyer needs this $250,000 brought forward immediately into fiscal 27 so they can address the HVA systems at the public safety building. So that's a good reason why you have an unanticipated new item in 27 when it's in the plan. But something happens and you have to either bring it forward for a justifiable reason or, in this case, a portion of it is being brought forward. Next, you have the H-40 truck, which is $370,000. Sorry, question. Yeah, just a quick question on the public safety HVAC. Do we expect the total cost of that to still be $750,000 and we're just pointing $250,000 forward? No, we reduced it to $750,000 in the out years. And the public safety building is, what, five years old? Oh, no, more than that. You mean the police station? All blends together. Okay. So we've got the end of life. They only have this one compressor and, as I understand as speaking of Mr. Feyer, parts for that are getting harder to come by. It was just yesterday we built that building there. 2001. Okay. Thanks. And just to confirm, so is the total cost over the horizon $750,000 or is the total cost $500,000? And if so, where are we saving $250,000? No, it was slotted in the plan for about three years out for $750,000. But because of the situation now, we're going to move $250,000 to this year and there'll still be a $500,000 later. Okay. Total $750,000. Correct. Keep going, Brian. All right. The 27 road repair, $881,000. The road repair is always in the capital budget. This is the new one, cybersecurity remediation and modernization that was not in the plan. In any of the five years, we have a new IT director. And at the last meeting, we talked to the finance committee about needed improvements in the IT area. This is one of them. And this is $250,000. The fire truck is in there at $615,000. $100,000 and some that was already in the operational budget. Brian, why are we putting some of that into the capital budget and some of that into the operating budget? Two different things. They're two different projects. Understood. But can you explain? Yeah, but just what's right now? It would be in the CIP form that we would have sent you, the complete detail of that. I guess the question is, why is this a capitalized item, the cybersecurity remediation and modernization? Some of it is hardware versus software. I'm just going from memory. I would have to pull up that form. Okay, thanks. So the fire truck is in here at $615,000. It was less last year, but the cost has gone up in one year. Now it's $615,000. In last field improvements, this is one that's in here routinely at $100,000, where Michael McCall assigns a certain project each year. So if we move on. Two quick questions. My apologies. The fire truck, this was unexpected fire truck? No, it was in the plan. The cost of it just went up. Sorry, I thought maybe some of these things had gone full force. I just want to. Okay, great. And then what's the H40 truck? Just because I'm not familiar. It's one of the large, it's one of the large dump trucks, the very large ones. Okay. All right. So before we move on, I just want to note that there's a couple notable differences here from the CIPC's recommendation. We increased the road repair after speaking. We restored it back to roughly what we had in the plan. CIPC had it at about half of what it is up there. I don't know the exact number. It was 400. 431. 431. Road maintenance is not, you know, glamorous. But you get a lot more out of your road if you, there's a philosophy called the best first repair. You try and maintain some of the roads that are in the best condition with different types of coatings and things. And not always a full restoration of the road, but to ensure you extend the life. Mr. Holder felt this was something that he campaigned for. But I really wanted to touch on the first two. The CIPC wanted to keep the... Just real quick though, Michael, I'm sure Tom had an opportunity to talk to CIPC. Why did they not... Why weren't they compelled to bring it down from, you know, 830 to... I just want to recognize me and tell you who I am. I'm the chair of the CIPC. The reason that we took it down was a combination of a few things. One, trying to get everything within the capital plan given additional requests, both the septic and... Now the highest will feel that they're adding right form in last year's plan. So just finding places who can save. But we also looked at balances that DPW had in the road budget. In prior years. Prior capital funding plus chapter... 990. And I think, Brian can correct me if I'm wrong, but when we look at sort of beginning of the end of the fiscal year and each year, there tends to be... Extra. Extra there. And so our thinking, and perhaps we were wrong, but our thinking was that we shouldn't continually be running at having an extra balance there because we're appropriating the money faster than we can use it. Got it. And so it was intended to be a one-time... Adjustment. Adjustment. Adjustment and then go back to the full work class. Got it. I think, Michael, the only question really... I don't think there's any disagreement with let's do the most cost-effective solutions that we can find. And if that means, you know, whatever, best repair first or something, suggesting to do less than what's most cost-effective. And so on the top two, wastewater treatment and the JD Vark City ball fields. The CIPC had had the wastewater treatment in this year. And for those of you who don't know, we were working on a solution with the DEP, a Title V solution. We've been... The wastewater facility over there has not been working for some time and we have been pumping out from the high school and the DEP is no longer excited about that solution. I'll just... I'll characterize it that way. So this has become more of a need to address the solution in this year's budget. What CIPC did is a funding source had said levy debt. And I'll address that after I mention the next one. The Barsi ball fields, as I understand... Wait, sorry. Can we... On high school wastewater, because that's a long story. Just... Can you fill us in on... Two years ago, it was five and a half million. We were hoping to... That was for the repair of that facility. Now we're doing something different. Okay. This is a Title V facility where they're... My understanding they'll have a leaching field out there. Okay. So it's a different solution. Okay. And what we're trying to do, couldn't get them all here. I think the chair is trying to organize a follow-up where we get DPW facilities and engineering over here to speak to both of these projects. Okay. Okay. Either next week or the following week. Okay. In this estimate, we feel like the two million... What did we do with? Sort of a study. Is that... So... Is that a good number? I talked to Tom Holder today and I believe he sent an email and may have gone to the chair. I don't think it went to the whole committee that the estimates that they had were, I think, 1.89 million dollars. And then when you add a construction contingency, it comes to roughly 2.1 million dollars. And so that's where they came with that number. The high school... So just to give the numbers at a time, Dave, 1.4 million dollars for construction is the estimate. 35% contingency. And then contract management, right, up to 2 million dollars. When I saw, and I've mentioned this to Tom, to Michael a few times, that it feels like 2 million dollars is a notional number and not like grounded. And now I appreciate that there is engineering vans. And so I may have confused the 1.4 million with the close to 1.9 million that Catherine Brenna talked about for the JV Varsity field. So I wasn't here. She had numbers that go back to 2017 and it was my understanding this may have been in the plan at one point in time. But it was taken out of the plan prior to my arrival. It might have been when Dr. Easy was here. Rec realizing that we need to improve upon our grass fields and knowing that they were going to be doing the wastewater treatment or hopefully doing that. And it's going to impact at least the varsity field. We're looking to do this at the same time. Now, where they get the 2.5 million dollars is the number that they had back in 2017, I believe, was roughly 1.9 million dollars. And given that it's almost nine years later, tried to do some estimates as to how, what that number would look like today. It's not a firm number, but it's an estimate that was provided to me by Ms. Brenna. I believe they are working with tie and bond on all of this. And hopefully we would have a better number. I couldn't get one for this evening. There's some expected efficiencies to be doing the ball fields at the same time as the septic field. I'm not sure geographically, are they co-located? I expect not, but I don't know. Unfortunately, when I posed to get some more information today for this, Mr. Holder said Ms. Charest was unavailable, and she's the one who's working on this with tie and bond. Then the other question has been, even without the septic fields, that the JV and varsity, I guess, baseball fields are not to spec. They don't have sufficient outfield? It's my understanding. We have been playing most of our varsity baseball games as away games because we haven't been able to use these fields because of the condition they're in. And so my further understanding is where they're currently located is not optimal in that area. So as part of this improvement of the JV varsity fields, they may relocate them, bring up some more space for some rectangles as well. Rectangular fields, grass fields for soccer and lacrosse as well. And part of the rationale why they're both excluded debt and both in this year is we just took some time cleaning up levee debt and we felt it may not be right to put it right back in. And we may be facing a three year override next year and didn't want to build all that into the levee. Additionally, this year, because we've moved the town improvements out potentially for a year or more for an excluded debt question, there's nothing that would be competing with these this year. Our concern was if we pushed some of these in the CIPC had the JV varsity field as excluded debt next year, that might be on the ballot with an override. How ready are we to actually do the work of the ball fields? Do you have a sense of sufficient study been done to know what we want and how to do it? I think that will be answered in greater detail. I did speak with Mr. Doucette this evening about what they're trying to do to maintain that and the minor improvements they're going to make this year, if we could go forward on this, they may not do those, saving a little money because they have to do band-aid repairs to keep some of these fields going. More story to be told. Yes. It is the largest capital project, two and a half million dollars, and it seems like not, at least from my standpoint at this stage, not well. No. Understood. And I guess along the same lines, have they talked about repairing the current field? I mean, I'm not sure what the, having, used to be a baseball player, like what's the condition of the field? Yes. I'm told I'm playable, and that's why they're playing all of their games on the road. It's... Well, if that's just like divots and stuff and you can... No. No. I don't know what... Mr. Deuce has indicated to me that to make them playable, they went out last year using some of the field improvement monies and some of the rec fee money, that it would be just under a hundred thousand dollars to make them playable for a season. Now, as it's been explained to me by Mr. Holden... That's less than two and a half million dollars. Right. Right. But mind you, the wastewater treatment, as I've been told, will immediately rip up those... Curious. Because where they have to... Where the ball fields are now, and where they're slated to put the septic, they're going to be overlapping. Can I ask Kelly to weigh in here as well? I'm Chair of the CIPC. So, the committee wasn't overall opposed to slotting the field. However, as we stated in our report, we found that we were not able to get sufficient information about the field. Similar questions that you're asking tonight, you've asked before. So, my understanding from those that... Tom Holder and others that spoke to us was, as Michael said, the field is not playable for games. They're doing those games as away games. We were told that it doesn't drain properly, so it's not just divots. However, we were not able, it doesn't sound like there's still this issue, or there is still this issue, to get a site plan of how much the septic was disrupting the fields, and how much true inefficiency would be created by the septic project. And for that reason, we said if we get more information, we'd reconsider it. But we, to date, really haven't gotten much more information. The proposal that Michael referred to that they're basing the costs on was a 2017 study that was a stadium project study. It was three phases that included the rebuild of the football field, the relocation of the tennis fields to the front of the school, and the girls' softball field to the back of the school. That was phases one and two. Phase three was the baseball diamonds, which includes moving the two diamonds, that gives them both shared outfield and room for red candles on the back on the outfield side. So it's a relatively old study. That's fine. But the design, right, that flushed out design and the intersection of the two projects still wasn't clear, and the price is still based on a relatively old estimate with some escalation. So that was the reason we left it out. Further, that was why we did not make the wastewater treatment plant an excluded debt project, because per town's recently adopted policies, excluded debt is recommended at projects over $5 million, and alone, necessarily. I think I covered all those. And what I'm hearing is maybe more of a location issue because of the septic, and not a playability. Playability can get fixed for $100,000, but it's... No, I don't think it can be fixed for $100,000. They can do a surface treatment, but the actual... The fact that it doesn't drain is... They actually have to rip out what's there and put in gravel, and then put dirt on top of that. So it was going to be more substantial, but I don't know. I'm sorry, Kelly, was there something? One other item that I just want to point out is that in the prior five-year plan, this is a question that we had had out to several of the town departments, and just recently got an answer after our report. The prior five-year plan had two fields in it that were... have now been determined to be the same field. One was labeled Space 3 Stadium Project, the other was labeled J.B. Varsity Basque Baseball Field. One was in FY29 and one was in FY30. We've since received information that those were indeed redundant requests. Got it. So, Michael, there's some work to do from the town standpoint. No, no, I don't disagree. We... Some of the people that I was hoping to get were out... Yeah, okay. ... beyond my control and their control, and I know you asked for a follow-up meeting with some of those key players to try and answer the... And hopefully we could have some of the answers back from the engineers that are looking at both the wastewater and... And on that, Brian, you found that I think only Michael Fair responded that he could make the 18th, and we haven't heard from anybody else. Have you gotten any other information? I have not. I know. I know. I have only heard from Michael Fair. It's... I think that school needs to be there. Michael Fair. Tom, if he's available. Abby, the engineer. Possibly Catherine Brenner, who has a history on the Rockfields. I think they're all important to be there. Yeah, and look, just to show of hands, can FinCom have a quorum on the 18th? I know it's school vacation week, but are folks... Okay. That's on Wednesday. That's on Wednesday night. A week from tonight. So FinCom could be there. Brian, could you please continue to work the process? As we all know, March 16th is coming up really quick, and these questions seem pretty fundamental. It may require FinCom not supporting this capital project. No, we... Again, respecting what they've done, they being the CIPC, we were looking at it. If we did the two at the same time, it would be 4.5 million, which is close to... I understand. ...the new policy. So we were... You know, we were just putting an altar in if it winds up something you don't support, because we don't have that additional information, you know... We might be able to support it if we got answers to the questions. Yep. So that's why we... I know 5 million was a number as far as excluded debt. I think that we don't, you know, subject to other people who know. I'd be inclined for moving to excluded debt to the degree that it fits. So we'd be interested to hear about policies on that. I have a question related to this. The wastewater treatment. If I recollect correctly, we had ongoing costs, right? Because of the... $10,000 a month to haul... Right. I was just... And so... Just for everyone who's new here. So basically, if I'm understanding at least the 2 million for the wastewater treatment element correctly, we'll spend the 2 million, but we get to remove at minimum $120,000 off of the operating, right? Yeah. So that's good. And then for fiscal year 27, my apologies because we went through it, I think, a little faster. Was the 120 there? It must be there still for this year, but then we would probably see it in fiscal year 28 removed? As far as the operating budget. Yes. That would be... I think... I'm not sure if it's in the DPW or the school. Brian might have to answer that. Okay. Brian, do you know the regular pumping of the high school septic? Is that in the school's budget or in the town's side through DPW? It's in the town facilities budget. Okay. All right. Great. So next year... And just to be clear, MassDP has said that we're not allowed to haul the wastewater. Anymore. Sure. We have to solve it. We have to have it 100% understood. I'm just saying from a monetary standpoint, there's an ROI on that $2 million. That's the removal of the 120 in operating for... And my understanding is that's been in the operating budget for like, what, a decade? Like a long time, right? A long time. So it's nice to know that there's savings there. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Continue right along here. Here's the top five. Again, we've talked about the high school field, high school wastewater, road construction, fire truck, and the building elevator. So if we move to the next slide. This slide summarizes the five-year capital omnibus capital budget. On the right-hand side, you see the five numbers. I'm not going to read each one of them. But those are the sum total of fiscal 27 through fiscal 31. The total omnibus budget five-year is $40.4 million. The enterprise fund has $7.3 million. In addition to that, they also have the $38 million MWRA that is going to the annual time meeting in May. So that's the summary numbers right there. If you want to move on, Michael. So there's a chart. Just one question. Before we move on, Michael, we're looking at maybe putting, you know, $50, $60 million into capital spend over these next few years with MWRA. Do we have the leadership involved to be able to make sure we're managing all of that appropriately? Or do we need to... Well, certain projects require owner projects managers. Yeah. And both... This came up recently with regard to the Snakebook Dam project. We have outside project managers on some of these, I believe. But in-house, we have qualified. Michael Fea and both Tom Holder were qualified. Michael Fea is going to be running the Snakebook Dam project for us. So we do have some qualified folks in-house. I don't know for each one of these projects. Do we need 10? Do we need 10 folks to be doing? I mean, Wastewater High School, Fields High School, you know, MWRA, which is probably three projects? Well, I believe Tom Holder would like to be involved. He has some expertise in that field, so I... Just from an oversight standpoint, I mean, let's make sure we're being really thoughtful. We've got the management in place. Yep. And winding down, we still have a number of open projects as well. Yes, and Brian will comment on that later. We've got a couple of people to close out a bunch of things as we were coming into finalizing the capital plan. So he'll be able to comment on that in a minute or two. Okay, Brian, take it away. Well, here's a chart that just shows my department across four years, the sum totals of each one. Obviously, the school department is the top over five years, $16.5 million. Second to DPW is 11.4. And number three is facilities at $5.1 million. So the average of the five-year omnibus capital, which when I say that is going to be just the town and school capital, the enterprise fund capital for the first time will be appropriated within the enterprise article. So the finance committee will not be bringing the enterprise capital into their operating omnibus budget. We're going to be putting that in the enterprise fund budget. So the average of the five-year average of the omnibus budget is $8.8 million. And that's, again, that's the five-year average. What was the thought just behind moving the capital to the enterprise article as opposed to where it has been? Can you repeat that, Pam? Why are we moving the enterprise capital funds to the article, the enterprise fund article, as opposed to the way we've shown it before as part of the town? So historically, the enterprise fund budget was always part of the omnibus budget. Back when Louise was here, we took out the enterprise fund budget out of the omnibus budget and did a standalone on advice from KP Law. Within the last couple of years, Brian O'Hurley has brought up the fact that why aren't we not just appropriating all of the enterprise budgets within one article? And we haven't been able to do that the last couple of years because of timing. I'm indifferent to it. I kind of think it makes sense to put it in the enterprise fund budgets. So right now it is pending to be in the enterprise budget. So that's how it originated really from Brian requesting this the last couple of years and us not being able to do it with timing, but we do have the timing this year to do it. So when the enterprise, the enterprise article then for, we'll have, we'll have that 1.37 and the 125. And I'll have the capital from here. Will it also have the reserve funding for these, for these enterprise funds or that still is separate? I don't know, just the funding that's... The capital project reserves? No, the, the, I guess it's in the operational, the reserve funding that we, like, do you know what I'm saying? There's also reserve funding for... For the contributions that... Yeah, for like the enterprise funds? Transfer for... Yeah, so that's, okay, so that's still all separate. I think, I think that all stays, that stays the same as it has. So I did send the article, I think, to Pam and Anne Brensley. Is Iris the enterprise fund? I am. Okay, sorry, it's not the right person. All right. Okay, here is the fiscal 27 budget. Here's the numbers. You can see that the school department is gaining more than the lion's share of the appropriations. Included in that, obviously, is the high school, $4.5 million. The next one is the five-year look, and it all looks almost identical. The school department, over a five-year period, is getting the most of the appropriations, second to DPW. Facilities being number three. Move on. Spooned debt in the budget. What we're looking at here is both what would be included in the Omnibus budget and a separate article. So on the left-hand side, you see fiscal 27. You see the two numbers that we were just talking about. The sum total of $4.5 million. That is being recommended as the Omnibus excluded debt funding. On the right-hand side, you see fiscal 28. That's a separate article at $5.7 million. We had it in last year as a separate article because we wanted the town to start discussing this building as what was going to be its future. That's why last year's plan had this also as a separate article and not in the Omnibus budget. On the right-hand side is just an optic of that. You see on the left-hand side, the two blues is the high school in the third column. From the left is the town building, and then the total you see, obviously, the two stacks. So that's the excluded debt in the plan right now, a little over $10 million. And here's the, obviously, it jumps right out at you. The water fund is getting that $38 million right in the first year. And there's the fiscal 27 through 31 look. Transfer station will and does have some appropriations going to them. They've been in existence for five or six years. They do have a fund balance of $300,000. So some of the projects will be allocated to them in this budget. There is an ongoing study being done with the, I'm sorry, the transfer station to see if it's solvent enough to keep on going. But that report is ongoing, and we don't know that. But we do have capital items in the plan that would be funded by the transfer station. And Michael, I flagged this with others, but I'll flag it again just for emphasis. Let's see if Sudbury and Whalen could put the transfer station together and save money for both towns.
Brian, we can't hear you. Can you change it? Can you hear me? Yes. All right. So some of this we talked about already in the meeting. Here's the fiscal 27 to 31. In the past, we have used cash capital to fund the budgets. We do not use taxation anymore to fund any of the budgets because of the levy constraints. We talked about the debt service and the MWA connection at $38 million. The excluded debt within fiscal 28, I'm sorry, 27. We did have in last year's plan the million dollars of MSBA as excluded debt. We have changed that to levy debt because of the financial policy being $5 million. I was involved in that $5 million conversation, and I did stress there needs to be flexibility in that policy. At times we would need to appropriate some items for less than $5 million. $5 million is a big number as only the threshold to do that. So I think we do need to be flexible when it comes to that policy. The next one, the capital stabilization, we annually fund it with $250,000, buy free cash, and we use that right now for the field improvements. Plan free cash, it's pretty much have it between $1.5 and $2.5 million. You see the plan now. It has 2.1, and I'll get to that in a little bit. We do have now a constraint with Moody's to make sure that we continuously build our fund balance. We can use free cash as long as we replenish it. If we get to the point where we're not replenishing free cash, the capital budget will be impacted because we will not be able to fund some of these capital appropriations by free cash. So it is very important to prudently map out the use of free cash. That's why I said from the very beginning, there's a lot of other financial schedules that are tied to the capital budget, one being free cash. And the next, it just took- What is the criteria that you need to replenish? Or is there a hurdle number? We want 25%. The criteria is the 25%? Yeah. From 20%. Right. And that includes- I thought we had been at 25%. No. We've been at 20%. Okay. We're trying to mean 20%. Well, I know that it said that, but I didn't know that that was new. Yeah. I thought it had been. I get one additional question on that. So the 25% is for free cash balance, but also, didn't you mention that it is also the new required balance? Is it for the enterprise funds or for the reserve funds? I thought it also has to do with some of the other- Did I misunderstand it? I know. I guess- What are the components of that 25%? So previously, before Moody's made the change, they wanted governmental funds, which is the general fund and stabilization funds are referred to as governmental funds. They wanted those fund balance to be at least at a minimum of 20% of fund balance. We're at that 20% minimum. But we had other things going on in the town where we were rated to offset that. Some towns like Brookline, Cambridge, they're in the 30% tile. We're at 20%. What changed was they were now bringing in enterprise funds. They're now bringing in the enterprise funds fund balance, and they want the collective governmental funds as well as the enterprise funds. And with the enterprise funds, it's really a calculation of their assets, not so much fund balance, but it's pretty much the same thing, current assets. And they want that number, collective number, to be at least 25% of the town's revenues. So that's the threshold that we need to search for. We're around that right now, but we need to maintain that. That's why it's important that the water department set their rates properly to cover their expenses. So that's the background on the Moody's criteria. At some point, can you just show us that breakdown of the numerator and the denominator? We can figure out the town revenue, but all the components that get to the 25%, you know, the 25 plus million. Both as a town as well as for the enterprise. Exactly. Is that clear, Brian? Yep. It'll be a little bit before I get to it. I'm going to get some other work up, but I'll get that to you. Thank you. So here is the five-year town financing plan. You see all the revenue sources over five years. The average debt that we're going to raise per year is around $4.9 million. The average use of free cash is $2.6 million. So that's how we're going to pay for the funding. If you move to the next slide. And this excludes the MWR, the water infrastructure. Yeah. It does not include the $38 million. No, no. This slide here just shows obviously that the levy tax pretty much drives the capital budget. It's very indicative of most communities that their debt, their level of the debt really is what driving capital, because you can pay for it over many, many years. You know, other towns do use free cash. Other towns do use tax. So predominantly we use in revenue. I'm sorry, levy debt to drive our capital fees. So the next chart. Real quick, just for my own confirmation. So the levy taxation works against us in terms of the levy limit, right? It counts into that calculation. The excluded taxation does not. Correct. Right. But the excluded taxation on the year is already accounted for in the 5.5% increase. This is, you know, yes. I'm just making sure. 5.38, right? That we saw on Monday. Increasing monthly. Oh, year-over-year. Year-over-year. Taxes. Right. Yes. But it just doesn't count toward the levy limit, the excluded debt. Excluded debt actually buys us more room and sort of that rings a hurdle. Right. So it gives us more room. Yes. By capacity. But we don't have to. We don't raise taxes to pay for excluded debt. Right. We do, but we don't. It's already accounted for in that final number that we're talking about. That's what I want to make sure. That 5.3%. Sorry. Go ahead. The cost of that debt, whether it's levy debt or excluded debt, is all. We're paying for that. We're paying for all of that. We're paying for the principal of the interest. Yes. That's in the debt service. That's in the debt service. Thank you. I just wanted to make sure. Thank you. Okay. It gives us sort of that extra room for the levy. Right. Yes. I knew that the debt doesn't go into the levy debt, but I was just taking care. It's already included. It's included in debt service. Debt service, yes. That is my question. Thank you. Chair recognizes Kelly. Yes. Kelly Lappin, Chair of the CRPC. I just want to point out, because it's not always obvious, any of your FY27 capital projects funded with debt, whether levy or excluded debt, are not affecting your FY27 operating money. Understood. All right. Brian, continue. Do you want to turn the slide? Do you want to talk about capital closeouts, because it's there now or later? Wait till I get to the 27 numbers. So again, here's just the fiscal five year funding sources. Again, levy taxation will be the predominant funding source, second to free cash. If you want to move to the next slide, here's a breakdown if you want to spend some time looking on the left hand side. On the left hand side, simply has the omnibus debt that's going to be raised within the omnibus. You have excluded debt that will be in the omnibus of 4.5 million. You have a 5.4 million, which would be by article. And I've simply placed that over the five year period. The ones in purple would be the total debt. And you can see, you know, the blue in the first column is levy. The red in the next column is excluded debt. And then the total in purple. Move to the next year, Excel changes to green. I don't know why they didn't keep it red. But in the second year, 28, the green is the town building. But overall, you can see the total debt within the first couple of years is significantly more than the next five years, the last three years of the plan. So moving, that's that's. So what I would suggest. Go ahead. This excludes the schools, right? Did you say that at the beginning of the presentation? This excludes any potential for work on the schools? Yeah, I think there's. Well, maintenance might be there. Maintenance might be there. But like the new building. The new building. There are conversations happening. This excludes that currently. Facilities master plan too. Okay. So what I can do now is go through what's in the fiscal 27 year and talk to each one of the items. And then I can get into the open, open capital. And then I guess we can entertain questions at that point. So in your Excel file that I sent and stop me as you wish when I get to one. This year's plan, compared to last year's fiscal 27, has 15 new items. And that's not a good thing to have 15 new items enter into the first year of a five year plan. And we'll go through the different reasons for those. So the first one roads at 831,000 that that has been in the plan. The sidewalk improvement 250 that's in the plan. The age 40, $370,000 that's been in the plan. The next one, 325,000, the age 11 and the age 17 at $150,000 were not in the plan. Right. So the tab is FY27. Yeah. No, I thought I clicked on it. So what we were showing and what you were talking about were two different things. So why don't you. I'm on your screen now. I'm on FY27. You want it on just FY27? Yeah, just FY27. Okay. So you want me to start over? No, he went through those three. Yeah, I think we got it. Okay. So the age 11 and the age 17 were not in the plan in fiscal 27. They were in the capital plan. Michael Holder has switched a truck that was in this fiscal 27 for these two. So that was just a switching of a capital item. And in most cases, that's acceptable. You don't want a lot of it. Did you just say that again? Brian, I'm not following you. Okay, the age 11 and the age 17 were in the plan last year. They were not in fiscal 27. They were in, I think, fiscal 29. Okay. Michael Holder switched the truck that was in fiscal 27 and brought forward these 29 ones. Yeah. Tom Holder. Yeah. Okay. So the next one radios 275,000. It's an increase that was in the plan. Brian, you've got to take a pause. There's questions. Rob, go ahead. I just want to ask about the road improvements. We've heard a lot at FinCom about Sherman's Bridge and the work that's been proposed there. Do you know, is the road improvements line item here in any way tied to that work? Or is this just kind of a standard? This is standard. Yeah. This is standard. That, those, it all goes according to plan. The vast majority of that money is going to come through MassDOT for, and it's a debt repair. It's not a rehab of the bridge. Yeah. Okay, Brian, keep going. Okay. The next one is $100,000. That has been in the plan. That is the one that's funded by the capital stabilization. The next three. I have a quick question about that one too. It seems, why is that a capital expense? There was an article or proposed article last year's town meeting to create a separate field called Field Study Group to look at how we're going to improve the grass fields given that we have the moratorium and probably by 2031 we're going to be looking at the end of life of the artificial turf over at the high school. And as an alternative to that article, I met with staff last year and agreed that we would commit $100,000 a year to Joe Doucette, who has taken a lot of training. It was actually a training today for field maintenance to upgrade the irrigation systems and make improvements to a lot of the rectangles around town. So it was a commitment to try and improve the playing services so that we have adequate fields available should we pull that artificial turf offline. Because right now that artificial turf can accommodate more play than traditional grass fields. So if it's town meetings desire to extend the moratorium and not allow turf to go back there, we have to start building these other fields up to take the amount of play. So my alternative solution or suggestion last year was to start committing at least an additional $100,000 to the folks at DPW so they can improve the irrigation and make these other fields usable and playable as we move towards 2031. So I guess the word maintenance and bill level number is kind of what threw me. But what I'm hearing is basically this is sort of a $500,000 field improvement capital expense that just happens to be divided into $500,000 chunks. Yes, and Mr. Doucette is picking a particular field and using some monies that come from REC as well in combination to make these improvements. Okay. My other question is just how much have we been spending over the past year or so? I would have to get a number for you from Mr. Doucette, but I can do that. Okay. And then where are we? I don't recall in the three-year war time on turf fields. I don't remember. Synthetic turf fields. Yeah. Right. Synthetic turf fields. Yeah. Because it's turf too. Yes. I agree. Did we just do it in my first year in the big home? So I think it might be this might be the last year. We renewed it. We renewed it. I think last year. Did it? Okay. All right. So Brian, we're now on to IT. Okay. The next three are IT. The first number there is cybersecurity that we talked about earlier. You see there $47,000. It's actually 250, and I'll get to that in a minute. The public safety regional system is $150,000. The cybersecurity firewall at $100,000. All three of these were not in the capital plan whatsoever last year. Michael has already talked about the need to do IT improvements. So these came out of the blue. So I met with the IT director, and what he agreed to do was move two of the products that were in the plan in fiscal 27 out a couple of years. He also agreed to close out an old project that he had to $202,000. So he did close out a project to help fund these three. Here's a good example of a situation where a lot of money comes into the first year plan, and there's no money to pay for it. The money has already been allocated. If you take a look at the fiscal 28 tab, you will see all the projects, and all of the projects have revenue sources. They've already been designated. So once you get to the next year when you have people come in and want all of these new projects, it's very difficult to accommodate them because in many ways I wouldn't say that they cut the line, but the fact of the matter is we don't have money to pay for it. So everything over a five-year period has got to be reset just to accommodate these items that we would view as necessary and they must be done. I wouldn't say they're safety issues, but they're pretty much projects that can't wait. They have to be inserted into the next year. And when you have 15 projects come in and we have to go in and rejigger five years, that's not an effective five-year plan. And that's why it wreaks havoc on our forecast. So here's an example where a department had stepped up and closed out $202,000 of an existing project to help fund these three. So any questions on those? What is the public safety regional emergency system? That's a system they need to put in place when they're doing the transition to the 9-1-1 with the regional ethnic in Framingham. So they have to put in that infrastructure. Is that new? It would be new, yes. And it's new to the plan and it's new equipment, yes. So I think maybe going off of Pam's question, if we knew we were trying to do a public safety initiative with Framingham and others, why would that be new? Wouldn't that be a known cost? We always signed the IMA last year. This has just been over the last. So we have been exploring since I got here joining the regional dispatch center. We were looking at others. We had at one point looked at joining Framingham and NAIC and the model for that was not in our best interest. They went back and rethought it because no one else was joining. And as they were coming together last year, they signed an IMA and realized if we signed on, we could collectively get more 9-1-1 grant money to build out this system. And it would be advantageous to us in future budgets. They're hoping to have the facility done later this year and maybe start staffing and taking some of our staff over. So when that gets paid out, the way a lot of these grants work, you get some of the money 100% the first couple of years and then they slowly win you up, but there would be some savings for us if our dispatchers were paid out of that grant versus out of our budget. But we signed the IMA last year and we have to do some things. We had to make some adjustments in our regular operating budget because we had to start paying a prorated assessment that we joined and we have to make some improvements on our side as well. So we asked for this, we're putting in 150 and then the forecast once those grants start paying us, maybe next year or the year after, what's the cost savings that's forecasted? A lot of it will be operational. We're supposed to be able to use some of our existing consoles and our existing handheld radios, but I'm told that in the future that the regional dispatch should be picking up some of the capital costs for some of the radios. I don't have an exact amount. But the number of total people involved in the four shifts that we have to run to maintain our individual system is a dozen? We have, I believe, eight full-time dispatchers that we have and there will be opportunities for some of those people to move over. We still haven't figured out what we will do. There will most likely be a public expectation that there will be somebody in that lobby. So we have a lot of the towns that have shifted to regional still provide somebody there for so many hours a day, not always 24 hours a day. So we'll see, I can't say it's a one-for-one exchange, but we should see substantial savings. But we may still have to keep some FTEs in the building for the lot. And the other aspect, as I understand, is it will be a more effective system because we'll be immediately coordinated with all the neighborhoods as far as needs go. Because they are mutual aid partners, they'll know right away if there's an issue. I'm on board with that. I would love to know the number. And that's okay if we don't know it off the top of our head. But we'll just start our conversation around the $2 million capital to save the $120 ongoing operation. It would just be nice to know what the actual number is. So that's okay. Well, I can't quantify that at the moment. I'm happy to come back at a later date. But the other thing is the grants, they want to do away. See, when I come in and you ask me a question off topic, I can't remember the acronym for a PSAP. It's like a public safety access point. And that's what they call our individual 911 dispatch here. And the grant monies are being geared toward the regional ones. And that's not only Massachusetts, it's a national trend. So it behooves us to join one of those because once we're a part of it, we should be getting more money through the grant system. And as we're a part of that, our assessment is based on the population as well as the number of calls. And so right now, out of the three, I think we pay less than 20% of the costs over there, more or more than 16%. Happy to come back. I'm on the three-member board of directors. And we're right now looking at the construction of the facility. They have an executive director. And as I said, they're looking at starting to train and move some folks over at the beginning of the next fiscal year. So as we get closer, I'm happy to come in and try and talk about what impact that will have on our FY27 budget and future budgets. That's like a nice efficiency, though, that you can point to the benefit of the regional grants. Yeah, this should be on the list as I requested for any bullets on efficiencies that we can trumpet in the FinCom report. Things we know or things we're expecting. Keep going, Brian. Okay, moving right along, down to police, you have the in-car computer replacements, $90,000. And the traffic signal purchase, $50,000. That was in the plan all along. The next one, the dash in body cameras that was brought forward by the active police chief. Chief Heber wanted that $100,000 in 2017. He needed to get that purchase done sooner than later. So that's an example where we brought something in. You know, I review that one as a public safety issue as well. Moving down the line, you had the fire truck. Is that a curiosity? We don't have dash in body cameras now? We do, but I think this is a place. Oh, great. Got it. Okay, thanks. So that wasn't the plan moving forward and we just brought it up? Closer in. Got it. Okay, keep going, Brian. So the next one, we talked about the fire truck, $615,000. You know, in the past, we bought a fire truck for $950,000 and we had the ambulance fund pay the debt service for that. I tried really hard to have the debt service covered by the ambulance fund to cover this. Maybe down the road, we can flip that. But right now, taxation is going to pay that. We're going to issue levy debt to pay for that. But, you know, down the road, we may be able to switch that and have the ambulance fund reimburse the general fund for some of the debt service. As we did the $950,000 truck we bought about six years ago, a seven. The next one is the dive equipment for the fire. That's paid for by the ambulance fund. Chief McPherson brought in new. The Cadillac monitoring related equipment. $80,000, again, paid out of the ambulance fund. We did talk about the public safety. Sorry, I had a quick question. And maybe this is really like, we probably need someone for fire to help explain, but $25,000 on dive equipment? Like, that's a large number. Is that because we pay some special, really high rate? Is that because we need to help fit like 20 people in the dive equipment? Like, what's that? I'm going from memory, but I believe in my conversations with the chief, when we've had emergencies, we border a river, we have to respond to calls there. And I believe we have some folks that are specialized in dive, and from time to time they need equipment. I can't speak exactly what this particular piece is at the moment, but we do have somebody that's trained, that responds, I think not only in town, but as part of a regional response team for dive. Yeah. I'm aware of that actually, because I've spoken with the fire chief as well, and it's lovely. Yeah, yeah. I'm really happy we have that. But 25 grand is a lot. Like 25 grand of equipment is a lot of equipment, and I would just be interested in knowing, like, are we outfitting everyone? Are we buying a sub? Like, what are we getting? Yeah. So, thanks. I understand the question. All right. You can keep going. Okay. So, the public safety building, HVAC, we talked about that at 250,000 on the DPW facilities rehab. 250,000 that's been in the plan all along. The next one is the town building gym, the town building elevator, the town building elevator specifications, and the town building water pads. First, going back to the roof. We had the roof last year as excluded debt. This year, it's in the plan as levy debt. So, apparently, Michael Fair is going to only address the roof on the gym next year at $310,000 by levy debt. I believe the total roof cost, if I go by memory, was around $2.8 million or $2.6 million. But, of that $2.8 million or $2.6 million, he's going to spend the $310,000 to cover the roof in the fiscal 27 capital budget by levy debt. What was new was the elevator. The elevator was nowhere in the plan, even when we did the calculation of what was needed in the town building last year. This came up recently this year that the elevator, I think both of them were failing. And then Michael Fair needs to correct those or they would not be in operation. So, that's $271,000. Again, a surprise CIP that we did not plan for. So, that's $200,000 or $471,000? $471,000. I'm sorry, on the roof replacement, the total cost you said is $2.8. Can you explain that again? We've got $310,000 in here. So, I think this goes in part with the CIPC's recommendations. We were looking at one point, doing a complete repair of the roof up here. I was informed... For the entire... For the whole... For the whole town building. For the whole town building. And, you know, if we're not sure what we're going to... That the gym roof is only $310,000? Well, we've had a leak above since I've come here. There's been a problem with the gym roof where it leaks and some other things. So, we're just going to address the critical need over there. But, I was informed that when HVAC and other improvements were made in the attic in this building, they compromised some of the structural integrity up there. That, you know, we're doing okay, but if we had some extreme... Multiple extreme weather events like we had and had a huge buildup of snow, we could actually see some of the rafters give way. That's what I was told. I'm not... That's why we were looking at a complete repair and replacement of the roof up there. But, if we don't know what we're doing, why would we spend all of that money right now? I understand that. I'm just wondering if $310,000 is adequate for the gym. Um, relying on what Mr. Fay has indicated... It sounds like Kelly... Yeah, Kelly Lapp, I'm the IPB. So, I think Michael got moved. When Michael Fay brought us the higher than what was in... Is that everything that this building needs to bring it up to... Not, not to a Taj Mahal standard, but to a... You know, a decent standard. And the answer was no. And we asked him to go back and give us a better sense of... Is it $6 million, or is it $10 million, or is it $15 million? Because we didn't think that the residents should be voting on $6 million without knowledge of the follow-on. And so, he took that. He went back. He's still working on what that number and what those needs are. But when he came back, he said, like, to stage the roof to the most critical pieces. I don't know that it's replacing, but it's dealing with the issue. Okay. And then at that point he came back with the elevator. It's not necessarily full replacements that I know of. It's a fix. It's a fix. But that was also when the elevators got added, which kind of just further solidified, right, our concern, which is we don't have a good handle on the whole needs of this building. And we don't have a good handle on what we want to use the building for. Exactly. CIPC has more work to do. So, moving right along, the $80,000 on the gym pads in that same gym are in tough shape. So, for a safety issue, they wanted to replace them. That makes sense to me. Moving down, the district-wide... This is for the school to repair and replacement of driveways and sidewalks. The $444,000 has been in the plan all along. The middle school roads and sidewalks, again, was in the plan at $431,000. We already talked about the septic in the baseball field at the high school. The next one down would be the wastewater, hot water system. That was not in the plan. We have now placed that in each of the years. This, again, came out of left field. It was not in the plan. It's a substantial amount of money. And, you know, we certainly don't want to leave any of the schools without hot water. But from my perspective, this should have been in the plan all along. And this really messes things up, like I talked about previously. So, we have slotted this in, $359,000. Elementary... I'm sorry, quickly. You said that's in the plan for every year now? It's in multiple years, yes. At different schools. Okay. Okay. But it was not in last year's five-year plan. In a perfect world, this would be entering the fifth year and work its way down. Yeah. Not leaping to the first year. Yeah. But it's not necessarily... We expect to have a $360,000 recurring hot water system expense. It's just that the middle school happens to need it this year and we're going to do it. And we slotted the high school in for two years from now or whatever. Right. Right. Makes sense. And so, the next one, $540,000 for the elementary HVAC. That's been in the plan all along. The next one's a tough one. We got the happy hollow fire alarm at $148,000. There are already open, unspent fire alarm appropriations done. So, you're between a rock and a hot place. Do you not fund this because they haven't done the other ones? And then you have something happen, a happy hollow. So, we put it in the plan because it's related to fire alarm systems. So, here's a case where we have to inject $148,000 into the plan because it's clearly safety related. But, again, it should have been in the plan all along and we do have open appropriations. But, I see no other way that we do need to include this in the plan. Just so I'm understanding, are you saying they've got a backlog of fire alarm? They have open capital for fire. So, they've opened capital. At other schools, we have substandard fire alarm systems that we need to replace. Right. That's what I'm trying to understand. You already have appropriations that were voted previously that they're not completed. Right. For not happy hollow? Yeah. Other schools. Okay. So, what's the... Let's recognize Kelly. My understanding is that there are different components. The unspent appropriations have to do with, I believe, the board, the fire alarm control boards. Additional requests, I think, I can't see it with sensors. So, it's a follow on once they replace the panels and there's additional components that then work into the... Do you feel like they're ready for this if they haven't done any other work? I don't know what the status of the current status of that work was, but my understanding was that it was in progress. Okay. That would be good to know. Okay. So, want me to keep going? Yes, please. So, the next is a new one, safety and security communications from the schools to the police and fire, $135,000. Again, a safety issue was not in the plan. It's a safety issue, so we have to insert it and, again, move things around to make it work financially for the town. What does that mean? What does that mean? Safety and security communications? What does that mean? Apparently, communication systems between the five schools and the fire and the police station had to be improved. Thank you, Kelly Lappin, Chair of the CIPC. This one, my understanding is that currently, the schools use basically the radio castoffs from police and fire and that they are all operating on not necessarily the same technology and the same frequency, so they can't, not necessarily reliable communication. Our committee's feeling on that is that we don't want to be in a situation where something happened and replacing all the radios. Thank you for clarifying. What is it? So, moving along, the next one is the Pre-K Elementary Literacy Curriculum. So, back when Dr. Easy was here and Tom LaFleur, they brought forward a CIP for a math curriculum. This was, at the time, it was really viewed as an operating expense. And we told Dr. Easy and Tom LaFleur at the time that it was an operating expense. And the only way we would fund it is if they did close-outs to fund this because, again, they had come in and injected that into the first year of the five-year plan. So, they did come up with close-outs. That's why we did fund the math curriculum back when Dr. Easy was here. That math curriculum is still unspent. It still has $80,000 in it. So, in fiscal 27, they submitted for a literacy curriculum. In my view, and I did tell the superintendent this and the school business manager, my view, this is an operating expense. And I did meet with them and I told them that I would not put it in the plan because I didn't have the financing and that the only way it could be put in the plan is that they went back and closed out existing projects. So, they came back and closed out $400,000 in projects. Some were funded by bonds. Some were voted by free cash. That's the reason why we're able to financially put this in the fiscal 27 budget is because they stepped up and closed out $400,000 of prior appropriations to do this one. I appreciate that part of it, but Michael, tell me, we're going to spend $200,000 for pre-K literacy? This is like 50 kids at Children's Way? I'm not sure what this is. We came forward and Ryan and I talked a little bit about it. He had, I was tied up with a different matter, but he went back and forth with Dr. Fleischman about the need for this and the funding for this. So, I could not do being pulled away from something else. Yeah, we got it. Kelly, do you have perspective on this? I don't remember, tell it off and share with the CRC, I don't remember pre-K specifically, but I do remember that there was grant funding that they will not be able to take advantage of if they don't have the funding for the curriculum. So, there was, I want to say, several hundred thousand dollars of grant funding that would be It may not be pre-K. It does say pre-K elementary. It's just pre-K. It says pre-K elementary. So, it might be like a pre-K. Yeah, I think it was pre-K slash elementary, not... Okay. Okay. Through... It might be worth clarifying because I had actually the same reaction and impression fill of like... I just read it and...
Okay. Is this a new item, Brian? Anecdotally. Yes. It is a new item. It was not in the plan. Okay. Anything else, Brian? I mean, we can... I mean, you do see the water. The ones in the water have been in the plan. They're going to be doing the water main design and construction on Dudley Road. 1.1 million and you got the water truck. But that's separate from the 38 million, right? The water main design? Yes. Right, right. These have been in the plan all along. And is the truck part of DPW before? Yes. Okay. And then the low pressure replacement for the wastewater at $125,000. And that's being obviously funded by their funds. It does not affect taxation. I understand. Right. So that's all... I mean, for water, I mean, there's going to be a lot more coming on, but that will go immediately into the rates to cover that. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Do we have any idea like what, to add to that point, seems like there are a lot of things that are going to be funded by water rate increases. Do you have any idea like Ballpark, what the percent increase in the water rate? Yeah, we do. There's been studies done. I can share them with you. But Ballpark, with the 38 million, it'll raise rates by about 74% over where they are today. That's going to come in 2029, I believe. There is a smaller, what you're looking at here, plus some existing projects will raise rates about a third of that total in the year. All right. So 74% total by 29, kind of ramping up for small. Yes. And the challenge with water, we haven't been having sufficient revenues by the way that we've been charging it. And so we have to get up to speed on this. And so, you know, I've spoken with Mr. Holder, who's advocated in the past that they had, you know, incrementally raised rates in anticipation of this. And I know they did their new water meter replacement, hoping that was going to uncover some new revenue. And I'm not. It has not. Not. So it's going to be a spike in rates. And the other challenge has been, of course, we've had water bans. So the folks that used to use lots of water have not been. So the higher rate users have not been using it. So it's a challenge. I've encouraged Tom and DPW to look at the idea of an automatic true-up every couple of quarters so that if revenues ever fall below, that it automatically adjusts rates accordingly. Because that's a lot of debt to be taken on if we're not collecting the sufficient. And we can't debt into retained earnings sufficiently to cover that. Did you know we had a conversation about that at some point as far as what if this is going to be funded by water rates versus taxes? Select board is putting 100% into water rates as the plan at this stage. Fair enough. That is certainly the more, I think, regressive option. But I guess that's not our call. Just on that, there's been a lot of conversation about . Yes, Ron. You know, there's a lot of conversation at multiple meetings about the equity issue as to, you know, if you put in taxes versus who's actually using it. Yep. And you could take an example of somebody who's a retiree living in a large house having to pay more taxes to support the water when they don't use nearly as much as somebody. So I think that would trade off. Yeah. Yep. I think the argument the other way is people who live in large houses tend to have higher assets, right, and use less water relatively. But anyway. This is not the time for that conversation. Oh, we can catch up. I'll have to. Yep. Brian, what other topics should we touch on? Yeah. Just that last year we used an Excel file that worked effectively. I would suggest that have the Finance Committee members, and I will send the file out tomorrow, send their questions to April, have April send the questions to me. I can respond back and copy everybody. That way you don't have to wait, you know, four or five days to get some questions answered. I'll send the file out tomorrow. You can ask a question about any one of the capital items over the five years. We will respond to you in email so that way all members can see it and start, you know, get the ball going and start answering a lot of the questions. Yeah. Let's take a break for a second. April, are you okay being the consolidator point? But Brian, you do remember I did send an email that you are going to be the person responsible for making the tables and charts for the warrant for capital and for all the finance. April is not going to be doing that this year. I'm confirming that with you. Are you asking me or telling me? I'm telling you. Okay. I already asked you about two or three weeks ago. I said, instead of April taking on the chart production and tables production, we need you to do that. Easy to do. Be happy to do it. Thank you. I appreciate that. It's confirmed. And I've already noted some questions from tonight, so I'll get with Brian. Yeah. I have a question. Please. Have you thought about or have you done any prioritization or ranking? And I guess what I'm thinking of is, and it's the way my mind works, is to go through and say, this is the most important second or third. Another way to do it is to say, these are the critical ones. An example might be the HVAC and the town safety. These are the ones that are partially delayed, like the roads could be partially delayed, not all of it. And then others, maybe the baseball field could be fully delayed. Have you done that sort of ranking? So to their credit, the CIPC did that this year. And so, as I said, this is an inaugural year and a condensed year for all of us to do this. So as we start next year and have a full year, maybe that's something we can explore and also Brian and I can look at ranking these as well using similar models that they did. Okay. And the whole idea of having them is to put a different set of eyes, you know, Brian and I often get challenged with, you know, a key portion of our respective jobs is to do this. But there are a lot of things pushing and pulling us. So it's much appreciated to have these other volunteers who also live in the town to put their take on what we should be looking at. So, you know, that was one of the reasons I thought it's very helpful to have that there. And we try to incorporate as many of those suggestions. We had a little slightly different spin. But at the end, this committee can kind of look at both. And I don't think we necessarily disagree on things. They didn't have all the information. We have a little bit more, but I know you need that. Do they have a parallel, maybe I've missed it. Do they have a parallel one that we can match up? Yes, they sent January 20, I think, was the date of their report that circulated. And it came up with, on the order, $9 million, if I remember? Yeah, it was 8 points. Yeah, for the recommended for fiscal year 27. Versus 14, was it? Versus 12 points. Versus 12 points, okay. So the initial ask from town was 14.7. Okay. CIPC looked at it and thought that there was 8 million? Okay. It was, yeah, it was 8 points. 8 to 9, yeah. But the 15, remember, that was recommended last year included over $5.5 million of town building. Yes, actually. Everyone's taken it out. So 14 to 8 to 9 to 12, it sounds like. Yeah. So that has been going on. And if you take out, say, the varsity baseball appeal, that brings it right down to about 10. Closer. It gets closer to their recommendation. That's the biggest difference, is us trying to put that in this year, combine the two for a debt exclusion. So just to make sure I understand, but I'm just looking at this capital budget spreadsheet right now, it says FY 27, 13.77 million? That's the water in there. That's the water in there. That's the water in there. Okay, in the water. Yep. Alright. Cool. Just on a slightly different note, tomorrow afternoon I have the Board of Directors meeting with West Suburban Health Group. Oh, good. We'll get numbers. And we will be getting, we should be getting our healthcare numbers, and I will likely send an email out. Right. Mr. Hurley, he often attends some of those, so you might get the email from him first. I don't know. Because a lot of that is open to the public, but I will send out something to the select board, and I can also copy this committee as well. Thank you. Other topics on capital? I want to give Kelly a moment to make any comments you would like to. I think we've covered policies. Here, these fall within those policies, and if they don't, we're explained. You can have flexibility and choose to not follow a policy and do that consistently. The policy is meaningless, and for someone like a Moody Rating Agency, not following the policy consistently is going to have them sooner. That's a generic, I appreciate the comment and support it. Is there anything that particularly flags for you? Was it a debt exclusion? The debt exclusion, there's still, even though it's excluded debt, one of the policies is that your total debt service, including excluded debt and including enterprise, doesn't exceed 10%. Yes. And so there, with the waste, with the MWA project, could start to be a challenge. So that's the one that they're most likely to. Yeah. Brian, can you report back to FinCama as to where we are on that 10% number? We're at 6% in fiscal 27. For total debt service? For total debt service? For total debt service as a percentage of budget. Total debt at 28, and once we start taking on... So just confirm... The MWA would not be factored into that. That would be debt of the enterprise fund, so that would not be a metric. I think it might be, from a Moody standpoint, when they consolidate. No, they would look at the total debt of the town, and we're substantially under the total debt that we can raise. We got that from Hilltop. We're substantially... Even with the MWA, we're substantially under the amount of debt that the town could raise. Okay, just so it'd be good to circulate that calculation. I encourage you to look at the debt policy, which says total debt service, no more than 10% of the total operating budget, and that was including enterprise funds, including... Did you hear that, Brian? I have not heard that from Moody's. Moody's would always say... This is a question of the town financial policies that were, you know, formalized, whatever, six months ago or something, and circulated in the fall. Well, I mean, the debt service and the enterprise funds are as substantial as a percentage of their budget as well as waste water. Not so much in the general fund. So, you know, it would be impossible to maintain that metric in the enterprise funds. It's less than the type of amount. Yeah. This suggests fund by fund basis, perhaps. It's omnibus operating plus enterprise funds. That's a separate metric for the general fund only. Yeah, I understand. I'll follow up, Brian. Okay. The other items I just wanted to mention were, I think we already covered it a little bit, was the idea that there may be a need given structural constraints in the budget if you still want to comply with the $5 million excluded debt policy to bundle debt items for a vote. Ignore the policy. So that was the other one. And then the town building was the third one, which we already discussed. Got it. Good. It needs to have. Thank you, Kelly, and the committee. Anything else for Michael, Brian? One other question I had, just as it pertains like Moody's and the ratings. Is there just a chart of what we'd project free cash to be over the next X years? It's right in the capital file that we sent. There's a tab for free cash. Yep. I don't think there's, is there a projection of? Perfect. Thank you. Of our use of free cash. Oh, no. It's a projected balance of free cash at the top of the. Yeah. Goes out to 20, 30. I don't know why I didn't think to look into free cash tabs. So thank you. Is that in that file? Okay. Yeah. And the Excel. Yep. Exactly what you're expecting. Typo on the tab there, Brian. The last column I. Yeah. 31. You have 20, 30 in two columns. Okay. Yep. And again, those are all assumptions. Forecasting out, you know. Yep. But just, yeah, forecasting and according to plan that grows and doesn't shrink. I will note to your point that the capital plan calls for the most expenses this year, including a bunch of expenses we didn't predict. So it's probably just worth us thinking about the fact that every year we'll have expenses we didn't predict and spent more than we thought we would. This is an unusual year. This many new expenses, it feels to me. But yes. Aaron? Well, actually, that was one of my, the only question that I have that Brian didn't answer, and I appreciate what all these said. Last year, the capital plan was capital budget was 12.9 million. This year, it's 12.2. That excludes the enterprise funds. And it's projected to drop to under $7 million in the next couple of years. It just doesn't feel realistic. I mean, yes, people will, some things we brought forward, some things will drop out. But that's just a really big difference from recent history. It worries me. Well, I think what you see is that the last year, fiscal 31, the fifth year, is usually the lightest. People spend less time projecting out what they need in the 30, 31. But then once you get to 30, a year forward, you see a big bump in people submitting for capital budgets. I don't have the actual number of what was injected into this plan that was not involved at all. We did talk about the heating systems in the schools. I mean, that was clearly over a million dollars over five years that was not even in the plan, over, you know, that was not part of the planet whatsoever. So, you know, you do see the first two, three years, usually the highest, because that's when people are rushing in to sort of get things done. And the fourth and the fifth year, usually the lightest. You know, that all makes sense. I just, I'm not taking a lot of comfort that these numbers are going to drop substantial in the last two years. That's all. Yeah. We're going to slot the, and I know the CIPC mentioned slotting the varsity next year, but we were moving it. So if we're moving things down, you're going to see some change and we may have to backfill if we're trying to keep it consistent, or we could choose, we want to bring it down. Have we done an assessment? I know we have in the past, but I don't know where things stand or where the plan is on sort of looking at each of the schools and recognizing, you know, what needs to be updated or refreshed and just so we have fewer of these surprises that are coming in from year to year. Since we've brought Mr. Fay on board, he's been doing an excellent job of trying to get around to all these things. This year we had, we did that type of capital needs assessment for this, for the town side, using on-site insight. I know the school did it a couple of years ago. I don't know how current, I don't know the actual year they did it and whether they need to do it again. And the school is obviously doing the visioning work as well. Yes. And I guess my other question is, I think that when we've looked at things, we've had the plan and those figures for whatever project tend to stay static. Do we, how often do we kind of go in and revalue those and refresh for inflation? Well, and that's the point with this varsity field. Right. They just have the number that they created back in 2017. Yeah. I don't know if we add inflation to those out years that you'd have to ask Mr. Kevin if he's still listening. Brian, are you there? Yeah. Can you repeat the question, Michael? So, what Ms. Roman was asking is, year over year, for those out years in the five-year plan, as things shift over, do we make any adjustments to the dollar amount of the request? So, for example, the things that we're putting in right now in today's dollars in FY31. By the time we get to 31, have we made any adjustments for inflation as they move over each year so that the numbers are more accurate? Well, all the department heads are asked every year to submit their CIPs for the first year. They're also required to submit a five-year plan. And most times the numbers and the projects that were submitted, they do true up the numbers and they increase them as the fire truck was, as the radios were at DPW. So, many times when they submit the five-year plan, they will submit the items with an increase in cost. Anything else for now on capital? Hearing not. Thank you. And Brian, you'll send us the spreadsheet that we can add questions to? Yes. It worked well. The last couple of years, we'll send that out tomorrow. Thank you. Appreciate it. And thank you for having us. I'm happy to update. I'll try and answer the questions you gave us this evening. And again, thank you for Ms. Lappin, Chair Lappin of the CIPC for the work they did. And, you know, as Mr. Huss indicated, you know, bring a different point of view, how we rank, prioritize going forward. And so we'll work on it in the next year, create a better plan. I offer for CIPC to jointly meet with FinCom whenever makes sense. I appreciate there's, right now, it's a crunch time for a lot of things. But if next fall, it makes sense for us to get together. Yes. We were meeting last night and there was no room for us to meet here tonight. So if I brought it in, we wouldn't really have our meetings. That's fine. Yeah, no, that's fine. But at the right time, in prior years, we've looked at capital budgets in the fall. But, you know, so that we can all kind of come up to speed earlier. Maybe that'd be something to think about. Going forward, since we'll actually have a committee. Yes. Continue our work right after next year and the improvement. Improving the CIP form to collect more detailed information we currently get. So that we did do a very elementary ranking of high, medium, low. Creating a more quantitative method as well as resource, financial resources, but staff resources. Progress on getting projects done, but there's still a pretty significant number and balance. Is the high, medium, and low something you've already sent us? It's in our report. It is. Okay. We'll be issuing an addendum likely this weekend with our recommendations for FY 28-31. Obviously aren't going to line up with what Michael and Brian suggested, but it will have the details of our thinking and all of the meetings. Yeah, and Michael, just as one person, I would look forward to learning about the ball fields and what's going to be involved in that and to really understand where there's some economies to be had and that we've got good numbers behind it. No, and I know you're trying to get that meeting to get those right people in that can answer, and I've impressed upon them to get as much information from the engineers that they're currently doing. And to answer, again, Chair Lapp and they had asked, you know, can they quantify the savings between the two years? Yeah. I've asked. I was hoping I would have had some answer this afternoon. I did. Understood. A meeting is great. It has to be just folks sending us emails around to kind of address the questions. That's, you know. Good. Good. Thank you. As we break, I smile because we all get drilled down in the details. And when I detail, I get into the baseball field. I used to play and coach. Can I walk the field? Is it really wet? Is it playable? It's like no bills. Back off. I get paid to crawl. Next topic on the agenda was to look further at any of the operating budget. There's further questions or reflections on town or school. It's funny. One reflection I had in thinking about it was that Michael and the team did a great job in hitting the target. We set the target. And I'm thinking, well, maybe we set the bar. We didn't set it low enough. We should have set it, you know, oh, we want to do it at inflation and then see what they could do. Are we, do we feel like we're in a position that we know enough about the budget that we're going to be in a position to either support it or not? Did we get the detail yet? Yeah. Oh, so we did get that spreadsheet? Yes. This is the school board proposing it. Aren't they confirming it tonight? So I thought they were going to send it out. Oh, the school budget. Oh, the school budget. Sorry. Yeah. I want to see what. The, so we have the number, but not the breakdowns. We got a little bit on, you know, the special ed or what was the expenses question. We got that one. But that's because they haven't approved it and they were voting tonight. No, I don't know that, but they are voting tonight as I understood. I'm not sure why we didn't get it. We can, I'll send a note to Kirstie. I thought it was because they weren't, they didn't get it. That was the difference of Dr. Fleischman versus Kirstie as to what needed. But I think Dr. Fleischman was ready to send it to us immediately, but it hasn't gotten done. I was looking for the detail on the town budget today and I could not find it. Do you think you, you say we have that? We do. For the operating. Yeah. Brian had sent that out January 29th, I think. Yeah. I thought I'd seen it. I just can't find it. Would somebody be kind enough to send it? There was a PowerPoint in a spreadsheet. It's on the 30th? Pam is remembering the 29th and I'm not going to challenge that. I'm just responding to email on the 30th, that's why. Okay. And the PowerPoint was the one we actually looked at a couple days ago. We did. And there was a spreadsheet attached to it. So I got that. But in that same email was the spreadsheet. I can't find the email. I mean, it must have deleted by the smart guy. That's one with the tax paper and all that stuff, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I just wanted to do 27 budget. Maybe it's 30. Yep. Yeah. I mean, to answer your question for me at this point, I'm still a little bit up in the air about how I feel about the budget. I think there was a ton of work. I think they did a great job in terms of getting it low enough that they're not doing an override. I think they could have gotten it lower. And I really like the inflation bar and to see how close they could get. So there's part of me that says, you know, if the bar were, is this presentable to the town? I would say yes. If it's like, hey, this is, you know, backed by Bill as the best they possibly could do, I would have trouble. So. So we're going to be asked to take a vote. And we recommend proceeding with this budget. Right. And each of us gets the vote. Right. What do we mean by proceed with the budget? I think the large. That was the conversation we had last time. Exactly. We recommend that budget. We recommend that budget. Right. Right. You know, and there's also part of me that thinks, you know, there's a message if we go unanimous versus a message if we're partially split. Yeah. No. But what questions do you want to address that happen? School budget details. I don't know if there are any more questions. I just think, you know, I would have been more aggressive. I have, I want to see the numbers from suburban. Oh, yeah. Right. Like there is a, I know that we have some numbers that are estimates. Right. And I think the hope of the goal is that we've estimated high and that number comes in lower. So there is a potential that the number actually drops. And I think that that is important because certainly I'm, I'm, I know how I feel about what was presented, but I don't think that that actually represents where we're going to finally land. And I think some of those final details will matter. Um, I think. Other details than West Suburban? I, the West Suburban for sure. And I thought in my head there was one more that we had talked about. And I, my apologies because I'm Monday now, I'm blanking. But I thought there was one other thing that we said could further reduce the final number. That there was something else that they were still waiting on. Not in the timeframe. Okay. I think that there's special ed, you know, uncertainties with that. The salary reserves. Yeah. I thought that was it. The special ed funding, but I guess. That just helps them for funding this. Okay. Okay. Correct. I'm also not sure what the impact is if either we don't recommend or the town doesn't pass it. So what happens then? What do you mean? We need to have a budget, otherwise we can't proceed. We don't recommend, I think the town votes on it anyway. Right. But, right. But if the town votes it down. In other words, if the town says yes we'll follow the finance committee's recommendation and we're not going to vote for the budget. What happens? Go back at this all? Yeah. They have to redo it. And then they have a special . Oh yeah. We get something to occur. Okay. And that would require, you know, obviously layoffs and, you know, massive change. That was kind of in the question of it. Well, we didn't know that. Sorry. No, no. If you're saying that if you wanted to cut the budget substantially. No, I'm saying if this goes to town meeting and the budget gets voted down, what happens? I mean, do they call an emergency town meeting and go back and, I don't know. I think people, like when it comes up to something, usually the plans are proposed is something else. I don't think that'll happen. You can amend the budget in something else. Okay. You know, but yeah, you pretty much need a budget. Right. That's my point. I guess we cross that bridge if it ever happens. It's hypothetical. Yeah. Someone, when I was signing up for this, said that there is a world where Finnecom could propose its own budget. Yeah. So if we agreed we did not endorse this budget, we could propose an alternative budget that the town would vote on. To your point, if the town votes on no budget, I assume, like you say, there's some emergency town meeting procedure to... Or we just keep town meeting going until we get to a budget. I don't know if it's like the federal government that you have a partial shutdown or like what happens. I mean, I think following along sort of Bill's train of thought, the two things that struck out to me were that the healthcare costs and the retirement costs for how they're increasing are unsustainable. Right. I don't think that that's a big secret. Like if they continue to increase on... It's not unique to our town. And it's not unique to our town. It's not. No, no. And I'm not at all trying to suggest they are. Right. And I recognize those are very complex issues. But I would like to see, I think, more conversation and more of an actual plan on what do we plan to do about it. You mean after the budget's passed? Because we don't have time to get into those topics. I agree, but I think my point personally, like my point personally is like, I feel like voting for it suggests that I'm comfortable with the path and trajectory we're on when in reality, what I would really like to see is we recognize that this is unsustainable. We are working towards trying to address it, but when we had that conversation, the answer was, we're banking in a 5% year over year over year. And that to me questions like, how much effort are we really putting into acknowledging what's uncomfortable? But to be clear, it's the state's that's the only solution to that. It is not going to be a town solution. I don't know if I believe that. Oh, oh. I don't know if I believe that. I don't know if I believe that. Oh, okay. You've got other solutions? So, hold on a second. I don't think I'm saying she has other solutions. I'm not saying that. But what is Massachusetts state mandated exactly? Sure, funding our previous obligations that we made is Massachusetts state funded, but we are not having active conversations around, at least not that I believe. No, no. I'm saying that to get state legislation to change to be able to have a bigger role in supporting the town's health care costs. Right. That's one path. That's one path. And it's not the only thing I'm suggesting. I'm just saying, like, in my personal opinion, like, and this is, again, just a personal opinion, as a, when I think about my household budget and just like how I run a budget, okay? If a cost is increasing greater than I can support the cost of increase, I start talking about alternatives and what I need to do about that. And if that means, what are those alternatives looking like, what the extreme side you have going without, and then you have alternatives of replacement, and frankly, sometimes a worse option, right? But, but as, as a household, as an individual, those are real trade-offs that I have to make every day. And I also feel like at some point, since we're asking people to pay for all of this, we also need to be having those conversations. And I know I'm not part of every conversation. I guess I'm confused. I guess, like, before March 15th, do you want to try and get more insight? I'm just sharing, and I guess, like, what items are you thinking about? I mean, in the unclassified budget? Yeah. General insurance? Yeah. The insurance is high. The health care. The health care is really high. It's just really tough. It is. But what, I mean, I don't know, I think they have said there are a couple, like, there aren't many alternatives. And I'm not sure if we should be looking at it. The other thing is, before I keep going, we make, we recommend a budget, and we also submit a report. So, in that report, we have space to elaborate on our recommendations and what we would like to see happen. But we've written in that report for many years. Yeah. For many years. Right? I mean, I don't think there's a lot we're going to do to change it between March 15th. Right. But I do agree 100% with your original point when you said, you know, voting for it seems like we're endorsing the trajectory. Right. And that bothers me. Correct. That would be the reason why I wouldn't vote for it. That's concerning. Yep. And we've made the recommendation in the report, and we've talked about the fact that we need to explore alternatives, and I'm not sure if it's happening as quickly as we need it to happen to try to find an alternative. Or else we're just signing it for- But maybe that's the problem. Anybody has alternatives. There's no town. I don't think there are alternatives, and I don't think the alternatives are one from another is significantly better than what happened. I mean, maybe there are some marginal improvements to be made. Yeah, I mean, I'm not a healthcare expert, but you can obviously have higher deductibles. You can, you know, renegotiate a different kind of healthcare plan. But you won't tie into- Yeah, now you may get, you know, a strike, you know, from your employees or whatever. But there are other, you know, it's not like there's no alternatives. It just might not be a better alternative. But it's also tied into collective bargaining, which is part of the big issue that- Right, right. Exactly. Absolutely, it's tied in. Yep. That doesn't mean there's not an alternative, it just means there might not be one that's feasible or comfortable. Yeah. And FinCom is not involved in any recommendations. Right, right, right. I would say that, which is the biggest piece of the budget is personnel. Some of the FinCom recommendations that you have made in the past have been addressed. I feel CYPC is a huge one. Right, right. That, I mean, they used to get a capital budget like five minutes before, and then it was like you had to go through- No, but it was, it was, I think early on when I first started, as Brian said, they've been doing a five-year budget for- Yes. This is the sixth or seventh year. Yeah. So initially it was a, you know, here's our budget, capital budget this year, and it was, you know, all new things and subject to change. There wasn't a plan as to what projects that need to be done and what's the timeline. So that has improved and we've seen, you know, and I think part of the CIPC, we'd asked for, and they've addressed, they've done a lot in a short time because there's a lot to do. The other piece of it is looking forward, looking farther ahead. So like a 15 to 20 year, begin on the five year plan to say, okay, if in fact for this building, which is a great example, like what do we want to do with it? And then if we're looking at a new school, is that 10 years out? And then we need to do something else. We need to consider how things are funded. So based off the recommendations that we have made, they are doing things that might take a lot longer. I mean, I don't feel like government moves past at all. So we're moving in the right direction. Okay. So for the FinCom to need a position to either recommend the budget, we would like to look at suburban numbers. I would like those numbers. Yes. And school budget details. And school budget details. I still have, and I will submit these to Brian, but even on some of the, just the line items, the departmental line items, looking at the changes. So I think for personnel, just, I just want to make sure I understood. Just cola is in the reserve. No. It's reserve. Steps and cola plus lands and everything. Steps and lanes are in the, why is that? I don't know. Because collective bargaining, I think. But that's not been done before. Like before we had steps and lanes that were part of, it was part of, it would have been part of the predicted increase. Personal cost. Yeah. Right. Because you know someone's working on it. They said that the reserve includes both. I thought it was just cola, but then I, then I heard, then I thought something else. That's why I was unclear. I could. I'm fairly sure we asked and they said it was both in there, but. I'm not sure why. I think. I may not be recording any of the transcripts, but I thought I went over that last night and I think it's just cola. I don't think it's. There was a reason not to just have it cola. One was not to sort of flag for the bargaining unit conversations. Okay. Because that then becomes a floor. Oh, you've already reserved, you know, X percent. We want X percent plus. But I'm not sure. Okay. So I guess that's a, that is just still a question. And then, um, so I had, so I can submit those and I can get those in Brian and hopefully he can bring that back to everybody. Good. Well, two things. There's the stall here. We actually, I don't think we can suggest line item. Well, but we can. You just have a budget that doesn't happen. Yeah. Whatever is objection. Right. Exactly. So we can, we can make a recommendation on a number. Core inflation, I mean, about 3% last year, right? So just to stay with inflation, you've already exceeded 2.5%. And these, these big drivers, I mean, it's not personnel. It's not bodies. It's not bodies. It's part of them. You know, so. No, staffing hasn't gone up. So. It's the cost of bodies. The cost is flat. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not a percent of cost. No, no, no. Employment. Right. Right. But the cost is still gone up. Yeah. But not very much. Well, well under inflation for personnel. Um, expenses are higher, proved this tonight. But what we're gonna find is those big drivers that are out of our hands, will door the savings we, we can cut. I mean, Cam's approach that to put our concerns in the report and still endorse the budget is certainly a reasonable way of proceeding. I wouldn't suggest a line item. I mean, I just think, at least for me personally, I don't know the line item well enough. If you did, I think we're saying, you know. But that was the other thing I wanted to say, which is that I, I actually think you can. No, that's not right. I can. Okay. I'm not gonna tell anybody else what for a budget because I don't like them. Right. Right. And that's, that was sort of, that's why I asked the question about what happens if you don't. Yeah. I agree. You know, I was just thinking from a policy point of view, the reason they passed prop two and a half in the first place is because, you know, town management and committees aren't all that good at keeping costs down. So we needed some help. So that's why they passed it. We'll get two and a half in an inflationary time. Yeah. I mean, that's, I mean, it was, inflation wasn't so high. True. True. And we did have a number of years in the not too distant past where we didn't have much inflation, but. Yeah. Yeah. And we haven't had an override in whatever it's been now. Right. So the friction is healthy and this is what you're supposed to do, so. Anything else on budget for tonight? I don't think we're going to have room for going through articles. Yeah. But I would appreciate folks getting them ready. And just to clarify guidance going forward is all of the select board sponsored articles that have no material financial impact. FinCom can give them to select board right now and they can take those on. And that vote that we. Will be recorded as the 700. As the 700 for all of those articles. Yes. Yes. Right. There are other no material financial impact articles that are sponsored by petitioners, planning board, or town clerk. Okay. And I propose that we do the regular write-ups on those with pros and cons that, you know, up to the individual FinCom person that's looking at it that says, yes, we want to weigh in on those. And we'll state that they have no financial impact as we have done in prior years. Mm-hmm. Because I have the town clerk, the dogs and dog regulations. Yeah. The one with the petalings. The petalings. So it's actually such a minimal financial impact. So if there's nothing to really state about pros and cons on them, that's fine. Okay. Well, I mean, there are probably pros and cons, but I thought we were going to be writing the reports on them. Right. It was unclear. Carol suggested that we didn't have to write them on any of the non-material. The select board. Yeah. Carol, the chair of the select board suggested. I've followed up with her. She said, oh, that was only in regards to the select board-sponsored articles. For the other articles, we can make the call. Yeah. I think the test is what helps the town make good decisions around these. Right. Okay. Yeah. The town clerk on with the peddlers, and it's like, that's not going to have any, I mean, nothing. Right. But you're still writing it up, doing the write-up now on that? No. So, I'm just doing the standard one that we said, we have no opinion. In other words, there was a fair one. Right. I think each kind of person, I know April had already written up pros and cons around unknown material. I don't even know which one it was. So, your suggestion. And it would be helpful to explain to folks, potentially. So, it's up to us. Potentially. So, it's up to us. But, I have a question, because I was confused by that, because- Yes. We were confused. It says that we shouldn't do the pros and cons, and Carol made a question, or made a comment about- 150 words. In the finance comments. Or, like, that's where I'm confused. It's like, so do you do pros and cons, or do you do- My understanding was, you don't do fin-con comments, or pros and cons. That was my understanding. So, in essence, we're not doing a write-up. Right. We just do our blurbun. Right. Would we like it that way? For all the non- Yes. Are there any non-material financial articles that we think we want to explain for the town better? Are you talking about petition articles, or board articles? Yes. Petition articles, planning board articles, and town clerk articles. The only one that I wanted to make a comment on was, like, the town code and the meeting. That was one of the ones that I had put pros and cons, and I'm sure the finance committee is going to have a position on this. Yeah, that's because we would want something. Like, we have an impact on that. Right. But that was the one I had submitted to Carol, and she was like, get rid of all of that stuff, so. And she's the liaison on that one? I don't think that. If people are wondering what income, especially on that one, to me, where they're recognizing that income has, you know, some skin on the game, they might want to hear our opinion, what our vote is, what we support that. As opposed to others that... Are there others that also fall into that? That was the big one for me. I had, like, visible house numbers, and I did pros and cons, but I took them out because I did feel, and then the other one I had was, I didn't even have pros and cons because it was just the recognizing town officers or the year service. Yeah, yeah. So those were the three that I had written up that I, to whom I did the pros and cons. So I think that there, and I think we may fall to you, Rob, but I think there are some petitioner articles that are not very well explained. And... Sherman Bridge. Yeah. Yeah. And so, I think we can write up to 150 words. And the petitioner, if we don't write anything, the petitioner, as I understand it, can write up to 150 words, and we can... Yeah, but you can't, but, but, but, have you read that they owned it? Well, but I think they can add an additional 150 words, right? That's... So I could work with said petitioner on their 150 words. You can do that, or you write your own. It seems like you have to, you know. But I don't think you have to write pros and cons if we keep it under 150 words. That's the rule. But I just... I think the 150 is just for them. I think I can write as much as I want here, here, right? Sometimes the pros and cons are usually correct. Yeah, it's just because it's like you're not giving an opinion, you're just giving... Here's pros and cons of like... Well, I guess, I think maybe at his point, some of these Sherman's Bridge articles that I'm responsible for are a little... The way they were written might make it a little hard to understand what they're even asking for, so rather than necessarily saying pros and cons, it's a fairly clear choice, right? Should we lower the speed? Like, the pros and cons seem fairly intuitive, right? Could it be like, you know, state recommendation or whatever, like... Well, it's not really any sort of problem. But I guess I'm saying like, even just trying to clarify like, you know, if you vote... And I think in some of the... Maybe in Arlington they did this when I looked there, right? And just having a clear like, this is what voting for this would mean, right? So let me ask that each FinCon person who has a non-material financial impact article, make a determination as to whether there's going to be any kind of a write-up, and then give me that list where Carol, and let her know that all the other articles... Is there any... I have like four of the Sherman's Bridge, and I'm just curious, what's the... Like, do we have the background there? I had sent out a note to Doug Levine, and I haven't heard back from them. I don't know if they were talking about it this week. I don't know what current... There's been lots of background, but I don't know. Like, is it just the DOT funds going, like Michael said tonight? Is there DOT funds being earmarked for repairs on that bridge? So, I don't know. There was an initial design that was going to replace the wood bridge with steel bridge, or steel supports, or whatever on it, which would have changed the nature of the bridge dramatically. It probably was seen as cost-effective and long-standing. Like, once that was done, it would last. And I think it was state-supported. But there was the folks who looked at it and said, wait a minute, we like our wooden bridge. We don't want to destroy the look and feel of it. So, in town, the neighbors weren't engaged. That's not a capital project that's coming through. That's where I'm trying to understand. No, so I asked about that, I think, in the context of the road repairs, because the feedback from the petitioners was that the Sherman's Bridge project was being funded in a way that sort of sidestepped some approval processes, feedback from the petitioners. I don't know how true that is. I mean, it's not going through capital. No, it sounds like basically all of the funding would be coming through DOT. So, it seems like it's coming through DOT, which then I'm like, okay. What's our goal? If it's coming through DOT, we're not paying for it. If it doesn't come through DOT, we're going to have to... It's kind of like, to me, that other bridge thing. So, I'm just trying to understand, like... I don't know. I think this is less of a financial thing, right? It sounds like it could be a huge financial thing. But I don't think the changing of the design necessarily doesn't mean DOT doesn't still fund it. Okay, and that... I don't know that. Yeah, I guess... It wasn't like there was only one way that DOT would support it. It was more of like there was... They were going down one design and they hadn't engaged with folks or thought about what else... And I guess your point, my assumption right now is it's not in the capital plan. It's not, as I understand, in the DPW's budget. If the DOT is not going to fund it, presumably at some point, the town needs to acquire the money and then it would become our problem. So, the walkways and all that other stuff would end up getting put into the... The walkways, I think, those, I think, would potentially be a financial thing. I'm just trying to figure out where did it come from? Yeah. It just seemed to have come out of the narrow movement. The select board has been engaged on it. Oh, I think we're... So, there's no article on whether to make these changes or not. And articles are all about residents who like the bridge the way it is, wanting to with their interests. Yep. And I think... And some of them do want physical changes like adding a second walkway. Three or four of those articles. The speed limit, putting some safety signs up, things like that. He has the safety in that stuff and then I have the other ones. I have two of three safety ones, I think. No bridge suggestion. Okay. I'm just curious. We'll wait to hear. Yeah. Because I know legal was looking at it too, so that's where I was wondering, like... Yeah. I know. So, we will meet next Wednesday. And we'll need to get a room, Carl, and put an agenda together. Articles hopefully we'll have a bunch to look at at that point. And hopefully we'll have a capital discussion further, particularly around the ball field. We'll see. Any other business for tonight? Motion to adjourn. I'll second. All in favor? All right. Everyone. Great. Thank you. Thank you.
Iris, do you bring the laptop just for extra weight to carry around? It's really just in case I need anything, like, to see something larger, but generally... The phone, you got it all working? Yeah, I just observed you working on the phone, and it's impressive to me. This is for reading, this is like, if I need to... Okay. So are you attaching the slides to it as well, or how does that work? The slides are an attachment that is available. Not in the minutes, but it's kept separate. Okay, so it's referenced? Yeah. Okay. Folks want more time, or...? It probably looks okay in the name. Okay. Okay.
Motion to approve the minutes. Second. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Thank you, April. The minutes approved as modified, or actually not modified now, as revised. And now, let's grab Michael and go to capital budget. Sorry, can you guys repeat? Iris does on the divine. So, Iris... Iris moved, Bill seconded, and everyone voted in favor. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Robbie, do you see Brian Kevney on the... Yeah, he's already on. Okay, great. You can make him by the panelist. The black void that is Brian. Inquisitorial, right? He's in a box, can you? He can't get out. Yep. Questions from all sides. Welcome, Michael. Michael, you sit there. I got your plug.
I knew I should have broke.
Oh, no, I said I got it. Robbie? Yes? What can I unplug? The three things plugged in here. If any. You can plug one on the power for itself.
You are plugged in, Michael. Just in case.
I think what I'm going to have to do, Mr. Chair, is to log into the meeting. Brian Kevney is on. No, he doesn't have his laptop. Okay.
You're logging on. There's a question about the $907,000 is what made up. Yeah, yeah. I saw the response. I think ties that down pretty well. Yep.
Yeah. Allspent.
Tiny bit of other things. Allspent.
I came in as a Zoom manager. Yeah, he came in the palace area. Good evening, Mr. Chair and members of the Finance Committee. Thank you, again, for having me and Mr. Kevin, who's online here this evening. Just before we walk through the presentation, Brian and I, just like the other night, give some introductory remarks, and then Brian and I will comment as we go through the slides. As you know, this year was a different year. In that last year at town meeting, we added a new Section 20 to the Article 19, forming our Capital Improvement Planning Committee. And under ideal situation, they would have been able to start early in the season, make their recommendations, get them to me, so that we can incorporate them in their plan. This being inaugural year, how it played out by the time that the committee assembled, they were already challenged with time. They made some recommendations and got them to us, and we're getting them to you this evening. They did yeoman's work looking at the five-year plan that we had presented last year, and they came up with their methodology, ranking some of these by priority, and the recommendations that came to us, and we understand why they came to us, looked radically different than what our five-year plan would have been for this fiscal year, had you moved, just if you shifted over the fiscal years. And I think what has been spawned out of that, and all of us began to recognize that one of the big things that the town has to grapple with is this particular building we're sitting in this evening. It's an old high school from 1935 that we've been using as the town office building, and when we put together the five-year plan last year, what we were looking at doing was multiple upgrades to this building using excluded debt, and as you know, the Capital Improvement Planning Committee, they looked at taking some of that out of this year, addressing things that they felt were of critical importance, and having a longer, a separate discussion along looking at the long-term plan for this building. When we received their plan and some of their drafts, we were having a similar conversation in-house with Mr. Fayah, Mr. Holder, some public safety about what we should do, and we were talking informally, we should start putting together a working group. And I had conversations with Select Board Member Fayah about this, and as you may well know, he recommended that the town should have a visioning committee for a town hall. And I think there's four real things we need to consider, whether we stay in this building and make some of these critical repairs, whether we lease, whether we try and put together a private-public partnership, let's say, with the town center on some of their land and develop over there, or look at some of the few parcels we have here in town to build a new town hall. But that will be something that we will put this visioning group together and look at that. So working with the spirit of the recommendations that came in from the Capital Planning Committee, Mr. Kevin and I got together, talked about them, brought in some of the department heads, primarily Mr. Holder from DPW, Mr. Fayah from Facilities, we brought in REC, and we talked about how to integrate some of the projects that weren't previously slated for this fiscal year into this fiscal year's capital plan, and then how do we then move and reshift things to the outer years and re-examine the funding plan. So it wasn't so simple as, oh, we'll just swap these new projects in that they identified and some of our new staff have identified. For instance, you'll see some here from IT, we have a new IT director. He realized that we, you know, needed some critical IT infrastructure updates. Some of those are in this plan. So now we had, we were pulling things from outer years in, pushing things we had originally slotted for F-127 out and trying again to do this in recognizing the effort put in by the CIPC and trying to accommodate everything. And so with that, I will start going through what we've done and what we've attempted to do, recognizing the hard work of that committee, trying to balance it with the existing five-year plan. And we know they're still working, Ms. Chairman, Chairwoman Lappin is, I know, in the audience here, and we, again, appreciate the work that they've done, and trying to develop something, again, that is mindful of the taxpayers' dollars, realizing where we are with our omnibus budget, where we may be in the next couple of years, and we'll talk about levy debt, excluded debt, and our rationale as we get to those sections. Brian, if you're ready, I'm going to start moving through the slides. You all set? Yes. I'm ready to go. Michael, just for context, you haven't been able to get with CIPC once you've now got your new thoughts together on what the plan is, just for context. Correct. We've received the recommendations. We've tried to incorporate as many of them. We didn't get a formal meeting back with them, just the timing of so many meetings going on. Public Board, FinCom, their meetings. That is why we invited Chair Lappin to be here this evening, and she has some comments. Okay. Good dive of the context. As you go through, you'll talk about sort of high level, the differences between what you ended up with and what they had recommended. So we have the PowerPoint, and we also have an Excel spreadsheet, and I asked Mr. Kevin, he'll walk through some of those changes. We had one we were working off, but it was in the red, and, you know, there's changes. So I'll have Brian highlight those. So, Brian, I'm on slide number two of the deck. Okay. Okay. So we can begin. Just a note for the new members on the Finance Committee, you have said it before. The capital budget is an important piece of the overall financial forecast. All of the debt service and the taxation comes out of the capital plan that goes into the long-term plan. The capital budget also creates models for free cash, capital stabilization, and the ambulance fund. So the capital budget is an important piece in forecasting out, you know, five, ten years, our override situation. What's problematic is when we have mass changes within the five-year capital plan where we're constantly updating and changing our forecast related to levy debt or excluded debt. So it's important that a capital plan, if it's working properly, only has minor adjustments to the first year and you're bringing in the fifth year. So this is the seventh year of myself and other members of staff compiling a true capital budget. So I can't emphasize enough the importance of a capital budget within working with a forecast. So the specific challenges for 27 and 31, as Michael said, we have town building improvements that we need to address. The public safety HVA system needed an upgrade and I'll get to that in a bit. We need to complete open capital appropriations. We still have a lot of capital appropriations and I'll get to what we were able to close out in just a bit. The town building, we have the future of the town building and the necessary short-term building improvements are evident in the fiscal 27 capital omnibus budget. They're also labeled as a fiscal 28 exclusion debt. So the town building is in this capital plan. The finance committee is only responsible for the omnibus budget. We are constantly reacting to unanticipated building needs within all buildings. We've seen that recently in the last couple of years with the school buildings where the boilers became defective and we had them get appropriations to fix them. Within the fields, we have in the plan to complete the final stage of the high school improvement. We also have a field, a turf field moratorium still in existence. So right now we can't put any synthetic fields. So having a synthetic field in a five-year capital plan is not doable right now because of this restriction. School facilities. The school is still working on the elementary school feasibility study with a possible new construction or a major renovation. Right now there is no large renovation in the five-year capital plan for any school buildings, including the high school and the middle school. We need to, at some point, determine the next significant building project because there's a lot going on in the town, you know, the MWRA. So we really need to determine if the next school building is really, is it the sixth year out or the seventh year? At some point it is on the horizon because the three elementary school buildings have not been renovated. I know the high school was and I believe that middle school was before the high school was renovated. But the middle schools are certainly in need of either a major renovation or possibly a new construction. So you want to flip it, Michael? And Brian, not on that chart is the wastewater at the high school. Yeah, it's upcoming. So we also have the water suppliers. So the MWRA connection is moving forward with a $38 million appropriation. The Water Department and the Board of Public Works are currently working on a complete plan with the MWRA to implement that. In developing a long-term financing plan, they need to, you know, obviously do adequate rate raisings to meet their expenses. Water rate ratings. The Abrams Group and Kleinfeld have been hired to assist the DPW and the Board of Public Works in doing this MWRA connection. This year we've had unexpected fiscal 26 Happy Hollow repairs. So we've had to actually purchase water for the MWRA. We don't know if this is going to continue, but it's an old facility. And because things are breaking down at its cost in the Water Department, unanticipated expenses in purchasing water directly from the MWRA. So if we move forward into the fiscal 27 capital budget. Brian, approximately how much have we spent on the MWRA? I believe it's around $200,000 so far. Okay. Thanks for the context. Okay, so we get into fiscal 27 budget. So here are the largest appropriations. We have the high school treatment plant. We have it in the plan as excluded debt at $2 million. You have the high school varsity JV baseball field. That's also in the plan at $2.7 million as excluded debt. You have the public safety HVA system in there at $225,000. That was actually slotted in at $750,000, and it was three years out. But because only one of the four compressors at the public safety building is working right now, Michael Feyer needs this $250,000 brought forward immediately into fiscal 27 so they can address the HVA systems at the public safety building. So that's a good reason why you have an unanticipated new item in 27 when it's in the plan. But something happens and you have to either bring it forward for a justifiable reason or, in this case, a portion of it is being brought forward. Next, you have the H-40 truck, which is $370,000. Sorry, question. Yeah, just a quick question on the public safety HVAC. Do we expect the total cost of that to still be $750,000 and we're just pointing $250,000 forward? No, we reduced it to $750,000 in the out years. And the public safety building is, what, five years old? Oh, no, more than that. You mean the police station? All blends together. Okay. So we've got the end of life. They only have this one compressor and, as I understand as speaking of Mr. Feyer, parts for that are getting harder to come by. It was just yesterday we built that building there. 2001. Okay. Thanks. And just to confirm, so is the total cost over the horizon $750,000 or is the total cost $500,000? And if so, where are we saving $250,000? No, it was slotted in the plan for about three years out for $750,000. But because of the situation now, we're going to move $250,000 to this year and there'll still be a $500,000 later. Okay. Total $750,000. Correct. Keep going, Brian. All right. The 27 road repair, $881,000. The road repair is always in the capital budget. This is the new one, cybersecurity remediation and modernization that was not in the plan. In any of the five years, we have a new IT director. And at the last meeting, we talked to the finance committee about needed improvements in the IT area. This is one of them. And this is $250,000. The fire truck is in there at $615,000. $100,000 and some that was already in the operational budget. Brian, why are we putting some of that into the capital budget and some of that into the operating budget? Two different things. They're two different projects. Understood. But can you explain? Yeah, but just what's right now? It would be in the CIP form that we would have sent you, the complete detail of that. I guess the question is, why is this a capitalized item, the cybersecurity remediation and modernization? Some of it is hardware versus software. I'm just going from memory. I would have to pull up that form. Okay, thanks. So the fire truck is in here at $615,000. It was less last year, but the cost has gone up in one year. Now it's $615,000. In last field improvements, this is one that's in here routinely at $100,000, where Michael McCall assigns a certain project each year. So if we move on. Two quick questions. My apologies. The fire truck, this was unexpected fire truck? No, it was in the plan. The cost of it just went up. Sorry, I thought maybe some of these things had gone full force. I just want to. Okay, great. And then what's the H40 truck? Just because I'm not familiar. It's one of the large, it's one of the large dump trucks, the very large ones. Okay. All right. So before we move on, I just want to note that there's a couple notable differences here from the CIPC's recommendation. We increased the road repair after speaking. We restored it back to roughly what we had in the plan. CIPC had it at about half of what it is up there. I don't know the exact number. It was 400. 431. 431. Road maintenance is not, you know, glamorous. But you get a lot more out of your road if you, there's a philosophy called the best first repair. You try and maintain some of the roads that are in the best condition with different types of coatings and things. And not always a full restoration of the road, but to ensure you extend the life. Mr. Holder felt this was something that he campaigned for. But I really wanted to touch on the first two. The CIPC wanted to keep the... Just real quick though, Michael, I'm sure Tom had an opportunity to talk to CIPC. Why did they not... Why weren't they compelled to bring it down from, you know, 830 to... I just want to recognize me and tell you who I am. I'm the chair of the CIPC. The reason that we took it down was a combination of a few things. One, trying to get everything within the capital plan given additional requests, both the septic and... Now the highest will feel that they're adding right form in last year's plan. So just finding places who can save. But we also looked at balances that DPW had in the road budget. In prior years. Prior capital funding plus chapter... 990. And I think, Brian can correct me if I'm wrong, but when we look at sort of beginning of the end of the fiscal year and each year, there tends to be... Extra. Extra there. And so our thinking, and perhaps we were wrong, but our thinking was that we shouldn't continually be running at having an extra balance there because we're appropriating the money faster than we can use it. Got it. And so it was intended to be a one-time... Adjustment. Adjustment. Adjustment and then go back to the full work class. Got it. I think, Michael, the only question really... I don't think there's any disagreement with let's do the most cost-effective solutions that we can find. And if that means, you know, whatever, best repair first or something, suggesting to do less than what's most cost-effective. And so on the top two, wastewater treatment and the JD Vark City ball fields. The CIPC had had the wastewater treatment in this year. And for those of you who don't know, we were working on a solution with the DEP, a Title V solution. We've been... The wastewater facility over there has not been working for some time and we have been pumping out from the high school and the DEP is no longer excited about that solution. I'll just... I'll characterize it that way. So this has become more of a need to address the solution in this year's budget. What CIPC did is a funding source had said levy debt. And I'll address that after I mention the next one. The Barsi ball fields, as I understand... Wait, sorry. Can we... On high school wastewater, because that's a long story. Just... Can you fill us in on... Two years ago, it was five and a half million. We were hoping to... That was for the repair of that facility. Now we're doing something different. Okay. This is a Title V facility where they're... My understanding they'll have a leaching field out there. Okay. So it's a different solution. Okay. And what we're trying to do, couldn't get them all here. I think the chair is trying to organize a follow-up where we get DPW facilities and engineering over here to speak to both of these projects. Okay. Okay. Either next week or the following week. Okay. In this estimate, we feel like the two million... What did we do with? Sort of a study. Is that... So... Is that a good number? I talked to Tom Holder today and I believe he sent an email and may have gone to the chair. I don't think it went to the whole committee that the estimates that they had were, I think, 1.89 million dollars. And then when you add a construction contingency, it comes to roughly 2.1 million dollars. And so that's where they came with that number. The high school... So just to give the numbers at a time, Dave, 1.4 million dollars for construction is the estimate. 35% contingency. And then contract management, right, up to 2 million dollars. When I saw, and I've mentioned this to Tom, to Michael a few times, that it feels like 2 million dollars is a notional number and not like grounded. And now I appreciate that there is engineering vans. And so I may have confused the 1.4 million with the close to 1.9 million that Catherine Brenna talked about for the JV Varsity field. So I wasn't here. She had numbers that go back to 2017 and it was my understanding this may have been in the plan at one point in time. But it was taken out of the plan prior to my arrival. It might have been when Dr. Easy was here. Rec realizing that we need to improve upon our grass fields and knowing that they were going to be doing the wastewater treatment or hopefully doing that. And it's going to impact at least the varsity field. We're looking to do this at the same time. Now, where they get the 2.5 million dollars is the number that they had back in 2017, I believe, was roughly 1.9 million dollars. And given that it's almost nine years later, tried to do some estimates as to how, what that number would look like today. It's not a firm number, but it's an estimate that was provided to me by Ms. Brenna. I believe they are working with tie and bond on all of this. And hopefully we would have a better number. I couldn't get one for this evening. There's some expected efficiencies to be doing the ball fields at the same time as the septic field. I'm not sure geographically, are they co-located? I expect not, but I don't know. Unfortunately, when I posed to get some more information today for this, Mr. Holder said Ms. Charest was unavailable, and she's the one who's working on this with tie and bond. Then the other question has been, even without the septic fields, that the JV and varsity, I guess, baseball fields are not to spec. They don't have sufficient outfield? It's my understanding. We have been playing most of our varsity baseball games as away games because we haven't been able to use these fields because of the condition they're in. And so my further understanding is where they're currently located is not optimal in that area. So as part of this improvement of the JV varsity fields, they may relocate them, bring up some more space for some rectangles as well. Rectangular fields, grass fields for soccer and lacrosse as well. And part of the rationale why they're both excluded debt and both in this year is we just took some time cleaning up levee debt and we felt it may not be right to put it right back in. And we may be facing a three year override next year and didn't want to build all that into the levee. Additionally, this year, because we've moved the town improvements out potentially for a year or more for an excluded debt question, there's nothing that would be competing with these this year. Our concern was if we pushed some of these in the CIPC had the JV varsity field as excluded debt next year, that might be on the ballot with an override. How ready are we to actually do the work of the ball fields? Do you have a sense of sufficient study been done to know what we want and how to do it? I think that will be answered in greater detail. I did speak with Mr. Doucette this evening about what they're trying to do to maintain that and the minor improvements they're going to make this year, if we could go forward on this, they may not do those, saving a little money because they have to do band-aid repairs to keep some of these fields going. More story to be told. Yes. It is the largest capital project, two and a half million dollars, and it seems like not, at least from my standpoint at this stage, not well. No. Understood. And I guess along the same lines, have they talked about repairing the current field? I mean, I'm not sure what the, having, used to be a baseball player, like what's the condition of the field? Yes. I'm told I'm playable, and that's why they're playing all of their games on the road. It's... Well, if that's just like divots and stuff and you can... No. No. I don't know what... Mr. Deuce has indicated to me that to make them playable, they went out last year using some of the field improvement monies and some of the rec fee money, that it would be just under a hundred thousand dollars to make them playable for a season. Now, as it's been explained to me by Mr. Holden... That's less than two and a half million dollars. Right. Right. But mind you, the wastewater treatment, as I've been told, will immediately rip up those... Curious. Because where they have to... Where the ball fields are now, and where they're slated to put the septic, they're going to be overlapping. Can I ask Kelly to weigh in here as well? I'm Chair of the CIPC. So, the committee wasn't overall opposed to slotting the field. However, as we stated in our report, we found that we were not able to get sufficient information about the field. Similar questions that you're asking tonight, you've asked before. So, my understanding from those that... Tom Holder and others that spoke to us was, as Michael said, the field is not playable for games. They're doing those games as away games. We were told that it doesn't drain properly, so it's not just divots. However, we were not able, it doesn't sound like there's still this issue, or there is still this issue, to get a site plan of how much the septic was disrupting the fields, and how much true inefficiency would be created by the septic project. And for that reason, we said if we get more information, we'd reconsider it. But we, to date, really haven't gotten much more information. The proposal that Michael referred to that they're basing the costs on was a 2017 study that was a stadium project study. It was three phases that included the rebuild of the football field, the relocation of the tennis fields to the front of the school, and the girls' softball field to the back of the school. That was phases one and two. Phase three was the baseball diamonds, which includes moving the two diamonds, that gives them both shared outfield and room for red candles on the back on the outfield side. So it's a relatively old study. That's fine. But the design, right, that flushed out design and the intersection of the two projects still wasn't clear, and the price is still based on a relatively old estimate with some escalation. So that was the reason we left it out. Further, that was why we did not make the wastewater treatment plant an excluded debt project, because per town's recently adopted policies, excluded debt is recommended at projects over $5 million, and alone, necessarily. I think I covered all those. And what I'm hearing is maybe more of a location issue because of the septic, and not a playability. Playability can get fixed for $100,000, but it's... No, I don't think it can be fixed for $100,000. They can do a surface treatment, but the actual... The fact that it doesn't drain is... They actually have to rip out what's there and put in gravel, and then put dirt on top of that. So it was going to be more substantial, but I don't know. I'm sorry, Kelly, was there something? One other item that I just want to point out is that in the prior five-year plan, this is a question that we had had out to several of the town departments, and just recently got an answer after our report. The prior five-year plan had two fields in it that were... have now been determined to be the same field. One was labeled Space 3 Stadium Project, the other was labeled J.B. Varsity Basque Baseball Field. One was in FY29 and one was in FY30. We've since received information that those were indeed redundant requests. Got it. So, Michael, there's some work to do from the town standpoint. No, no, I don't disagree. We... Some of the people that I was hoping to get were out... Yeah, okay. ... beyond my control and their control, and I know you asked for a follow-up meeting with some of those key players to try and answer the... And hopefully we could have some of the answers back from the engineers that are looking at both the wastewater and... And on that, Brian, you found that I think only Michael Fair responded that he could make the 18th, and we haven't heard from anybody else. Have you gotten any other information? I have not. I know. I know. I have only heard from Michael Fair. It's... I think that school needs to be there. Michael Fair. Tom, if he's available. Abby, the engineer. Possibly Catherine Brenner, who has a history on the Rockfields. I think they're all important to be there. Yeah, and look, just to show of hands, can FinCom have a quorum on the 18th? I know it's school vacation week, but are folks... Okay. That's on Wednesday. That's on Wednesday night. A week from tonight. So FinCom could be there. Brian, could you please continue to work the process? As we all know, March 16th is coming up really quick, and these questions seem pretty fundamental. It may require FinCom not supporting this capital project. No, we... Again, respecting what they've done, they being the CIPC, we were looking at it. If we did the two at the same time, it would be 4.5 million, which is close to... I understand. ...the new policy. So we were... You know, we were just putting an altar in if it winds up something you don't support, because we don't have that additional information, you know... We might be able to support it if we got answers to the questions. Yep. So that's why we... I know 5 million was a number as far as excluded debt. I think that we don't, you know, subject to other people who know. I'd be inclined for moving to excluded debt to the degree that it fits. So we'd be interested to hear about policies on that. I have a question related to this. The wastewater treatment. If I recollect correctly, we had ongoing costs, right? Because of the... $10,000 a month to haul... Right. I was just... And so... Just for everyone who's new here. So basically, if I'm understanding at least the 2 million for the wastewater treatment element correctly, we'll spend the 2 million, but we get to remove at minimum $120,000 off of the operating, right? Yeah. So that's good. And then for fiscal year 27, my apologies because we went through it, I think, a little faster. Was the 120 there? It must be there still for this year, but then we would probably see it in fiscal year 28 removed? As far as the operating budget. Yes. That would be... I think... I'm not sure if it's in the DPW or the school. Brian might have to answer that. Okay. Brian, do you know the regular pumping of the high school septic? Is that in the school's budget or in the town's side through DPW? It's in the town facilities budget. Okay. All right. Great. So next year... And just to be clear, MassDP has said that we're not allowed to haul the wastewater. Anymore. Sure. We have to solve it. We have to have it 100% understood. I'm just saying from a monetary standpoint, there's an ROI on that $2 million. That's the removal of the 120 in operating for... And my understanding is that's been in the operating budget for like, what, a decade? Like a long time, right? A long time. So it's nice to know that there's savings there. Yeah. Cool. Cool. Continue right along here. Here's the top five. Again, we've talked about the high school field, high school wastewater, road construction, fire truck, and the building elevator. So if we move to the next slide. This slide summarizes the five-year capital omnibus capital budget. On the right-hand side, you see the five numbers. I'm not going to read each one of them. But those are the sum total of fiscal 27 through fiscal 31. The total omnibus budget five-year is $40.4 million. The enterprise fund has $7.3 million. In addition to that, they also have the $38 million MWRA that is going to the annual time meeting in May. So that's the summary numbers right there. If you want to move on, Michael. So there's a chart. Just one question. Before we move on, Michael, we're looking at maybe putting, you know, $50, $60 million into capital spend over these next few years with MWRA. Do we have the leadership involved to be able to make sure we're managing all of that appropriately? Or do we need to... Well, certain projects require owner projects managers. Yeah. And both... This came up recently with regard to the Snakebook Dam project. We have outside project managers on some of these, I believe. But in-house, we have qualified. Michael Fea and both Tom Holder were qualified. Michael Fea is going to be running the Snakebook Dam project for us. So we do have some qualified folks in-house. I don't know for each one of these projects. Do we need 10? Do we need 10 folks to be doing? I mean, Wastewater High School, Fields High School, you know, MWRA, which is probably three projects? Well, I believe Tom Holder would like to be involved. He has some expertise in that field, so I... Just from an oversight standpoint, I mean, let's make sure we're being really thoughtful. We've got the management in place. Yep. And winding down, we still have a number of open projects as well. Yes, and Brian will comment on that later. We've got a couple of people to close out a bunch of things as we were coming into finalizing the capital plan. So he'll be able to comment on that in a minute or two. Okay, Brian, take it away. Well, here's a chart that just shows my department across four years, the sum totals of each one. Obviously, the school department is the top over five years, $16.5 million. Second to DPW is 11.4. And number three is facilities at $5.1 million. So the average of the five-year omnibus capital, which when I say that is going to be just the town and school capital, the enterprise fund capital for the first time will be appropriated within the enterprise article. So the finance committee will not be bringing the enterprise capital into their operating omnibus budget. We're going to be putting that in the enterprise fund budget. So the average of the five-year average of the omnibus budget is $8.8 million. And that's, again, that's the five-year average. What was the thought just behind moving the capital to the enterprise article as opposed to where it has been? Can you repeat that, Pam? Why are we moving the enterprise capital funds to the article, the enterprise fund article, as opposed to the way we've shown it before as part of the town? So historically, the enterprise fund budget was always part of the omnibus budget. Back when Louise was here, we took out the enterprise fund budget out of the omnibus budget and did a standalone on advice from KP Law. Within the last couple of years, Brian O'Hurley has brought up the fact that why aren't we not just appropriating all of the enterprise budgets within one article? And we haven't been able to do that the last couple of years because of timing. I'm indifferent to it. I kind of think it makes sense to put it in the enterprise fund budgets. So right now it is pending to be in the enterprise budget. So that's how it originated really from Brian requesting this the last couple of years and us not being able to do it with timing, but we do have the timing this year to do it. So when the enterprise, the enterprise article then for, we'll have, we'll have that 1.37 and the 125. And I'll have the capital from here. Will it also have the reserve funding for these, for these enterprise funds or that still is separate? I don't know, just the funding that's... The capital project reserves? No, the, the, I guess it's in the operational, the reserve funding that we, like, do you know what I'm saying? There's also reserve funding for... For the contributions that... Yeah, for like the enterprise funds? Transfer for... Yeah, so that's, okay, so that's still all separate. I think, I think that all stays, that stays the same as it has. So I did send the article, I think, to Pam and Anne Brensley. Is Iris the enterprise fund? I am. Okay, sorry, it's not the right person. All right. Okay, here is the fiscal 27 budget. Here's the numbers. You can see that the school department is gaining more than the lion's share of the appropriations. Included in that, obviously, is the high school, $4.5 million. The next one is the five-year look, and it all looks almost identical. The school department, over a five-year period, is getting the most of the appropriations, second to DPW. Facilities being number three. Move on. Spooned debt in the budget. What we're looking at here is both what would be included in the Omnibus budget and a separate article. So on the left-hand side, you see fiscal 27. You see the two numbers that we were just talking about. The sum total of $4.5 million. That is being recommended as the Omnibus excluded debt funding. On the right-hand side, you see fiscal 28. That's a separate article at $5.7 million. We had it in last year as a separate article because we wanted the town to start discussing this building as what was going to be its future. That's why last year's plan had this also as a separate article and not in the Omnibus budget. On the right-hand side is just an optic of that. You see on the left-hand side, the two blues is the high school in the third column. From the left is the town building, and then the total you see, obviously, the two stacks. So that's the excluded debt in the plan right now, a little over $10 million. And here's the, obviously, it jumps right out at you. The water fund is getting that $38 million right in the first year. And there's the fiscal 27 through 31 look. Transfer station will and does have some appropriations going to them. They've been in existence for five or six years. They do have a fund balance of $300,000. So some of the projects will be allocated to them in this budget. There is an ongoing study being done with the, I'm sorry, the transfer station to see if it's solvent enough to keep on going. But that report is ongoing, and we don't know that. But we do have capital items in the plan that would be funded by the transfer station. And Michael, I flagged this with others, but I'll flag it again just for emphasis. Let's see if Sudbury and Whalen could put the transfer station together and save money for both towns.
Brian, we can't hear you. Can you change it? Can you hear me? Yes. All right. So some of this we talked about already in the meeting. Here's the fiscal 27 to 31. In the past, we have used cash capital to fund the budgets. We do not use taxation anymore to fund any of the budgets because of the levy constraints. We talked about the debt service and the MWA connection at $38 million. The excluded debt within fiscal 28, I'm sorry, 27. We did have in last year's plan the million dollars of MSBA as excluded debt. We have changed that to levy debt because of the financial policy being $5 million. I was involved in that $5 million conversation, and I did stress there needs to be flexibility in that policy. At times we would need to appropriate some items for less than $5 million. $5 million is a big number as only the threshold to do that. So I think we do need to be flexible when it comes to that policy. The next one, the capital stabilization, we annually fund it with $250,000, buy free cash, and we use that right now for the field improvements. Plan free cash, it's pretty much have it between $1.5 and $2.5 million. You see the plan now. It has 2.1, and I'll get to that in a little bit. We do have now a constraint with Moody's to make sure that we continuously build our fund balance. We can use free cash as long as we replenish it. If we get to the point where we're not replenishing free cash, the capital budget will be impacted because we will not be able to fund some of these capital appropriations by free cash. So it is very important to prudently map out the use of free cash. That's why I said from the very beginning, there's a lot of other financial schedules that are tied to the capital budget, one being free cash. And the next, it just took- What is the criteria that you need to replenish? Or is there a hurdle number? We want 25%. The criteria is the 25%? Yeah. From 20%. Right. And that includes- I thought we had been at 25%. No. We've been at 20%. Okay. We're trying to mean 20%. Well, I know that it said that, but I didn't know that that was new. Yeah. I thought it had been. I get one additional question on that. So the 25% is for free cash balance, but also, didn't you mention that it is also the new required balance? Is it for the enterprise funds or for the reserve funds? I thought it also has to do with some of the other- Did I misunderstand it? I know. I guess- What are the components of that 25%? So previously, before Moody's made the change, they wanted governmental funds, which is the general fund and stabilization funds are referred to as governmental funds. They wanted those fund balance to be at least at a minimum of 20% of fund balance. We're at that 20% minimum. But we had other things going on in the town where we were rated to offset that. Some towns like Brookline, Cambridge, they're in the 30% tile. We're at 20%. What changed was they were now bringing in enterprise funds. They're now bringing in the enterprise funds fund balance, and they want the collective governmental funds as well as the enterprise funds. And with the enterprise funds, it's really a calculation of their assets, not so much fund balance, but it's pretty much the same thing, current assets. And they want that number, collective number, to be at least 25% of the town's revenues. So that's the threshold that we need to search for. We're around that right now, but we need to maintain that. That's why it's important that the water department set their rates properly to cover their expenses. So that's the background on the Moody's criteria. At some point, can you just show us that breakdown of the numerator and the denominator? We can figure out the town revenue, but all the components that get to the 25%, you know, the 25 plus million. Both as a town as well as for the enterprise. Exactly. Is that clear, Brian? Yep. It'll be a little bit before I get to it. I'm going to get some other work up, but I'll get that to you. Thank you. So here is the five-year town financing plan. You see all the revenue sources over five years. The average debt that we're going to raise per year is around $4.9 million. The average use of free cash is $2.6 million. So that's how we're going to pay for the funding. If you move to the next slide. And this excludes the MWR, the water infrastructure. Yeah. It does not include the $38 million. No, no. This slide here just shows obviously that the levy tax pretty much drives the capital budget. It's very indicative of most communities that their debt, their level of the debt really is what driving capital, because you can pay for it over many, many years. You know, other towns do use free cash. Other towns do use tax. So predominantly we use in revenue. I'm sorry, levy debt to drive our capital fees. So the next chart. Real quick, just for my own confirmation. So the levy taxation works against us in terms of the levy limit, right? It counts into that calculation. The excluded taxation does not. Correct. Right. But the excluded taxation on the year is already accounted for in the 5.5% increase. This is, you know, yes. I'm just making sure. 5.38, right? That we saw on Monday. Increasing monthly. Oh, year-over-year. Year-over-year. Taxes. Right. Yes. But it just doesn't count toward the levy limit, the excluded debt. Excluded debt actually buys us more room and sort of that rings a hurdle. Right. So it gives us more room. Yes. By capacity. But we don't have to. We don't raise taxes to pay for excluded debt. Right. We do, but we don't. It's already accounted for in that final number that we're talking about. That's what I want to make sure. That 5.3%. Sorry. Go ahead. The cost of that debt, whether it's levy debt or excluded debt, is all. We're paying for that. We're paying for all of that. We're paying for the principal of the interest. Yes. That's in the debt service. That's in the debt service. Thank you. I just wanted to make sure. Thank you. Okay. It gives us sort of that extra room for the levy. Right. Yes. I knew that the debt doesn't go into the levy debt, but I was just taking care. It's already included. It's included in debt service. Debt service, yes. That is my question. Thank you. Chair recognizes Kelly. Yes. Kelly Lappin, Chair of the CRPC. I just want to point out, because it's not always obvious, any of your FY27 capital projects funded with debt, whether levy or excluded debt, are not affecting your FY27 operating money. Understood. All right. Brian, continue. Do you want to turn the slide? Do you want to talk about capital closeouts, because it's there now or later? Wait till I get to the 27 numbers. So again, here's just the fiscal five year funding sources. Again, levy taxation will be the predominant funding source, second to free cash. If you want to move to the next slide, here's a breakdown if you want to spend some time looking on the left hand side. On the left hand side, simply has the omnibus debt that's going to be raised within the omnibus. You have excluded debt that will be in the omnibus of 4.5 million. You have a 5.4 million, which would be by article. And I've simply placed that over the five year period. The ones in purple would be the total debt. And you can see, you know, the blue in the first column is levy. The red in the next column is excluded debt. And then the total in purple. Move to the next year, Excel changes to green. I don't know why they didn't keep it red. But in the second year, 28, the green is the town building. But overall, you can see the total debt within the first couple of years is significantly more than the next five years, the last three years of the plan. So moving, that's that's. So what I would suggest. Go ahead. This excludes the schools, right? Did you say that at the beginning of the presentation? This excludes any potential for work on the schools? Yeah, I think there's. Well, maintenance might be there. Maintenance might be there. But like the new building. The new building. There are conversations happening. This excludes that currently. Facilities master plan too. Okay. So what I can do now is go through what's in the fiscal 27 year and talk to each one of the items. And then I can get into the open, open capital. And then I guess we can entertain questions at that point. So in your Excel file that I sent and stop me as you wish when I get to one. This year's plan, compared to last year's fiscal 27, has 15 new items. And that's not a good thing to have 15 new items enter into the first year of a five year plan. And we'll go through the different reasons for those. So the first one roads at 831,000 that that has been in the plan. The sidewalk improvement 250 that's in the plan. The age 40, $370,000 that's been in the plan. The next one, 325,000, the age 11 and the age 17 at $150,000 were not in the plan. Right. So the tab is FY27. Yeah. No, I thought I clicked on it. So what we were showing and what you were talking about were two different things. So why don't you. I'm on your screen now. I'm on FY27. You want it on just FY27? Yeah, just FY27. Okay. So you want me to start over? No, he went through those three. Yeah, I think we got it. Okay. So the age 11 and the age 17 were not in the plan in fiscal 27. They were in the capital plan. Michael Holder has switched a truck that was in this fiscal 27 for these two. So that was just a switching of a capital item. And in most cases, that's acceptable. You don't want a lot of it. Did you just say that again? Brian, I'm not following you. Okay, the age 11 and the age 17 were in the plan last year. They were not in fiscal 27. They were in, I think, fiscal 29. Okay. Michael Holder switched the truck that was in fiscal 27 and brought forward these 29 ones. Yeah. Tom Holder. Yeah. Okay. So the next one radios 275,000. It's an increase that was in the plan. Brian, you've got to take a pause. There's questions. Rob, go ahead. I just want to ask about the road improvements. We've heard a lot at FinCom about Sherman's Bridge and the work that's been proposed there. Do you know, is the road improvements line item here in any way tied to that work? Or is this just kind of a standard? This is standard. Yeah. This is standard. That, those, it all goes according to plan. The vast majority of that money is going to come through MassDOT for, and it's a debt repair. It's not a rehab of the bridge. Yeah. Okay, Brian, keep going. Okay. The next one is $100,000. That has been in the plan. That is the one that's funded by the capital stabilization. The next three. I have a quick question about that one too. It seems, why is that a capital expense? There was an article or proposed article last year's town meeting to create a separate field called Field Study Group to look at how we're going to improve the grass fields given that we have the moratorium and probably by 2031 we're going to be looking at the end of life of the artificial turf over at the high school. And as an alternative to that article, I met with staff last year and agreed that we would commit $100,000 a year to Joe Doucette, who has taken a lot of training. It was actually a training today for field maintenance to upgrade the irrigation systems and make improvements to a lot of the rectangles around town. So it was a commitment to try and improve the playing services so that we have adequate fields available should we pull that artificial turf offline. Because right now that artificial turf can accommodate more play than traditional grass fields. So if it's town meetings desire to extend the moratorium and not allow turf to go back there, we have to start building these other fields up to take the amount of play. So my alternative solution or suggestion last year was to start committing at least an additional $100,000 to the folks at DPW so they can improve the irrigation and make these other fields usable and playable as we move towards 2031. So I guess the word maintenance and bill level number is kind of what threw me. But what I'm hearing is basically this is sort of a $500,000 field improvement capital expense that just happens to be divided into $500,000 chunks. Yes, and Mr. Doucette is picking a particular field and using some monies that come from REC as well in combination to make these improvements. Okay. My other question is just how much have we been spending over the past year or so? I would have to get a number for you from Mr. Doucette, but I can do that. Okay. And then where are we? I don't recall in the three-year war time on turf fields. I don't remember. Synthetic turf fields. Yeah. Right. Synthetic turf fields. Yeah. Because it's turf too. Yes. I agree. Did we just do it in my first year in the big home? So I think it might be this might be the last year. We renewed it. We renewed it. I think last year. Did it? Okay. All right. So Brian, we're now on to IT. Okay. The next three are IT. The first number there is cybersecurity that we talked about earlier. You see there $47,000. It's actually 250, and I'll get to that in a minute. The public safety regional system is $150,000. The cybersecurity firewall at $100,000. All three of these were not in the capital plan whatsoever last year. Michael has already talked about the need to do IT improvements. So these came out of the blue. So I met with the IT director, and what he agreed to do was move two of the products that were in the plan in fiscal 27 out a couple of years. He also agreed to close out an old project that he had to $202,000. So he did close out a project to help fund these three. Here's a good example of a situation where a lot of money comes into the first year plan, and there's no money to pay for it. The money has already been allocated. If you take a look at the fiscal 28 tab, you will see all the projects, and all of the projects have revenue sources. They've already been designated. So once you get to the next year when you have people come in and want all of these new projects, it's very difficult to accommodate them because in many ways I wouldn't say that they cut the line, but the fact of the matter is we don't have money to pay for it. So everything over a five-year period has got to be reset just to accommodate these items that we would view as necessary and they must be done. I wouldn't say they're safety issues, but they're pretty much projects that can't wait. They have to be inserted into the next year. And when you have 15 projects come in and we have to go in and rejigger five years, that's not an effective five-year plan. And that's why it wreaks havoc on our forecast. So here's an example where a department had stepped up and closed out $202,000 of an existing project to help fund these three. So any questions on those? What is the public safety regional emergency system? That's a system they need to put in place when they're doing the transition to the 9-1-1 with the regional ethnic in Framingham. So they have to put in that infrastructure. Is that new? It would be new, yes. And it's new to the plan and it's new equipment, yes. So I think maybe going off of Pam's question, if we knew we were trying to do a public safety initiative with Framingham and others, why would that be new? Wouldn't that be a known cost? We always signed the IMA last year. This has just been over the last. So we have been exploring since I got here joining the regional dispatch center. We were looking at others. We had at one point looked at joining Framingham and NAIC and the model for that was not in our best interest. They went back and rethought it because no one else was joining. And as they were coming together last year, they signed an IMA and realized if we signed on, we could collectively get more 9-1-1 grant money to build out this system. And it would be advantageous to us in future budgets. They're hoping to have the facility done later this year and maybe start staffing and taking some of our staff over. So when that gets paid out, the way a lot of these grants work, you get some of the money 100% the first couple of years and then they slowly win you up, but there would be some savings for us if our dispatchers were paid out of that grant versus out of our budget. But we signed the IMA last year and we have to do some things. We had to make some adjustments in our regular operating budget because we had to start paying a prorated assessment that we joined and we have to make some improvements on our side as well. So we asked for this, we're putting in 150 and then the forecast once those grants start paying us, maybe next year or the year after, what's the cost savings that's forecasted? A lot of it will be operational. We're supposed to be able to use some of our existing consoles and our existing handheld radios, but I'm told that in the future that the regional dispatch should be picking up some of the capital costs for some of the radios. I don't have an exact amount. But the number of total people involved in the four shifts that we have to run to maintain our individual system is a dozen? We have, I believe, eight full-time dispatchers that we have and there will be opportunities for some of those people to move over. We still haven't figured out what we will do. There will most likely be a public expectation that there will be somebody in that lobby. So we have a lot of the towns that have shifted to regional still provide somebody there for so many hours a day, not always 24 hours a day. So we'll see, I can't say it's a one-for-one exchange, but we should see substantial savings. But we may still have to keep some FTEs in the building for the lot. And the other aspect, as I understand, is it will be a more effective system because we'll be immediately coordinated with all the neighborhoods as far as needs go. Because they are mutual aid partners, they'll know right away if there's an issue. I'm on board with that. I would love to know the number. And that's okay if we don't know it off the top of our head. But we'll just start our conversation around the $2 million capital to save the $120 ongoing operation. It would just be nice to know what the actual number is. So that's okay. Well, I can't quantify that at the moment. I'm happy to come back at a later date. But the other thing is the grants, they want to do away. See, when I come in and you ask me a question off topic, I can't remember the acronym for a PSAP. It's like a public safety access point. And that's what they call our individual 911 dispatch here. And the grant monies are being geared toward the regional ones. And that's not only Massachusetts, it's a national trend. So it behooves us to join one of those because once we're a part of it, we should be getting more money through the grant system. And as we're a part of that, our assessment is based on the population as well as the number of calls. And so right now, out of the three, I think we pay less than 20% of the costs over there, more or more than 16%. Happy to come back. I'm on the three-member board of directors. And we're right now looking at the construction of the facility. They have an executive director. And as I said, they're looking at starting to train and move some folks over at the beginning of the next fiscal year. So as we get closer, I'm happy to come in and try and talk about what impact that will have on our FY27 budget and future budgets. That's like a nice efficiency, though, that you can point to the benefit of the regional grants. Yeah, this should be on the list as I requested for any bullets on efficiencies that we can trumpet in the FinCom report. Things we know or things we're expecting. Keep going, Brian. Okay, moving right along, down to police, you have the in-car computer replacements, $90,000. And the traffic signal purchase, $50,000. That was in the plan all along. The next one, the dash in body cameras that was brought forward by the active police chief. Chief Heber wanted that $100,000 in 2017. He needed to get that purchase done sooner than later. So that's an example where we brought something in. You know, I review that one as a public safety issue as well. Moving down the line, you had the fire truck. Is that a curiosity? We don't have dash in body cameras now? We do, but I think this is a place. Oh, great. Got it. Okay, thanks. So that wasn't the plan moving forward and we just brought it up? Closer in. Got it. Okay, keep going, Brian. So the next one, we talked about the fire truck, $615,000. You know, in the past, we bought a fire truck for $950,000 and we had the ambulance fund pay the debt service for that. I tried really hard to have the debt service covered by the ambulance fund to cover this. Maybe down the road, we can flip that. But right now, taxation is going to pay that. We're going to issue levy debt to pay for that. But, you know, down the road, we may be able to switch that and have the ambulance fund reimburse the general fund for some of the debt service. As we did the $950,000 truck we bought about six years ago, a seven. The next one is the dive equipment for the fire. That's paid for by the ambulance fund. Chief McPherson brought in new. The Cadillac monitoring related equipment. $80,000, again, paid out of the ambulance fund. We did talk about the public safety. Sorry, I had a quick question. And maybe this is really like, we probably need someone for fire to help explain, but $25,000 on dive equipment? Like, that's a large number. Is that because we pay some special, really high rate? Is that because we need to help fit like 20 people in the dive equipment? Like, what's that? I'm going from memory, but I believe in my conversations with the chief, when we've had emergencies, we border a river, we have to respond to calls there. And I believe we have some folks that are specialized in dive, and from time to time they need equipment. I can't speak exactly what this particular piece is at the moment, but we do have somebody that's trained, that responds, I think not only in town, but as part of a regional response team for dive. Yeah. I'm aware of that actually, because I've spoken with the fire chief as well, and it's lovely. Yeah, yeah. I'm really happy we have that. But 25 grand is a lot. Like 25 grand of equipment is a lot of equipment, and I would just be interested in knowing, like, are we outfitting everyone? Are we buying a sub? Like, what are we getting? Yeah. So, thanks. I understand the question. All right. You can keep going. Okay. So, the public safety building, HVAC, we talked about that at 250,000 on the DPW facilities rehab. 250,000 that's been in the plan all along. The next one is the town building gym, the town building elevator, the town building elevator specifications, and the town building water pads. First, going back to the roof. We had the roof last year as excluded debt. This year, it's in the plan as levy debt. So, apparently, Michael Fair is going to only address the roof on the gym next year at $310,000 by levy debt. I believe the total roof cost, if I go by memory, was around $2.8 million or $2.6 million. But, of that $2.8 million or $2.6 million, he's going to spend the $310,000 to cover the roof in the fiscal 27 capital budget by levy debt. What was new was the elevator. The elevator was nowhere in the plan, even when we did the calculation of what was needed in the town building last year. This came up recently this year that the elevator, I think both of them were failing. And then Michael Fair needs to correct those or they would not be in operation. So, that's $271,000. Again, a surprise CIP that we did not plan for. So, that's $200,000 or $471,000? $471,000. I'm sorry, on the roof replacement, the total cost you said is $2.8. Can you explain that again? We've got $310,000 in here. So, I think this goes in part with the CIPC's recommendations. We were looking at one point, doing a complete repair of the roof up here. I was informed... For the entire... For the whole... For the whole town building. For the whole town building. And, you know, if we're not sure what we're going to... That the gym roof is only $310,000? Well, we've had a leak above since I've come here. There's been a problem with the gym roof where it leaks and some other things. So, we're just going to address the critical need over there. But, I was informed that when HVAC and other improvements were made in the attic in this building, they compromised some of the structural integrity up there. That, you know, we're doing okay, but if we had some extreme... Multiple extreme weather events like we had and had a huge buildup of snow, we could actually see some of the rafters give way. That's what I was told. I'm not... That's why we were looking at a complete repair and replacement of the roof up there. But, if we don't know what we're doing, why would we spend all of that money right now? I understand that. I'm just wondering if $310,000 is adequate for the gym. Um, relying on what Mr. Fay has indicated... It sounds like Kelly... Yeah, Kelly Lapp, I'm the IPB. So, I think Michael got moved. When Michael Fay brought us the higher than what was in... Is that everything that this building needs to bring it up to... Not, not to a Taj Mahal standard, but to a... You know, a decent standard. And the answer was no. And we asked him to go back and give us a better sense of... Is it $6 million, or is it $10 million, or is it $15 million? Because we didn't think that the residents should be voting on $6 million without knowledge of the follow-on. And so, he took that. He went back. He's still working on what that number and what those needs are. But when he came back, he said, like, to stage the roof to the most critical pieces. I don't know that it's replacing, but it's dealing with the issue. Okay. And then at that point he came back with the elevator. It's not necessarily full replacements that I know of. It's a fix. It's a fix. But that was also when the elevators got added, which kind of just further solidified, right, our concern, which is we don't have a good handle on the whole needs of this building. And we don't have a good handle on what we want to use the building for. Exactly. CIPC has more work to do. So, moving right along, the $80,000 on the gym pads in that same gym are in tough shape. So, for a safety issue, they wanted to replace them. That makes sense to me. Moving down, the district-wide... This is for the school to repair and replacement of driveways and sidewalks. The $444,000 has been in the plan all along. The middle school roads and sidewalks, again, was in the plan at $431,000. We already talked about the septic in the baseball field at the high school. The next one down would be the wastewater, hot water system. That was not in the plan. We have now placed that in each of the years. This, again, came out of left field. It was not in the plan. It's a substantial amount of money. And, you know, we certainly don't want to leave any of the schools without hot water. But from my perspective, this should have been in the plan all along. And this really messes things up, like I talked about previously. So, we have slotted this in, $359,000. Elementary... I'm sorry, quickly. You said that's in the plan for every year now? It's in multiple years, yes. At different schools. Okay. Okay. But it was not in last year's five-year plan. In a perfect world, this would be entering the fifth year and work its way down. Yeah. Not leaping to the first year. Yeah. But it's not necessarily... We expect to have a $360,000 recurring hot water system expense. It's just that the middle school happens to need it this year and we're going to do it. And we slotted the high school in for two years from now or whatever. Right. Right. Makes sense. And so, the next one, $540,000 for the elementary HVAC. That's been in the plan all along. The next one's a tough one. We got the happy hollow fire alarm at $148,000. There are already open, unspent fire alarm appropriations done. So, you're between a rock and a hot place. Do you not fund this because they haven't done the other ones? And then you have something happen, a happy hollow. So, we put it in the plan because it's related to fire alarm systems. So, here's a case where we have to inject $148,000 into the plan because it's clearly safety related. But, again, it should have been in the plan all along and we do have open appropriations. But, I see no other way that we do need to include this in the plan. Just so I'm understanding, are you saying they've got a backlog of fire alarm? They have open capital for fire. So, they've opened capital. At other schools, we have substandard fire alarm systems that we need to replace. Right. That's what I'm trying to understand. You already have appropriations that were voted previously that they're not completed. Right. For not happy hollow? Yeah. Other schools. Okay. So, what's the... Let's recognize Kelly. My understanding is that there are different components. The unspent appropriations have to do with, I believe, the board, the fire alarm control boards. Additional requests, I think, I can't see it with sensors. So, it's a follow on once they replace the panels and there's additional components that then work into the... Do you feel like they're ready for this if they haven't done any other work? I don't know what the status of the current status of that work was, but my understanding was that it was in progress. Okay. That would be good to know. Okay. So, want me to keep going? Yes, please. So, the next is a new one, safety and security communications from the schools to the police and fire, $135,000. Again, a safety issue was not in the plan. It's a safety issue, so we have to insert it and, again, move things around to make it work financially for the town. What does that mean? What does that mean? Safety and security communications? What does that mean? Apparently, communication systems between the five schools and the fire and the police station had to be improved. Thank you, Kelly Lappin, Chair of the CIPC. This one, my understanding is that currently, the schools use basically the radio castoffs from police and fire and that they are all operating on not necessarily the same technology and the same frequency, so they can't, not necessarily reliable communication. Our committee's feeling on that is that we don't want to be in a situation where something happened and replacing all the radios. Thank you for clarifying. What is it? So, moving along, the next one is the Pre-K Elementary Literacy Curriculum. So, back when Dr. Easy was here and Tom LaFleur, they brought forward a CIP for a math curriculum. This was, at the time, it was really viewed as an operating expense. And we told Dr. Easy and Tom LaFleur at the time that it was an operating expense. And the only way we would fund it is if they did close-outs to fund this because, again, they had come in and injected that into the first year of the five-year plan. So, they did come up with close-outs. That's why we did fund the math curriculum back when Dr. Easy was here. That math curriculum is still unspent. It still has $80,000 in it. So, in fiscal 27, they submitted for a literacy curriculum. In my view, and I did tell the superintendent this and the school business manager, my view, this is an operating expense. And I did meet with them and I told them that I would not put it in the plan because I didn't have the financing and that the only way it could be put in the plan is that they went back and closed out existing projects. So, they came back and closed out $400,000 in projects. Some were funded by bonds. Some were voted by free cash. That's the reason why we're able to financially put this in the fiscal 27 budget is because they stepped up and closed out $400,000 of prior appropriations to do this one. I appreciate that part of it, but Michael, tell me, we're going to spend $200,000 for pre-K literacy? This is like 50 kids at Children's Way? I'm not sure what this is. We came forward and Ryan and I talked a little bit about it. He had, I was tied up with a different matter, but he went back and forth with Dr. Fleischman about the need for this and the funding for this. So, I could not do being pulled away from something else. Yeah, we got it. Kelly, do you have perspective on this? I don't remember, tell it off and share with the CRC, I don't remember pre-K specifically, but I do remember that there was grant funding that they will not be able to take advantage of if they don't have the funding for the curriculum. So, there was, I want to say, several hundred thousand dollars of grant funding that would be It may not be pre-K. It does say pre-K elementary. It's just pre-K. It says pre-K elementary. So, it might be like a pre-K. Yeah, I think it was pre-K slash elementary, not... Okay. Okay. Through... It might be worth clarifying because I had actually the same reaction and impression fill of like... I just read it and...
Okay. Is this a new item, Brian? Anecdotally. Yes. It is a new item. It was not in the plan. Okay. Anything else, Brian? I mean, we can... I mean, you do see the water. The ones in the water have been in the plan. They're going to be doing the water main design and construction on Dudley Road. 1.1 million and you got the water truck. But that's separate from the 38 million, right? The water main design? Yes. Right, right. These have been in the plan all along. And is the truck part of DPW before? Yes. Okay. And then the low pressure replacement for the wastewater at $125,000. And that's being obviously funded by their funds. It does not affect taxation. I understand. Right. So that's all... I mean, for water, I mean, there's going to be a lot more coming on, but that will go immediately into the rates to cover that. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Do we have any idea like what, to add to that point, seems like there are a lot of things that are going to be funded by water rate increases. Do you have any idea like Ballpark, what the percent increase in the water rate? Yeah, we do. There's been studies done. I can share them with you. But Ballpark, with the 38 million, it'll raise rates by about 74% over where they are today. That's going to come in 2029, I believe. There is a smaller, what you're looking at here, plus some existing projects will raise rates about a third of that total in the year. All right. So 74% total by 29, kind of ramping up for small. Yes. And the challenge with water, we haven't been having sufficient revenues by the way that we've been charging it. And so we have to get up to speed on this. And so, you know, I've spoken with Mr. Holder, who's advocated in the past that they had, you know, incrementally raised rates in anticipation of this. And I know they did their new water meter replacement, hoping that was going to uncover some new revenue. And I'm not. It has not. Not. So it's going to be a spike in rates. And the other challenge has been, of course, we've had water bans. So the folks that used to use lots of water have not been. So the higher rate users have not been using it. So it's a challenge. I've encouraged Tom and DPW to look at the idea of an automatic true-up every couple of quarters so that if revenues ever fall below, that it automatically adjusts rates accordingly. Because that's a lot of debt to be taken on if we're not collecting the sufficient. And we can't debt into retained earnings sufficiently to cover that. Did you know we had a conversation about that at some point as far as what if this is going to be funded by water rates versus taxes? Select board is putting 100% into water rates as the plan at this stage. Fair enough. That is certainly the more, I think, regressive option. But I guess that's not our call. Just on that, there's been a lot of conversation about . Yes, Ron. You know, there's a lot of conversation at multiple meetings about the equity issue as to, you know, if you put in taxes versus who's actually using it. Yep. And you could take an example of somebody who's a retiree living in a large house having to pay more taxes to support the water when they don't use nearly as much as somebody. So I think that would trade off. Yeah. Yep. I think the argument the other way is people who live in large houses tend to have higher assets, right, and use less water relatively. But anyway. This is not the time for that conversation. Oh, we can catch up. I'll have to. Yep. Brian, what other topics should we touch on? Yeah. Just that last year we used an Excel file that worked effectively. I would suggest that have the Finance Committee members, and I will send the file out tomorrow, send their questions to April, have April send the questions to me. I can respond back and copy everybody. That way you don't have to wait, you know, four or five days to get some questions answered. I'll send the file out tomorrow. You can ask a question about any one of the capital items over the five years. We will respond to you in email so that way all members can see it and start, you know, get the ball going and start answering a lot of the questions. Yeah. Let's take a break for a second. April, are you okay being the consolidator point? But Brian, you do remember I did send an email that you are going to be the person responsible for making the tables and charts for the warrant for capital and for all the finance. April is not going to be doing that this year. I'm confirming that with you. Are you asking me or telling me? I'm telling you. Okay. I already asked you about two or three weeks ago. I said, instead of April taking on the chart production and tables production, we need you to do that. Easy to do. Be happy to do it. Thank you. I appreciate that. It's confirmed. And I've already noted some questions from tonight, so I'll get with Brian. Yeah. I have a question. Please. Have you thought about or have you done any prioritization or ranking? And I guess what I'm thinking of is, and it's the way my mind works, is to go through and say, this is the most important second or third. Another way to do it is to say, these are the critical ones. An example might be the HVAC and the town safety. These are the ones that are partially delayed, like the roads could be partially delayed, not all of it. And then others, maybe the baseball field could be fully delayed. Have you done that sort of ranking? So to their credit, the CIPC did that this year. And so, as I said, this is an inaugural year and a condensed year for all of us to do this. So as we start next year and have a full year, maybe that's something we can explore and also Brian and I can look at ranking these as well using similar models that they did. Okay. And the whole idea of having them is to put a different set of eyes, you know, Brian and I often get challenged with, you know, a key portion of our respective jobs is to do this. But there are a lot of things pushing and pulling us. So it's much appreciated to have these other volunteers who also live in the town to put their take on what we should be looking at. So, you know, that was one of the reasons I thought it's very helpful to have that there. And we try to incorporate as many of those suggestions. We had a little slightly different spin. But at the end, this committee can kind of look at both. And I don't think we necessarily disagree on things. They didn't have all the information. We have a little bit more, but I know you need that. Do they have a parallel, maybe I've missed it. Do they have a parallel one that we can match up? Yes, they sent January 20, I think, was the date of their report that circulated. And it came up with, on the order, $9 million, if I remember? Yeah, it was 8 points. Yeah, for the recommended for fiscal year 27. Versus 14, was it? Versus 12 points. Versus 12 points, okay. So the initial ask from town was 14.7. Okay. CIPC looked at it and thought that there was 8 million? Okay. It was, yeah, it was 8 points. 8 to 9, yeah. But the 15, remember, that was recommended last year included over $5.5 million of town building. Yes, actually. Everyone's taken it out. So 14 to 8 to 9 to 12, it sounds like. Yeah. So that has been going on. And if you take out, say, the varsity baseball appeal, that brings it right down to about 10. Closer. It gets closer to their recommendation. That's the biggest difference, is us trying to put that in this year, combine the two for a debt exclusion. So just to make sure I understand, but I'm just looking at this capital budget spreadsheet right now, it says FY 27, 13.77 million? That's the water in there. That's the water in there. That's the water in there. Okay, in the water. Yep. Alright. Cool. Just on a slightly different note, tomorrow afternoon I have the Board of Directors meeting with West Suburban Health Group. Oh, good. We'll get numbers. And we will be getting, we should be getting our healthcare numbers, and I will likely send an email out. Right. Mr. Hurley, he often attends some of those, so you might get the email from him first. I don't know. Because a lot of that is open to the public, but I will send out something to the select board, and I can also copy this committee as well. Thank you. Other topics on capital? I want to give Kelly a moment to make any comments you would like to. I think we've covered policies. Here, these fall within those policies, and if they don't, we're explained. You can have flexibility and choose to not follow a policy and do that consistently. The policy is meaningless, and for someone like a Moody Rating Agency, not following the policy consistently is going to have them sooner. That's a generic, I appreciate the comment and support it. Is there anything that particularly flags for you? Was it a debt exclusion? The debt exclusion, there's still, even though it's excluded debt, one of the policies is that your total debt service, including excluded debt and including enterprise, doesn't exceed 10%. Yes. And so there, with the waste, with the MWA project, could start to be a challenge. So that's the one that they're most likely to. Yeah. Brian, can you report back to FinCama as to where we are on that 10% number? We're at 6% in fiscal 27. For total debt service? For total debt service? For total debt service as a percentage of budget. Total debt at 28, and once we start taking on... So just confirm... The MWA would not be factored into that. That would be debt of the enterprise fund, so that would not be a metric. I think it might be, from a Moody standpoint, when they consolidate. No, they would look at the total debt of the town, and we're substantially under the total debt that we can raise. We got that from Hilltop. We're substantially... Even with the MWA, we're substantially under the amount of debt that the town could raise. Okay, just so it'd be good to circulate that calculation. I encourage you to look at the debt policy, which says total debt service, no more than 10% of the total operating budget, and that was including enterprise funds, including... Did you hear that, Brian? I have not heard that from Moody's. Moody's would always say... This is a question of the town financial policies that were, you know, formalized, whatever, six months ago or something, and circulated in the fall. Well, I mean, the debt service and the enterprise funds are as substantial as a percentage of their budget as well as waste water. Not so much in the general fund. So, you know, it would be impossible to maintain that metric in the enterprise funds. It's less than the type of amount. Yeah. This suggests fund by fund basis, perhaps. It's omnibus operating plus enterprise funds. That's a separate metric for the general fund only. Yeah, I understand. I'll follow up, Brian. Okay. The other items I just wanted to mention were, I think we already covered it a little bit, was the idea that there may be a need given structural constraints in the budget if you still want to comply with the $5 million excluded debt policy to bundle debt items for a vote. Ignore the policy. So that was the other one. And then the town building was the third one, which we already discussed. Got it. Good. It needs to have. Thank you, Kelly, and the committee. Anything else for Michael, Brian? One other question I had, just as it pertains like Moody's and the ratings. Is there just a chart of what we'd project free cash to be over the next X years? It's right in the capital file that we sent. There's a tab for free cash. Yep. I don't think there's, is there a projection of? Perfect. Thank you. Of our use of free cash. Oh, no. It's a projected balance of free cash at the top of the. Yeah. Goes out to 20, 30. I don't know why I didn't think to look into free cash tabs. So thank you. Is that in that file? Okay. Yeah. And the Excel. Yep. Exactly what you're expecting. Typo on the tab there, Brian. The last column I. Yeah. 31. You have 20, 30 in two columns. Okay. Yep. And again, those are all assumptions. Forecasting out, you know. Yep. But just, yeah, forecasting and according to plan that grows and doesn't shrink. I will note to your point that the capital plan calls for the most expenses this year, including a bunch of expenses we didn't predict. So it's probably just worth us thinking about the fact that every year we'll have expenses we didn't predict and spent more than we thought we would. This is an unusual year. This many new expenses, it feels to me. But yes. Aaron? Well, actually, that was one of my, the only question that I have that Brian didn't answer, and I appreciate what all these said. Last year, the capital plan was capital budget was 12.9 million. This year, it's 12.2. That excludes the enterprise funds. And it's projected to drop to under $7 million in the next couple of years. It just doesn't feel realistic. I mean, yes, people will, some things we brought forward, some things will drop out. But that's just a really big difference from recent history. It worries me. Well, I think what you see is that the last year, fiscal 31, the fifth year, is usually the lightest. People spend less time projecting out what they need in the 30, 31. But then once you get to 30, a year forward, you see a big bump in people submitting for capital budgets. I don't have the actual number of what was injected into this plan that was not involved at all. We did talk about the heating systems in the schools. I mean, that was clearly over a million dollars over five years that was not even in the plan, over, you know, that was not part of the planet whatsoever. So, you know, you do see the first two, three years, usually the highest, because that's when people are rushing in to sort of get things done. And the fourth and the fifth year, usually the lightest. You know, that all makes sense. I just, I'm not taking a lot of comfort that these numbers are going to drop substantial in the last two years. That's all. Yeah. We're going to slot the, and I know the CIPC mentioned slotting the varsity next year, but we were moving it. So if we're moving things down, you're going to see some change and we may have to backfill if we're trying to keep it consistent, or we could choose, we want to bring it down. Have we done an assessment? I know we have in the past, but I don't know where things stand or where the plan is on sort of looking at each of the schools and recognizing, you know, what needs to be updated or refreshed and just so we have fewer of these surprises that are coming in from year to year. Since we've brought Mr. Fay on board, he's been doing an excellent job of trying to get around to all these things. This year we had, we did that type of capital needs assessment for this, for the town side, using on-site insight. I know the school did it a couple of years ago. I don't know how current, I don't know the actual year they did it and whether they need to do it again. And the school is obviously doing the visioning work as well. Yes. And I guess my other question is, I think that when we've looked at things, we've had the plan and those figures for whatever project tend to stay static. Do we, how often do we kind of go in and revalue those and refresh for inflation? Well, and that's the point with this varsity field. Right. They just have the number that they created back in 2017. Yeah. I don't know if we add inflation to those out years that you'd have to ask Mr. Kevin if he's still listening. Brian, are you there? Yeah. Can you repeat the question, Michael? So, what Ms. Roman was asking is, year over year, for those out years in the five-year plan, as things shift over, do we make any adjustments to the dollar amount of the request? So, for example, the things that we're putting in right now in today's dollars in FY31. By the time we get to 31, have we made any adjustments for inflation as they move over each year so that the numbers are more accurate? Well, all the department heads are asked every year to submit their CIPs for the first year. They're also required to submit a five-year plan. And most times the numbers and the projects that were submitted, they do true up the numbers and they increase them as the fire truck was, as the radios were at DPW. So, many times when they submit the five-year plan, they will submit the items with an increase in cost. Anything else for now on capital? Hearing not. Thank you. And Brian, you'll send us the spreadsheet that we can add questions to? Yes. It worked well. The last couple of years, we'll send that out tomorrow. Thank you. Appreciate it. And thank you for having us. I'm happy to update. I'll try and answer the questions you gave us this evening. And again, thank you for Ms. Lappin, Chair Lappin of the CIPC for the work they did. And, you know, as Mr. Huss indicated, you know, bring a different point of view, how we rank, prioritize going forward. And so we'll work on it in the next year, create a better plan. I offer for CIPC to jointly meet with FinCom whenever makes sense. I appreciate there's, right now, it's a crunch time for a lot of things. But if next fall, it makes sense for us to get together. Yes. We were meeting last night and there was no room for us to meet here tonight. So if I brought it in, we wouldn't really have our meetings. That's fine. Yeah, no, that's fine. But at the right time, in prior years, we've looked at capital budgets in the fall. But, you know, so that we can all kind of come up to speed earlier. Maybe that'd be something to think about. Going forward, since we'll actually have a committee. Yes. Continue our work right after next year and the improvement. Improving the CIP form to collect more detailed information we currently get. So that we did do a very elementary ranking of high, medium, low. Creating a more quantitative method as well as resource, financial resources, but staff resources. Progress on getting projects done, but there's still a pretty significant number and balance. Is the high, medium, and low something you've already sent us? It's in our report. It is. Okay. We'll be issuing an addendum likely this weekend with our recommendations for FY 28-31. Obviously aren't going to line up with what Michael and Brian suggested, but it will have the details of our thinking and all of the meetings. Yeah, and Michael, just as one person, I would look forward to learning about the ball fields and what's going to be involved in that and to really understand where there's some economies to be had and that we've got good numbers behind it. No, and I know you're trying to get that meeting to get those right people in that can answer, and I've impressed upon them to get as much information from the engineers that they're currently doing. And to answer, again, Chair Lapp and they had asked, you know, can they quantify the savings between the two years? Yeah. I've asked. I was hoping I would have had some answer this afternoon. I did. Understood. A meeting is great. It has to be just folks sending us emails around to kind of address the questions. That's, you know. Good. Good. Thank you. As we break, I smile because we all get drilled down in the details. And when I detail, I get into the baseball field. I used to play and coach. Can I walk the field? Is it really wet? Is it playable? It's like no bills. Back off. I get paid to crawl. Next topic on the agenda was to look further at any of the operating budget. There's further questions or reflections on town or school. It's funny. One reflection I had in thinking about it was that Michael and the team did a great job in hitting the target. We set the target. And I'm thinking, well, maybe we set the bar. We didn't set it low enough. We should have set it, you know, oh, we want to do it at inflation and then see what they could do. Are we, do we feel like we're in a position that we know enough about the budget that we're going to be in a position to either support it or not? Did we get the detail yet? Yeah. Oh, so we did get that spreadsheet? Yes. This is the school board proposing it. Aren't they confirming it tonight? So I thought they were going to send it out. Oh, the school budget. Oh, the school budget. Sorry. Yeah. I want to see what. The, so we have the number, but not the breakdowns. We got a little bit on, you know, the special ed or what was the expenses question. We got that one. But that's because they haven't approved it and they were voting tonight. No, I don't know that, but they are voting tonight as I understood. I'm not sure why we didn't get it. We can, I'll send a note to Kirstie. I thought it was because they weren't, they didn't get it. That was the difference of Dr. Fleischman versus Kirstie as to what needed. But I think Dr. Fleischman was ready to send it to us immediately, but it hasn't gotten done. I was looking for the detail on the town budget today and I could not find it. Do you think you, you say we have that? We do. For the operating. Yeah. Brian had sent that out January 29th, I think. Yeah. I thought I'd seen it. I just can't find it. Would somebody be kind enough to send it? There was a PowerPoint in a spreadsheet. It's on the 30th? Pam is remembering the 29th and I'm not going to challenge that. I'm just responding to email on the 30th, that's why. Okay. And the PowerPoint was the one we actually looked at a couple days ago. We did. And there was a spreadsheet attached to it. So I got that. But in that same email was the spreadsheet. I can't find the email. I mean, it must have deleted by the smart guy. That's one with the tax paper and all that stuff, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So I just wanted to do 27 budget. Maybe it's 30. Yep. Yeah. I mean, to answer your question for me at this point, I'm still a little bit up in the air about how I feel about the budget. I think there was a ton of work. I think they did a great job in terms of getting it low enough that they're not doing an override. I think they could have gotten it lower. And I really like the inflation bar and to see how close they could get. So there's part of me that says, you know, if the bar were, is this presentable to the town? I would say yes. If it's like, hey, this is, you know, backed by Bill as the best they possibly could do, I would have trouble. So. So we're going to be asked to take a vote. And we recommend proceeding with this budget. Right. And each of us gets the vote. Right. What do we mean by proceed with the budget? I think the large. That was the conversation we had last time. Exactly. We recommend that budget. We recommend that budget. Right. Right. You know, and there's also part of me that thinks, you know, there's a message if we go unanimous versus a message if we're partially split. Yeah. No. But what questions do you want to address that happen? School budget details. I don't know if there are any more questions. I just think, you know, I would have been more aggressive. I have, I want to see the numbers from suburban. Oh, yeah. Right. Like there is a, I know that we have some numbers that are estimates. Right. And I think the hope of the goal is that we've estimated high and that number comes in lower. So there is a potential that the number actually drops. And I think that that is important because certainly I'm, I'm, I know how I feel about what was presented, but I don't think that that actually represents where we're going to finally land. And I think some of those final details will matter. Um, I think. Other details than West Suburban? I, the West Suburban for sure. And I thought in my head there was one more that we had talked about. And I, my apologies because I'm Monday now, I'm blanking. But I thought there was one other thing that we said could further reduce the final number. That there was something else that they were still waiting on. Not in the timeframe. Okay. I think that there's special ed, you know, uncertainties with that. The salary reserves. Yeah. I thought that was it. The special ed funding, but I guess. That just helps them for funding this. Okay. Okay. Correct. I'm also not sure what the impact is if either we don't recommend or the town doesn't pass it. So what happens then? What do you mean? We need to have a budget, otherwise we can't proceed. We don't recommend, I think the town votes on it anyway. Right. But, right. But if the town votes it down. In other words, if the town says yes we'll follow the finance committee's recommendation and we're not going to vote for the budget. What happens? Go back at this all? Yeah. They have to redo it. And then they have a special . Oh yeah. We get something to occur. Okay. And that would require, you know, obviously layoffs and, you know, massive change. That was kind of in the question of it. Well, we didn't know that. Sorry. No, no. If you're saying that if you wanted to cut the budget substantially. No, I'm saying if this goes to town meeting and the budget gets voted down, what happens? I mean, do they call an emergency town meeting and go back and, I don't know. I think people, like when it comes up to something, usually the plans are proposed is something else. I don't think that'll happen. You can amend the budget in something else. Okay. You know, but yeah, you pretty much need a budget. Right. That's my point. I guess we cross that bridge if it ever happens. It's hypothetical. Yeah. Someone, when I was signing up for this, said that there is a world where Finnecom could propose its own budget. Yeah. So if we agreed we did not endorse this budget, we could propose an alternative budget that the town would vote on. To your point, if the town votes on no budget, I assume, like you say, there's some emergency town meeting procedure to... Or we just keep town meeting going until we get to a budget. I don't know if it's like the federal government that you have a partial shutdown or like what happens. I mean, I think following along sort of Bill's train of thought, the two things that struck out to me were that the healthcare costs and the retirement costs for how they're increasing are unsustainable. Right. I don't think that that's a big secret. Like if they continue to increase on... It's not unique to our town. And it's not unique to our town. It's not. No, no. And I'm not at all trying to suggest they are. Right. And I recognize those are very complex issues. But I would like to see, I think, more conversation and more of an actual plan on what do we plan to do about it. You mean after the budget's passed? Because we don't have time to get into those topics. I agree, but I think my point personally, like my point personally is like, I feel like voting for it suggests that I'm comfortable with the path and trajectory we're on when in reality, what I would really like to see is we recognize that this is unsustainable. We are working towards trying to address it, but when we had that conversation, the answer was, we're banking in a 5% year over year over year. And that to me questions like, how much effort are we really putting into acknowledging what's uncomfortable? But to be clear, it's the state's that's the only solution to that. It is not going to be a town solution. I don't know if I believe that. Oh, oh. I don't know if I believe that. I don't know if I believe that. Oh, okay. You've got other solutions? So, hold on a second. I don't think I'm saying she has other solutions. I'm not saying that. But what is Massachusetts state mandated exactly? Sure, funding our previous obligations that we made is Massachusetts state funded, but we are not having active conversations around, at least not that I believe. No, no. I'm saying that to get state legislation to change to be able to have a bigger role in supporting the town's health care costs. Right. That's one path. That's one path. And it's not the only thing I'm suggesting. I'm just saying, like, in my personal opinion, like, and this is, again, just a personal opinion, as a, when I think about my household budget and just like how I run a budget, okay? If a cost is increasing greater than I can support the cost of increase, I start talking about alternatives and what I need to do about that. And if that means, what are those alternatives looking like, what the extreme side you have going without, and then you have alternatives of replacement, and frankly, sometimes a worse option, right? But, but as, as a household, as an individual, those are real trade-offs that I have to make every day. And I also feel like at some point, since we're asking people to pay for all of this, we also need to be having those conversations. And I know I'm not part of every conversation. I guess I'm confused. I guess, like, before March 15th, do you want to try and get more insight? I'm just sharing, and I guess, like, what items are you thinking about? I mean, in the unclassified budget? Yeah. General insurance? Yeah. The insurance is high. The health care. The health care is really high. It's just really tough. It is. But what, I mean, I don't know, I think they have said there are a couple, like, there aren't many alternatives. And I'm not sure if we should be looking at it. The other thing is, before I keep going, we make, we recommend a budget, and we also submit a report. So, in that report, we have space to elaborate on our recommendations and what we would like to see happen. But we've written in that report for many years. Yeah. For many years. Right? I mean, I don't think there's a lot we're going to do to change it between March 15th. Right. But I do agree 100% with your original point when you said, you know, voting for it seems like we're endorsing the trajectory. Right. And that bothers me. Correct. That would be the reason why I wouldn't vote for it. That's concerning. Yep. And we've made the recommendation in the report, and we've talked about the fact that we need to explore alternatives, and I'm not sure if it's happening as quickly as we need it to happen to try to find an alternative. Or else we're just signing it for- But maybe that's the problem. Anybody has alternatives. There's no town. I don't think there are alternatives, and I don't think the alternatives are one from another is significantly better than what happened. I mean, maybe there are some marginal improvements to be made. Yeah, I mean, I'm not a healthcare expert, but you can obviously have higher deductibles. You can, you know, renegotiate a different kind of healthcare plan. But you won't tie into- Yeah, now you may get, you know, a strike, you know, from your employees or whatever. But there are other, you know, it's not like there's no alternatives. It just might not be a better alternative. But it's also tied into collective bargaining, which is part of the big issue that- Right, right. Exactly. Absolutely, it's tied in. Yep. That doesn't mean there's not an alternative, it just means there might not be one that's feasible or comfortable. Yeah. And FinCom is not involved in any recommendations. Right, right, right. I would say that, which is the biggest piece of the budget is personnel. Some of the FinCom recommendations that you have made in the past have been addressed. I feel CYPC is a huge one. Right, right. That, I mean, they used to get a capital budget like five minutes before, and then it was like you had to go through- No, but it was, it was, I think early on when I first started, as Brian said, they've been doing a five-year budget for- Yes. This is the sixth or seventh year. Yeah. So initially it was a, you know, here's our budget, capital budget this year, and it was, you know, all new things and subject to change. There wasn't a plan as to what projects that need to be done and what's the timeline. So that has improved and we've seen, you know, and I think part of the CIPC, we'd asked for, and they've addressed, they've done a lot in a short time because there's a lot to do. The other piece of it is looking forward, looking farther ahead. So like a 15 to 20 year, begin on the five year plan to say, okay, if in fact for this building, which is a great example, like what do we want to do with it? And then if we're looking at a new school, is that 10 years out? And then we need to do something else. We need to consider how things are funded. So based off the recommendations that we have made, they are doing things that might take a lot longer. I mean, I don't feel like government moves past at all. So we're moving in the right direction. Okay. So for the FinCom to need a position to either recommend the budget, we would like to look at suburban numbers. I would like those numbers. Yes. And school budget details. And school budget details. I still have, and I will submit these to Brian, but even on some of the, just the line items, the departmental line items, looking at the changes. So I think for personnel, just, I just want to make sure I understood. Just cola is in the reserve. No. It's reserve. Steps and cola plus lands and everything. Steps and lanes are in the, why is that? I don't know. Because collective bargaining, I think. But that's not been done before. Like before we had steps and lanes that were part of, it was part of, it would have been part of the predicted increase. Personal cost. Yeah. Right. Because you know someone's working on it. They said that the reserve includes both. I thought it was just cola, but then I, then I heard, then I thought something else. That's why I was unclear. I could. I'm fairly sure we asked and they said it was both in there, but. I'm not sure why. I think. I may not be recording any of the transcripts, but I thought I went over that last night and I think it's just cola. I don't think it's. There was a reason not to just have it cola. One was not to sort of flag for the bargaining unit conversations. Okay. Because that then becomes a floor. Oh, you've already reserved, you know, X percent. We want X percent plus. But I'm not sure. Okay. So I guess that's a, that is just still a question. And then, um, so I had, so I can submit those and I can get those in Brian and hopefully he can bring that back to everybody. Good. Well, two things. There's the stall here. We actually, I don't think we can suggest line item. Well, but we can. You just have a budget that doesn't happen. Yeah. Whatever is objection. Right. Exactly. So we can, we can make a recommendation on a number. Core inflation, I mean, about 3% last year, right? So just to stay with inflation, you've already exceeded 2.5%. And these, these big drivers, I mean, it's not personnel. It's not bodies. It's not bodies. It's part of them. You know, so. No, staffing hasn't gone up. So. It's the cost of bodies. The cost is flat. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's not a percent of cost. No, no, no. Employment. Right. Right. But the cost is still gone up. Yeah. But not very much. Well, well under inflation for personnel. Um, expenses are higher, proved this tonight. But what we're gonna find is those big drivers that are out of our hands, will door the savings we, we can cut. I mean, Cam's approach that to put our concerns in the report and still endorse the budget is certainly a reasonable way of proceeding. I wouldn't suggest a line item. I mean, I just think, at least for me personally, I don't know the line item well enough. If you did, I think we're saying, you know. But that was the other thing I wanted to say, which is that I, I actually think you can. No, that's not right. I can. Okay. I'm not gonna tell anybody else what for a budget because I don't like them. Right. Right. And that's, that was sort of, that's why I asked the question about what happens if you don't. Yeah. I agree. You know, I was just thinking from a policy point of view, the reason they passed prop two and a half in the first place is because, you know, town management and committees aren't all that good at keeping costs down. So we needed some help. So that's why they passed it. We'll get two and a half in an inflationary time. Yeah. I mean, that's, I mean, it was, inflation wasn't so high. True. True. And we did have a number of years in the not too distant past where we didn't have much inflation, but. Yeah. Yeah. And we haven't had an override in whatever it's been now. Right. So the friction is healthy and this is what you're supposed to do, so. Anything else on budget for tonight? I don't think we're going to have room for going through articles. Yeah. But I would appreciate folks getting them ready. And just to clarify guidance going forward is all of the select board sponsored articles that have no material financial impact. FinCom can give them to select board right now and they can take those on. And that vote that we. Will be recorded as the 700. As the 700 for all of those articles. Yes. Yes. Right. There are other no material financial impact articles that are sponsored by petitioners, planning board, or town clerk. Okay. And I propose that we do the regular write-ups on those with pros and cons that, you know, up to the individual FinCom person that's looking at it that says, yes, we want to weigh in on those. And we'll state that they have no financial impact as we have done in prior years. Mm-hmm. Because I have the town clerk, the dogs and dog regulations. Yeah. The one with the petalings. The petalings. So it's actually such a minimal financial impact. So if there's nothing to really state about pros and cons on them, that's fine. Okay. Well, I mean, there are probably pros and cons, but I thought we were going to be writing the reports on them. Right. It was unclear. Carol suggested that we didn't have to write them on any of the non-material. The select board. Yeah. Carol, the chair of the select board suggested. I've followed up with her. She said, oh, that was only in regards to the select board-sponsored articles. For the other articles, we can make the call. Yeah. I think the test is what helps the town make good decisions around these. Right. Okay. Yeah. The town clerk on with the peddlers, and it's like, that's not going to have any, I mean, nothing. Right. But you're still writing it up, doing the write-up now on that? No. So, I'm just doing the standard one that we said, we have no opinion. In other words, there was a fair one. Right. I think each kind of person, I know April had already written up pros and cons around unknown material. I don't even know which one it was. So, your suggestion. And it would be helpful to explain to folks, potentially. So, it's up to us. Potentially. So, it's up to us. But, I have a question, because I was confused by that, because- Yes. We were confused. It says that we shouldn't do the pros and cons, and Carol made a question, or made a comment about- 150 words. In the finance comments. Or, like, that's where I'm confused. It's like, so do you do pros and cons, or do you do- My understanding was, you don't do fin-con comments, or pros and cons. That was my understanding. So, in essence, we're not doing a write-up. Right. We just do our blurbun. Right. Would we like it that way? For all the non- Yes. Are there any non-material financial articles that we think we want to explain for the town better? Are you talking about petition articles, or board articles? Yes. Petition articles, planning board articles, and town clerk articles. The only one that I wanted to make a comment on was, like, the town code and the meeting. That was one of the ones that I had put pros and cons, and I'm sure the finance committee is going to have a position on this. Yeah, that's because we would want something. Like, we have an impact on that. Right. But that was the one I had submitted to Carol, and she was like, get rid of all of that stuff, so. And she's the liaison on that one? I don't think that. If people are wondering what income, especially on that one, to me, where they're recognizing that income has, you know, some skin on the game, they might want to hear our opinion, what our vote is, what we support that. As opposed to others that... Are there others that also fall into that? That was the big one for me. I had, like, visible house numbers, and I did pros and cons, but I took them out because I did feel, and then the other one I had was, I didn't even have pros and cons because it was just the recognizing town officers or the year service. Yeah, yeah. So those were the three that I had written up that I, to whom I did the pros and cons. So I think that there, and I think we may fall to you, Rob, but I think there are some petitioner articles that are not very well explained. And... Sherman Bridge. Yeah. Yeah. And so, I think we can write up to 150 words. And the petitioner, if we don't write anything, the petitioner, as I understand it, can write up to 150 words, and we can... Yeah, but you can't, but, but, but, have you read that they owned it? Well, but I think they can add an additional 150 words, right? That's... So I could work with said petitioner on their 150 words. You can do that, or you write your own. It seems like you have to, you know. But I don't think you have to write pros and cons if we keep it under 150 words. That's the rule. But I just... I think the 150 is just for them. I think I can write as much as I want here, here, right? Sometimes the pros and cons are usually correct. Yeah, it's just because it's like you're not giving an opinion, you're just giving... Here's pros and cons of like... Well, I guess, I think maybe at his point, some of these Sherman's Bridge articles that I'm responsible for are a little... The way they were written might make it a little hard to understand what they're even asking for, so rather than necessarily saying pros and cons, it's a fairly clear choice, right? Should we lower the speed? Like, the pros and cons seem fairly intuitive, right? Could it be like, you know, state recommendation or whatever, like... Well, it's not really any sort of problem. But I guess I'm saying like, even just trying to clarify like, you know, if you vote... And I think in some of the... Maybe in Arlington they did this when I looked there, right? And just having a clear like, this is what voting for this would mean, right? So let me ask that each FinCon person who has a non-material financial impact article, make a determination as to whether there's going to be any kind of a write-up, and then give me that list where Carol, and let her know that all the other articles... Is there any... I have like four of the Sherman's Bridge, and I'm just curious, what's the... Like, do we have the background there? I had sent out a note to Doug Levine, and I haven't heard back from them. I don't know if they were talking about it this week. I don't know what current... There's been lots of background, but I don't know. Like, is it just the DOT funds going, like Michael said tonight? Is there DOT funds being earmarked for repairs on that bridge? So, I don't know. There was an initial design that was going to replace the wood bridge with steel bridge, or steel supports, or whatever on it, which would have changed the nature of the bridge dramatically. It probably was seen as cost-effective and long-standing. Like, once that was done, it would last. And I think it was state-supported. But there was the folks who looked at it and said, wait a minute, we like our wooden bridge. We don't want to destroy the look and feel of it. So, in town, the neighbors weren't engaged. That's not a capital project that's coming through. That's where I'm trying to understand. No, so I asked about that, I think, in the context of the road repairs, because the feedback from the petitioners was that the Sherman's Bridge project was being funded in a way that sort of sidestepped some approval processes, feedback from the petitioners. I don't know how true that is. I mean, it's not going through capital. No, it sounds like basically all of the funding would be coming through DOT. So, it seems like it's coming through DOT, which then I'm like, okay. What's our goal? If it's coming through DOT, we're not paying for it. If it doesn't come through DOT, we're going to have to... It's kind of like, to me, that other bridge thing. So, I'm just trying to understand, like... I don't know. I think this is less of a financial thing, right? It sounds like it could be a huge financial thing. But I don't think the changing of the design necessarily doesn't mean DOT doesn't still fund it. Okay, and that... I don't know that. Yeah, I guess... It wasn't like there was only one way that DOT would support it. It was more of like there was... They were going down one design and they hadn't engaged with folks or thought about what else... And I guess your point, my assumption right now is it's not in the capital plan. It's not, as I understand, in the DPW's budget. If the DOT is not going to fund it, presumably at some point, the town needs to acquire the money and then it would become our problem. So, the walkways and all that other stuff would end up getting put into the... The walkways, I think, those, I think, would potentially be a financial thing. I'm just trying to figure out where did it come from? Yeah. It just seemed to have come out of the narrow movement. The select board has been engaged on it. Oh, I think we're... So, there's no article on whether to make these changes or not. And articles are all about residents who like the bridge the way it is, wanting to with their interests. Yep. And I think... And some of them do want physical changes like adding a second walkway. Three or four of those articles. The speed limit, putting some safety signs up, things like that. He has the safety in that stuff and then I have the other ones. I have two of three safety ones, I think. No bridge suggestion. Okay. I'm just curious. We'll wait to hear. Yeah. Because I know legal was looking at it too, so that's where I was wondering, like... Yeah. I know. So, we will meet next Wednesday. And we'll need to get a room, Carl, and put an agenda together. Articles hopefully we'll have a bunch to look at at that point. And hopefully we'll have a capital discussion further, particularly around the ball field. We'll see. Any other business for tonight? Motion to adjourn. I'll second. All in favor? All right. Everyone. Great. Thank you. Thank you.