February 9, 2026 – Finance Committee – Video & Transcript
February 9, 2026 - Finance Committee
Welcome everyone. It's 7 p.m. We're starting our finance committee meeting on February 9th and we have all finance committee members in attendance. And pursuant to chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, this meeting is being conducted in person and via remote access and the meeting is being recorded and will be made available afterwards on Wacom.
Anyone may watch or participate remotely with the meeting leave. That can be found on the town's website. Anyone wishing to provide public comments or attend the meeting may do so. Please limit public comments to two minutes per person.
In our agenda this evening, we will take public comments and then we will move to reviewing and proving the minutes from February 4th, which people got in our hands. We appreciate that.
And then we will turn to a presentation by Town Manager Michael McCall and Finance Director Brian McKibney on this year's fiscal year 2027 operating budget.
And following that David Fleishman, Dr. Fleishman will be here to present this school's budget. And I think Kirstine Patterson will be on the phone for that one.
Fleishman is expected. So hopefully at the end of this evening we'll have either an understanding and appreciation and agreements on operating budgets.
or a list of questions that we need to get some further information that we'd like to see come out of this.
And with that, let me turn to public comments.
Thank you.
There's no audio.
I'm sorry, can you hear me?
I can't hear you.
Robbie.
Can you hear me now?
I can see you're talking.
Can you hear me? Yes. No. Yes. No. No. This is the second time. Robbie. He's working on it. Yeah. Yeah. Testing. Testing. One, two, three. Testing. Testing. One, two, three. No, she's saying no still. I'm sorry. On your computer. I'll try to log in again. Should I wait for her to come back in? Is that the only thing? Can you hear me at all? I know you couldn't hear us. That's not it. Shouldn't there be a mic? Sorry. That was normal? No, there's a mic here and a mic there. Is that just too much? I think she was saying she wasn't hearing anything. That's how I interpreted it. Do we need to do all right? R.quimpy at wayland.ma.us. R.quimpy or just R?quimpy at wayland.ma.us. Got it. Okay. Do we know who that is? Who that is? She's back on. Can you hear us now? It's not Philly Dugy. It's Philly Command. It is Philly Dugy. Yeah, so she needs to be removed from the panelists. That's her frozen face. Kate Ryan. Yeah. She looks frozen. I don't think we're ever frozen, but she looks... Can the other participants? I don't know if there's anyone else online. There's Carol Plum, Kate Ryan, they're on their attendees right now. And she's going in and out. Can Carol hear us? Can you see Carol? Is Carol's video up there? Carol's video is not up there. No, she just attended. We have two panelists. One panelist is us. Yep, yep, yep. Right, and the other one's incorrect. Yeah. Correct. I just joined on my computer. She's moving again. Her image is moving. Can you hear us? No, she's safe now. No, she can't hear us. We have three chart directories. Testing, testing, one, two, three, testing, one, two, three, testing, testing. Connected. Yeah, it's all connected. I can unplug it again. I did test that audio earlier. I see a lot of web up right now, a little bit out here, but that's how I was watching. Testing, testing. I can definitely hear. It's definitely going through when I do that. Any suggestions? I'm trying to, I don't know, unplug and plug it in again. Can we do something like that the other week and it worked for whatever reason? We're holding the program. Could you hear people talking? Yeah, it hasn't plugged it. Yeah, it's all set. Okay, Rodney. We're going to presume it's working, Rodney. I just unplugged it. Let's come back on again. I'm not sure it's acting right there, but it might be. I still don't hear anyone, but I put on the closed caption. She can see that. Oh, you can see the closed caption. Yeah, I just unplugged it. Plugged it back. Plugged it back in again. I tried to ask that, but she can't hear us. Well, she's loved it as a panelist, so. Her volume might be all the way down and not doing it. Testing, testing. No, my volume's all the way up. And you still can't hear it? She can't hear you, so asking. Well, I'm just checking. She's getting a transcript. Okay. She's using closed captioning. All right. That means the speaker's working, because the last time I couldn't get the transcript, so. Understood. Rodney will continue. All right, let's continue. Imperfectly. Such is life. No, that's next.
So, with that, Jim, could you please provide your two minutes of public comment? Two minutes. Less than two minutes. I'm Jim Van Eskiver, 19 Holiday Road. First off, I want to thank the Finance Committee for the work that you're doing on behalf of our town. I've never attended Finance Committees before the past few weeks, and you guys do a lot of work. Thank you. I attended the last school committee meeting, where the selectmen presented DD25 to the school committee. And upon hearing their presentation, the school committee, and upon discussing the possible transfer of the 25 holiday property to the town, Chair Aaron Gibbons said, we are not inclined to acquiesce. While this reflects the view of a single member at an early stage of discussion, it highlights a central concern, which is that the select board's proposing to spend $200,000 on a transaction involving property it does not currently control. My understanding is that this portion of the meeting concluded with agreement that DD25 would now be rewritten as a joint proposal between the school committee and the select board. Even so, this approach further obscures the purpose of justification for the proposed expenditure. Finally, I ask to the Finance Committee whether you would be willing to allow one or two representatives from the abutting neighborhood organization to meet directly with the member drafting the FinCon opinion. We would request a single meeting to present a concise, organized summary of our concerns regarding this article. That's all I'm going to say. Sure. I'm going to be sure. Thank you very much. I'm not the chair, but I am the person working on the article. Yeah. Okay, great. And what would be good for you? We'll work this offline. We'll get this offline. Sort that online. And I would encourage, Rob, if you find the, I think Bill Whitney is the select board point person, maybe he could join that conversation after efficiency. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you. With that, we'll move to review. Is there anyone else wanting to make a public comment? Yes. A public comment. Please state your name and address. Mike Hill, 25 Watches Lane. I've lived in town for 42 years. This is my first finance committee meeting. I come to you to thank you for all the work you do and also to ask just some questions. I'm a big counter. I'm trying to understand some of the processes that happen in town in terms of finance. In particular, as it relates to what's happening on Holiday Road in Watches Lane. Because I've been digging into some information. I may be off base in terms of how I've got sort of a calculated out thing. But EDC had a meeting back in November. And there was a slide produced, which I did talk to Carol over the slide for, and she says it's not serious, but it does have what you'd lay the name on it. I think it's serious, just to be clear. So it's one of those things that you look at it and say, it's funny, you tell me it's not serious, but it's got her name on it. And it's hostile land that you're looking to take or do something with. So I looked at that, and it had 50 units, 50 townhouses, which it said it was going to bring in roughly $800,000. So I looked at it, and they said they were going to probably get $4 million for the property, but it didn't speak to capital improvements, widening the road. As long as the lanes were narrow, so that's going to cost a lot of money, trying to fill the road, all the different roads going up to it, bringing water, and then creating some other infrastructure. So then I said, you know, $800,000 seems like a lot of money. But it seems like that's all I hear in town is about the revenue side, and not about the cost side. If you're in a bean counter, I look and say, geez, you know, something's just a fight. Stay around tonight, you'll hear all about the cost side. I get that part of it, and I respect what you do about it. But when someone's evaluating a piece of property, you'd say, well, what's going to be the cost? So I took a stab at something which could be way off base. But I looked and said that your budget is about $111 million, roughly, a big token. And I took out the non-tax revenues. It's our budget. What's that? It's our budget. Yes, your budget. No, our budget. Yours too. Trust me. And so you take out $13.4 million of non-tax revenue. And so you left over $97 million. You divide that up amongst the 14,500 residents. And you come up to a per capita cost of $6,750 per person. So then I looked at the townhouses, and I said, how do you even live in these townhouses? I said, let's just take the average of homes in Wayland, which is 5,100 homes in Wayland, roughly, and there's 14,500 people in there. So an average of 2.8 people per home. I did see the email trail between you, I think, and Carol. Yes, I sent it to all of the people. And I didn't know I've been with Reddit. I have. And I appreciate the context there. I think that would be interesting information to inform the Finance Committee article when it gets written about pros and cons and provide some context on that. I don't think we have the bandwidth to really dig into either saying the numbers make sense or don't make sense to them. Cool. So then could I ask a second question to get off that one? Okay. Is that, does anyone have you post-bordems on the developments that have been done in the town? Because the latter half of my email speaks to Alta. I saw that. And the question I have is, was it a good deal for the town in terms of if you use the per capita information that I have versus how much we collect in real estate taxes? If the new valuation at $98 million, we get $125 million. A year ago it was $72 million. Yep. And it was far less. And there's got to be at least three to four hundred people living here. You have 218 apartments. So it's probably costing us an awful lot of money in the negative effect of the budget. And the question becomes, you know. So I don't have any numbers to confirm. But does anyone do the numbers? The EDC, Economic Development Committee, has looked at, you know, the impacts of things like Alta. But as a Finance Committee, on an ongoing basis, do you look at this and say, hey, this is why our budget is struggling because we may be paying services in excess of, I don't know, $400 million? $200 million? I understand the question. What's that? I understand your perspective. And what happens with it? I don't have any answers to that. The town manager and finance manager might be able to give you perspectives. Well, perspective is one thing. The question is, I'm going to be writing a letter to the editor of the newspaper and some of the other stuff. Because I think as a taxpayer, we do deserve answers. You know, a deal was done. I have seen postmortems on Alta-Oxpo as far as what the economics were and what the impact was and what the costs were. I don't have that available as a document to share. But it has been part of conversations with EDC. I just wanted to make you aware of that. Thank you. And it sounds like it goes nowhere. It will be part of the considerations as to drafting the article and then the town gets to vote on how to proceed. Okay. So it does go. Well, it does go. But I mean, in other words, there's no postmortems, no information you can share about the postmortems. I don't have a document that I can share. Okay. Who does have a document? I think EDC may have that. They discussed it with us as the economic info. They discussed it. They find a couple of things. Okay. They talked about townhomes having a lower than average, townhomes first having a lower than average constipancy frame. And also they talked about having specific fewer children, because the kids cost a lot, right? Right. Absolutely. So homes that house fewer children are paying relatively more compared to. But anyway, EDC is a better place to direct that question. It is a good question. Cool. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Please, Mike. Typically, if someone comes forward and is proposing this type of project, we will look at those numbers, that type of impact. We're doing staffing studies right now, say for our fire department, because we have to time to time look at what's happening in the community. In my time here, I've been here for three years. We haven't had a new project since off of Oxford, so there probably hasn't been postmortem recently to look at these types of things. But I can tell you, when we had a proposed project about three years ago coming into the old whole site, we started looking at this, because the nature of the project, if it's going to be from multiple bedrooms, family oriented, you look at the impact on the schools, public safety. Sure. But since we haven't had one in my time here, I haven't participated in a postmortem. All right. Thank you. With that, let's turn to the minutes. One was the vote. Is there other public comments? Okay. One was the vote of reviewing and repeating the prior minutes. I think Rob abstained, if I remember correctly. I abstained. Oh, okay. I abstained, yeah, two weeks ago. February 14th. Two meetings ago. Yeah. Yeah, but that wasn't this one. Good. Okay. So, no change. I also had him as an absent and remote, so I fixed that. Yes. And at the bottom, I put following the meeting, not joint meeting, so I noticed that. Yeah, good. The last sentence is in the description just above topics, and I recently anticipated the chair. I would just cross out. I'm unsure budget, school budget, just type it into the poll. Yeah. Anything else from anyone? We have a motion to approve as modified. So moved. Bill? Second. Second. Favor? Aye. Done. And with that, we will... Just for the record, I was not here. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Thank you. And with that, we will turn to our first substantive agenda item, which is the town's budget. Yeah, yeah. Brian and Michael? If I may, Mr. Chair, I am going to attempt to... Sure, screen? Yes. And thank you for sending the materials around Friday, and thank you for having 20 pages in the first section in the appendix for the remaining 23 pages. Always good to shorten that. It should be up there. Good. I got it in front of you as well. I guess I would just preface this. Good evening, Mr. Chair, members of the Finance Committee. Mr. Kevin and I are pleased to be here this evening to talk about the FY 2027 budget, which you have all received. Most of what you will see in here tonight is nothing new. We've done a couple of financial presentations along the way. As you know, we started with a budget working group last summer, and we were faced with roughly a $1.8 million deficit, and we worked with the budget working group in our community. We worked with the budget working group in our community, and we worked with the budget working group in our community. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Chair. You can go out with the budget working group and our department heads along the way, starting with preliminary budgets. I meet regularly with Brian. Brian does some of the bulk of the work meeting, some of the department heads we meet together as time permits, and we did a couple of financial updates in the fall as we also tried to work on the ... as you know, we did two proposals from the budget working group. was to go out and refinance some bands to save some money and then we had a special election to convert some levy debt. That combined with some cuts and a level service budget got us to where we are today. Michael just heard a band is a bond anticipation. We did per code provide a preliminary budget on December 31st however we knew that there were still some outlying issues. We still needed to get some better numbers from the school as well as we needed to get our state aid numbers. We have some of those numbers now. We did get a little less state aid than we had planned on. I've already spoken to our legislative delegation and then asked them to reconsider increasing our chapter 70 per pupil costs if at all possible through the budget cycle and the last big piece that we're waiting for is our health care numbers. I sit on the board with West Suburban Health Group and we are having our board meeting later this week so hopefully we'll have that last piece of the puzzle for you this week. I encourage Michael on Friday when you're having your meeting have them update in January not in February next year. Yeah I think that has been a message to them. Our consultant is Gallagher and they work with us but I know a lot of the cities and towns throughout the Commonwealth are always waiting. Maya released their numbers at the MMA about two weeks ago but for some reason West Suburban has been two weeks behind. So we will work through these. Brian will probably narrate most of the slides and we're happy to answer questions. Great thanks. Okay so we might as well get into this. Some of this you've seen before but as we go through the slides if you have a question just stop me. There's no point in going back. So obviously the acknowledgments there is a group after with the finance team as you can see all the individuals involved in that as well as the boards and committees. The second slide is the budget group. These folks got together starting in July for Phil, Michael, and myself. This is our seventh month dealing with this budget. We met straight through the summer into the fall and all those are all the folks that showed up religiously and went through the budget. We went through a whole bunch of different ideas and a lot of them actually went to town vote and we had the selectmen also do some votes to help us get through this budget. So next slide what we're going to do is we're going to go through the budgetary goals, budgetary challenges, the FY27 town budget, town school and underclassified budgets, the fiscal 27 financial plan and it did put in an appendix. If you folks want to take a look at the history of some of these different items like increase the tax, increase the budget, you know average single-family home it's all in the back. So budgetary goals if we move into that we wanted to produce a budget within prop two and a half. As we finished on the 26th we knew this may be a very realistic challenge so that's what we put together the group in July. We wanted to maintain town and school services. We wanted the budget to reflect historical budgetary spending. Many times as you know these departments wanted a certain number and we tried to discourage large termbacks so we took a look at the actual spending. Michael has already started doing the collective pocketing agreements. All contracts expire at the end of this June so like we've been working on that endeavor. We put out a memo they have the 27 budgets to be either level funded, level service or decreased. We only use recurring revenue for operating budgets except for the COA which is getting their final custodian which was known last year. There are new there are no new FTEs in garden to the town. Brian just to be clear level funded versus level service. How are those terms utilized? So if you have simplest way level funded is if you bought a hundred pounds of dirt last year for a hundred dollars. So level service means if that same hundred pounds cost a hundred and ten you spend a hundred and ten. Okay. Level service means if you spend a hundred you're only gonna get ninety pounds. So the challenge is um so uh I guess that the contracts all expire which is a challenge to put out a budget in estimating what the wage contract has is very difficult. As you'll see all of the COAs for fiscal 27 are in the salary reserve account. We still have an unsettled fire labor contract. It goes back to 2004 which is also challenging. Uh we knew the uh levy, unused levy was continuing in 2020. 24 yeah. We knew that the unused levy is continuing to decline. Um we wanted to maintain adequate level of special education funding. Hope education continues to increase. We're up to four or maybe even more kids next year going to Keith Tech in Minuteman. They're struggling. We saw a couple kids maybe wanted to go to Minuteman. Now we have actually two now going to Keith. So that number has gone up. Uh we have uncertain state aid. Uh the count continues to be a minimum aid community with respect to chapter seven. And there is there is no new growth expected uh in fiscal 27 that will help out our tax levy. So the next page is the budget uh group projections. This is what um the group went over in the summertime. We wanted to flip the DPW debt from excluded to levy. The residents in town voted for ability for that. Uh the select one agreed to issue bond bond and anticipation notes instead of bonds. That saved $800,000 of expense off our budget. When we did the budget of forecasting in the summertime we projected new growth to be around $400,000. It came in at $934,000 which was a plus of $534,000. Uh we had local receipts um going up an additional $237,000 more than we projected. So that was a plus. The downside is that state aid did not go up as expected by $26,000. I just want to pause for a moment on the new growth. Um it appeared as I've come to understand that our assessors team had not been processing uh the new assessments um and so we weren't getting the revenues in the prior years from the new assessments. Um we've got this is really catching up the backlog. Um it isn't like we've had any big new developments that are true in this number if I got that right. I guess I would also uh Mr. LaRue. Robert LaRue is our assessor. We finally have a stable group in there. Um there had been some turnover when we first arrived and um our assistant assessor has now been certified. So he's got a competent staff. They've been going out and as you said there's been a backlog and they've been going out much more aggressively to take care of the backlog and make sure that they were properly getting the values. So that's how we wound up with some of the unanticipated um new growth. But going forward apart from any significant new developments we're looking at a $400,000 or $500,000 a year new growth from a project. We also had lunch away come on board. Okay yeah. 26. Okay. And this all compounds the prop 2.5% calculation. 27. So moving on to the operating budget. If you move to this is just a summary of the entire budget. Uh it's a $113.3 million operating budget which is a 5.3 uh increase in revenue. We're an overall 4.98% increase. On the bottom of the other budgets that we fund by tax you have OPEB of $500,000. State charges $142,000. Chery seat offsets at $335,000. And Chery seat just for folks. That's the state aid. Right. Okay. It's basically a charge. It's less state aid. So when you're talking about state aid it's net. It's what they give you less the assessments. And then you have the overlay at $340,000. So the town would need to appropriate a total by tax of $114.3 million. So again the idea increase in the operating budget is a little under 5%. So to turn the page this is a little. Sorry can you go back. Okay. I just want to make sure I understand. So $114 the 5% increase. It's all by tax but all through real estate property taxes or through various taxes. Real estate taxes. All through the real estate taxes. Excludes any revenue generated through like excise taxes etc. Well that will come in as local receipts. It comes in as local receipts. Okay. Thank you. I just wanted to clarify. So all this is just through the property taxes. Excludes local receipts. Well said in another way the operating budget is funded by a few different things. Okay. You can't actually say this is going to be by tax. It's basically a mix of different revenues that go in. Okay. So. Or predominantly it would be taxed. For sure. But just appreciating like it's not a 5% slapped onto your real estate bill. It's actually everything you're paying including the excise taxes including right like it's all of those different revenue sources. Adding a 5%. Yeah. And then investment income all sorts of different. Okay. I'm just making sure. But these are all the expenses. Yes. Yes. Understood. Understood. Understood. I just wanted to make sure. Because both have said specifically by tax but the other ones don't. So I was just trying to understand. The next slide is just a summary of the town budget splitting up the town department budgets by payroll and expense. The same with the school. We'll get into the allocated versus non allocated. What you're looking at here is an unallocated budget. So again on the far right hand side the budget is increased at 4.98%. It would appear that the town budget is going up to 1.92. It would also appear that the school budget is going up to 1.91 in the unclassified a little over 12%. And again this is an unallocated piece. We'll get into the allocated in the back. But just for folks context the two biggest numbers in the unclassified is the 32B of health insurance. And then the salary adjustment reserves for salary adjustments. Right. Well the biggest is real estate, retirement, debt. But the biggest dollar increase would be in the salary reserve. Right. The salary reserve that's like actually town and school. But it's just showing up on unclassified right. That's why the paid town and school employees is just in the reserve now. That's right. Until the collective bargaining determines the actual increase and then it's allocated to. Yep. Is there an expectation for like how that sounds with curiosity? Well we know internally by the breakdown of that reserve we have to wait for one of these bargaining groups to settle. And we'll allocate. The salary reserve will come down. The one in item budget will go up by the same amount. But we don't know that yet. Yeah. Still negotiation. So the best guess is probably like same ratios existing. Right. Like if the school's payroll is currently placed, the town payroll, two thirds of that reserve for you. Sure. Directionally. Yeah. There's an allocated budget in here. Right. And salary reserve. Yes. And then for the 12%, this is also maybe perhaps something I should have done before. But does that include everything that goes into the cost for the resources? Like does the 12%, is that truly just payroll and payroll taxes? Or does that also include any additional benefits or the cost of those benefits or anything else that's negotiated on? There's a slide in here that breaks up. Okay. Great. Lovely. Then I can wait. Thank you. It's in the back. It's page 32 just from the slide standpoint. So it's things like energy is in there and stormwater. Okay. This here is just a summary of the total. This is an unallocated budget. So here is just an object of the dollar increases as you see on the right hand side. The school is obviously the largest piece of the budget. It will always be that way. And this is just an object of the different expense pieces. The school payroll is number one. The unclassified is number two. The town payroll is number three. The school expenses are number four. So these are the drivers for you. If you turn the page, you'll get to Iris' question. So this is more of a breakout of the Italian budget on top. You have town payroll, town expenses, school, and now you have the complete run of all the unclassified numbers. As you can see, it's highlighted. The second one from the bottom line is about 12%. And the biggest drive is within the debt. Debt actually is coming down $307,000 because we did not issue one from debt. You have the vote going up 184%. It's a large increase percentage-wise. It's going from $87,000 to $250,000 because we have simply more kids going to vote education. And we'll be with Dr. Fleischman later. But in years past, we were part of Minuteman. And so what, we were spending even bigger numbers then? We were probably spending $400,000 or $500,000 a year at the time. Okay. So being sort of the a la carte user now, we pay per student. Right. But it's decided to creep back up. The real cost of the vote is tuition and transportation. Yes, transportation. It's the transportation that's far more expensive. Yeah. Is it something to look back at at Minuteman? I think that would be, I'm not sure whose decision that is. It's a town budget. I understand. Would it, do we think it would provide better economic answers? Or do we even know? Do you go back into Minuteman? Yeah. I think it's worth looking at once we get past this year. Yeah. Obviously looking at it. Because now you have four kids in a moment. I understand. Does being part of it get us a break on the transportation? I mean, the transportation is the biggest part of it. That would be built into the tuition. Now we pay separately. We pay tuition and then we pay a bus service. I see. If we were part of Minuteman, we would just pay per person tuition. Got it. And there would be a capital surcharge too. But I'm not saying it's a good idea. No. It's not something on the list. But if it's a growing thing that the kids are interested in education, we really should take a look at it. Yeah. There's another one that's hard to project. And we won't know that one until like March because it's a total guess because they get some information from the eighth grade kids that they may be interested, but there's really no commitments. And then you have to get in. So if three kids want to go to Minuteman from Whalen is eighth graders, they'll only get in late in June once they are able to get them in. So it's way off the budget. Yeah. It's probably cheaper for them to go all to one school though, right? Because transportation is a large portion. So if they're going to two different places, you'd think that you get economies of scale. They all get four going to one place versus dividing it out. Yeah. And if you look at some of the stories in the news of economics, there seems to be a growing interest in the trades for a lot of younger students. Just to Iris' point earlier, I just double checked. I don't think it's in the slides, but there's just under 200 town FTEs and there's over 460 or roughly 460 school FTEs. So it's almost two and a half times size. That's why the school budget is so much larger. Yeah. I agree that there's certainly continued interest in the trades and certainly we love to see that. But I struggle maybe perhaps with appreciating, given what we spend per pupil, how we get to these sort of numbers per pupil to support that education. It's just surprising. And I mean, really like it's- What's the breakdown of two thirds transportation or three quarters? I would say it's 30% tuition, 70% transportation. That's where the numbers go. It's not, yeah, it's not the school cost. Right. I mean, that's there. Yeah. Keep this $22,000 per kid tuition. Okay. All right. So right off the bat it's, you know, 44 grand. Not even including getting the kids back, you know, twice a day, five days a year. Sure. But that's more comparable to what we spend per pupil, which feels reasonable, right? In terms of, you know, but like when you see 87 grand to send one kid to school, that is a bit mind boggling. So good to, good to clarify. So last thing on this page, you see this big salary adjustment going up 349%. Obviously, we put a lot more money in there because it's all like, hold on, 27 is estimated enough. So I have a couple, sorry, other quick questions here since, sir, first of all, we must react to these. So the insurance, the 12%, I know we've been talking a lot about that. I know sort of talking with, um, have they given any indication and I know that they are not alone in, in sort of rising healthcare costs, but why does this end? I mean, this is 12% year over year is, that's, that's unsustainable, right? Like at some point they're going to lose the, like, they're going to lose these towns, right? Like I know, I know, I know last year someone left, like it, it's just unsustainable. I don't see how we can manage. But we had better, if I may. Yeah. The last year, West Berman had better numbers than GIC and Maya. Now, you can't tell a lot of it. Did they buy down the rate? What was that? Did they buy down the rate last year? Well, we had a really good rate before, roughly about 4%, and they wanted to reduce it further with their reserves. I was the lone dissenter on that. I just, I felt there would be other times when we may need that. So that's why I voted that way. Um, this year I attended, uh, Maya gave its presentation. They used primarily Blue Cross Blue Shield, and they came out with an average number of 8%, and that meant there could be people with numbers lower and higher, up to, I think, 14%. And some of this is driven by loss ratios. They pool a lot of their losses. And the more members you have, um, the easier it is to distribute those large losses across, um, all of your membership. We have a smaller one. The difficulty here is there's about a, I won't say a dozen of us, maybe. I don't have the number committed for all of the West Berman, uh, membership. But if somebody leaves before we officially disband as a unit, you leave your contributions into their reserves. And I think our, our share is just under one, one and a half million dollars. So it would have to be in our best interest. We'd have to do some significant research to see is it worth leaving that money on the table to join some other joint purchasing, um, organization, joint, JPA joint purchasing agreement. The problem is the other year, um, some folks like Maya were saying, we weren't taking new members. Now they might take us because we use them for property and casualty and other, um, insurance. But some organizations that are independent don't want to take on new members. Um, although I don't think it was striked out. They did talk at the Maya meeting that one of the things that was lowering their costs was Blue Cross Blue Shields looking at discontinuing coverage for GLP-1s. So that would create some savings across the board for some of these communities. But that can be tricky too because a lot of times your healthcare coverage is tied into into your collective bargaining agreements and there is a public employees committee. It's called the PEC and you have agreements on, uh, with the collective bargaining units on what type of healthcare you offer. And if we were to decide to leave West Suburban, we would have to sit down with that group and say, hey, this is what we're thinking of doing. You can't just leave without, uh, bargaining that with your, your labor. I appreciate that. It's still concerning. It is. From a sustainability standpoint. It's not unique to the town obviously. No, I appreciate that. And there is not, if you've got other options or ways to look into it. I mean, I think that there are, there becomes a point, I guess. And some of us obviously appreciate the collective bargaining element, but he, the cost versus the value even directly to the employees feels like we might be getting to a point where I'm not sure really that we're getting the value that we're paying for, for these employees in terms of coverage. I'm not sure what the alternatives are. Well, we have. As someone who's spent a million dollars at my health insurance when I had open heart surgery. Yeah, but. I mean, you know. And that, that's an argument against self-insured. You know. Some, some folks have, I'm aware that there have been communities that want to self-insure, but you can, you have one case in one of my other municipalities, when we were talking about these things, a retiree came forward and said that, um, five million dollars was spent on their specialized treatment, it was covered by insurance and they were arguing not to change and not to change, you know, to consider, you know, self-insuring or any other option because they felt the town was, um, better protected with the carrier we had at the time. So, it's really hard to tell. Who's mine? Massachusetts. It's the Massachusetts Interlocal Insurance Agency. Thanks. If someone comes up with ideas to look at this differently, open to it. But whatever you get, keep going through it. For sure. Okay. My next, did you have a question, Rob, before I go to my next one? What's other insurance? So, also at 8%. General insurance, liability, building insurance. And I'm assuming that that also is just, uh, the industry is going up? Like, we actually hadn't yet 10%, but since we, town assessing good claims, we actually brought the estimate down at 8%. So, it was, it was higher during the summer. It was going to be a high year. How did you tell? It could be future incidents and accidents. Yeah, but it's, it's. Do we shop that every year? It could be higher next year, it could be lower next year. Brian, do we shop that to other vendors every year? We get, we get most insurance from Maya. Okay. We have a big, um, in the industry for municipalities. We do small other insurances as well. But we get predominantly all our insurance. We take, we make a payment in July, so we get a discount as well. Yep. And we've been aggressively pursuing credits and having our employees participate in training to get those credits and actually brought down our claims this year. So, we did get recognized by Maya. And we get off. They essentially put us on a performance improvement plan and we are off that. Okay. Because of some of the large claims that we had had. So, we've gotten better there. Um, one more question. And then the retirement line here at six and a half percent. What specifically is that retirement health care? We pay into, uh, we have a share that we have to pay into Middlesex retirement. That is, it's our assessment for all the future, all the current retirees. It's current employees, excuse me. The current employees for their future pensions. Okay. The current employees for their future pensions. Okay. So, OPEB is other post-employment benefits. Those are for retiree health care. Health care. And then the retirement line here at six and a half percent. What specifically is that retirement health care? We pay into, uh, we have a share that we have to pay into Middlesex retirement. That is, it's our assessment for all the future, all the current retirees. It's current employees, excuse me. The current employees for their future pensions in Middlesex. Okay. So, OPEB is other post-employment benefits, those are for retiree health insurance. Right. Yeah. So, the six and a half increase, is that also generally, it increases six and a half percent? No. How is that? Okay. That number there is, right now we're on a 10% to pay off our unfunded liability in 10 years. Mm-hmm. In order to get to the unfunded liability, which is, it's right now, $60 million. Mm-hmm. We're going to be flipping between a six percent increase and a nine percent. Maybe a three at some point. Um, which led to the compensation of the pension obligation bond. But, it goes back and forth. Middlesex gives us a two-year assessment. Last year's assessment was nine percent. That's a change. This one is six. We may go back to nine, but we don't know it. Right. So, this is the one that's over in 2039, is that right? 27, 20, 30, 2036. 2036. It all goes right. The thing was, as Brian indicated, they do an assessment every two years. And we were on an assessment where it was three percent, six percent every other year. And then last year, when they did it, they reassessed us, we went to this six and nine, which we weren't anticipating that additional increase in the annual payments. And we tried to contest it. Right. That didn't go in our favor. They wanted us to pay. To redo the actuary. Yeah. So, looking forward, we anticipate six to nine percent, kind of, from foreseeable. Until 2036, when then this drops to zero? Right off the table. Okay. And just so I appreciate how that works, then that means that current employees and potentially future employees who have, who are pension eligible, will have their pensions funded. There's no further obligation on the part of the town. Well, once the town meets its full funding amount. Right. In 2036. The investment return should be able to carry the fund indefinitely, unless you have a market correction. Sure. And we would, at that point, we'd have to pay. And that has happened. In 2008, the extent of this amortization schedule, though, because a lot of the markets went down. Sure. I think now, in 10 years, we're probably going to have some wealth work correction. Maybe two of those. Sure. 2008 was particularly bad, right? Like, we're not talking your average bear market. I assume we're talking, like, 2008, which certainly was more substantive. Well, all the money's in print with the dental sector. It's a safe investment. Okay. It's not scattered all over the place. Yeah. Our road trip is with Britain as well. So, it's a professional investment firm. Sure. Okay, on budget detail for now. Any more questions, please. Let's keep going. Let's keep going. One quick thing. Math-wise, it looks like the salary reserve is basically like a 3.75% increase on average on the payments. Yeah. Exactly. They went up an additional $1.6 million. They went up. The total was $1.8 million. The total was $1.8 million. The total was $1.6 million. The total was $1.6 million. And I should just say, there's no direct correlation to the increase in that fund to the schools that may be bargained for because you have to factor in steps and lanes and other obligations as people not only go year over year, but if they hit longevity, there's certain longevity milestones that are triggered in there. Or people in the schools, they have steps and lanes. Our folks generally on the town side just have steps, but there's other promotional considerations that have to play. Some people always say, oh, that's the cola they're getting? No. No. You said the cola is not in this amount? No. It is, but it's not just cola. No, no. I guess what I'm trying to say is, Robert asked, the number is increasing by approximately 3.7%. That doesn't mean people are getting 3.7% cola. We have to hone in on the number we think, and then also project what impact that will have on people moving year and year, if they're entitled to a step, or if we have to anticipate some people get increases in their education, which also can add to salaries. So there's a lot of factors in going into that number. It's called as a subset of that. Yes. To a half percent. Correct. Makes sense. Here's just a pie chart of, as you can see in red, that's the school budget. In blue is the town, and I classify it as the upper left and the green. Most municipalities are that way as well. So a quick question on that, just to clarify with the FTEs. So the 200 versus the 460 FTEs. Last year, I'll put it somewhere, but at the end of last year in our budget book we had about 192 for the town side and 460, I think, for the school. If anything, we may have reduced a couple of positions. We had a hiring freeze, or I instituted one, I sent it out. We have a couple of positions that are still in the budget that we haven't filled, and we're trying to determine, we're waiting to see what will happen at the end, what town meeting does, whether or not we fill those or not. When we look at that pie chart and look at the part for the school versus the unclassified, the unclassified includes, of course, like we just discussed, the healthcare and the retiree funding. Does that include the healthcare and the retiree funding for the school employees as well? Well, the teachers are part of the teacher retirements, and they're not part of the retirement, but they are still school employees who are not in teacher retirement. They will be in there. Okay. So some of the unclassified is also sort of spent on school employees? Yes. Oh, predominantly. I mean, the unclassified, 60% probably of the unclassified budget is the school. The health insurance certainly is the big driver. Got it. Okay. So it includes the health insurance for the school employees. That's right. Okay. So the reason why I ask, right, because when we look at it this way, it looks sort of very even keel, but then if we actually were to parse out that unclassified as covering employees for which sector. It would spread kind of like the other two. It would spread further. Okay. All right. Thank you for clarifying. So here is the 27 budget when you allocate what's in the salary reserve. So when you do that, the town budget on the left-hand side is going up 3.72%. School budget is a little under 5%. Unclassified drops to 6%. Again, there's your overall 4.98. Take a look at the right-hand side. That's just an optic of showing you how the unallocated and the allocated match up against each other. So this is just a rejigging of the unclassified budget which has the salary reserve. Next one is just a breakdown of the top drivers of the fiscal 27 budget. Obviously in the top, from a dollar point of view, you have the salary reserve going up 1.8 million dollars over last year. Insurance, which might as microcyl were carrying at 12% at 1.2. School expenses, 900,000. Towns, 600. I'm not going to go through every one, but those are the top 10 drivers of the budget. School expenses are employee benefits? Is that true? I can ask Dr. Bushman later. What's your question? School expenses, the category is employee benefits. Oh, yeah. That's a mistake. Okay. All right. Thank you. As you'll see in the next slide, of the 5.3 million dollars, 77% of that is for compensation and benefits. So if you want to change to the next page. So you just said that in the prior chart, chart 15, the school expenses are miscategorized? Right. They're not. It's school expenses. Just on the far right, the category listing. Just on the far right. Yeah. And I'm just wondering if that carries over to the next chart. No. Because the next chart 20 benefits versus other budgets. On the next chart, you see on the left-hand side, again, the top 10 project drivers. It does. Yeah. But of the 5.3 million dollars, if you take a look at it and say, okay, what actually is going up, 4.1 of the 5.3 relates to compensation and benefits. Yeah. And the school expenses are correctly categorized in that chart. That's right. Correct. So that's what's driving the budget. Employee benefits, which is health insurance, pension, salary increases, Medicare tax, and it probably misses an unemployment. On the next is the financial plan. So here's how we're going to pay for it. Before we go there, any questions on the spending that we haven't addressed so far? There will be more. Yeah. There will be more. We have more. We're trying to get less and get through it. Okay. Fine. So of the total budget on the left-hand side, we have to raise $114 million. And you see that on the left-hand side, the revenue sources to do that, we have $96 million in tax, $6 million in local receipts, $9 million in state aid, and we have transfers. So the overall increase in tax to fund this budget will be fine. I'm sorry, Brian, transfers again? What's going on there? Enterprise funds. Okay. They reimburse the general fund for benefits like health insurance and Medicaid tax. Okay. So the financial plan has taxation going up 5.39% over last year. Local receipts is projected to go up 2.5%. State aid, as we talked about earlier, went up only 2.4%. We're looking for transfers that go up a little over 3%. So that's the financial plan to pay $114.3 million in budget. Can you remind me what transfers are, please? Excuse me? What's a transfer? We take money out of certain enterprise funds to cover water and sewer. Okay, got it. Just the enterprise funds, not premiums. No, no, no. We return to school view all the funds we do as well. Basically, anybody who's running payroll, we take a charge to reimburse the general fund for the health insurance. Health insurance is appropriate in the general fund, not in these funds. So what we have is the funds pay us, reimburse the general. The OR allows us to put that $1.34 million on the tax recap as a reoccurring revenue stream. Okay. Okay. Thank you for that. We've seen in the past, sometimes those numbers have changed. We've had some reductions in the past in transfers. Yeah. When schools struggle with COVID, they did make reimbursements or catch up from last year or the year before. So there's not as many as we first thought. There used to be a full decay in this, but now full decay is part of the operating budget. So it's still a very valuable and welcome revenue stream to the general fund. So moving, so the financial plan, again, that's just an optic of what we talked about. You have a, on the pie side, you see that the taxation is clearly, you know, well into the 80s as the primary revenue source to fund the down budget. On the right-hand side is, again, a stack of taxation approaching $100 million in a few years. It was probably not that far away. And the next slide is the Raylan tax limit. So this is obviously very important. So we went into the summertime, we realized that we made sure with our prop 2.5% calculation, so what we had this slide to do, as you'll see on the left-hand side highlighted in yellow, we see that $703,000, that's the DBW, excluded debt added to the max levy count. So when you factor all that in, taking into account that we have to raise $96.7 million, this budget is estimated to yield an unused levy of $755,000, which is a little bit more that we were hoping for. But we're hoping that when the insurance comes in, this number grows even more. That's where technically we stand right now. The new growth in this fiscal year 27 is what? Long. And if again, it comes in higher, it would just count to the unused in compound into 08. Yeah. There's nothing new coming on that would add to that number. That's just a standard. I mean, it's fluctuating between four. If you take out River's Edge, like the anomalies, it's running $400 or $500. So the next page is the financial indicators. Let's run through them quickly. The budget increases a little under five. You have a tax increase, a 5.39. You have an estimated tax rate, $15.62. The average single family tax bill, approximately $19,200. The estimated unused levy, $755,000. The debt service as a percentage of the budget is 6%. The unfunded OPEP liability is actually 43% on the 40. I'm sorry. We're fully funded at 43% on OPEP. We're fully funded on the pension liability at a little under 60%. Our free cash certification was 11.9 as of July 1, 2025. And as I just said, there are no expected increases in developments in 27. So the open items, we talked about the fact that we're going to get an health insurance number this week. The client contract is out from 24 through 26. And obviously, we don't have anything beyond that. We're in the middle of arbitration on that. We've concluded the exchange of briefs, and it's been sitting with the arbitration panel. And we're expecting a decision any time now. And special ed cost isn't shown as an open item here, Brian. No. Feeling like we have it locked in well enough? Yeah, I mean, Christine and Dr. Foster will speak to that. Yeah. I think we got the handle on it. That's obviously a very big driver on the $900,000. Yeah, I understand. Okay. As we talked about, it's $250,000. And again, the open contracts are an open item as we walked into town, meaning we probably don't know the labor cost in 27, 28, and 29. The next page is the uses of free cash. Again, the top number was certified 11.8. We have restricted 5.4 with the advancing from the general fund to temporarily fund some of the projects in the capital fund. This goes along with the band versus bonds financial plan we used. So pending right now is the capital appropriations for 27, which is an open item right now. We have the capital stabilization. Moving on that on Wednesday. We have capital stabilization at $250,000, SPED $300,000, service-wide quality. It's either going to be $0,000 or $30,000. And we have pending to move $537,000 by free cash into the general stabilization fund. Does everybody understand what that's about so it doesn't come back? So it doesn't come back? Please tell us. All right. So right now in the fiscal 26 budget, we have $537,000 on the total reserve. If the fire does not settle, it's not a hotel meeting that will move by free cash that exact same amount of money into the general stabilization. The purpose of that is that we don't have to reappropriate that $537,000 again in 2027. It will be available to fund the contract. The money will simply be in the general stabilization fund. So we had talked about that during the summertime as well. And that's pretty – so let's get into – I'm sorry. We're using a lot of free cash, right? I mean this is – The use of free cash would be the capital budget, which is unknown at this point. I'm sorry. So what is the 26 capital budget advancing, the 5.46? That's when the selectmen agreed to transfer $5.4 million from the general fund to the capital funds to give them temporary funding until we issue bans in June. Okay. That's for the fiscal year joining such projects. That money will be coming back. Right. Okay. So that's still considered cash. It's just in stabilization. It's not stabilization. Well, sorry. It's in other funds. Right. It's restricted funds. It's cash held in different pockets in the town, for the town. But I guess my concern is how much free cash are we looking at using this year? That I don't know. I'm pretty positive we're going to use the 250 on capital stabilization, 300 on the SPED. If the FIRE contract gets settled, we will not be transferring the 537,000. If it does – if it gets settled, we won't use it. If it does not get settled, we will use it. Because the $537,000 that's in the fiscal 27 budget will flow to free cash. It's basically – it won't be plunge free cash. But that $5.4 million will be coming back. Yeah. That's just a temporary level of money. Right. So, I think the number to look at is what could be used at town meeting is the 6.4 million. 6.4 million. Yeah. And then, yeah. We'll be more waiting to see what the capital appropriations are for this year as well. Right. And so really, like, the band here, what could be in use is anywhere from 550 all the way up to the 1.1 number that you have here. Right. Because if the fireman that gets settled, we won't need this. And you just mentioned surface water quality might not go through. Right. So really, the total amount spent potentially could go as low as 550. 550 plus the capital appropriation. Capital. That's a big – That's it. That's going to be – That's a big – The 25. $10 million for the capital. That – We're going to take – Number two. No. It'll be – it'll be around 2 million bucks. 2.5. But that's the – We're going to take that from free cash. We always do. Yeah. Oh, I see. Okay. That's not – That's what I'm saying. It's like, so we're going – No, because we're coming back on one money stated. Okay. Okay. Because other money – Oh, understood. Okay. Borrowing. And so where – because that's – cash and reserves have been sort of one of the issues that the rating agencies look at where will we stand in terms of percentages, percentage to the general fund if – you know, depending – like if we say $2 million for 27 appropriations. Yeah. So you're right. We have to be proven about our use of free cash because Moody's has new criteria that they view fund balance not only in the general fund or what they call governmental funds. Which – they're also not bringing in enterprise funds. And they want the collective fund balance of those categories to be at least 25% of revenues. We're around 20%. So as we build up the fund balance in the general fund, we need to ensure that the enterprise funds maintain theirs not been very vocal about the water fund. And these funds need to maintain their fund balances and not be depleted. So to answer Pam's question, yes, we need to be proven. How we use free cash just to make sure that we maintain our money rating at AAA. That's 20% now or that's also 20%? It was only 20%. Now they're moving into 45%. Okay. And we're looking forward with 27 appropriations. We're still projecting about 20%. Is that correct? Yes. The general fund would be the general fund stabilization fund. So even this 537, that's really taking free cash from one fund and putting into it. So it doesn't really go away. Right. That's what I was saying. It's kind of switching buckets. Right. Okay. The big question on this is going to be the water and infrastructure investment. Because that's such a massive investment. And we'll need to make sure the revenues from the water department are staying up with that amount of debt service. If you're not dipping into the forwarder. Yeah. They're coming in at 18. So we've got three more minutes. All right. So moving on to the town budget. Obviously we talked about before it's going up 2.92%. Again, if we allocate that, the budget is going up 3.72. Michael talked about it a little while ago about adding the last contingent. across the street at the city way building. $50,000 is part of the payroll increase on the town side. So overall the town is going up 3.72%. So overall the town is going up 3.72%. Take a look at the town payroll on the next side. You can see that predominantly the city is going up 3.72. So we've got a lot of money for the town budget. And then we've got to make sure that the city is going up 3.72. So moving on to the town budget. So the town budget, obviously we talked about before is going up 2.92%. Again, if we allocate that, the budget is going up 3.72. Michael talked about a little while ago about adding the last custodian across the street at the city way building. $50,000 is part of the payroll increase on the town side. So overall the town is going up 3.72%. Take a look at the town payroll on the next side. You can see that predominantly the increases are all in the step. COVID should be there, that word. It's really just step increases. And you have the other ones. There's no FTE in there and then some restructuring. But the FTE at $50,000 plus the steps is predominantly what's making up the increase in the town payroll. And as you can see on the right-hand side which categories are going up. Obviously the general government has the largest amount of departments. So the general government is going up the most with respect to the payroll increases. And this is all step increases what you're looking at here, not co-op. Next on the town expenses. Town expenses are going up 6% on a level service basis. We're going up $126,000. IT is the biggest driver this year. This was one that we did not see coming. Obviously there's a lot of new initiatives that the IT department needs to put in. They wanted even more than $107,000 that you see there. This is what you did not see last year that I hope. This is an anomaly. This is not going to happen year over year over year. This is basically getting all the software's up to date and getting the licenses, getting the firewall up and running. So again, this is a 2027 anomaly of $107,000 increase. Building maintenance. Sorry. Can you give any more detail on that software? So we had a long time. IT director leave last spring. And I brought in a new IT director, Nick Lombardi. He came in from the state. He ran one of the larger state agencies, the IT director there. He came in and realized that we weren't well positioned. Almost all of our devices were running Windows 10, which is end of life. And we have Microsoft Office 2016, which is also being end of life. And if you don't upgrade those, you will no longer get the security updates. And you render yourself vulnerable to some type of outside attack. And so Cyril, he worked, as I said, at the state. Their security was at a different level. He's gone back and looked at our firewall, a lot of different areas. We've done a lot of kind of take penetration testing with the state and outside resources to check for vulnerabilities so that we wouldn't be in danger here. So there's some overdue upgrades that really needed to be done right away. So he immediately notified us of that. And it's something that we just felt we couldn't ignore. I think that's the case. And I suspect, just reacting to your comment of this being a one-time thing, I suspect that there might be more of these. Just thinking about how software works, right? Like, generally. I think, Michael, you were mentioning before that he also identified opportunities for savings and efficiencies to be had and that we had licenses for things that we... Right. He also, Mr. Lombardi, indicated there may be savings on how we do our licensing, how many people get licensed for certain software. But he had to kind of put that on a back burner looking at the security first and foremost. But it's... We'll see. There may be some savings to be had. Sure. Most software these days runs through a SaaS model, right? So the idea is, it's not like it was 20 years ago where you get a CD-ROM and you can just upload it and you're good. They want you to continuously pay for... Which we need to. Right, which we need to. And so my point is, if we under-budgeted this, this might be a one-time anomaly in the amount, but we might need to consider that this amount might be higher than it previously has been in order to maintain the high level of security and the software that you all need in order to be able to do your jobs. Like, that's my point. Yes. Okay. I agree, but I also say when we start doing this, this is where we have opportunities to get savings with our insurance carrier because we can have cybersecurity insurance when we do certain things and we can say, hey, we're making these upgrades. Awesome. Got it. Love it. Can't guarantee you how much... Right. You know, it isn't always a one-for-one. Oftentimes, you get a small percentage back as a credit. The next slide. Legal service. Sorry. What's driving that? They haven't had an increase in probably five years, so we had to put in some level of an increase. Is that where it's been running? Is that what actuals have... Level service? Well, no. Legal service right here. It's level service. I'm sorry. That was the increase... Sorry. There is also on what you had given us before, and this is another spreadsheet, that was like $10,000 for legal. Right. We recently received a notice. Our legal provider is KP Law. They will be changing their rates in a small amount. It's incumbent upon the select board if they wish to put that out to bid. They were contemplating that last year. We had a good relationship with KP Law. But as some of you may know, we have continually been involved in some rather large pieces of litigation. I came in here. There's cases that go back five, ten years. They're just going. So it seems more than my other towns, we've had a lot of active. And sorry, just on that too, I think there were some facilities and building maintenance expenses that were $40,000, $50,000 that were in this breakdown that you joined us. This is from the... There is a new janitor for their Council of Aging building. I don't know if that's... Um... This is an expense on payroll. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Facilities Department 36-9. No routine maintenance has always been an issue. I have to say, there are just things that you don't anticipate. And right now, we're... You may hear from us with regard to the Finance Committee reserves. We've had two unfortunate incidents where we've had damage to a couple of our buildings recently, which then the dollar amounts are falling right under our insurance deductibles. But after a while, they'll mount up and we have to pay for them somehow. And... This was the fire truck in the garage? Or... Yes, that's one. So... Um... You try and plan for some of these, you can't always tell. If you go to this... I've sent you guys the file against all of the department spending. It goes back five years. You can actually see the increase for a line. Back to the maintenance. I mean, looking at it right now... It's not on this... For anybody who's watching, it's not on the slide, but... The building appears went from... Just the building went from 130 to 150. You got HVAC increases. You got electrical increases. You look at these... This file here, but I've sent you guys. It has all the details per line. I'm sorry, which file is that? It was a budget breakdown. When I think time each sent out the earlier presentation. The last couple weeks ago? Yeah. Okay, yeah. I know that's what I'm looking at. I can talk to you. The line gives you the 27 budget, 26 budget, and 3 is actual... Corrections. Yeah, this is... That was the one that I asked questions from that spreadsheet. Yeah, but it was tough to understand. It says fiscal year 27, but then the actual tab says fiscal year 26. Okay. This is... Okay. This is... That's a PDF. That's a PDF. Yeah. That's... You should move on. Okay, so moving along. So the next one is just an optic of the town. Expenses you see rubble service. The software increase there on the left-hand side. Moving to the school budget. Dr. Forsman is going to talk about this in a minute, but you do see that the unallocated increase is 1.9%. The allocated amount is a little over 4%. And the total budget increase is... I'm sorry, the payroll is going up a little over 4%. And the total increase is 4.98%. And the total increase is 4.98%. And the total increase is 4.98%. And the other one is just an optic of the town. Expenses you see rubble service. The software increase there. On the left-hand side. Moving to the school budget. Dr. Forsman is going to talk about this in a minute. But you do see that the unallocated increase is 1.9%. The allocated amount is a little over 4%. And the total budget increase is... I'm sorry, the payroll is going up a little over 4%. And the total increase is 4.98%. The last category is unclassified budgets. We've talked about this a little bit so far. But I did give you a breakdown again of all the different categories within unclassified. You see what's actually going up. And we did talk about these in a previous slide. The next one... Actually, sorry. The one I didn't ask about there was energy. We've got 5% increases in there. Can you give us an update on where we are today in 26 and... What we did... We were carrying about 3.5% in the summertime. And Michael Fair, because of the cost of electricity, we brought it up to 5%. We'd have to have facilities different breakdown of where they spend. So far we're sharing. But there has not been turnbacks. This used to be in the facilities budget. We've moved into unclassified. So we've kind of hit this one on the dime. So we don't have big turnbacks on energy. But we do have this one in at 5%. And again, the last one is the optical and the increases. This is UC Salary Reserve obviously the biggest driver. And the second is the health insurance. And I will not go into historical trends. Turn it back over to the chair in case you want to make sure your questions. One question I think Irish was touching on. That's what is this projector average Whelan tax, homeowners taxes to go up? Other questions, comments at this time? My overall question is I usually start at the bottom line and work up. 5% increase, which of course inflation is only under 3%. So I had sort of a two-part question. One, did you run some alternative budget scenarios where you had 2 million less or whatever that would bring that closer? And two, if 5% is not sustainable long-term, you can have one year where you're at 5%, but you can't have 10 years at 5% or at least 2% or 3% over inflation. Is there a feeling like we're going to get back closer to inflation in the middle term? So I think the first point, we didn't run an alternate budget. We started out realizing that just to live within the levy, we were just under $2 million short. So our primary focus was to develop a budget that had level services and still within the levy. So we worked to close that $1.8 billion gap without trying to come back and raise taxes. Given what the drivers are, they're primarily healthcare costs, debt interest, and retirement, some of those numbers are outside of our control. We can continue to try and scale back. There was one slide that showed restructuring and a slight decrease. As I said, we're holding a handful of open positions on the town side. We haven't filled and we may eliminate those positions. We did a joint study with the school department with the Collins Center to try and find some savings by consolidating services. We restructured in the HR department. We had somebody leave. We implemented their structure and we didn't fill one of those positions. We're doing something similar in land use. We had some people leave. We looked at how we could take advantage of that, still provide the same services. So we're trying to accommodate change in technology in order to save taxpayers money. I would say overall, at least on the town side, we run fairly lean. I've worked in a couple other towns where we have more staff and say the assessor's office and the treasurer's office, more people at the window. I think the next thing that we would have to do is look at cutting some services on the town if we were to look for an alternative budget that didn't go back to the taxpayers. That being said, when we worked with the budget working group, we looked at what was going to happen over the next 10 years. And we projected that we were going to run out of levy capacity. And the only way to kind of meet that growing need between four and 5% year over year is we would be looking at potentially three override questions every three years. And we would have to work with on that same budget team to project what we thought salary increases, health care, retirement, and then put numbers out to the public. And we worked very hard not to go for an override this year. We realized taxpayers are going to be hit with the MWRA increases. We have to look at what's going to happen on the select board. We've started talking staff and the select board independently and how we're going to work on it together. Looking at a visioning committee for this building, the new capital improvement planning committee's concern was, you know, do we continue to do modest improvements to this building? Or do we just come up with a long-term plan? Unlike many, I mean, much like a lot of our peer communities in Metro West and greater Boston, we were all built out in the post-World War II baby room. A lot of the infrastructure that was developed, the schools, town buildings, other things are coming due rapidly at the same time. And I just see that we've deferred from time to time certain improvements that are now coming due. We've had a lot of requests to fix HVAC. It's become a problem in our public safety buildings and some of our schools. And so those are some of the necessary things we're trying to do in our capital. So to your second part, it will be challenging in the next coming years. But if you look around, if you were to Google overrides in Massachusetts or whatever your browser of choice is, you will see that a lot of communities in and around Boston within the 495 belt have been faced with the same challenges. How do we live within Proposition 2.5 with rising inflation and rising health care costs and all these other unclassified. But you see increases greater than inflation occurring pretty much every year for the next 10 years. It's possible. I think in those certain areas of unclassified, as Ira mentioned, the health care costs seems to be unsustainable and that keeps going up. And we keep getting recessed in the pension area and that keeps going up. It all depends upon the investment strategies at Middlesex County Retirement. And there are reports issued, I want to say, by the Massachusetts, what's it called? The pension? NASA. Yes. Sorry. Thank you. Middlesex County hasn't performed as well as some of the other retirement boards. So consequently, I think we wind up having to pay new assessments every couple of years to ensure that we're getting closer to 100% funding. At some point, Michael, it would be helpful to identify, probably for the FinCon report, any efficiencies that we've gotten over this last, that we're going into fiscal year 27. Just bullets as to where we've gotten some. And I know that there's potential efficiencies in the future that we've discussed and identified joint dispatch of first responders as a possibility. It may not be big numbers, but... So we have another meeting coming up tomorrow, actually. That is the Middlesex Regional Emergency Communications Center. We have joined up with Natick and Framingham to develop a regional dispatch center, which, based on the amount of state aid that's being, or I should say, 9-1-1 grant monies that are going there, should help us provide some relief going forward as we transfer our dispatchers. We'll still have to pay our proportionate share of the operations over there, but it may be less, it is projected to be less than what we are running our own independent 9-1-1 response here. So we are looking at alternatives to try and save money longer. And then the other big swing is once the pension fund is fully, the unfunded liability is fully paid for, that's like a $6 or $7 million step down at that point. You know, $10. $36. $10 million. $10 million. That's how we got this. Great. Any other questions for Brian and Michael? Thank you, guys. Appreciate the leadership. Thank you for having me. We'll see you again on Wednesday. Yeah. This stuff isn't easy. We all are reflecting on questions and we'll let them back to you. Thanks. Thank you very much. With that, Dr. Fleischman, please join us. Thank you. Thanks. And I think Kirstine is going to be on probably. She's on. She may need to be a panelist so that she was going to drive the slides I understood. See her? We don't see her. Do we know who it is? David. It's not Carol. It's not Colin. Is it you? Can we move you back over and see if it's you? Dr. David, she doesn't seem to be on. Oh, she's not on. Oh, she's not on. It's just us. It's just us. Alright. I have the slides on my. Do you all have to? You just dropped. I wonder if it was you. That's right. Oh, you know, I sent her my Zoom link if they're individualized. That's probably it. That's probably it. Okay. Did you switch her over? No, she just dropped. So hopefully she rejoins. Okay. I'm going to make you. Should I ask her to look on the Zoom for her? No, I'm going to promote her to panelist. Okay, thanks. But she's just going to be known as Phil. That's what happened. I got to see. Yeah. It's very hard. Here we go. Thank you. Now we can share our screen. Can you hear us? Were you not being able to hear us before? We were not being able to hear us before? We were not being able to hear us. We were not being able to hear us before. We were not being able to hear us. I wasn't, but then midway it clicked on, so I could hear, but I was still reading along. Curious. Okay. Well, glad you're on now. All right. Good evening, everybody. And I will, you've already had the slide, so I will be really brief. And also feel free to cut me off. Jump in. I'm sure that's the way you work anyway. So it's a pleasure to be here. I look forward to rich conversation. So we will run through this pretty quickly. I'm going to do kind of our general education overview, and then I'm going to cover special ed with some really specific slides with lots of data. And make sure we're really thorough in that regard. All right, Kirstie, we can roll from here. And just for context setting, the school board hasn't voted on the budget. Correct. We've had two nights of discussion and another one on Wednesday night. Okay. So I'm going to, you know, provide some context. Some of you are new to this. Some of you have been around for a while and touched a number of areas. And as I said, finish with student services and also personnel and non-personnel services. Next. So I always think about, you know, the context, and this builds on what Michael and Brian were talking about. You know, where are our increased cost areas as a finance committee? You should know it is in special education, tuition, special ed transportation, and regular transportation, and health insurance. I put health insurance on there because if it's on the town side, we're a part of it. So I think it's important to be transparent and honest. And I should share that every district is facing the same, you know, I could do this presentation in 351 districts. And I know you were talking earlier about, obviously, our maintenance costs related to aging buildings and baby boom buildings, I call them. You all know that. Next, Kirstine, we'll keep going. So our real challenge was, you know, how do we keep our forward momentum going while managing costs in these areas? That is kind of our budget challenge. Notice, we're not talking about new initiatives, new programs, new supports, any of that. So David, just curious, vocational education isn't spelled out. It's one of the big cost drivers. It's certainly a bump. It was a bump. Not as big as some others, but it is a bump because it's used a couple of students to make it. We have a difference. Okay. So just a little context. Last year, we reduced over 10 positions. And that was really to address every efficiency. Last year was really, really tight as every year is. And this year, it's really not possible to do that at that level without impacting program supports and class size. Our goal is not to do that. I'm sure we'll talk about the impact that we were to do that. Next. So you can see our budget here is 4.98. There's the proposed and recommended budget, and I'll show some past year's budget. Next. You can see where we are compared to the last two years. Pretty, pretty comparable over the last, over the last three years. In terms of how we look at this year over year, what's really interesting, this is the personnel ledger. And you can see last year, our personnel increase was less. And that was due to the fact that we let people go. You know, we didn't cut positions. I won't say we let people go. We cut positions. Where the other two years, more consistent in terms of that 4%. Now we'll take a look at non-personnel on the next slide. And you can see that last year, we were really hit with non-personnel. A lot of that was we had to address the significant special ed costs from the year before, where we were way over. And as a result, there was real pressure on non-personnel last year. As a matter of fact, last year, of course, we had a freeze in the middle of the year just to balance at the end of the year. This year, our non-personnel is lower, certainly, percentage-wise. I'm sorry, can you clarify that? Yep. So the 900K here is special education primarily driving this up? Non-personnel, exactly. Tuition, transportation, you'll see that overall... Tuition for out-of-district? Out-of-district. So tuition is all out-of-district. Okay. Transportation is all out-of-district. Transportation is in-district and out-of-district. I'll talk about some of those percentages, but the tuition is all out-of-district for 44 students. Okay. So, and apologies, because I'm less familiar with how your budget works. Sure. So when we talk about spending, and we talk about the $6 million numbers and the $5 million numbers, that has to do with any special education, both in-district and out-of-district? That's tuition. That's tuition. In terms of teachers, you're talking about that is personnel. Okay. Got it. Think about tuition and transportation as non-personnel special education. Got it. For students who are in-district, which overwhelmingly most students aren't getting special education services in-district, that is all personnel. So that's the distinction between personnel and non-person. Well, what about their transportation? That would go into this non-personnel cost. Correct. All transportation, both in-district and out. Got it. The costs are much more out-of-district because you're traveling outside of Wayland. Sure. You may have students that are in-district programs that are in a van service, so their transportation would be more. And, sorry, one last question on that. Absolutely. Go ahead. So, and does the $900 grand increase include spending down from the Sped Reserve Fund? It, um... That takes into account that they've also spent that money or intend to spend that money? Correct. We're not sure where this year we hope not to spend it. Okay. To move it forward. What I would tell you is that we're just a little more than halfway in the school year. So, if a couple of students move in, that reserve could go. Um, and, and we'll get to some of the special education laws about move-ins. Anyone who's a student moves in before April 1st is on our dime. April, after April 1st, it's not. So, that is why it's premature to, to give a final. Okay. Okay. So, you said 44 students are projected for 27? Yes. And then what did we have for 26? We're at about 44 right now. Okay. And what's hard is, you know, you don't know because that can shift. Right. And also, it's not so much the number, it's also the intensity of the need. Right. In terms of the placement. So... The transportation is the location. The average transportation is about 60,000 a student for out of district. Um, and obviously some are higher, some would be lower if they're close. So, a little bit about, as you think about a budget and, and a school district. There, there are five key areas that districts have to make decisions on. The first one is program breadth. Think about what kind of a lecture should we offer in music, arts, science, social studies, drama at the middle school. That's really, really important. Something, obviously, that Wayland deeply values. We think about educational infrastructure. That's changed in the last 20 years because part of our infrastructure now is technology. And that is now very much a, almost a fixed cost. Um, and obviously we look, we look, next year we're looking more at Chromebooks versus max. Um, it is a fixed cost. As well as classroom support for teachers. Next, class size. Um, that is really, really expensive. New York State, you know, for New York City now is a law about class size. It's gonna cost them millions and billions just because having class sizes that are reasonable is a very expensive personnel decision. People really... What are class sizes now? What are your habits? They vary at the elementary. They're in the 20 ranges. High schools can, you know, the average class size of high school is really tricky. Some are high. Some are, some are the middle. And that is in our, in our budget books. Middle school team size is in the low 20s. In some cases in the mid 20s. Um, so, but that, that, those are really important, um, decisions and not easy to make because if you have 50 students, 52 students in a third grade, do you go 26 and 26? Wayland parents generally 27 if it's 54? That seems too high. But yet then you divide by three and it's small. That's one of the challenges that we face in terms of class size. Next, student services is mental health and psychologists, but it's, it's also, uh, special education. That's the biggest part of student services. Every district that has excellent general education really should have excellent special education. And certainly Wayland is a longstanding commitment to that. And lastly, facilities and operations. So, there's two parts. If you think about school facilities, there's the operating budget to maintain schools. And then of course there's, which is what we're talking about here. And there's a capital budget, which is longer term planning. Um, our schools would acquire a lot of maintenance because they're old and we did not increase our maintenance budget hardly at all just because we don't have the resources to do it. Even though we sometimes have unanticipated maintenance expenses. Next, in terms of, these are just some of our district goals. I won't speak at length about these, but, um, you can see that we try to educate the whole child through academic achievement, belonging and equity, social emotional learning. That's all part of the classroom experience. And also next student services on the next slide. And obviously community engagement. That's just a goal, not, not really significant cost. And operational, which is developing a plan to improve our existing buildings. We have a, uh, long term facilities planning group, part of the community now. Working with our actual firm. We'll have some recommendations about that. Are they tied into the capital improvement planning committee? Do we? Are they, is that group tied into the capital improvement planning? Not directly, but aware of, certainly aware of. They encourage the connections. Right. Because they've come out with kind of what the expenses would be that kind of take care of our buildings on the long term. Versus, you know, new, um, so this is some of the work we do before we develop the budget. We take a look at our enrollment projections, our class sections, and this is all looking at data, of course. We take a look at our caseloads, particularly in special education, but also in counseling. And obviously our expenses around district operations, maintenance, et cetera. So this budget includes, uh, continuation of all programs and electives, and continued expansion of our special education program. There's no cost to that, but we're just using staff to expand programming with the goal of keeping students in district. Um, at our elementary level, in terms of next year, um, we're going to have a slight, you know, enrollment decline, 32 students. The challenge with 32, if you divide that by six grades and three schools, that's the highest, you know, enrollment. We have one projection that shows us declining less. It depends on the kindergarten. This year we had more kindergarten students than were projected. You don't necessarily cut sections with that because it was two or three students a grade. It doesn't make a difference unless they're in the same school. Most likely we'll have the same number of sections. Um, with bad luck, we would need one more. With good luck, we need one less. It's really hard to project. Next, at the middle school, um, 36 students. Um, again, over three grades won't make, it's largely over one grade. But what we have, we have a very big eighth grade class leaving into the high school. Um, class size would be relatively comparable. The sixth grade's a little smaller. That'll be more a class teacher shift. And lastly, our high school- Actually, can you, just on, on, on the middle school, um, Spanish immersion, is, is there a cost to expanding out each year? There is not here. I mean, and so how does that work? The way it works is students take a social studies class in Spanish, but they would have social studies anyway. So the teacher teaches the same number of classes. There, we have two bilingual social studies teachers at the middle school. Okay. So the students have social studies in Spanish. But if we didn't have Spanish immersion, they would just be teaching students in English. So there's no cost to it. Right. And they have Spanish. If you have, you have, you're fortunate, we're fortunate to have two social studies teachers that speak Spanish. But if someone were to leave, they keep that in. Fortunate and really rare. It's a great question. To have two bilingual social studies teachers is amazing out of seven teachers. And that's, that's sort of the, the expectation is that it's Spanish and social studies. Yes, because that's where the teachers are who are bilingual. Okay. So, um, it's a very popular program. Very popular. Isn't it a class that goes through? I mean, how many? It's, it's 20 students that start in kindergarten, go all the way through. And it's where the, uh, it's really hard to find, like, finding a bilingual, you know, science teacher would even be harder. But the fact that they have two is, is amazing. And they can teach. You have to be quite fluent to teach your subject. Sure. Yeah. And then they have a Spanish class as well, that obviously is much, is quite advanced. Right. I don't think they need to hire someone, Pam, if that was your question. No, no, that's not my question. Okay. I understand that we don't need to hire someone. But if we did need to hire someone, if we had someone moving out and you need to hire that person, you're probably having to find a very specific person. You're likely to have to pay more to attract that person. It would be really hard. Or you're not able to offer that service. To find somebody, um, at that level of fluency, because you really need to be truly bilingual to teach a social studies class in Spanish. Right. Well, if they're doing well, it would be hard. It's probably not like a massive budget increase. Right. Like, to the point about paying more for somebody, you pay 20% more from a teacher. I understand that. I'm just asking generally. Right. It's sort of about keeping sort of a special program throughout, you know, eight, this is the ninth year these students have been in if they started in kindergarten. Correct. It's amazing. Yeah. And then for high school, how does, what's the? High school, they're going to, that'll be, they're going to have, um, Spanish teachers teach the content because they don't have content teachers to do that. So Spanish teachers will teach either a literature class, you know, a literature class. So the Spanish teachers will teach different sections based on, on that. So it'll be in Spanish. Um, and, but they'll be doing a lot of advanced literature. Right. That they wouldn't typically do in a Spanish class. Okay. So there might be sort of an incremental cost there. You've got more Spanish sections. Yes, but they would probably, they would take that instead of something, instead of something else. So right now they don't participate. Okay. So in terms of high school next year, this is where there is a big enrollment. Uh, because there's a much bigger in on ninth grade class than there is class leaving. So we, you know, overall class sizes will be comparable, but they will not be the same. This is where our greatest risk is. We don't know yet. It, it students sign, you know about, uh, sections when students sign up for classes. But as you see here, we can't promise that all the sections will be the same. Nor can we promise that all the elective sections, they may be capped. If we get a little more money from the state, um, then we have now, this would be the area where we would want to put it. But obviously we just have the governor's budget. So it's premature to count on anything else. Next, um, the children's way. Um, this is where, you know, we go through data. And due to the enrollment, we will be reducing one classroom teacher. And still have class sizes that will work. Um, so, you know, non-personality. That's the only personnel change from fiscal year 26 to 27. That's the only budget, budget based, based on enrollment. We, you know, it was hard to touch. And we hard started with the standards that we didn't want to reduce. And then the high school is also under pressure. So that's. And no efficiencies to be found in the admin side of this. Uh, we did it all. We did it all last kind of. And when I say admin, we kind of have a handful of people in our central office. My first year I cut a teaching and learning position, cut an HR position. And then, you know, the question is, do the schools get the support they need? Um, so we, we didn't do that this year. Um, in terms of some of the areas, you know, transportation, again, is both. You can see that it kind of our budget book is range is from five to 30%. We have some out of district placements with an increase in transportation is 30%, which is really, really high. The opera, the Office of Operational Services, which is a state agency. It's not DESE that controls that. So that is a challenge for all districts in terms of. Is there an effort or, I mean, it just seems like for schools to collaborate or to work together. I don't know if to try to find more efficient. Yeah. I know some of it's just, you need. Five to 30%. These are very, these are specialized schools that are raising in some cases their tuition, you know, 30% due to their costs. Um, in some cases it's less, it's five or even 10%. Um, but even 10%, if you think about our increase in 10%, it puts great pressure on the rest of our budget. Um, and, you know, transit, same thing, even, you know, five year, 5% increase in transportation is still, you know, it's, it's not significant, but it's higher than what our budget to budget increases. Increases certain our superintendents group and the mass association school committee. As communities have tried to address this again, it's, it's a, it's a handful of schools, but we have two students with tuition going up, going up 30%. Um, even like athletics for, you know, which is really important here. That transportation is calling up 6.67%. It doesn't sound like a lot. But if you think about our cap, it's still, it's still not insignificant. Um, we're in a multiple year contract for based transportation. Exactly. This is, this is year three. General education transportation is a 5% increase in year three of the contract. Which, you know, you would take in this, in this environment. Um, and some other things, um, almost transportation, which you, you know, we get some reimbursement did go up by a fair amount. Um, we are circuit breaker offset circuit breaker is the reimbursement you get for high cost tuitions. And how does that work again? The state gets you the year later, you get reimbursed. So we pay the first whatever 50,000 and then we get, depending on, depending on what the reimbursement is filled. Okay. And that's determined, you know, by the legislature budget at the end. So we don't know that yet. So you want to budget fairly conservatively, but we include an offset of, you can see that almost 2.4 million dollars is our circuit breaker offset from our 26, from our last year. Expenses. That's what we'll have next year. Um, building maintenance. Is that coming in sort of as expected or the circuit? Yeah. Yeah. Kirsten, it pretty much came in as expected, right? So I might that. For this year, Kirsten, our, our circuit breaker was. Yes. For FY26, it's coming in as expected and FY25, because of the move ins, you had extraordinary relief as well. So there was a slight bump due to those significant costs. Right. So when you're out of district, tuition and transportation goes up more than 25% due to unexpected, you get some extraordinary relief from the state. We didn't qualify this year, but we did qualify last year. That's why you saw that very large number of non personnel expenses. Those, that was due to the increase in tuition as Kirsten said. Um, and building maintenance, we're just doing some contracted services instead of hiring some students. That is revenue neutral. Hockey is the third year of a four year investment. Is that hiring students to do building maintenance? It's just to prepare in the fall. It's preparing school in the fall. Okay. Having some, you know, students. But it is your contracted services. Just, I mean, the structures will be easier. Um, it's not maintenance. It's just getting ready. When, when there's summer school and you have a couple of weeks to get a school ready, you need, you need a lot of, a lot of hands on. Okay. Anything else about that, Kirsten, I should say? I have a quick question. Yeah. You mentioned earlier, I think, around infrastructure, some of the technology you use. And you mentioned moving away from Mac into Chromebooks. Is that reflected in non personnel expenses? That is non personnel. Exactly. That, that was pretty much, our tech budget was level service. I think it was 460. Correct. Right, Kirsten? It didn't increase.
It's available in technology. And there's something called a Chromebook Plus, which does a lot. Um, has there been any conversation around less technology? And potentially, given what we know about using technology as a tool for young minds, has there been any conversation around that? There's certainly a great question. You know, 10 years ago, if I was at a parent meeting, 10, 12 years ago, questions would be, when are you going to have one-to-one computers, so all the kids are going to have a computer. Today's the question are, how can you get the technology, particularly at elementary, less on my kids' hand. I want kids holding books. This is high school that we're talking about. And you have to have some technology in a high school. But what's really different now, you don't have computer labs. Plenty of times you walk into a classroom, you know, computers are shut down. And, you know, you even have kids doing some paper and pencil essays today. That is due to a different kind of technology where we're going back. The art of the blue book has come back to college campuses. That is something that was not seen for a while. So that is part of our experimenting. But some technology is needed, but you're absolutely right. Face-to-face discussion is a lost art. That's why I really wanted to be here. I said, can I come in person for that? He said, absolutely. Even better. I said, great. That's what I like. So that's not- Maybe. Maybe there's a cost savings there maybe at some point. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to know. I mean, technology has come down a lot in terms of cost. That's true. Like, we are going to, you don't see an increase in our technology budget. That would have been unheard of years ago when it was going up. So that is one good news story is the cost of technology is not increasing. All right. I think we pretty much, Kirsten, should we go to, do I have anything else? Not really. Why don't we do some special ed? Any questions? Any questions? Any questions? I guess one thing I was kind of curious about, you kind of touch on at the high level in that but the $900,000 increase in expenses, do you have sort of a breakdown of where those are going? You talking about non-personnel? Yes. Yeah. Kirsten, the 900 in non-personnel expenses is mostly all student services, correct? Correct. And then there's also the general transportation, homeless transportation. Right. Those are all contribute to that. Especially tuition and transportation, I should say both. Okay. Because the rest of our non-personnel budget, our non-personnel budget is only going up 1.9%. That's really low. Yeah. In terms of you're seeing, you know, if you go line by line, you're seeing a lot of lines just literally flat. And we went line by line in order to do that. Do you know the details? I know in the past you've had kind of a more detailed book that was online. For whatever reason, I can't get into the school committee or anything. Yup. We have it all. And we'll make sure that gives you line. It literally is line by line. Right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. We will get that. It had been on the website in the past too. I don't know if it is. I'm not able to. Did they put it on the website? No, they're going to be voting, I believe, Wednesday. And we had a couple of corrections. So it wasn't formalized yet. Okay. We can certainly, we will certainly get that. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry, maybe I'm sort of off. I was, so looking at the town budget that was sent out, it had this school budget, school expenses line, almost 10% increase. That's, I guess, I'm trying to match what we heard there. That was the non-personnel. The non-personnel is the expenses. Okay. I thought you said it was by 2%. The overall budget is up by 2%. Right. So 2%. 2% of like a 54 million is about, let me just think, one million. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Kirstie, how do we have the map there? The total. The total budget, I'm sorry, I'm just looking at the top and under slide, right? Yeah. 5.6 million. 15 million total budget. 1 million increase. 1.9% total. That's not including the salary increases, because those are all in the reserves. not including the salary increases because those are all correct in the reserves but it's mostly the 9.75 percent increase in school expenses that's what's mapping to those those kind of high level that's i think so that's on so if you look at slide nine that's the total non-personnel that's the special item so that maps to the to brian's presentation of expenses
all right should we go to just share some data this will be really useful very specific special ed presentation appreciate the acronym spelling absolutely we don't want jargon phil we don't want jargon that is not good for anybody first page was enough yes all right this will be this will be jargon free so these are just our special education goals a big part has been i'm not going to run through this want to go back to the first one kirsten just but to develop programming so we can keep students in district to the greatest extent possible and really serve them here which is david this is relatively this is a trend that we've been on for last since you've been in this role the last we've expanded um certainly our special ed programming district particularly in two areas students with learning disabilities in the area of like dyslexia reading as well as social and emotional you know those two we certainly have programs we're just expanding them more at the secondary level particularly the high school um and some elementary as well okay so next kirsten i'm not going to run for this next slide it's kind of some of our initiatives but i want to be sensitive to time yeah so these are just you know a bunch of our programs language-based programs and here what you see is this is the number of students that we project um in various schools you can see clay pit hill all our elementary programs are clay pit hill that's why there's so many more students and those students go into the middle and high school that's changing it um go ahead children's the children's way yeah a couple of things a lot of students are going into kindergarten who are on ieps and also students in the children's way once they took students turn three they go in when you have an iep regardless of what your birthday is so if you have a birthday in march you have an iep you will go right into the children's way because it's age three it doesn't start in september so you can get students moving in at different times so that's why but we are anticipating somewhat of an enrollment drop but remember there are other students there there are gen ed students there because it's an integrated preschool so half the students are not on ieps and half are but based on our projections that's why we're reducing it teacher um so and there are the other numbers um we've got 18.7 percent of students on ieps high school is going up just slightly that we have a much bigger class they are going middle school going going down a little bit so um you know we do have a decrease in our special education pro overall uh for a range of reasons and these are students who when i say decrease the special education these are not students these are in district special education students so we're we just have more students in general education providing general education support so they you know that they will just not get support through an iep there's a cost fewer meetings less paperwork um this doesn't have a lot to do with tuition and transportation because this is not this is the mild to moderate population not students who would go out of district next so what we do have at the same time while we have a decline overall in special education we have an increase of students with more intensive needs and this is the key is numbers down intensive needs increasing particularly in the social and emotional behavior and physical disabilities and those are the students most likely to be out of district and right now we have 102 students that are in district programming um which is a lot it's 21 percent these are specialized programs for students whether it's social and emotional whether it's learning or whether it's different kinds of learning disabilities for the most part so next and we also have a grant to work with students there's 102 sorry 102 students you said there were 44 out of district yeah and the rest are within yeah they're within their home schools so i go to happy hollow or loker and i guess i'm in a co-taught classroom with a special ed and gen ed teacher these are students all um in district and any student who would get specialized transportation would be a student in a program in the district that that would that would be students in specialized programs next um we did get a grant we're always looking for money to help with students in a timeout room these are secure spaces for students who become dysregulated or also looking at um you know we have really strong programs now one of our elementary programs at clay pit for students uh with dyslexia we're thinking about can we tuition a couple of students in um some revenue and that you we have to be careful only do a couple at a time but that's something now that our programs are really strong we may have an opportunity to bring a couple of students in district um that's just kind of an overview of our different programs at different schools we can keep going kirsteen um so this is an important slide these are our programs that are district-wide um and they they vary their language-based programs their life skills programs um that's for students who go up to age 22 that we're responsible for um i mentioned social emotional language based and you can see the total program cost like we would lose students in language based but you can see what it is if we go out of district that gives you a sense of out of district tuition so that we would we pay that comparable but those are really for students that we can't educate here and we we try to bring students back when we can but you can see those costs are really significant 130 170 80. i should also say that that does not include transportation so that's another 60 60 000. is any sort of anecdotal evidence of how having these programs and sort of expanding some of that has helped i think what it does is we've had you know we have students with more intensive needs and we've been able to hold the number where in other places that number would be going up with more intensive needs and certainly at the high school keeping students um who we've had students bring students back who haven't been in public school and coming back to the high school because we have an intensive program and reading support for students who are dyslexic at the high school that's relatively new um what you can see is there are three different kinds of out of district placements there's private placements where we have 36 students these are state approved schools tuition set by the school approved by the office of uh what's it called inspectional services right uh yes and then we have collaboratives which are non-profit public schools that are less restrictive we have six students there and then we have two students that we tuition into other districts typically those may be districts like one of the students is tuitioned in a newton they have a program for students with physical disabilities we just don't have a cohort so it wouldn't make sense for us to run for a program like that but that would be less restrictive and less costly than a private place lastly one more slide to show actually two more slides so you can see the range of i'm not going to read this to you but you can see the range of placements uh tuitions we have average is 128 collaborative average is 93.5 it typically increased five percent a year so i mean i should note that as i said at the start but it's just there there are several that have tuition increases between 20 to 32 and you see what the average cost of transportation i've already mentioned that and we also have students who are eligible out of district to age 22 because of their level of their disability um i referred to this earlier um when a student moves in we'll go back kirstie uh if a student moves in at a district from a public or collaborative we start funding right away but the students in a private school um and they move in only if before april first after after april first it's on that other district's time for another year um and you can see if parents live in two different districts we split the cost that's just good information for you to know um it also speaks to kind of it's just unpredictable when our students move in and we've certainly experienced that lastly um circuit breaker um there it is um you're mentioning fill the close to 50 000 for the threshold um 75 percent um 45 to 50 for transportation in district cannot be claimed um what are we hopeful for this year kirsten in terms of circuit breaker uh well they are telling us at the state level that there is 150 million of fair share money that is funding circuit breaker that is meant to get all districts um up to the 75 percent reimbursement for the tuition over the 53 000 that you spend um so we are hopeful again when we projected our um reimbursement uh 2.39 is again conservative we did use the 75 percent reimbursement on tuition and we leveled at um 50 percent for transportation so if all things go well at the state and there's enough money at the end of the year they will issue uh any variances that they have left over in circuit breaker and and distribute that out so we might have a little bit more than the 2.39 million that we have right um rejected the one thing to add you know if you heard what kirsten said that um you know the state is using money that was a you know that came from the millionaire's tax for circuit breaker and what that tells you is how tight things are at the state level because initially it was not necessarily for circuit breaker but districts were in such a challenge in this area and the state is so short that they're using this money i think that that's kind of telling where we are i mean i support it don't get me wrong but give you a sense of the challenges that we're facing at the state and local level did we end up getting less than 75 reimbursement last year or in one of the other i don't know kirsten what we got last year the transportation was not funded at the student opportunity act level that they had hoped for but we did get extraordinary relief so that helps so ultimately it kind of topped it off yes would have been so for 44 students we might get 40 000 per student is it about 40 for the 44 kids kirsteen what's your guess uh in terms of what we would get again it depends on their placement yeah so it i can't give you a off the cuff number we we do have a worksheet that we're required to maintain and submit for the circuit breaker information and it is very delineated by student and all of the additional services so it's not just their tuition a lot some of them require nursing that goes um with them for their transportation so there's a lot of one-to-one additional costs inclusive of this calculation that we get reimbursed for that's an excellent example because when i talk about physical disabilities many of these you know some of these students are going to school with full nursing and that's part of the overall package in terms of circuit paper reimbursement right questions in terms of the overall presentation yeah yeah yeah i mean i guess i go back to a little bit my philosophy earlier one i think of your five pillar slide and uh i think those of us i mean i teach you back in college and i just came from the travel science workshop to the discovery museum so i'm very pro-education we all want to see the pillars grow but on the other hand i see five percent growth which is getting higher than inflation and uh probably not sustained in the long term so if you were to look at your five pillars where would you look if you had to save a million dollars out of your budget where in those pillars would you look yeah so i think i'm going to go back to something i said other i think we are at a you know we're like every other district the challenges are all in the same area and the question is what's the role of the state going to be in special education tuition and transportation i i think that's really the key question because we're actually holding the line on a lot of costs you know when i look like when i step back and look at our budget it's really special education tuition and transportation and we have a moral obligation to give kids what they need and so it's really hard even to sit here and talk about special education tuition transportation because it's sometimes uncomfortable to talk about because we have a moral obligation but yet every district is facing this challenge and i i do think that's why you know the question is how much of the fair share money should be used in this area and i think i can tell you that the superintendent's association of school committees the number one legislative priority is this area because we're holding a line in in kind of other areas so i appreciate your question about pillars um and i think you have to kind of hit you know hit them all like last year we reduced it gets harder because you know raising class size is a very hard it's very hard politically to touch class size in wayland it's very hard to touch programs and wayland so i mean this is like politically not easy but if you set the political side you know you you probably raise class size you have fewer electives at the high school you cap all of the cap all of that because you have to do things that are mandated so you know what's going on in higher education right now is that we're just going to cut the philosophy department we're going to cut the art history department what's challenging in public education we can't say we're not going to have third grade next year you know and so that's what's i'm very familiar with my family members of higher ed administration i'm really familiar with it what i'm seeing is they are just you know taking a sledgehammer to certain departments class sizes are up and class sizes are up so class size is kind of one area but you have to touch program two and if you touch student services it may be on the mental health side because special education there's a lot of mandates i feel like we already touched i don't know how we can cut building maintenance anymore because we've level funded and we and we and we shouldn't so those are kind of the areas where um it's it's it's really hard and i mean districts are we're going to have to do this because your question is actually a realistic one too because if we don't pass an override next year we're going to hit all those areas so that's my answer the reason i like showing the pillars because it gives you a sense of like where our touch points would be the answer is they would be all five yeah and are you aware of any just off of your conversation um you mentioned the group that you're a part of and having these conversations around special education and just the um the obligation but simultaneously the challenge right with trying to continuously fund an unexpected amount in increasing cost um are you aware of any legislation or anything at the state level to try to address like great question so i think it is you know how do you you know fully fund circuit breaker because that's the reimbursement for students so when that percentage goes down like kirsten was talking about in transportation that gets really difficult so how do you really get that really really high and you know part of it is we have a higher standard here in massachusetts which is you know in terms of taking care of people with all kinds of needs and and i will tell you what's really hard right now is that the cut the federal cuts in medicaid are making it really hard for education and and this is going on everywhere and what it is because you know the largest cost of every state is public health and medicaid and what happens is states are like massachusetts are having to make up some of the difference for medicaid and that's competing with education dollars because education is second after health care and so that is that's a real dilemma so you know part of the answer to the question is that actually we need to fully fund medicaid more medicaid the federal will actually help us in education because it's actually all interconnected one question i wonder about it's just to break out that nine hundred thousand seven hundred dollars of expense growth kind of i know it's in the details there yeah even just an email back we can do that kirstie the nine hundred thousand yep um in terms of where it is absolutely great question yeah yeah because if we took that away your you know uh budget growth would be you know two percent or two and a half percent or something yep david if i can add it i think it's important to recognize that with the special education the out of district tuition and transportation budget per se that is has taken a two-year cycle to get caught up to when we've had those move-ins because the budgeting cycle does not match when we are required to take on the expenses of any move-ins because right now we're delivering you a budget that we anticipate for the students that we have now and their costs we have a month and a half before april 1st that things could change so that's why we've been very proactive to try to hold on to any additional reserve money and not have to spend the entire um stabilization fund that should truly be a safety net um to help us out and so that has also impacted that non-personnel increase this year because we are getting to where our true costs are for those students that we are out placing right now got it question came up at fincom one day i think on the special uh ed reserve fund was should it be bigger so can handle some of those fluctuations yes i would answer i understand great any other questions for tonight thank you david sure if you have other questions thank you christine let us know we appreciate the sample questions keep us posting so much we will good night that's great appreciate it sure um there is a proposal to actually take all the articles that we've already said 7001 and just and then i think the select board is that as you read the note from carol that was i that's how i wrote it back to just make sure that i was understanding correctly um in my summary and i haven't gotten confirmation okay okay but i don't think that we'll need to go through every article we'll just adopt the language and then hand it back to our select board member yes i would copy pam on it all just to have so make sure yes make sure you're you know well that the the finance comments are and that you take out sort of all the stuff about background information and you take out the pros and cons since we're not doing those um yeah that that it fits i think april sent the sort of the template but then was right okay for the you know no financial yeah or if there are proposers comments just let me just make sure that started reaching out to the select board where are your proponents comments but if i can cut myself out of that happy too yeah that's what the thought was okay so when did this uh when did this yell today today this afternoon i think you were copied on it it's the one i'm thinking of i didn't read it that way and it's also would be inconsistent with what i was told by the select board a few days ago which is that just because we've voted that there's no financial impact he's not the end of the story that that sometimes they look to think i'm to write more coherently than perhaps some proponents might so i'll be so who determines if we are to write that article i think we are so but let's let's hear what she has to say in response to hearing out so i had a similar question because i did arguments in favor and arguments opposed for a few of my articles that still had no financial impact just to have those pros and cons and carol wrote back and said you don't need it based off of the law and right that whole thing um i said well i thought we were there were some that we wanted to have pros and cons um so i was confused as well in all i think when we've voted that there's no financial impact no pros and cons that there's it's it's there are no finest committee comments except for that little blurb on we're not taking position um and then you take out any pros and cons right like it's we don't do the write-up the work that we typically would do for each article i think that's great about the pros and cons i'm not so sure that we don't do a short i think we don't we don't we did last year though no i don't think we did no no i'm not easy enough to check yeah that's fine not what she says because i don't want to do any more work on that no i don't i don't i think that that the the goal of the change in the i think carol was behind that sort of yes amendment to the was was so that we don't that fincom does not have to to do anything for for non-financial and if the proposer has comments they can be included otherwise the article stands on its own um and people can assess it and the town assesses it okay and i also say the other thing that carol did mention is that town council has been asked to review the articles that were submitted for non-financial so they could come back to us correct if we're doing not other discussion points there was the wayland post article this past week and i just wanted for clarification for the record to say that it really wasn't the school budget that i was talking about it was the whole budget that we hadn't got in town we usually oftentimes i mean it was we hadn't seen yet the detail on the schools but we also hadn't seen anything detail on town so it was it was or the capital budget so um your point is relevant i just wanted to be clear on that because that's what initiative to send a letter to the editor uh for that right because because it's true like the the timing it is typically something where it's an iterative process um and years and number of years number of times in the past um fincom has had questions and it's been the budget has changed we've made adjustments based on the questions and some of the time for that sort of pressure points that we've noted so and the response to that is what you saw today which is we have lots of questions and and we will need more time and to get them answered the uh and so pam just for context um the reporter reached out to me okay i reached out uh before the article went out and then i reached out to michael uh who connected with the reporter okay um so i'm not sure of the nature of what got covered in that conversation but she got back to me and said look i'm all set i just spoken to michael um and then as come not surprised ai drafted the article like they you know what was in the paper did its best at listening to us and did its best at interpreting what we said my little quote had a ken versus can't switch and here that happens exactly the opposite of what i said but it was not yeah right it's well just the nature of trying to communicate and through the press you know period but these days and so thank you for taking this initiative and i would encourage anyone that would be out there to speak up it was great to flag me and carol we're all responsible adults here reading it as religiously so now it wasn't a big deal bill and i were and pam were on the front page of the women's post my luckily it was really short yours was a lot they're celebrities but that's fine yeah it does speak to the communication challenge that we've talked to before and you know trying to help you know put all of this work together in context and be able to communicate it to all the town's residents so we can all make good decisions ongoing challenge um just one comment before closing terms you know phil i was thinking a lot about your question to why person is that is that really expected and sort of how that's over inflation and certainly i think you expressed maybe personally not what you were expecting right um and what part of i think um fourth of the answer is that you know in short response is no right like that is what they're modeling out and what i took away from his response though is like really there are two pieces that are driving that to five percent as opposed to three right the first is the retirement piece the second is the health care and i think without a substantial departure from what we're doing in those two areas we don't know that we have the opportunity to really drive that number down and so i think in terms of trying to put emphasis on where we need to actually have an impact i think that's it i think that's like where we need to really focus um in terms of i'm looking at the health care rates like the health care rates they're not great like they're like in the sense that they're not great for anyone right like these are this is a high coverage right like and a rate for an individual for a month is like eighteen hundred dollars like that is you know health care is not economically sustainable right for a town for a country right of course and i know that there is there is legislation in massachusetts i don't know if you guys are well aware to look at single-payer options um for the state there are there's but it's the the and i've been through the legislative processes there's this will it wouldn't surprise me if this would be one of you know 10 000 bills that get filed and not acted on sure but it doesn't change the fact that i think as a town the focus should be on trying to explore avenues that are within our control like i can think of a number of things that i'm not sure if we've explored that that like i think are worthy of just conversation with trying to understand if there's an appetite if there's a cost saving like i know that some of the companies that like we generally work with like they'll offer an opt-out credit so you feel are married to your spouse they are looking at that great excellent so i'm not sure you know yeah so things like that that i think like we need to explore because i think without being able to have other conversation about like what do we do then it's just the only other lever there is then just start reducing services it's a hard conversation and people don't like to have that conversation but he mentioned that we you know next year if we don't get prop two and a half perhaps then they have to do it yeah i like i just like people doing hypothetically oh yeah no we went through that all with the budget process we're starting to think of having two budgets yeah that was a question that i just asked you is even like putting this budget together how much forethought was there into okay we're setting this baseline base for foundation for next year and we may have to go one of two directions that's right and so one of the conversations was doing a prop two and a half in the same time that you're trying to negotiate all the bargaining unit for whatever it is two-thirds or three-quarters of 10 employees adds another whole level of complication together right so we are working but we're skimming by with just getting us through and um and you know if even if the debt service was lower this year and yeah you know they're they're they're like we've kind of you know over the past few years we've kind of made tweaks here and there and we've used some cash where we hadn't always in the past and i think highways used to be um like dpw we used to do like six hundred thousand in cash and then we decided we're going to do that as a capital thing going forward so i mean we've made changes and made some tweaks to kind of keep eking out and we're really at the end of at the end of the line and and i just hope there's and i know it i completely understand the complications with collective bargaining at the same time as doing a budget but i i just really hope next year we're prepared with strategies and communication and communication and just
it may very well need to be a multi-year override right our last override we misremember the dates i think was 2013 and maybe it was yeah so we haven't had a lot of experience it's been a long time yeah and and that means you know a lot of town residents have never and and it also means like having to identify what would be cut if it doesn't pass because that will be one of the people's first questions great i guess we heard i was going to say we now have a 40 000 capital and a property tax deduction so maybe we have a tax savings we're actually going the other way so think about who wants to be the finance committee chair can we have a motion to adjourn motion to adjourn second on favor
unanimous
Can you hear me? Yes. No. Yes. No. No. This is the second time. Robbie. He's working on it. Yeah. Yeah. Testing. Testing. One, two, three. Testing. Testing. One, two, three. No, she's saying no still. I'm sorry. On your computer. I'll try to log in again. Should I wait for her to come back in? Is that the only thing? Can you hear me at all? I know you couldn't hear us. That's not it. Shouldn't there be a mic? Sorry. That was normal? No, there's a mic here and a mic there. Is that just too much? I think she was saying she wasn't hearing anything. That's how I interpreted it. Do we need to do all right? R.quimpy at wayland.ma.us. R.quimpy or just R?quimpy at wayland.ma.us. Got it. Okay. Do we know who that is? Who that is? She's back on. Can you hear us now? It's not Philly Dugy. It's Philly Command. It is Philly Dugy. Yeah, so she needs to be removed from the panelists. That's her frozen face. Kate Ryan. Yeah. She looks frozen. I don't think we're ever frozen, but she looks... Can the other participants? I don't know if there's anyone else online. There's Carol Plum, Kate Ryan, they're on their attendees right now. And she's going in and out. Can Carol hear us? Can you see Carol? Is Carol's video up there? Carol's video is not up there. No, she just attended. We have two panelists. One panelist is us. Yep, yep, yep. Right, and the other one's incorrect. Yeah. Correct. I just joined on my computer. She's moving again. Her image is moving. Can you hear us? No, she's safe now. No, she can't hear us. We have three chart directories. Testing, testing, one, two, three, testing, one, two, three, testing, testing. Connected. Yeah, it's all connected. I can unplug it again. I did test that audio earlier. I see a lot of web up right now, a little bit out here, but that's how I was watching. Testing, testing. I can definitely hear. It's definitely going through when I do that. Any suggestions? I'm trying to, I don't know, unplug and plug it in again. Can we do something like that the other week and it worked for whatever reason? We're holding the program. Could you hear people talking? Yeah, it hasn't plugged it. Yeah, it's all set. Okay, Rodney. We're going to presume it's working, Rodney. I just unplugged it. Let's come back on again. I'm not sure it's acting right there, but it might be. I still don't hear anyone, but I put on the closed caption. She can see that. Oh, you can see the closed caption. Yeah, I just unplugged it. Plugged it back. Plugged it back in again. I tried to ask that, but she can't hear us. Well, she's loved it as a panelist, so. Her volume might be all the way down and not doing it. Testing, testing. No, my volume's all the way up. And you still can't hear it? She can't hear you, so asking. Well, I'm just checking. She's getting a transcript. Okay. She's using closed captioning. All right. That means the speaker's working, because the last time I couldn't get the transcript, so. Understood. Rodney will continue. All right, let's continue. Imperfectly. Such is life. No, that's next.
So, with that, Jim, could you please provide your two minutes of public comment? Two minutes. Less than two minutes. I'm Jim Van Eskiver, 19 Holiday Road. First off, I want to thank the Finance Committee for the work that you're doing on behalf of our town. I've never attended Finance Committees before the past few weeks, and you guys do a lot of work. Thank you. I attended the last school committee meeting, where the selectmen presented DD25 to the school committee. And upon hearing their presentation, the school committee, and upon discussing the possible transfer of the 25 holiday property to the town, Chair Aaron Gibbons said, we are not inclined to acquiesce. While this reflects the view of a single member at an early stage of discussion, it highlights a central concern, which is that the select board's proposing to spend $200,000 on a transaction involving property it does not currently control. My understanding is that this portion of the meeting concluded with agreement that DD25 would now be rewritten as a joint proposal between the school committee and the select board. Even so, this approach further obscures the purpose of justification for the proposed expenditure. Finally, I ask to the Finance Committee whether you would be willing to allow one or two representatives from the abutting neighborhood organization to meet directly with the member drafting the FinCon opinion. We would request a single meeting to present a concise, organized summary of our concerns regarding this article. That's all I'm going to say. Sure. I'm going to be sure. Thank you very much. I'm not the chair, but I am the person working on the article. Yeah. Okay, great. And what would be good for you? We'll work this offline. We'll get this offline. Sort that online. And I would encourage, Rob, if you find the, I think Bill Whitney is the select board point person, maybe he could join that conversation after efficiency. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you. With that, we'll move to review. Is there anyone else wanting to make a public comment? Yes. A public comment. Please state your name and address. Mike Hill, 25 Watches Lane. I've lived in town for 42 years. This is my first finance committee meeting. I come to you to thank you for all the work you do and also to ask just some questions. I'm a big counter. I'm trying to understand some of the processes that happen in town in terms of finance. In particular, as it relates to what's happening on Holiday Road in Watches Lane. Because I've been digging into some information. I may be off base in terms of how I've got sort of a calculated out thing. But EDC had a meeting back in November. And there was a slide produced, which I did talk to Carol over the slide for, and she says it's not serious, but it does have what you'd lay the name on it. I think it's serious, just to be clear. So it's one of those things that you look at it and say, it's funny, you tell me it's not serious, but it's got her name on it. And it's hostile land that you're looking to take or do something with. So I looked at that, and it had 50 units, 50 townhouses, which it said it was going to bring in roughly $800,000. So I looked at it, and they said they were going to probably get $4 million for the property, but it didn't speak to capital improvements, widening the road. As long as the lanes were narrow, so that's going to cost a lot of money, trying to fill the road, all the different roads going up to it, bringing water, and then creating some other infrastructure. So then I said, you know, $800,000 seems like a lot of money. But it seems like that's all I hear in town is about the revenue side, and not about the cost side. If you're in a bean counter, I look and say, geez, you know, something's just a fight. Stay around tonight, you'll hear all about the cost side. I get that part of it, and I respect what you do about it. But when someone's evaluating a piece of property, you'd say, well, what's going to be the cost? So I took a stab at something which could be way off base. But I looked and said that your budget is about $111 million, roughly, a big token. And I took out the non-tax revenues. It's our budget. What's that? It's our budget. Yes, your budget. No, our budget. Yours too. Trust me. And so you take out $13.4 million of non-tax revenue. And so you left over $97 million. You divide that up amongst the 14,500 residents. And you come up to a per capita cost of $6,750 per person. So then I looked at the townhouses, and I said, how do you even live in these townhouses? I said, let's just take the average of homes in Wayland, which is 5,100 homes in Wayland, roughly, and there's 14,500 people in there. So an average of 2.8 people per home. I did see the email trail between you, I think, and Carol. Yes, I sent it to all of the people. And I didn't know I've been with Reddit. I have. And I appreciate the context there. I think that would be interesting information to inform the Finance Committee article when it gets written about pros and cons and provide some context on that. I don't think we have the bandwidth to really dig into either saying the numbers make sense or don't make sense to them. Cool. So then could I ask a second question to get off that one? Okay. Is that, does anyone have you post-bordems on the developments that have been done in the town? Because the latter half of my email speaks to Alta. I saw that. And the question I have is, was it a good deal for the town in terms of if you use the per capita information that I have versus how much we collect in real estate taxes? If the new valuation at $98 million, we get $125 million. A year ago it was $72 million. Yep. And it was far less. And there's got to be at least three to four hundred people living here. You have 218 apartments. So it's probably costing us an awful lot of money in the negative effect of the budget. And the question becomes, you know. So I don't have any numbers to confirm. But does anyone do the numbers? The EDC, Economic Development Committee, has looked at, you know, the impacts of things like Alta. But as a Finance Committee, on an ongoing basis, do you look at this and say, hey, this is why our budget is struggling because we may be paying services in excess of, I don't know, $400 million? $200 million? I understand the question. What's that? I understand your perspective. And what happens with it? I don't have any answers to that. The town manager and finance manager might be able to give you perspectives. Well, perspective is one thing. The question is, I'm going to be writing a letter to the editor of the newspaper and some of the other stuff. Because I think as a taxpayer, we do deserve answers. You know, a deal was done. I have seen postmortems on Alta-Oxpo as far as what the economics were and what the impact was and what the costs were. I don't have that available as a document to share. But it has been part of conversations with EDC. I just wanted to make you aware of that. Thank you. And it sounds like it goes nowhere. It will be part of the considerations as to drafting the article and then the town gets to vote on how to proceed. Okay. So it does go. Well, it does go. But I mean, in other words, there's no postmortems, no information you can share about the postmortems. I don't have a document that I can share. Okay. Who does have a document? I think EDC may have that. They discussed it with us as the economic info. They discussed it. They find a couple of things. Okay. They talked about townhomes having a lower than average, townhomes first having a lower than average constipancy frame. And also they talked about having specific fewer children, because the kids cost a lot, right? Right. Absolutely. So homes that house fewer children are paying relatively more compared to. But anyway, EDC is a better place to direct that question. It is a good question. Cool. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Please, Mike. Typically, if someone comes forward and is proposing this type of project, we will look at those numbers, that type of impact. We're doing staffing studies right now, say for our fire department, because we have to time to time look at what's happening in the community. In my time here, I've been here for three years. We haven't had a new project since off of Oxford, so there probably hasn't been postmortem recently to look at these types of things. But I can tell you, when we had a proposed project about three years ago coming into the old whole site, we started looking at this, because the nature of the project, if it's going to be from multiple bedrooms, family oriented, you look at the impact on the schools, public safety. Sure. But since we haven't had one in my time here, I haven't participated in a postmortem. All right. Thank you. With that, let's turn to the minutes. One was the vote. Is there other public comments? Okay. One was the vote of reviewing and repeating the prior minutes. I think Rob abstained, if I remember correctly. I abstained. Oh, okay. I abstained, yeah, two weeks ago. February 14th. Two meetings ago. Yeah. Yeah, but that wasn't this one. Good. Okay. So, no change. I also had him as an absent and remote, so I fixed that. Yes. And at the bottom, I put following the meeting, not joint meeting, so I noticed that. Yeah, good. The last sentence is in the description just above topics, and I recently anticipated the chair. I would just cross out. I'm unsure budget, school budget, just type it into the poll. Yeah. Anything else from anyone? We have a motion to approve as modified. So moved. Bill? Second. Second. Favor? Aye. Done. And with that, we will... Just for the record, I was not here. Oh, that's right. Yeah. Thank you. And with that, we will turn to our first substantive agenda item, which is the town's budget. Yeah, yeah. Brian and Michael? If I may, Mr. Chair, I am going to attempt to... Sure, screen? Yes. And thank you for sending the materials around Friday, and thank you for having 20 pages in the first section in the appendix for the remaining 23 pages. Always good to shorten that. It should be up there. Good. I got it in front of you as well. I guess I would just preface this. Good evening, Mr. Chair, members of the Finance Committee. Mr. Kevin and I are pleased to be here this evening to talk about the FY 2027 budget, which you have all received. Most of what you will see in here tonight is nothing new. We've done a couple of financial presentations along the way. As you know, we started with a budget working group last summer, and we were faced with roughly a $1.8 million deficit, and we worked with the budget working group in our community. We worked with the budget working group in our community, and we worked with the budget working group in our community. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Mr. Chair. You can go out with the budget working group and our department heads along the way, starting with preliminary budgets. I meet regularly with Brian. Brian does some of the bulk of the work meeting, some of the department heads we meet together as time permits, and we did a couple of financial updates in the fall as we also tried to work on the ... as you know, we did two proposals from the budget working group. was to go out and refinance some bands to save some money and then we had a special election to convert some levy debt. That combined with some cuts and a level service budget got us to where we are today. Michael just heard a band is a bond anticipation. We did per code provide a preliminary budget on December 31st however we knew that there were still some outlying issues. We still needed to get some better numbers from the school as well as we needed to get our state aid numbers. We have some of those numbers now. We did get a little less state aid than we had planned on. I've already spoken to our legislative delegation and then asked them to reconsider increasing our chapter 70 per pupil costs if at all possible through the budget cycle and the last big piece that we're waiting for is our health care numbers. I sit on the board with West Suburban Health Group and we are having our board meeting later this week so hopefully we'll have that last piece of the puzzle for you this week. I encourage Michael on Friday when you're having your meeting have them update in January not in February next year. Yeah I think that has been a message to them. Our consultant is Gallagher and they work with us but I know a lot of the cities and towns throughout the Commonwealth are always waiting. Maya released their numbers at the MMA about two weeks ago but for some reason West Suburban has been two weeks behind. So we will work through these. Brian will probably narrate most of the slides and we're happy to answer questions. Great thanks. Okay so we might as well get into this. Some of this you've seen before but as we go through the slides if you have a question just stop me. There's no point in going back. So obviously the acknowledgments there is a group after with the finance team as you can see all the individuals involved in that as well as the boards and committees. The second slide is the budget group. These folks got together starting in July for Phil, Michael, and myself. This is our seventh month dealing with this budget. We met straight through the summer into the fall and all those are all the folks that showed up religiously and went through the budget. We went through a whole bunch of different ideas and a lot of them actually went to town vote and we had the selectmen also do some votes to help us get through this budget. So next slide what we're going to do is we're going to go through the budgetary goals, budgetary challenges, the FY27 town budget, town school and underclassified budgets, the fiscal 27 financial plan and it did put in an appendix. If you folks want to take a look at the history of some of these different items like increase the tax, increase the budget, you know average single-family home it's all in the back. So budgetary goals if we move into that we wanted to produce a budget within prop two and a half. As we finished on the 26th we knew this may be a very realistic challenge so that's what we put together the group in July. We wanted to maintain town and school services. We wanted the budget to reflect historical budgetary spending. Many times as you know these departments wanted a certain number and we tried to discourage large termbacks so we took a look at the actual spending. Michael has already started doing the collective pocketing agreements. All contracts expire at the end of this June so like we've been working on that endeavor. We put out a memo they have the 27 budgets to be either level funded, level service or decreased. We only use recurring revenue for operating budgets except for the COA which is getting their final custodian which was known last year. There are new there are no new FTEs in garden to the town. Brian just to be clear level funded versus level service. How are those terms utilized? So if you have simplest way level funded is if you bought a hundred pounds of dirt last year for a hundred dollars. So level service means if that same hundred pounds cost a hundred and ten you spend a hundred and ten. Okay. Level service means if you spend a hundred you're only gonna get ninety pounds. So the challenge is um so uh I guess that the contracts all expire which is a challenge to put out a budget in estimating what the wage contract has is very difficult. As you'll see all of the COAs for fiscal 27 are in the salary reserve account. We still have an unsettled fire labor contract. It goes back to 2004 which is also challenging. Uh we knew the uh levy, unused levy was continuing in 2020. 24 yeah. We knew that the unused levy is continuing to decline. Um we wanted to maintain adequate level of special education funding. Hope education continues to increase. We're up to four or maybe even more kids next year going to Keith Tech in Minuteman. They're struggling. We saw a couple kids maybe wanted to go to Minuteman. Now we have actually two now going to Keith. So that number has gone up. Uh we have uncertain state aid. Uh the count continues to be a minimum aid community with respect to chapter seven. And there is there is no new growth expected uh in fiscal 27 that will help out our tax levy. So the next page is the budget uh group projections. This is what um the group went over in the summertime. We wanted to flip the DPW debt from excluded to levy. The residents in town voted for ability for that. Uh the select one agreed to issue bond bond and anticipation notes instead of bonds. That saved $800,000 of expense off our budget. When we did the budget of forecasting in the summertime we projected new growth to be around $400,000. It came in at $934,000 which was a plus of $534,000. Uh we had local receipts um going up an additional $237,000 more than we projected. So that was a plus. The downside is that state aid did not go up as expected by $26,000. I just want to pause for a moment on the new growth. Um it appeared as I've come to understand that our assessors team had not been processing uh the new assessments um and so we weren't getting the revenues in the prior years from the new assessments. Um we've got this is really catching up the backlog. Um it isn't like we've had any big new developments that are true in this number if I got that right. I guess I would also uh Mr. LaRue. Robert LaRue is our assessor. We finally have a stable group in there. Um there had been some turnover when we first arrived and um our assistant assessor has now been certified. So he's got a competent staff. They've been going out and as you said there's been a backlog and they've been going out much more aggressively to take care of the backlog and make sure that they were properly getting the values. So that's how we wound up with some of the unanticipated um new growth. But going forward apart from any significant new developments we're looking at a $400,000 or $500,000 a year new growth from a project. We also had lunch away come on board. Okay yeah. 26. Okay. And this all compounds the prop 2.5% calculation. 27. So moving on to the operating budget. If you move to this is just a summary of the entire budget. Uh it's a $113.3 million operating budget which is a 5.3 uh increase in revenue. We're an overall 4.98% increase. On the bottom of the other budgets that we fund by tax you have OPEB of $500,000. State charges $142,000. Chery seat offsets at $335,000. And Chery seat just for folks. That's the state aid. Right. Okay. It's basically a charge. It's less state aid. So when you're talking about state aid it's net. It's what they give you less the assessments. And then you have the overlay at $340,000. So the town would need to appropriate a total by tax of $114.3 million. So again the idea increase in the operating budget is a little under 5%. So to turn the page this is a little. Sorry can you go back. Okay. I just want to make sure I understand. So $114 the 5% increase. It's all by tax but all through real estate property taxes or through various taxes. Real estate taxes. All through the real estate taxes. Excludes any revenue generated through like excise taxes etc. Well that will come in as local receipts. It comes in as local receipts. Okay. Thank you. I just wanted to clarify. So all this is just through the property taxes. Excludes local receipts. Well said in another way the operating budget is funded by a few different things. Okay. You can't actually say this is going to be by tax. It's basically a mix of different revenues that go in. Okay. So. Or predominantly it would be taxed. For sure. But just appreciating like it's not a 5% slapped onto your real estate bill. It's actually everything you're paying including the excise taxes including right like it's all of those different revenue sources. Adding a 5%. Yeah. And then investment income all sorts of different. Okay. I'm just making sure. But these are all the expenses. Yes. Yes. Understood. Understood. Understood. I just wanted to make sure. Because both have said specifically by tax but the other ones don't. So I was just trying to understand. The next slide is just a summary of the town budget splitting up the town department budgets by payroll and expense. The same with the school. We'll get into the allocated versus non allocated. What you're looking at here is an unallocated budget. So again on the far right hand side the budget is increased at 4.98%. It would appear that the town budget is going up to 1.92. It would also appear that the school budget is going up to 1.91 in the unclassified a little over 12%. And again this is an unallocated piece. We'll get into the allocated in the back. But just for folks context the two biggest numbers in the unclassified is the 32B of health insurance. And then the salary adjustment reserves for salary adjustments. Right. Well the biggest is real estate, retirement, debt. But the biggest dollar increase would be in the salary reserve. Right. The salary reserve that's like actually town and school. But it's just showing up on unclassified right. That's why the paid town and school employees is just in the reserve now. That's right. Until the collective bargaining determines the actual increase and then it's allocated to. Yep. Is there an expectation for like how that sounds with curiosity? Well we know internally by the breakdown of that reserve we have to wait for one of these bargaining groups to settle. And we'll allocate. The salary reserve will come down. The one in item budget will go up by the same amount. But we don't know that yet. Yeah. Still negotiation. So the best guess is probably like same ratios existing. Right. Like if the school's payroll is currently placed, the town payroll, two thirds of that reserve for you. Sure. Directionally. Yeah. There's an allocated budget in here. Right. And salary reserve. Yes. And then for the 12%, this is also maybe perhaps something I should have done before. But does that include everything that goes into the cost for the resources? Like does the 12%, is that truly just payroll and payroll taxes? Or does that also include any additional benefits or the cost of those benefits or anything else that's negotiated on? There's a slide in here that breaks up. Okay. Great. Lovely. Then I can wait. Thank you. It's in the back. It's page 32 just from the slide standpoint. So it's things like energy is in there and stormwater. Okay. This here is just a summary of the total. This is an unallocated budget. So here is just an object of the dollar increases as you see on the right hand side. The school is obviously the largest piece of the budget. It will always be that way. And this is just an object of the different expense pieces. The school payroll is number one. The unclassified is number two. The town payroll is number three. The school expenses are number four. So these are the drivers for you. If you turn the page, you'll get to Iris' question. So this is more of a breakout of the Italian budget on top. You have town payroll, town expenses, school, and now you have the complete run of all the unclassified numbers. As you can see, it's highlighted. The second one from the bottom line is about 12%. And the biggest drive is within the debt. Debt actually is coming down $307,000 because we did not issue one from debt. You have the vote going up 184%. It's a large increase percentage-wise. It's going from $87,000 to $250,000 because we have simply more kids going to vote education. And we'll be with Dr. Fleischman later. But in years past, we were part of Minuteman. And so what, we were spending even bigger numbers then? We were probably spending $400,000 or $500,000 a year at the time. Okay. So being sort of the a la carte user now, we pay per student. Right. But it's decided to creep back up. The real cost of the vote is tuition and transportation. Yes, transportation. It's the transportation that's far more expensive. Yeah. Is it something to look back at at Minuteman? I think that would be, I'm not sure whose decision that is. It's a town budget. I understand. Would it, do we think it would provide better economic answers? Or do we even know? Do you go back into Minuteman? Yeah. I think it's worth looking at once we get past this year. Yeah. Obviously looking at it. Because now you have four kids in a moment. I understand. Does being part of it get us a break on the transportation? I mean, the transportation is the biggest part of it. That would be built into the tuition. Now we pay separately. We pay tuition and then we pay a bus service. I see. If we were part of Minuteman, we would just pay per person tuition. Got it. And there would be a capital surcharge too. But I'm not saying it's a good idea. No. It's not something on the list. But if it's a growing thing that the kids are interested in education, we really should take a look at it. Yeah. There's another one that's hard to project. And we won't know that one until like March because it's a total guess because they get some information from the eighth grade kids that they may be interested, but there's really no commitments. And then you have to get in. So if three kids want to go to Minuteman from Whalen is eighth graders, they'll only get in late in June once they are able to get them in. So it's way off the budget. Yeah. It's probably cheaper for them to go all to one school though, right? Because transportation is a large portion. So if they're going to two different places, you'd think that you get economies of scale. They all get four going to one place versus dividing it out. Yeah. And if you look at some of the stories in the news of economics, there seems to be a growing interest in the trades for a lot of younger students. Just to Iris' point earlier, I just double checked. I don't think it's in the slides, but there's just under 200 town FTEs and there's over 460 or roughly 460 school FTEs. So it's almost two and a half times size. That's why the school budget is so much larger. Yeah. I agree that there's certainly continued interest in the trades and certainly we love to see that. But I struggle maybe perhaps with appreciating, given what we spend per pupil, how we get to these sort of numbers per pupil to support that education. It's just surprising. And I mean, really like it's- What's the breakdown of two thirds transportation or three quarters? I would say it's 30% tuition, 70% transportation. That's where the numbers go. It's not, yeah, it's not the school cost. Right. I mean, that's there. Yeah. Keep this $22,000 per kid tuition. Okay. All right. So right off the bat it's, you know, 44 grand. Not even including getting the kids back, you know, twice a day, five days a year. Sure. But that's more comparable to what we spend per pupil, which feels reasonable, right? In terms of, you know, but like when you see 87 grand to send one kid to school, that is a bit mind boggling. So good to, good to clarify. So last thing on this page, you see this big salary adjustment going up 349%. Obviously, we put a lot more money in there because it's all like, hold on, 27 is estimated enough. So I have a couple, sorry, other quick questions here since, sir, first of all, we must react to these. So the insurance, the 12%, I know we've been talking a lot about that. I know sort of talking with, um, have they given any indication and I know that they are not alone in, in sort of rising healthcare costs, but why does this end? I mean, this is 12% year over year is, that's, that's unsustainable, right? Like at some point they're going to lose the, like, they're going to lose these towns, right? Like I know, I know, I know last year someone left, like it, it's just unsustainable. I don't see how we can manage. But we had better, if I may. Yeah. The last year, West Berman had better numbers than GIC and Maya. Now, you can't tell a lot of it. Did they buy down the rate? What was that? Did they buy down the rate last year? Well, we had a really good rate before, roughly about 4%, and they wanted to reduce it further with their reserves. I was the lone dissenter on that. I just, I felt there would be other times when we may need that. So that's why I voted that way. Um, this year I attended, uh, Maya gave its presentation. They used primarily Blue Cross Blue Shield, and they came out with an average number of 8%, and that meant there could be people with numbers lower and higher, up to, I think, 14%. And some of this is driven by loss ratios. They pool a lot of their losses. And the more members you have, um, the easier it is to distribute those large losses across, um, all of your membership. We have a smaller one. The difficulty here is there's about a, I won't say a dozen of us, maybe. I don't have the number committed for all of the West Berman, uh, membership. But if somebody leaves before we officially disband as a unit, you leave your contributions into their reserves. And I think our, our share is just under one, one and a half million dollars. So it would have to be in our best interest. We'd have to do some significant research to see is it worth leaving that money on the table to join some other joint purchasing, um, organization, joint, JPA joint purchasing agreement. The problem is the other year, um, some folks like Maya were saying, we weren't taking new members. Now they might take us because we use them for property and casualty and other, um, insurance. But some organizations that are independent don't want to take on new members. Um, although I don't think it was striked out. They did talk at the Maya meeting that one of the things that was lowering their costs was Blue Cross Blue Shields looking at discontinuing coverage for GLP-1s. So that would create some savings across the board for some of these communities. But that can be tricky too because a lot of times your healthcare coverage is tied into into your collective bargaining agreements and there is a public employees committee. It's called the PEC and you have agreements on, uh, with the collective bargaining units on what type of healthcare you offer. And if we were to decide to leave West Suburban, we would have to sit down with that group and say, hey, this is what we're thinking of doing. You can't just leave without, uh, bargaining that with your, your labor. I appreciate that. It's still concerning. It is. From a sustainability standpoint. It's not unique to the town obviously. No, I appreciate that. And there is not, if you've got other options or ways to look into it. I mean, I think that there are, there becomes a point, I guess. And some of us obviously appreciate the collective bargaining element, but he, the cost versus the value even directly to the employees feels like we might be getting to a point where I'm not sure really that we're getting the value that we're paying for, for these employees in terms of coverage. I'm not sure what the alternatives are. Well, we have. As someone who's spent a million dollars at my health insurance when I had open heart surgery. Yeah, but. I mean, you know. And that, that's an argument against self-insured. You know. Some, some folks have, I'm aware that there have been communities that want to self-insure, but you can, you have one case in one of my other municipalities, when we were talking about these things, a retiree came forward and said that, um, five million dollars was spent on their specialized treatment, it was covered by insurance and they were arguing not to change and not to change, you know, to consider, you know, self-insuring or any other option because they felt the town was, um, better protected with the carrier we had at the time. So, it's really hard to tell. Who's mine? Massachusetts. It's the Massachusetts Interlocal Insurance Agency. Thanks. If someone comes up with ideas to look at this differently, open to it. But whatever you get, keep going through it. For sure. Okay. My next, did you have a question, Rob, before I go to my next one? What's other insurance? So, also at 8%. General insurance, liability, building insurance. And I'm assuming that that also is just, uh, the industry is going up? Like, we actually hadn't yet 10%, but since we, town assessing good claims, we actually brought the estimate down at 8%. So, it was, it was higher during the summer. It was going to be a high year. How did you tell? It could be future incidents and accidents. Yeah, but it's, it's. Do we shop that every year? It could be higher next year, it could be lower next year. Brian, do we shop that to other vendors every year? We get, we get most insurance from Maya. Okay. We have a big, um, in the industry for municipalities. We do small other insurances as well. But we get predominantly all our insurance. We take, we make a payment in July, so we get a discount as well. Yep. And we've been aggressively pursuing credits and having our employees participate in training to get those credits and actually brought down our claims this year. So, we did get recognized by Maya. And we get off. They essentially put us on a performance improvement plan and we are off that. Okay. Because of some of the large claims that we had had. So, we've gotten better there. Um, one more question. And then the retirement line here at six and a half percent. What specifically is that retirement health care? We pay into, uh, we have a share that we have to pay into Middlesex retirement. That is, it's our assessment for all the future, all the current retirees. It's current employees, excuse me. The current employees for their future pensions. Okay. The current employees for their future pensions. Okay. So, OPEB is other post-employment benefits. Those are for retiree health care. Health care. And then the retirement line here at six and a half percent. What specifically is that retirement health care? We pay into, uh, we have a share that we have to pay into Middlesex retirement. That is, it's our assessment for all the future, all the current retirees. It's current employees, excuse me. The current employees for their future pensions in Middlesex. Okay. So, OPEB is other post-employment benefits, those are for retiree health insurance. Right. Yeah. So, the six and a half increase, is that also generally, it increases six and a half percent? No. How is that? Okay. That number there is, right now we're on a 10% to pay off our unfunded liability in 10 years. Mm-hmm. In order to get to the unfunded liability, which is, it's right now, $60 million. Mm-hmm. We're going to be flipping between a six percent increase and a nine percent. Maybe a three at some point. Um, which led to the compensation of the pension obligation bond. But, it goes back and forth. Middlesex gives us a two-year assessment. Last year's assessment was nine percent. That's a change. This one is six. We may go back to nine, but we don't know it. Right. So, this is the one that's over in 2039, is that right? 27, 20, 30, 2036. 2036. It all goes right. The thing was, as Brian indicated, they do an assessment every two years. And we were on an assessment where it was three percent, six percent every other year. And then last year, when they did it, they reassessed us, we went to this six and nine, which we weren't anticipating that additional increase in the annual payments. And we tried to contest it. Right. That didn't go in our favor. They wanted us to pay. To redo the actuary. Yeah. So, looking forward, we anticipate six to nine percent, kind of, from foreseeable. Until 2036, when then this drops to zero? Right off the table. Okay. And just so I appreciate how that works, then that means that current employees and potentially future employees who have, who are pension eligible, will have their pensions funded. There's no further obligation on the part of the town. Well, once the town meets its full funding amount. Right. In 2036. The investment return should be able to carry the fund indefinitely, unless you have a market correction. Sure. And we would, at that point, we'd have to pay. And that has happened. In 2008, the extent of this amortization schedule, though, because a lot of the markets went down. Sure. I think now, in 10 years, we're probably going to have some wealth work correction. Maybe two of those. Sure. 2008 was particularly bad, right? Like, we're not talking your average bear market. I assume we're talking, like, 2008, which certainly was more substantive. Well, all the money's in print with the dental sector. It's a safe investment. Okay. It's not scattered all over the place. Yeah. Our road trip is with Britain as well. So, it's a professional investment firm. Sure. Okay, on budget detail for now. Any more questions, please. Let's keep going. Let's keep going. One quick thing. Math-wise, it looks like the salary reserve is basically like a 3.75% increase on average on the payments. Yeah. Exactly. They went up an additional $1.6 million. They went up. The total was $1.8 million. The total was $1.8 million. The total was $1.6 million. The total was $1.6 million. And I should just say, there's no direct correlation to the increase in that fund to the schools that may be bargained for because you have to factor in steps and lanes and other obligations as people not only go year over year, but if they hit longevity, there's certain longevity milestones that are triggered in there. Or people in the schools, they have steps and lanes. Our folks generally on the town side just have steps, but there's other promotional considerations that have to play. Some people always say, oh, that's the cola they're getting? No. No. You said the cola is not in this amount? No. It is, but it's not just cola. No, no. I guess what I'm trying to say is, Robert asked, the number is increasing by approximately 3.7%. That doesn't mean people are getting 3.7% cola. We have to hone in on the number we think, and then also project what impact that will have on people moving year and year, if they're entitled to a step, or if we have to anticipate some people get increases in their education, which also can add to salaries. So there's a lot of factors in going into that number. It's called as a subset of that. Yes. To a half percent. Correct. Makes sense. Here's just a pie chart of, as you can see in red, that's the school budget. In blue is the town, and I classify it as the upper left and the green. Most municipalities are that way as well. So a quick question on that, just to clarify with the FTEs. So the 200 versus the 460 FTEs. Last year, I'll put it somewhere, but at the end of last year in our budget book we had about 192 for the town side and 460, I think, for the school. If anything, we may have reduced a couple of positions. We had a hiring freeze, or I instituted one, I sent it out. We have a couple of positions that are still in the budget that we haven't filled, and we're trying to determine, we're waiting to see what will happen at the end, what town meeting does, whether or not we fill those or not. When we look at that pie chart and look at the part for the school versus the unclassified, the unclassified includes, of course, like we just discussed, the healthcare and the retiree funding. Does that include the healthcare and the retiree funding for the school employees as well? Well, the teachers are part of the teacher retirements, and they're not part of the retirement, but they are still school employees who are not in teacher retirement. They will be in there. Okay. So some of the unclassified is also sort of spent on school employees? Yes. Oh, predominantly. I mean, the unclassified, 60% probably of the unclassified budget is the school. The health insurance certainly is the big driver. Got it. Okay. So it includes the health insurance for the school employees. That's right. Okay. So the reason why I ask, right, because when we look at it this way, it looks sort of very even keel, but then if we actually were to parse out that unclassified as covering employees for which sector. It would spread kind of like the other two. It would spread further. Okay. All right. Thank you for clarifying. So here is the 27 budget when you allocate what's in the salary reserve. So when you do that, the town budget on the left-hand side is going up 3.72%. School budget is a little under 5%. Unclassified drops to 6%. Again, there's your overall 4.98. Take a look at the right-hand side. That's just an optic of showing you how the unallocated and the allocated match up against each other. So this is just a rejigging of the unclassified budget which has the salary reserve. Next one is just a breakdown of the top drivers of the fiscal 27 budget. Obviously in the top, from a dollar point of view, you have the salary reserve going up 1.8 million dollars over last year. Insurance, which might as microcyl were carrying at 12% at 1.2. School expenses, 900,000. Towns, 600. I'm not going to go through every one, but those are the top 10 drivers of the budget. School expenses are employee benefits? Is that true? I can ask Dr. Bushman later. What's your question? School expenses, the category is employee benefits. Oh, yeah. That's a mistake. Okay. All right. Thank you. As you'll see in the next slide, of the 5.3 million dollars, 77% of that is for compensation and benefits. So if you want to change to the next page. So you just said that in the prior chart, chart 15, the school expenses are miscategorized? Right. They're not. It's school expenses. Just on the far right, the category listing. Just on the far right. Yeah. And I'm just wondering if that carries over to the next chart. No. Because the next chart 20 benefits versus other budgets. On the next chart, you see on the left-hand side, again, the top 10 project drivers. It does. Yeah. But of the 5.3 million dollars, if you take a look at it and say, okay, what actually is going up, 4.1 of the 5.3 relates to compensation and benefits. Yeah. And the school expenses are correctly categorized in that chart. That's right. Correct. So that's what's driving the budget. Employee benefits, which is health insurance, pension, salary increases, Medicare tax, and it probably misses an unemployment. On the next is the financial plan. So here's how we're going to pay for it. Before we go there, any questions on the spending that we haven't addressed so far? There will be more. Yeah. There will be more. We have more. We're trying to get less and get through it. Okay. Fine. So of the total budget on the left-hand side, we have to raise $114 million. And you see that on the left-hand side, the revenue sources to do that, we have $96 million in tax, $6 million in local receipts, $9 million in state aid, and we have transfers. So the overall increase in tax to fund this budget will be fine. I'm sorry, Brian, transfers again? What's going on there? Enterprise funds. Okay. They reimburse the general fund for benefits like health insurance and Medicaid tax. Okay. So the financial plan has taxation going up 5.39% over last year. Local receipts is projected to go up 2.5%. State aid, as we talked about earlier, went up only 2.4%. We're looking for transfers that go up a little over 3%. So that's the financial plan to pay $114.3 million in budget. Can you remind me what transfers are, please? Excuse me? What's a transfer? We take money out of certain enterprise funds to cover water and sewer. Okay, got it. Just the enterprise funds, not premiums. No, no, no. We return to school view all the funds we do as well. Basically, anybody who's running payroll, we take a charge to reimburse the general fund for the health insurance. Health insurance is appropriate in the general fund, not in these funds. So what we have is the funds pay us, reimburse the general. The OR allows us to put that $1.34 million on the tax recap as a reoccurring revenue stream. Okay. Okay. Thank you for that. We've seen in the past, sometimes those numbers have changed. We've had some reductions in the past in transfers. Yeah. When schools struggle with COVID, they did make reimbursements or catch up from last year or the year before. So there's not as many as we first thought. There used to be a full decay in this, but now full decay is part of the operating budget. So it's still a very valuable and welcome revenue stream to the general fund. So moving, so the financial plan, again, that's just an optic of what we talked about. You have a, on the pie side, you see that the taxation is clearly, you know, well into the 80s as the primary revenue source to fund the down budget. On the right-hand side is, again, a stack of taxation approaching $100 million in a few years. It was probably not that far away. And the next slide is the Raylan tax limit. So this is obviously very important. So we went into the summertime, we realized that we made sure with our prop 2.5% calculation, so what we had this slide to do, as you'll see on the left-hand side highlighted in yellow, we see that $703,000, that's the DBW, excluded debt added to the max levy count. So when you factor all that in, taking into account that we have to raise $96.7 million, this budget is estimated to yield an unused levy of $755,000, which is a little bit more that we were hoping for. But we're hoping that when the insurance comes in, this number grows even more. That's where technically we stand right now. The new growth in this fiscal year 27 is what? Long. And if again, it comes in higher, it would just count to the unused in compound into 08. Yeah. There's nothing new coming on that would add to that number. That's just a standard. I mean, it's fluctuating between four. If you take out River's Edge, like the anomalies, it's running $400 or $500. So the next page is the financial indicators. Let's run through them quickly. The budget increases a little under five. You have a tax increase, a 5.39. You have an estimated tax rate, $15.62. The average single family tax bill, approximately $19,200. The estimated unused levy, $755,000. The debt service as a percentage of the budget is 6%. The unfunded OPEP liability is actually 43% on the 40. I'm sorry. We're fully funded at 43% on OPEP. We're fully funded on the pension liability at a little under 60%. Our free cash certification was 11.9 as of July 1, 2025. And as I just said, there are no expected increases in developments in 27. So the open items, we talked about the fact that we're going to get an health insurance number this week. The client contract is out from 24 through 26. And obviously, we don't have anything beyond that. We're in the middle of arbitration on that. We've concluded the exchange of briefs, and it's been sitting with the arbitration panel. And we're expecting a decision any time now. And special ed cost isn't shown as an open item here, Brian. No. Feeling like we have it locked in well enough? Yeah, I mean, Christine and Dr. Foster will speak to that. Yeah. I think we got the handle on it. That's obviously a very big driver on the $900,000. Yeah, I understand. Okay. As we talked about, it's $250,000. And again, the open contracts are an open item as we walked into town, meaning we probably don't know the labor cost in 27, 28, and 29. The next page is the uses of free cash. Again, the top number was certified 11.8. We have restricted 5.4 with the advancing from the general fund to temporarily fund some of the projects in the capital fund. This goes along with the band versus bonds financial plan we used. So pending right now is the capital appropriations for 27, which is an open item right now. We have the capital stabilization. Moving on that on Wednesday. We have capital stabilization at $250,000, SPED $300,000, service-wide quality. It's either going to be $0,000 or $30,000. And we have pending to move $537,000 by free cash into the general stabilization fund. Does everybody understand what that's about so it doesn't come back? So it doesn't come back? Please tell us. All right. So right now in the fiscal 26 budget, we have $537,000 on the total reserve. If the fire does not settle, it's not a hotel meeting that will move by free cash that exact same amount of money into the general stabilization. The purpose of that is that we don't have to reappropriate that $537,000 again in 2027. It will be available to fund the contract. The money will simply be in the general stabilization fund. So we had talked about that during the summertime as well. And that's pretty – so let's get into – I'm sorry. We're using a lot of free cash, right? I mean this is – The use of free cash would be the capital budget, which is unknown at this point. I'm sorry. So what is the 26 capital budget advancing, the 5.46? That's when the selectmen agreed to transfer $5.4 million from the general fund to the capital funds to give them temporary funding until we issue bans in June. Okay. That's for the fiscal year joining such projects. That money will be coming back. Right. Okay. So that's still considered cash. It's just in stabilization. It's not stabilization. Well, sorry. It's in other funds. Right. It's restricted funds. It's cash held in different pockets in the town, for the town. But I guess my concern is how much free cash are we looking at using this year? That I don't know. I'm pretty positive we're going to use the 250 on capital stabilization, 300 on the SPED. If the FIRE contract gets settled, we will not be transferring the 537,000. If it does – if it gets settled, we won't use it. If it does not get settled, we will use it. Because the $537,000 that's in the fiscal 27 budget will flow to free cash. It's basically – it won't be plunge free cash. But that $5.4 million will be coming back. Yeah. That's just a temporary level of money. Right. So, I think the number to look at is what could be used at town meeting is the 6.4 million. 6.4 million. Yeah. And then, yeah. We'll be more waiting to see what the capital appropriations are for this year as well. Right. And so really, like, the band here, what could be in use is anywhere from 550 all the way up to the 1.1 number that you have here. Right. Because if the fireman that gets settled, we won't need this. And you just mentioned surface water quality might not go through. Right. So really, the total amount spent potentially could go as low as 550. 550 plus the capital appropriation. Capital. That's a big – That's it. That's going to be – That's a big – The 25. $10 million for the capital. That – We're going to take – Number two. No. It'll be – it'll be around 2 million bucks. 2.5. But that's the – We're going to take that from free cash. We always do. Yeah. Oh, I see. Okay. That's not – That's what I'm saying. It's like, so we're going – No, because we're coming back on one money stated. Okay. Okay. Because other money – Oh, understood. Okay. Borrowing. And so where – because that's – cash and reserves have been sort of one of the issues that the rating agencies look at where will we stand in terms of percentages, percentage to the general fund if – you know, depending – like if we say $2 million for 27 appropriations. Yeah. So you're right. We have to be proven about our use of free cash because Moody's has new criteria that they view fund balance not only in the general fund or what they call governmental funds. Which – they're also not bringing in enterprise funds. And they want the collective fund balance of those categories to be at least 25% of revenues. We're around 20%. So as we build up the fund balance in the general fund, we need to ensure that the enterprise funds maintain theirs not been very vocal about the water fund. And these funds need to maintain their fund balances and not be depleted. So to answer Pam's question, yes, we need to be proven. How we use free cash just to make sure that we maintain our money rating at AAA. That's 20% now or that's also 20%? It was only 20%. Now they're moving into 45%. Okay. And we're looking forward with 27 appropriations. We're still projecting about 20%. Is that correct? Yes. The general fund would be the general fund stabilization fund. So even this 537, that's really taking free cash from one fund and putting into it. So it doesn't really go away. Right. That's what I was saying. It's kind of switching buckets. Right. Okay. The big question on this is going to be the water and infrastructure investment. Because that's such a massive investment. And we'll need to make sure the revenues from the water department are staying up with that amount of debt service. If you're not dipping into the forwarder. Yeah. They're coming in at 18. So we've got three more minutes. All right. So moving on to the town budget. Obviously we talked about before it's going up 2.92%. Again, if we allocate that, the budget is going up 3.72. Michael talked about it a little while ago about adding the last contingent. across the street at the city way building. $50,000 is part of the payroll increase on the town side. So overall the town is going up 3.72%. So overall the town is going up 3.72%. Take a look at the town payroll on the next side. You can see that predominantly the city is going up 3.72. So we've got a lot of money for the town budget. And then we've got to make sure that the city is going up 3.72. So moving on to the town budget. So the town budget, obviously we talked about before is going up 2.92%. Again, if we allocate that, the budget is going up 3.72. Michael talked about a little while ago about adding the last custodian across the street at the city way building. $50,000 is part of the payroll increase on the town side. So overall the town is going up 3.72%. Take a look at the town payroll on the next side. You can see that predominantly the increases are all in the step. COVID should be there, that word. It's really just step increases. And you have the other ones. There's no FTE in there and then some restructuring. But the FTE at $50,000 plus the steps is predominantly what's making up the increase in the town payroll. And as you can see on the right-hand side which categories are going up. Obviously the general government has the largest amount of departments. So the general government is going up the most with respect to the payroll increases. And this is all step increases what you're looking at here, not co-op. Next on the town expenses. Town expenses are going up 6% on a level service basis. We're going up $126,000. IT is the biggest driver this year. This was one that we did not see coming. Obviously there's a lot of new initiatives that the IT department needs to put in. They wanted even more than $107,000 that you see there. This is what you did not see last year that I hope. This is an anomaly. This is not going to happen year over year over year. This is basically getting all the software's up to date and getting the licenses, getting the firewall up and running. So again, this is a 2027 anomaly of $107,000 increase. Building maintenance. Sorry. Can you give any more detail on that software? So we had a long time. IT director leave last spring. And I brought in a new IT director, Nick Lombardi. He came in from the state. He ran one of the larger state agencies, the IT director there. He came in and realized that we weren't well positioned. Almost all of our devices were running Windows 10, which is end of life. And we have Microsoft Office 2016, which is also being end of life. And if you don't upgrade those, you will no longer get the security updates. And you render yourself vulnerable to some type of outside attack. And so Cyril, he worked, as I said, at the state. Their security was at a different level. He's gone back and looked at our firewall, a lot of different areas. We've done a lot of kind of take penetration testing with the state and outside resources to check for vulnerabilities so that we wouldn't be in danger here. So there's some overdue upgrades that really needed to be done right away. So he immediately notified us of that. And it's something that we just felt we couldn't ignore. I think that's the case. And I suspect, just reacting to your comment of this being a one-time thing, I suspect that there might be more of these. Just thinking about how software works, right? Like, generally. I think, Michael, you were mentioning before that he also identified opportunities for savings and efficiencies to be had and that we had licenses for things that we... Right. He also, Mr. Lombardi, indicated there may be savings on how we do our licensing, how many people get licensed for certain software. But he had to kind of put that on a back burner looking at the security first and foremost. But it's... We'll see. There may be some savings to be had. Sure. Most software these days runs through a SaaS model, right? So the idea is, it's not like it was 20 years ago where you get a CD-ROM and you can just upload it and you're good. They want you to continuously pay for... Which we need to. Right, which we need to. And so my point is, if we under-budgeted this, this might be a one-time anomaly in the amount, but we might need to consider that this amount might be higher than it previously has been in order to maintain the high level of security and the software that you all need in order to be able to do your jobs. Like, that's my point. Yes. Okay. I agree, but I also say when we start doing this, this is where we have opportunities to get savings with our insurance carrier because we can have cybersecurity insurance when we do certain things and we can say, hey, we're making these upgrades. Awesome. Got it. Love it. Can't guarantee you how much... Right. You know, it isn't always a one-for-one. Oftentimes, you get a small percentage back as a credit. The next slide. Legal service. Sorry. What's driving that? They haven't had an increase in probably five years, so we had to put in some level of an increase. Is that where it's been running? Is that what actuals have... Level service? Well, no. Legal service right here. It's level service. I'm sorry. That was the increase... Sorry. There is also on what you had given us before, and this is another spreadsheet, that was like $10,000 for legal. Right. We recently received a notice. Our legal provider is KP Law. They will be changing their rates in a small amount. It's incumbent upon the select board if they wish to put that out to bid. They were contemplating that last year. We had a good relationship with KP Law. But as some of you may know, we have continually been involved in some rather large pieces of litigation. I came in here. There's cases that go back five, ten years. They're just going. So it seems more than my other towns, we've had a lot of active. And sorry, just on that too, I think there were some facilities and building maintenance expenses that were $40,000, $50,000 that were in this breakdown that you joined us. This is from the... There is a new janitor for their Council of Aging building. I don't know if that's... Um... This is an expense on payroll. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Facilities Department 36-9. No routine maintenance has always been an issue. I have to say, there are just things that you don't anticipate. And right now, we're... You may hear from us with regard to the Finance Committee reserves. We've had two unfortunate incidents where we've had damage to a couple of our buildings recently, which then the dollar amounts are falling right under our insurance deductibles. But after a while, they'll mount up and we have to pay for them somehow. And... This was the fire truck in the garage? Or... Yes, that's one. So... Um... You try and plan for some of these, you can't always tell. If you go to this... I've sent you guys the file against all of the department spending. It goes back five years. You can actually see the increase for a line. Back to the maintenance. I mean, looking at it right now... It's not on this... For anybody who's watching, it's not on the slide, but... The building appears went from... Just the building went from 130 to 150. You got HVAC increases. You got electrical increases. You look at these... This file here, but I've sent you guys. It has all the details per line. I'm sorry, which file is that? It was a budget breakdown. When I think time each sent out the earlier presentation. The last couple weeks ago? Yeah. Okay, yeah. I know that's what I'm looking at. I can talk to you. The line gives you the 27 budget, 26 budget, and 3 is actual... Corrections. Yeah, this is... That was the one that I asked questions from that spreadsheet. Yeah, but it was tough to understand. It says fiscal year 27, but then the actual tab says fiscal year 26. Okay. This is... Okay. This is... That's a PDF. That's a PDF. Yeah. That's... You should move on. Okay, so moving along. So the next one is just an optic of the town. Expenses you see rubble service. The software increase there on the left-hand side. Moving to the school budget. Dr. Forsman is going to talk about this in a minute, but you do see that the unallocated increase is 1.9%. The allocated amount is a little over 4%. And the total budget increase is... I'm sorry, the payroll is going up a little over 4%. And the total increase is 4.98%. And the total increase is 4.98%. And the total increase is 4.98%. And the other one is just an optic of the town. Expenses you see rubble service. The software increase there. On the left-hand side. Moving to the school budget. Dr. Forsman is going to talk about this in a minute. But you do see that the unallocated increase is 1.9%. The allocated amount is a little over 4%. And the total budget increase is... I'm sorry, the payroll is going up a little over 4%. And the total increase is 4.98%. The last category is unclassified budgets. We've talked about this a little bit so far. But I did give you a breakdown again of all the different categories within unclassified. You see what's actually going up. And we did talk about these in a previous slide. The next one... Actually, sorry. The one I didn't ask about there was energy. We've got 5% increases in there. Can you give us an update on where we are today in 26 and... What we did... We were carrying about 3.5% in the summertime. And Michael Fair, because of the cost of electricity, we brought it up to 5%. We'd have to have facilities different breakdown of where they spend. So far we're sharing. But there has not been turnbacks. This used to be in the facilities budget. We've moved into unclassified. So we've kind of hit this one on the dime. So we don't have big turnbacks on energy. But we do have this one in at 5%. And again, the last one is the optical and the increases. This is UC Salary Reserve obviously the biggest driver. And the second is the health insurance. And I will not go into historical trends. Turn it back over to the chair in case you want to make sure your questions. One question I think Irish was touching on. That's what is this projector average Whelan tax, homeowners taxes to go up? Other questions, comments at this time? My overall question is I usually start at the bottom line and work up. 5% increase, which of course inflation is only under 3%. So I had sort of a two-part question. One, did you run some alternative budget scenarios where you had 2 million less or whatever that would bring that closer? And two, if 5% is not sustainable long-term, you can have one year where you're at 5%, but you can't have 10 years at 5% or at least 2% or 3% over inflation. Is there a feeling like we're going to get back closer to inflation in the middle term? So I think the first point, we didn't run an alternate budget. We started out realizing that just to live within the levy, we were just under $2 million short. So our primary focus was to develop a budget that had level services and still within the levy. So we worked to close that $1.8 billion gap without trying to come back and raise taxes. Given what the drivers are, they're primarily healthcare costs, debt interest, and retirement, some of those numbers are outside of our control. We can continue to try and scale back. There was one slide that showed restructuring and a slight decrease. As I said, we're holding a handful of open positions on the town side. We haven't filled and we may eliminate those positions. We did a joint study with the school department with the Collins Center to try and find some savings by consolidating services. We restructured in the HR department. We had somebody leave. We implemented their structure and we didn't fill one of those positions. We're doing something similar in land use. We had some people leave. We looked at how we could take advantage of that, still provide the same services. So we're trying to accommodate change in technology in order to save taxpayers money. I would say overall, at least on the town side, we run fairly lean. I've worked in a couple other towns where we have more staff and say the assessor's office and the treasurer's office, more people at the window. I think the next thing that we would have to do is look at cutting some services on the town if we were to look for an alternative budget that didn't go back to the taxpayers. That being said, when we worked with the budget working group, we looked at what was going to happen over the next 10 years. And we projected that we were going to run out of levy capacity. And the only way to kind of meet that growing need between four and 5% year over year is we would be looking at potentially three override questions every three years. And we would have to work with on that same budget team to project what we thought salary increases, health care, retirement, and then put numbers out to the public. And we worked very hard not to go for an override this year. We realized taxpayers are going to be hit with the MWRA increases. We have to look at what's going to happen on the select board. We've started talking staff and the select board independently and how we're going to work on it together. Looking at a visioning committee for this building, the new capital improvement planning committee's concern was, you know, do we continue to do modest improvements to this building? Or do we just come up with a long-term plan? Unlike many, I mean, much like a lot of our peer communities in Metro West and greater Boston, we were all built out in the post-World War II baby room. A lot of the infrastructure that was developed, the schools, town buildings, other things are coming due rapidly at the same time. And I just see that we've deferred from time to time certain improvements that are now coming due. We've had a lot of requests to fix HVAC. It's become a problem in our public safety buildings and some of our schools. And so those are some of the necessary things we're trying to do in our capital. So to your second part, it will be challenging in the next coming years. But if you look around, if you were to Google overrides in Massachusetts or whatever your browser of choice is, you will see that a lot of communities in and around Boston within the 495 belt have been faced with the same challenges. How do we live within Proposition 2.5 with rising inflation and rising health care costs and all these other unclassified. But you see increases greater than inflation occurring pretty much every year for the next 10 years. It's possible. I think in those certain areas of unclassified, as Ira mentioned, the health care costs seems to be unsustainable and that keeps going up. And we keep getting recessed in the pension area and that keeps going up. It all depends upon the investment strategies at Middlesex County Retirement. And there are reports issued, I want to say, by the Massachusetts, what's it called? The pension? NASA. Yes. Sorry. Thank you. Middlesex County hasn't performed as well as some of the other retirement boards. So consequently, I think we wind up having to pay new assessments every couple of years to ensure that we're getting closer to 100% funding. At some point, Michael, it would be helpful to identify, probably for the FinCon report, any efficiencies that we've gotten over this last, that we're going into fiscal year 27. Just bullets as to where we've gotten some. And I know that there's potential efficiencies in the future that we've discussed and identified joint dispatch of first responders as a possibility. It may not be big numbers, but... So we have another meeting coming up tomorrow, actually. That is the Middlesex Regional Emergency Communications Center. We have joined up with Natick and Framingham to develop a regional dispatch center, which, based on the amount of state aid that's being, or I should say, 9-1-1 grant monies that are going there, should help us provide some relief going forward as we transfer our dispatchers. We'll still have to pay our proportionate share of the operations over there, but it may be less, it is projected to be less than what we are running our own independent 9-1-1 response here. So we are looking at alternatives to try and save money longer. And then the other big swing is once the pension fund is fully, the unfunded liability is fully paid for, that's like a $6 or $7 million step down at that point. You know, $10. $36. $10 million. $10 million. That's how we got this. Great. Any other questions for Brian and Michael? Thank you, guys. Appreciate the leadership. Thank you for having me. We'll see you again on Wednesday. Yeah. This stuff isn't easy. We all are reflecting on questions and we'll let them back to you. Thanks. Thank you very much. With that, Dr. Fleischman, please join us. Thank you. Thanks. And I think Kirstine is going to be on probably. She's on. She may need to be a panelist so that she was going to drive the slides I understood. See her? We don't see her. Do we know who it is? David. It's not Carol. It's not Colin. Is it you? Can we move you back over and see if it's you? Dr. David, she doesn't seem to be on. Oh, she's not on. Oh, she's not on. It's just us. It's just us. Alright. I have the slides on my. Do you all have to? You just dropped. I wonder if it was you. That's right. Oh, you know, I sent her my Zoom link if they're individualized. That's probably it. That's probably it. Okay. Did you switch her over? No, she just dropped. So hopefully she rejoins. Okay. I'm going to make you. Should I ask her to look on the Zoom for her? No, I'm going to promote her to panelist. Okay, thanks. But she's just going to be known as Phil. That's what happened. I got to see. Yeah. It's very hard. Here we go. Thank you. Now we can share our screen. Can you hear us? Were you not being able to hear us before? We were not being able to hear us before? We were not being able to hear us. We were not being able to hear us before. We were not being able to hear us. I wasn't, but then midway it clicked on, so I could hear, but I was still reading along. Curious. Okay. Well, glad you're on now. All right. Good evening, everybody. And I will, you've already had the slide, so I will be really brief. And also feel free to cut me off. Jump in. I'm sure that's the way you work anyway. So it's a pleasure to be here. I look forward to rich conversation. So we will run through this pretty quickly. I'm going to do kind of our general education overview, and then I'm going to cover special ed with some really specific slides with lots of data. And make sure we're really thorough in that regard. All right, Kirstie, we can roll from here. And just for context setting, the school board hasn't voted on the budget. Correct. We've had two nights of discussion and another one on Wednesday night. Okay. So I'm going to, you know, provide some context. Some of you are new to this. Some of you have been around for a while and touched a number of areas. And as I said, finish with student services and also personnel and non-personnel services. Next. So I always think about, you know, the context, and this builds on what Michael and Brian were talking about. You know, where are our increased cost areas as a finance committee? You should know it is in special education, tuition, special ed transportation, and regular transportation, and health insurance. I put health insurance on there because if it's on the town side, we're a part of it. So I think it's important to be transparent and honest. And I should share that every district is facing the same, you know, I could do this presentation in 351 districts. And I know you were talking earlier about, obviously, our maintenance costs related to aging buildings and baby boom buildings, I call them. You all know that. Next, Kirstine, we'll keep going. So our real challenge was, you know, how do we keep our forward momentum going while managing costs in these areas? That is kind of our budget challenge. Notice, we're not talking about new initiatives, new programs, new supports, any of that. So David, just curious, vocational education isn't spelled out. It's one of the big cost drivers. It's certainly a bump. It was a bump. Not as big as some others, but it is a bump because it's used a couple of students to make it. We have a difference. Okay. So just a little context. Last year, we reduced over 10 positions. And that was really to address every efficiency. Last year was really, really tight as every year is. And this year, it's really not possible to do that at that level without impacting program supports and class size. Our goal is not to do that. I'm sure we'll talk about the impact that we were to do that. Next. So you can see our budget here is 4.98. There's the proposed and recommended budget, and I'll show some past year's budget. Next. You can see where we are compared to the last two years. Pretty, pretty comparable over the last, over the last three years. In terms of how we look at this year over year, what's really interesting, this is the personnel ledger. And you can see last year, our personnel increase was less. And that was due to the fact that we let people go. You know, we didn't cut positions. I won't say we let people go. We cut positions. Where the other two years, more consistent in terms of that 4%. Now we'll take a look at non-personnel on the next slide. And you can see that last year, we were really hit with non-personnel. A lot of that was we had to address the significant special ed costs from the year before, where we were way over. And as a result, there was real pressure on non-personnel last year. As a matter of fact, last year, of course, we had a freeze in the middle of the year just to balance at the end of the year. This year, our non-personnel is lower, certainly, percentage-wise. I'm sorry, can you clarify that? Yep. So the 900K here is special education primarily driving this up? Non-personnel, exactly. Tuition, transportation, you'll see that overall... Tuition for out-of-district? Out-of-district. So tuition is all out-of-district. Okay. Transportation is all out-of-district. Transportation is in-district and out-of-district. I'll talk about some of those percentages, but the tuition is all out-of-district for 44 students. Okay. So, and apologies, because I'm less familiar with how your budget works. Sure. So when we talk about spending, and we talk about the $6 million numbers and the $5 million numbers, that has to do with any special education, both in-district and out-of-district? That's tuition. That's tuition. In terms of teachers, you're talking about that is personnel. Okay. Got it. Think about tuition and transportation as non-personnel special education. Got it. For students who are in-district, which overwhelmingly most students aren't getting special education services in-district, that is all personnel. So that's the distinction between personnel and non-person. Well, what about their transportation? That would go into this non-personnel cost. Correct. All transportation, both in-district and out. Got it. The costs are much more out-of-district because you're traveling outside of Wayland. Sure. You may have students that are in-district programs that are in a van service, so their transportation would be more. And, sorry, one last question on that. Absolutely. Go ahead. So, and does the $900 grand increase include spending down from the Sped Reserve Fund? It, um... That takes into account that they've also spent that money or intend to spend that money? Correct. We're not sure where this year we hope not to spend it. Okay. To move it forward. What I would tell you is that we're just a little more than halfway in the school year. So, if a couple of students move in, that reserve could go. Um, and, and we'll get to some of the special education laws about move-ins. Anyone who's a student moves in before April 1st is on our dime. April, after April 1st, it's not. So, that is why it's premature to, to give a final. Okay. Okay. So, you said 44 students are projected for 27? Yes. And then what did we have for 26? We're at about 44 right now. Okay. And what's hard is, you know, you don't know because that can shift. Right. And also, it's not so much the number, it's also the intensity of the need. Right. In terms of the placement. So... The transportation is the location. The average transportation is about 60,000 a student for out of district. Um, and obviously some are higher, some would be lower if they're close. So, a little bit about, as you think about a budget and, and a school district. There, there are five key areas that districts have to make decisions on. The first one is program breadth. Think about what kind of a lecture should we offer in music, arts, science, social studies, drama at the middle school. That's really, really important. Something, obviously, that Wayland deeply values. We think about educational infrastructure. That's changed in the last 20 years because part of our infrastructure now is technology. And that is now very much a, almost a fixed cost. Um, and obviously we look, we look, next year we're looking more at Chromebooks versus max. Um, it is a fixed cost. As well as classroom support for teachers. Next, class size. Um, that is really, really expensive. New York State, you know, for New York City now is a law about class size. It's gonna cost them millions and billions just because having class sizes that are reasonable is a very expensive personnel decision. People really... What are class sizes now? What are your habits? They vary at the elementary. They're in the 20 ranges. High schools can, you know, the average class size of high school is really tricky. Some are high. Some are, some are the middle. And that is in our, in our budget books. Middle school team size is in the low 20s. In some cases in the mid 20s. Um, so, but that, that, those are really important, um, decisions and not easy to make because if you have 50 students, 52 students in a third grade, do you go 26 and 26? Wayland parents generally 27 if it's 54? That seems too high. But yet then you divide by three and it's small. That's one of the challenges that we face in terms of class size. Next, student services is mental health and psychologists, but it's, it's also, uh, special education. That's the biggest part of student services. Every district that has excellent general education really should have excellent special education. And certainly Wayland is a longstanding commitment to that. And lastly, facilities and operations. So, there's two parts. If you think about school facilities, there's the operating budget to maintain schools. And then of course there's, which is what we're talking about here. And there's a capital budget, which is longer term planning. Um, our schools would acquire a lot of maintenance because they're old and we did not increase our maintenance budget hardly at all just because we don't have the resources to do it. Even though we sometimes have unanticipated maintenance expenses. Next, in terms of, these are just some of our district goals. I won't speak at length about these, but, um, you can see that we try to educate the whole child through academic achievement, belonging and equity, social emotional learning. That's all part of the classroom experience. And also next student services on the next slide. And obviously community engagement. That's just a goal, not, not really significant cost. And operational, which is developing a plan to improve our existing buildings. We have a, uh, long term facilities planning group, part of the community now. Working with our actual firm. We'll have some recommendations about that. Are they tied into the capital improvement planning committee? Do we? Are they, is that group tied into the capital improvement planning? Not directly, but aware of, certainly aware of. They encourage the connections. Right. Because they've come out with kind of what the expenses would be that kind of take care of our buildings on the long term. Versus, you know, new, um, so this is some of the work we do before we develop the budget. We take a look at our enrollment projections, our class sections, and this is all looking at data, of course. We take a look at our caseloads, particularly in special education, but also in counseling. And obviously our expenses around district operations, maintenance, et cetera. So this budget includes, uh, continuation of all programs and electives, and continued expansion of our special education program. There's no cost to that, but we're just using staff to expand programming with the goal of keeping students in district. Um, at our elementary level, in terms of next year, um, we're going to have a slight, you know, enrollment decline, 32 students. The challenge with 32, if you divide that by six grades and three schools, that's the highest, you know, enrollment. We have one projection that shows us declining less. It depends on the kindergarten. This year we had more kindergarten students than were projected. You don't necessarily cut sections with that because it was two or three students a grade. It doesn't make a difference unless they're in the same school. Most likely we'll have the same number of sections. Um, with bad luck, we would need one more. With good luck, we need one less. It's really hard to project. Next, at the middle school, um, 36 students. Um, again, over three grades won't make, it's largely over one grade. But what we have, we have a very big eighth grade class leaving into the high school. Um, class size would be relatively comparable. The sixth grade's a little smaller. That'll be more a class teacher shift. And lastly, our high school- Actually, can you, just on, on, on the middle school, um, Spanish immersion, is, is there a cost to expanding out each year? There is not here. I mean, and so how does that work? The way it works is students take a social studies class in Spanish, but they would have social studies anyway. So the teacher teaches the same number of classes. There, we have two bilingual social studies teachers at the middle school. Okay. So the students have social studies in Spanish. But if we didn't have Spanish immersion, they would just be teaching students in English. So there's no cost to it. Right. And they have Spanish. If you have, you have, you're fortunate, we're fortunate to have two social studies teachers that speak Spanish. But if someone were to leave, they keep that in. Fortunate and really rare. It's a great question. To have two bilingual social studies teachers is amazing out of seven teachers. And that's, that's sort of the, the expectation is that it's Spanish and social studies. Yes, because that's where the teachers are who are bilingual. Okay. So, um, it's a very popular program. Very popular. Isn't it a class that goes through? I mean, how many? It's, it's 20 students that start in kindergarten, go all the way through. And it's where the, uh, it's really hard to find, like, finding a bilingual, you know, science teacher would even be harder. But the fact that they have two is, is amazing. And they can teach. You have to be quite fluent to teach your subject. Sure. Yeah. And then they have a Spanish class as well, that obviously is much, is quite advanced. Right. I don't think they need to hire someone, Pam, if that was your question. No, no, that's not my question. Okay. I understand that we don't need to hire someone. But if we did need to hire someone, if we had someone moving out and you need to hire that person, you're probably having to find a very specific person. You're likely to have to pay more to attract that person. It would be really hard. Or you're not able to offer that service. To find somebody, um, at that level of fluency, because you really need to be truly bilingual to teach a social studies class in Spanish. Right. Well, if they're doing well, it would be hard. It's probably not like a massive budget increase. Right. Like, to the point about paying more for somebody, you pay 20% more from a teacher. I understand that. I'm just asking generally. Right. It's sort of about keeping sort of a special program throughout, you know, eight, this is the ninth year these students have been in if they started in kindergarten. Correct. It's amazing. Yeah. And then for high school, how does, what's the? High school, they're going to, that'll be, they're going to have, um, Spanish teachers teach the content because they don't have content teachers to do that. So Spanish teachers will teach either a literature class, you know, a literature class. So the Spanish teachers will teach different sections based on, on that. So it'll be in Spanish. Um, and, but they'll be doing a lot of advanced literature. Right. That they wouldn't typically do in a Spanish class. Okay. So there might be sort of an incremental cost there. You've got more Spanish sections. Yes, but they would probably, they would take that instead of something, instead of something else. So right now they don't participate. Okay. So in terms of high school next year, this is where there is a big enrollment. Uh, because there's a much bigger in on ninth grade class than there is class leaving. So we, you know, overall class sizes will be comparable, but they will not be the same. This is where our greatest risk is. We don't know yet. It, it students sign, you know about, uh, sections when students sign up for classes. But as you see here, we can't promise that all the sections will be the same. Nor can we promise that all the elective sections, they may be capped. If we get a little more money from the state, um, then we have now, this would be the area where we would want to put it. But obviously we just have the governor's budget. So it's premature to count on anything else. Next, um, the children's way. Um, this is where, you know, we go through data. And due to the enrollment, we will be reducing one classroom teacher. And still have class sizes that will work. Um, so, you know, non-personality. That's the only personnel change from fiscal year 26 to 27. That's the only budget, budget based, based on enrollment. We, you know, it was hard to touch. And we hard started with the standards that we didn't want to reduce. And then the high school is also under pressure. So that's. And no efficiencies to be found in the admin side of this. Uh, we did it all. We did it all last kind of. And when I say admin, we kind of have a handful of people in our central office. My first year I cut a teaching and learning position, cut an HR position. And then, you know, the question is, do the schools get the support they need? Um, so we, we didn't do that this year. Um, in terms of some of the areas, you know, transportation, again, is both. You can see that it kind of our budget book is range is from five to 30%. We have some out of district placements with an increase in transportation is 30%, which is really, really high. The opera, the Office of Operational Services, which is a state agency. It's not DESE that controls that. So that is a challenge for all districts in terms of. Is there an effort or, I mean, it just seems like for schools to collaborate or to work together. I don't know if to try to find more efficient. Yeah. I know some of it's just, you need. Five to 30%. These are very, these are specialized schools that are raising in some cases their tuition, you know, 30% due to their costs. Um, in some cases it's less, it's five or even 10%. Um, but even 10%, if you think about our increase in 10%, it puts great pressure on the rest of our budget. Um, and, you know, transit, same thing, even, you know, five year, 5% increase in transportation is still, you know, it's, it's not significant, but it's higher than what our budget to budget increases. Increases certain our superintendents group and the mass association school committee. As communities have tried to address this again, it's, it's a, it's a handful of schools, but we have two students with tuition going up, going up 30%. Um, even like athletics for, you know, which is really important here. That transportation is calling up 6.67%. It doesn't sound like a lot. But if you think about our cap, it's still, it's still not insignificant. Um, we're in a multiple year contract for based transportation. Exactly. This is, this is year three. General education transportation is a 5% increase in year three of the contract. Which, you know, you would take in this, in this environment. Um, and some other things, um, almost transportation, which you, you know, we get some reimbursement did go up by a fair amount. Um, we are circuit breaker offset circuit breaker is the reimbursement you get for high cost tuitions. And how does that work again? The state gets you the year later, you get reimbursed. So we pay the first whatever 50,000 and then we get, depending on, depending on what the reimbursement is filled. Okay. And that's determined, you know, by the legislature budget at the end. So we don't know that yet. So you want to budget fairly conservatively, but we include an offset of, you can see that almost 2.4 million dollars is our circuit breaker offset from our 26, from our last year. Expenses. That's what we'll have next year. Um, building maintenance. Is that coming in sort of as expected or the circuit? Yeah. Yeah. Kirsten, it pretty much came in as expected, right? So I might that. For this year, Kirsten, our, our circuit breaker was. Yes. For FY26, it's coming in as expected and FY25, because of the move ins, you had extraordinary relief as well. So there was a slight bump due to those significant costs. Right. So when you're out of district, tuition and transportation goes up more than 25% due to unexpected, you get some extraordinary relief from the state. We didn't qualify this year, but we did qualify last year. That's why you saw that very large number of non personnel expenses. Those, that was due to the increase in tuition as Kirsten said. Um, and building maintenance, we're just doing some contracted services instead of hiring some students. That is revenue neutral. Hockey is the third year of a four year investment. Is that hiring students to do building maintenance? It's just to prepare in the fall. It's preparing school in the fall. Okay. Having some, you know, students. But it is your contracted services. Just, I mean, the structures will be easier. Um, it's not maintenance. It's just getting ready. When, when there's summer school and you have a couple of weeks to get a school ready, you need, you need a lot of, a lot of hands on. Okay. Anything else about that, Kirsten, I should say? I have a quick question. Yeah. You mentioned earlier, I think, around infrastructure, some of the technology you use. And you mentioned moving away from Mac into Chromebooks. Is that reflected in non personnel expenses? That is non personnel. Exactly. That, that was pretty much, our tech budget was level service. I think it was 460. Correct. Right, Kirsten? It didn't increase.
It's available in technology. And there's something called a Chromebook Plus, which does a lot. Um, has there been any conversation around less technology? And potentially, given what we know about using technology as a tool for young minds, has there been any conversation around that? There's certainly a great question. You know, 10 years ago, if I was at a parent meeting, 10, 12 years ago, questions would be, when are you going to have one-to-one computers, so all the kids are going to have a computer. Today's the question are, how can you get the technology, particularly at elementary, less on my kids' hand. I want kids holding books. This is high school that we're talking about. And you have to have some technology in a high school. But what's really different now, you don't have computer labs. Plenty of times you walk into a classroom, you know, computers are shut down. And, you know, you even have kids doing some paper and pencil essays today. That is due to a different kind of technology where we're going back. The art of the blue book has come back to college campuses. That is something that was not seen for a while. So that is part of our experimenting. But some technology is needed, but you're absolutely right. Face-to-face discussion is a lost art. That's why I really wanted to be here. I said, can I come in person for that? He said, absolutely. Even better. I said, great. That's what I like. So that's not- Maybe. Maybe there's a cost savings there maybe at some point. Yeah. I mean, it's hard to know. I mean, technology has come down a lot in terms of cost. That's true. Like, we are going to, you don't see an increase in our technology budget. That would have been unheard of years ago when it was going up. So that is one good news story is the cost of technology is not increasing. All right. I think we pretty much, Kirsten, should we go to, do I have anything else? Not really. Why don't we do some special ed? Any questions? Any questions? Any questions? I guess one thing I was kind of curious about, you kind of touch on at the high level in that but the $900,000 increase in expenses, do you have sort of a breakdown of where those are going? You talking about non-personnel? Yes. Yeah. Kirsten, the 900 in non-personnel expenses is mostly all student services, correct? Correct. And then there's also the general transportation, homeless transportation. Right. Those are all contribute to that. Especially tuition and transportation, I should say both. Okay. Because the rest of our non-personnel budget, our non-personnel budget is only going up 1.9%. That's really low. Yeah. In terms of you're seeing, you know, if you go line by line, you're seeing a lot of lines just literally flat. And we went line by line in order to do that. Do you know the details? I know in the past you've had kind of a more detailed book that was online. For whatever reason, I can't get into the school committee or anything. Yup. We have it all. And we'll make sure that gives you line. It literally is line by line. Right. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sorry. We will get that. It had been on the website in the past too. I don't know if it is. I'm not able to. Did they put it on the website? No, they're going to be voting, I believe, Wednesday. And we had a couple of corrections. So it wasn't formalized yet. Okay. We can certainly, we will certainly get that. Thank you. Thank you. Sorry, maybe I'm sort of off. I was, so looking at the town budget that was sent out, it had this school budget, school expenses line, almost 10% increase. That's, I guess, I'm trying to match what we heard there. That was the non-personnel. The non-personnel is the expenses. Okay. I thought you said it was by 2%. The overall budget is up by 2%. Right. So 2%. 2% of like a 54 million is about, let me just think, one million. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Kirstie, how do we have the map there? The total. The total budget, I'm sorry, I'm just looking at the top and under slide, right? Yeah. 5.6 million. 15 million total budget. 1 million increase. 1.9% total. That's not including the salary increases, because those are all in the reserves. not including the salary increases because those are all correct in the reserves but it's mostly the 9.75 percent increase in school expenses that's what's mapping to those those kind of high level that's i think so that's on so if you look at slide nine that's the total non-personnel that's the special item so that maps to the to brian's presentation of expenses
all right should we go to just share some data this will be really useful very specific special ed presentation appreciate the acronym spelling absolutely we don't want jargon phil we don't want jargon that is not good for anybody first page was enough yes all right this will be this will be jargon free so these are just our special education goals a big part has been i'm not going to run through this want to go back to the first one kirsten just but to develop programming so we can keep students in district to the greatest extent possible and really serve them here which is david this is relatively this is a trend that we've been on for last since you've been in this role the last we've expanded um certainly our special ed programming district particularly in two areas students with learning disabilities in the area of like dyslexia reading as well as social and emotional you know those two we certainly have programs we're just expanding them more at the secondary level particularly the high school um and some elementary as well okay so next kirsten i'm not going to run for this next slide it's kind of some of our initiatives but i want to be sensitive to time yeah so these are just you know a bunch of our programs language-based programs and here what you see is this is the number of students that we project um in various schools you can see clay pit hill all our elementary programs are clay pit hill that's why there's so many more students and those students go into the middle and high school that's changing it um go ahead children's the children's way yeah a couple of things a lot of students are going into kindergarten who are on ieps and also students in the children's way once they took students turn three they go in when you have an iep regardless of what your birthday is so if you have a birthday in march you have an iep you will go right into the children's way because it's age three it doesn't start in september so you can get students moving in at different times so that's why but we are anticipating somewhat of an enrollment drop but remember there are other students there there are gen ed students there because it's an integrated preschool so half the students are not on ieps and half are but based on our projections that's why we're reducing it teacher um so and there are the other numbers um we've got 18.7 percent of students on ieps high school is going up just slightly that we have a much bigger class they are going middle school going going down a little bit so um you know we do have a decrease in our special education pro overall uh for a range of reasons and these are students who when i say decrease the special education these are not students these are in district special education students so we're we just have more students in general education providing general education support so they you know that they will just not get support through an iep there's a cost fewer meetings less paperwork um this doesn't have a lot to do with tuition and transportation because this is not this is the mild to moderate population not students who would go out of district next so what we do have at the same time while we have a decline overall in special education we have an increase of students with more intensive needs and this is the key is numbers down intensive needs increasing particularly in the social and emotional behavior and physical disabilities and those are the students most likely to be out of district and right now we have 102 students that are in district programming um which is a lot it's 21 percent these are specialized programs for students whether it's social and emotional whether it's learning or whether it's different kinds of learning disabilities for the most part so next and we also have a grant to work with students there's 102 sorry 102 students you said there were 44 out of district yeah and the rest are within yeah they're within their home schools so i go to happy hollow or loker and i guess i'm in a co-taught classroom with a special ed and gen ed teacher these are students all um in district and any student who would get specialized transportation would be a student in a program in the district that that would that would be students in specialized programs next um we did get a grant we're always looking for money to help with students in a timeout room these are secure spaces for students who become dysregulated or also looking at um you know we have really strong programs now one of our elementary programs at clay pit for students uh with dyslexia we're thinking about can we tuition a couple of students in um some revenue and that you we have to be careful only do a couple at a time but that's something now that our programs are really strong we may have an opportunity to bring a couple of students in district um that's just kind of an overview of our different programs at different schools we can keep going kirsteen um so this is an important slide these are our programs that are district-wide um and they they vary their language-based programs their life skills programs um that's for students who go up to age 22 that we're responsible for um i mentioned social emotional language based and you can see the total program cost like we would lose students in language based but you can see what it is if we go out of district that gives you a sense of out of district tuition so that we would we pay that comparable but those are really for students that we can't educate here and we we try to bring students back when we can but you can see those costs are really significant 130 170 80. i should also say that that does not include transportation so that's another 60 60 000. is any sort of anecdotal evidence of how having these programs and sort of expanding some of that has helped i think what it does is we've had you know we have students with more intensive needs and we've been able to hold the number where in other places that number would be going up with more intensive needs and certainly at the high school keeping students um who we've had students bring students back who haven't been in public school and coming back to the high school because we have an intensive program and reading support for students who are dyslexic at the high school that's relatively new um what you can see is there are three different kinds of out of district placements there's private placements where we have 36 students these are state approved schools tuition set by the school approved by the office of uh what's it called inspectional services right uh yes and then we have collaboratives which are non-profit public schools that are less restrictive we have six students there and then we have two students that we tuition into other districts typically those may be districts like one of the students is tuitioned in a newton they have a program for students with physical disabilities we just don't have a cohort so it wouldn't make sense for us to run for a program like that but that would be less restrictive and less costly than a private place lastly one more slide to show actually two more slides so you can see the range of i'm not going to read this to you but you can see the range of placements uh tuitions we have average is 128 collaborative average is 93.5 it typically increased five percent a year so i mean i should note that as i said at the start but it's just there there are several that have tuition increases between 20 to 32 and you see what the average cost of transportation i've already mentioned that and we also have students who are eligible out of district to age 22 because of their level of their disability um i referred to this earlier um when a student moves in we'll go back kirstie uh if a student moves in at a district from a public or collaborative we start funding right away but the students in a private school um and they move in only if before april first after after april first it's on that other district's time for another year um and you can see if parents live in two different districts we split the cost that's just good information for you to know um it also speaks to kind of it's just unpredictable when our students move in and we've certainly experienced that lastly um circuit breaker um there it is um you're mentioning fill the close to 50 000 for the threshold um 75 percent um 45 to 50 for transportation in district cannot be claimed um what are we hopeful for this year kirsten in terms of circuit breaker uh well they are telling us at the state level that there is 150 million of fair share money that is funding circuit breaker that is meant to get all districts um up to the 75 percent reimbursement for the tuition over the 53 000 that you spend um so we are hopeful again when we projected our um reimbursement uh 2.39 is again conservative we did use the 75 percent reimbursement on tuition and we leveled at um 50 percent for transportation so if all things go well at the state and there's enough money at the end of the year they will issue uh any variances that they have left over in circuit breaker and and distribute that out so we might have a little bit more than the 2.39 million that we have right um rejected the one thing to add you know if you heard what kirsten said that um you know the state is using money that was a you know that came from the millionaire's tax for circuit breaker and what that tells you is how tight things are at the state level because initially it was not necessarily for circuit breaker but districts were in such a challenge in this area and the state is so short that they're using this money i think that that's kind of telling where we are i mean i support it don't get me wrong but give you a sense of the challenges that we're facing at the state and local level did we end up getting less than 75 reimbursement last year or in one of the other i don't know kirsten what we got last year the transportation was not funded at the student opportunity act level that they had hoped for but we did get extraordinary relief so that helps so ultimately it kind of topped it off yes would have been so for 44 students we might get 40 000 per student is it about 40 for the 44 kids kirsteen what's your guess uh in terms of what we would get again it depends on their placement yeah so it i can't give you a off the cuff number we we do have a worksheet that we're required to maintain and submit for the circuit breaker information and it is very delineated by student and all of the additional services so it's not just their tuition a lot some of them require nursing that goes um with them for their transportation so there's a lot of one-to-one additional costs inclusive of this calculation that we get reimbursed for that's an excellent example because when i talk about physical disabilities many of these you know some of these students are going to school with full nursing and that's part of the overall package in terms of circuit paper reimbursement right questions in terms of the overall presentation yeah yeah yeah i mean i guess i go back to a little bit my philosophy earlier one i think of your five pillar slide and uh i think those of us i mean i teach you back in college and i just came from the travel science workshop to the discovery museum so i'm very pro-education we all want to see the pillars grow but on the other hand i see five percent growth which is getting higher than inflation and uh probably not sustained in the long term so if you were to look at your five pillars where would you look if you had to save a million dollars out of your budget where in those pillars would you look yeah so i think i'm going to go back to something i said other i think we are at a you know we're like every other district the challenges are all in the same area and the question is what's the role of the state going to be in special education tuition and transportation i i think that's really the key question because we're actually holding the line on a lot of costs you know when i look like when i step back and look at our budget it's really special education tuition and transportation and we have a moral obligation to give kids what they need and so it's really hard even to sit here and talk about special education tuition transportation because it's sometimes uncomfortable to talk about because we have a moral obligation but yet every district is facing this challenge and i i do think that's why you know the question is how much of the fair share money should be used in this area and i think i can tell you that the superintendent's association of school committees the number one legislative priority is this area because we're holding a line in in kind of other areas so i appreciate your question about pillars um and i think you have to kind of hit you know hit them all like last year we reduced it gets harder because you know raising class size is a very hard it's very hard politically to touch class size in wayland it's very hard to touch programs and wayland so i mean this is like politically not easy but if you set the political side you know you you probably raise class size you have fewer electives at the high school you cap all of the cap all of that because you have to do things that are mandated so you know what's going on in higher education right now is that we're just going to cut the philosophy department we're going to cut the art history department what's challenging in public education we can't say we're not going to have third grade next year you know and so that's what's i'm very familiar with my family members of higher ed administration i'm really familiar with it what i'm seeing is they are just you know taking a sledgehammer to certain departments class sizes are up and class sizes are up so class size is kind of one area but you have to touch program two and if you touch student services it may be on the mental health side because special education there's a lot of mandates i feel like we already touched i don't know how we can cut building maintenance anymore because we've level funded and we and we and we shouldn't so those are kind of the areas where um it's it's it's really hard and i mean districts are we're going to have to do this because your question is actually a realistic one too because if we don't pass an override next year we're going to hit all those areas so that's my answer the reason i like showing the pillars because it gives you a sense of like where our touch points would be the answer is they would be all five yeah and are you aware of any just off of your conversation um you mentioned the group that you're a part of and having these conversations around special education and just the um the obligation but simultaneously the challenge right with trying to continuously fund an unexpected amount in increasing cost um are you aware of any legislation or anything at the state level to try to address like great question so i think it is you know how do you you know fully fund circuit breaker because that's the reimbursement for students so when that percentage goes down like kirsten was talking about in transportation that gets really difficult so how do you really get that really really high and you know part of it is we have a higher standard here in massachusetts which is you know in terms of taking care of people with all kinds of needs and and i will tell you what's really hard right now is that the cut the federal cuts in medicaid are making it really hard for education and and this is going on everywhere and what it is because you know the largest cost of every state is public health and medicaid and what happens is states are like massachusetts are having to make up some of the difference for medicaid and that's competing with education dollars because education is second after health care and so that is that's a real dilemma so you know part of the answer to the question is that actually we need to fully fund medicaid more medicaid the federal will actually help us in education because it's actually all interconnected one question i wonder about it's just to break out that nine hundred thousand seven hundred dollars of expense growth kind of i know it's in the details there yeah even just an email back we can do that kirstie the nine hundred thousand yep um in terms of where it is absolutely great question yeah yeah because if we took that away your you know uh budget growth would be you know two percent or two and a half percent or something yep david if i can add it i think it's important to recognize that with the special education the out of district tuition and transportation budget per se that is has taken a two-year cycle to get caught up to when we've had those move-ins because the budgeting cycle does not match when we are required to take on the expenses of any move-ins because right now we're delivering you a budget that we anticipate for the students that we have now and their costs we have a month and a half before april 1st that things could change so that's why we've been very proactive to try to hold on to any additional reserve money and not have to spend the entire um stabilization fund that should truly be a safety net um to help us out and so that has also impacted that non-personnel increase this year because we are getting to where our true costs are for those students that we are out placing right now got it question came up at fincom one day i think on the special uh ed reserve fund was should it be bigger so can handle some of those fluctuations yes i would answer i understand great any other questions for tonight thank you david sure if you have other questions thank you christine let us know we appreciate the sample questions keep us posting so much we will good night that's great appreciate it sure um there is a proposal to actually take all the articles that we've already said 7001 and just and then i think the select board is that as you read the note from carol that was i that's how i wrote it back to just make sure that i was understanding correctly um in my summary and i haven't gotten confirmation okay okay but i don't think that we'll need to go through every article we'll just adopt the language and then hand it back to our select board member yes i would copy pam on it all just to have so make sure yes make sure you're you know well that the the finance comments are and that you take out sort of all the stuff about background information and you take out the pros and cons since we're not doing those um yeah that that it fits i think april sent the sort of the template but then was right okay for the you know no financial yeah or if there are proposers comments just let me just make sure that started reaching out to the select board where are your proponents comments but if i can cut myself out of that happy too yeah that's what the thought was okay so when did this uh when did this yell today today this afternoon i think you were copied on it it's the one i'm thinking of i didn't read it that way and it's also would be inconsistent with what i was told by the select board a few days ago which is that just because we've voted that there's no financial impact he's not the end of the story that that sometimes they look to think i'm to write more coherently than perhaps some proponents might so i'll be so who determines if we are to write that article i think we are so but let's let's hear what she has to say in response to hearing out so i had a similar question because i did arguments in favor and arguments opposed for a few of my articles that still had no financial impact just to have those pros and cons and carol wrote back and said you don't need it based off of the law and right that whole thing um i said well i thought we were there were some that we wanted to have pros and cons um so i was confused as well in all i think when we've voted that there's no financial impact no pros and cons that there's it's it's there are no finest committee comments except for that little blurb on we're not taking position um and then you take out any pros and cons right like it's we don't do the write-up the work that we typically would do for each article i think that's great about the pros and cons i'm not so sure that we don't do a short i think we don't we don't we did last year though no i don't think we did no no i'm not easy enough to check yeah that's fine not what she says because i don't want to do any more work on that no i don't i don't i think that that the the goal of the change in the i think carol was behind that sort of yes amendment to the was was so that we don't that fincom does not have to to do anything for for non-financial and if the proposer has comments they can be included otherwise the article stands on its own um and people can assess it and the town assesses it okay and i also say the other thing that carol did mention is that town council has been asked to review the articles that were submitted for non-financial so they could come back to us correct if we're doing not other discussion points there was the wayland post article this past week and i just wanted for clarification for the record to say that it really wasn't the school budget that i was talking about it was the whole budget that we hadn't got in town we usually oftentimes i mean it was we hadn't seen yet the detail on the schools but we also hadn't seen anything detail on town so it was it was or the capital budget so um your point is relevant i just wanted to be clear on that because that's what initiative to send a letter to the editor uh for that right because because it's true like the the timing it is typically something where it's an iterative process um and years and number of years number of times in the past um fincom has had questions and it's been the budget has changed we've made adjustments based on the questions and some of the time for that sort of pressure points that we've noted so and the response to that is what you saw today which is we have lots of questions and and we will need more time and to get them answered the uh and so pam just for context um the reporter reached out to me okay i reached out uh before the article went out and then i reached out to michael uh who connected with the reporter okay um so i'm not sure of the nature of what got covered in that conversation but she got back to me and said look i'm all set i just spoken to michael um and then as come not surprised ai drafted the article like they you know what was in the paper did its best at listening to us and did its best at interpreting what we said my little quote had a ken versus can't switch and here that happens exactly the opposite of what i said but it was not yeah right it's well just the nature of trying to communicate and through the press you know period but these days and so thank you for taking this initiative and i would encourage anyone that would be out there to speak up it was great to flag me and carol we're all responsible adults here reading it as religiously so now it wasn't a big deal bill and i were and pam were on the front page of the women's post my luckily it was really short yours was a lot they're celebrities but that's fine yeah it does speak to the communication challenge that we've talked to before and you know trying to help you know put all of this work together in context and be able to communicate it to all the town's residents so we can all make good decisions ongoing challenge um just one comment before closing terms you know phil i was thinking a lot about your question to why person is that is that really expected and sort of how that's over inflation and certainly i think you expressed maybe personally not what you were expecting right um and what part of i think um fourth of the answer is that you know in short response is no right like that is what they're modeling out and what i took away from his response though is like really there are two pieces that are driving that to five percent as opposed to three right the first is the retirement piece the second is the health care and i think without a substantial departure from what we're doing in those two areas we don't know that we have the opportunity to really drive that number down and so i think in terms of trying to put emphasis on where we need to actually have an impact i think that's it i think that's like where we need to really focus um in terms of i'm looking at the health care rates like the health care rates they're not great like they're like in the sense that they're not great for anyone right like these are this is a high coverage right like and a rate for an individual for a month is like eighteen hundred dollars like that is you know health care is not economically sustainable right for a town for a country right of course and i know that there is there is legislation in massachusetts i don't know if you guys are well aware to look at single-payer options um for the state there are there's but it's the the and i've been through the legislative processes there's this will it wouldn't surprise me if this would be one of you know 10 000 bills that get filed and not acted on sure but it doesn't change the fact that i think as a town the focus should be on trying to explore avenues that are within our control like i can think of a number of things that i'm not sure if we've explored that that like i think are worthy of just conversation with trying to understand if there's an appetite if there's a cost saving like i know that some of the companies that like we generally work with like they'll offer an opt-out credit so you feel are married to your spouse they are looking at that great excellent so i'm not sure you know yeah so things like that that i think like we need to explore because i think without being able to have other conversation about like what do we do then it's just the only other lever there is then just start reducing services it's a hard conversation and people don't like to have that conversation but he mentioned that we you know next year if we don't get prop two and a half perhaps then they have to do it yeah i like i just like people doing hypothetically oh yeah no we went through that all with the budget process we're starting to think of having two budgets yeah that was a question that i just asked you is even like putting this budget together how much forethought was there into okay we're setting this baseline base for foundation for next year and we may have to go one of two directions that's right and so one of the conversations was doing a prop two and a half in the same time that you're trying to negotiate all the bargaining unit for whatever it is two-thirds or three-quarters of 10 employees adds another whole level of complication together right so we are working but we're skimming by with just getting us through and um and you know if even if the debt service was lower this year and yeah you know they're they're they're like we've kind of you know over the past few years we've kind of made tweaks here and there and we've used some cash where we hadn't always in the past and i think highways used to be um like dpw we used to do like six hundred thousand in cash and then we decided we're going to do that as a capital thing going forward so i mean we've made changes and made some tweaks to kind of keep eking out and we're really at the end of at the end of the line and and i just hope there's and i know it i completely understand the complications with collective bargaining at the same time as doing a budget but i i just really hope next year we're prepared with strategies and communication and communication and just
it may very well need to be a multi-year override right our last override we misremember the dates i think was 2013 and maybe it was yeah so we haven't had a lot of experience it's been a long time yeah and and that means you know a lot of town residents have never and and it also means like having to identify what would be cut if it doesn't pass because that will be one of the people's first questions great i guess we heard i was going to say we now have a 40 000 capital and a property tax deduction so maybe we have a tax savings we're actually going the other way so think about who wants to be the finance committee chair can we have a motion to adjourn motion to adjourn second on favor
unanimous