July 27, 2026 – Finance Committee – Video & Transcript
July 27, 2026 - Finance Committee
And now being about 7.02, I call the meeting, this meeting of the Finance Committee to get to the border. We have in the room Iris Hoxha, Brian O'Hurlihy, Krishnak Honda.
We are visited tonight by Brian Kemeny, the Town Finance Director. And I'm Karl Barnes. And I believe that I see Rob Quimby joining us by Zoom.
Yep. Good evening.
And even as we speak, Satish Raj has joined us. I know that Bill Huss is not available, so we are good to go.
We've got a pretty close end of the night, but I'm going to start, as usual, by reading the following.
This meeting is being recorded and will be made available to the public on WACAM as soon as possible after the meeting.
Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, this meeting will be conducted in person and via remote access in accordance with applicable law.
One may watch or participate remotely with the meeting link that can be found on the board slash committee Zoom links tab on the town's homepage.
When required by law or allowed by the chair, persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise may participate in the meeting,
may do so at the meeting location, as to say in person or through remote access,
and public comments should be limited to two minutes per person.
We have a full agenda, and I refer anyone who might be watching this now or later to a full agenda as published on the town's website. Briefly, though, we will take public comment, if any. If you want to welcome our newest member, we'll take a look at and hopefully vote to approve the minutes of the July 13th meeting. Brian Keveney, the finance director, will provide an overview of the multi-year budget model. Klaus Schindler, pardon me, who is a member of the town's audit meeting, is going to join us to discuss the possible reappointment, his possible reappointment. We'll take a few minutes to discuss our own goals and timelines for fiscal 27th. We'll take a look at the 2026 warrant articles and review our process for, and try to improve that process for dealing with the warrant articles in fiscal 2027. We'll also take a preliminary look at the fiscal 2028 capital budget. To be clear, that doesn't exist yet, but we'll be looking at the capital plan, five-year capital plan, as it exists in the, as of the 2026 annual town meeting warrant, and perhaps take a look at the, at what CPSI, the capital improvement planning committee, had recommended. Finally, if there's time, we'll be looking at the, at sort of a high overview of the proposition two and a half process, and identify those among us who will take the lead in reviewing presentations and reports for prior prop two and a half overrides, and think about what getting to prepare documentation should one be in regards this year. And with all that, we look forward to adjourning at approximately 9, 9, 10.
I have no announcements. Anybody else? No. Okay.
Ravi, are there any members of the public? I'll see you on the public online. Okay. In that case, I'd like to turn to our newest member, Krishnakanda. I think most of you, I have a chance to talk with him already, but you can give us the highest level of view. Sure. Krishnakanda, you know, new resident here. It's been like three years at Weiland. I've been in Mass for about 24 years and a half. I was primarily watered on, and we did have a middle schooler and high schooler. I've been enjoying the Weiland so far. I've decided to do lacrosse, soccer, and so on and so forth. I'm really happy to contribute in whatever shape and form I can. Very glad to have you here. Is there anybody you have met yet? Who is? Is that this? He does it. Yeah. Good to see you. Yeah, I think it's a big time to get over here. You'll get to know us all probably more than you really want to. We'll have plenty of time for that. You're welcome.
Ryan was kind enough to draft the minutes of the July 13th meeting, which you've seen. And I'd like to see if there's any discussion about those minutes.
I'll tip my hand. I thought you were great. I'm sorry. One second. Hey, Robbie. Yeah. Is there a meeting, passcode for this meeting? Passcode? Yeah. I'll go Zoom. Yeah, for the Zoom. Yeah, for the Zoom. Okay.
They text. Text or somebody? No, it's fine. For sure? Yep. There is a passcode. There is a passcode. You want that? Yes, please. 003-479. 003-479. How about that? That's correct. We're recording in progress. I didn't think those invitations came out of the passcode. All right. Are we still connected to the public? Yeah, we're still connected. Okay. Yeah, I see it. I can bring you over. I see you. Yes, thank you. Great. So you're looking at those minutes now? I'm good at the minutes. Oh, okay. I'm good at the minutes. You should move over right now. Thank you.
Rob, I can't see you, but are you okay with the minutes, or do you have comments? Yep. Well, good to me.
You're nodding. Okay.
Brian, you wrote them, so I assume you like them, but if you can't change them. I have no proposed changes. Okay. In that case, I would move the question. All in paper for approving the minutes of the July 13th meeting as drafted. We need a motion and a second person. Oh, that was a motion? I hear my move. Oh, you made the move. Oh, I'm sorry. You made the move in. I second. Okay. Got it. All in favor. You need a roll call vote with Paris. Yes. Carl's, yes. So, do you, she is?
I probably should have stated from this one again. Okay. And Rob? Yes. All right. Thank you. Yes. All right. 5-0-1. Thank you. Thank you. Frank, Kevin, I did get you in here a few minutes earlier. And was on the agenda. So, if you, you can address the multi-year budget model and tell us what the big picture looks like. I greatly appreciate it. So, the one that came up on the screen is a little variation. I had sent this file to the Finance Committee to Brian and Carla probably two weeks ago. Brian came back and added the yellow tab on the file left, which is this one here, but I'm not going to go over this one. So, what this is, this is a file that we've used for over a decade on the Finance Committee. The Finance Committee used multi-year monomer and extensively, looks like 2014 to 2018 then, kind of stopped doing it. It's an important tool to do when you're preparing a budget. You have to look at the ideas to find the impact. So, what I did was rebuild it and I gave it to Brian and Carl because you folks will most likely need to get a presentation on an override or not. This file here will help you do that. This is the same file we're going to use internally to figure out what we're doing with the fiscal 28 budget and overrides. So, let me explain it. So, if you can see it, it starts off with revenue, which is the green tabs. And what I did was, and again, this is a big file to a lot of tabs, but it's broken out into different areas. So, it starts out with the green tabs and their revenue, which is a projection of the transfers from other funds. It has the local receipts, state aid. And what I do is I project out by cost driver. For example, 1.02 means a 2% increase. So, everything in here is driven by cost drivers. So, what you have is you have the first one, all revenue. The second one here, tab, is a summary of the excluded levy, sorry, the levy limit, state aid, local receipts, and transfers from other funds. As we keep going down, I'm trying to get rid of this.
Bobby, how can I get rid of this screen here? I can move the files.
Sidebar, how do you get rid of that?
You're trying to move here. I'm trying to scroll down. All right. Thank you. So, the next tab here is the levy. And what I did was I projected out what the levy limit is going to be. So, I believe it would go to 37, probably. So, at fiscal 27, you see the red yellow, 600,000. That's not confirmed yet by DOR. So, that's a projection at this point based upon the fiscal 26 levy limit. We're expecting new growth to be around 600,000. Last year, it was higher. As you can see, it was 934. But in the past bunch of years, it's been far less than that. So, right now, we're carrying $600,000 as the new growth. And what I do here is I factor out what the levy limit is going to be for those multiple years, which does not include an override. Line 8 is the debt exclusion. You see a number in there, for example, fiscal 27 starts with $5 million. That's the expected, that is our excluded debt that we've already borrowed in our capital budget. It's in our debt right now. Can I interrupt for just one second? For Satish and Krishna's benefit. I'm sure all of this will be Greek view. So, this is probably absorbed. And then maybe, as I reached out to the two of you, maybe we can get together and I can try to reinforce some of the concepts here. And on that note, could we take a little bit of time just to pause real quick? So, for the levy, Brian, do you want to explain real quick how we get, I mean, I think it's pretty obvious here that you add the numbers, but do you want to just really quick explain prior to your levy limit, what that means, plus what Prop 2.5 increase means, and then new growth? Just real quick. To what extent do you guys understand Prop 2.5? These are brand new folks here. So, you understand the high level. So, basically, it's a state mandate, I believe, in the 1980s maybe, Prop 2.5, was it the 80s, that it was voted in in Massachusetts that communities can increase their levy limit by 2.5%. No more than that, it's also driven by new growth. So, for example, in fiscal 26, we had a levy limit of 86.7 million. What we do is we add 2.5% to that, and we add in the new growth, which in that case was $900,000. So, you're starting the next year at 89.8. And it's basically a roll forward of 2.5%. But what drives this thing beyond 2.5% is new growth. Also, what is included in the overall limit, which is called the max limit, is you add excluded debt. That is when the residents vote certain capital projects that are outside Prop 2.5. It's called excluded debt, and that's on line 8. So, for example, in fiscal 27, you see on the line 8, you see $5 million. That's the excluded debt amount. We actually have that same amount as expenses in our budget. So, we can increase the levy by $5 million because we actually have $5 million of debt expense in our budget. So, it's just simply an offset. So, what I have factored in here is the next five years of excluded debt because our capital plan only goes out five years, and it's purely assumptions at that point. So, when we look at this file, pretty much 28 and 29 are your more confident numbers. Once you start getting past 30, 31, 32, things get cloudy because you don't know ultimately what we're actually going to vote for capital budgets, and they may change, and we may have changes in our new growth. So, as of right now, our best case scenario is that we're going to start fiscal 28 with a living limit prior of 92.6. We're going to have 2.3 million, up 2.5% increase, and $600,000, which brings us to $95.6 million. To that, we add the $4.8 million. So, walking into fiscal 28's budget, we have a total of $100.4 million that we can raise without an override. Again, once we start going to the out years, things get cloudy because we're not real sure at that point. But this is our best guess at this point. And as you go through the budget cycle, it'll pick up to you what the levy limit is and why we have an override because we can't raise taxes beyond how we want it to have a big deal. Let me scroll down just a little bit further. I think I added, since you're using the file I sent you, I think I added a couple of rows to this one.
Maybe I didn't. Okay, keep going. All right, so the next revenue stream is state aid, and each year we get state, for the cherry sheet, the state gives each city and town money to run their budgets. Our money that we're projecting at fiscal 28 is, you know, the total of, and they go down to the bottom, you know, is about a little over $10 million. We're driving this as a cost increase of 2.5%. I wouldn't recommend going over 2.5%. I know internally we're not going to be going over 2.5%. It could be volatile. Seems like when the state gets pressured from municipalities that they didn't get enough aid, we end up getting a little bit more aid in the spring after we vote the budget. That's typically how it works. But for purposes of the budget, we're going to carry 2.5%. We're walking into fiscal 28 with about a $10 million budget for state aid. And with this also comes assessments, which is really expenses that offset our aid. So anytime you hear of our net aid, it's basically what the state's going to give us, and then they take some away. So through the course of the budget season, you'll hear folks referred to as net state aid, and that's what that means.
Next, we have local receipts.
And this is what various departments will sell permits, fees. Pretty much this is all driven by town departments, not the school department. So we had a very good year, fiscal 26. We were, it's hard to explain all, because everything sort of falls into one. So the DOR allows us to put on a revenue called local receipts. It's based on what you actually did the year before. So as we walk into fiscal 27, we had a total amount of local receipts of $1 million over budget. So our fiscal 26 budget was exceeded by $1 million. That means in fiscal 27, I can ask for more money. DOR looks at what I want compared to what we did in 26, and we'll agree to that. Having a good year goes a long way in bringing down our projection of an override. However, the sour point in all this is that one of the big drivers in our local receipts is on line 20, I'm not sure if you can see it. It's highlighted in yellow. It's $1.5 million. That's investment returns. When we have money, we put it into banks with CDs or presuries. There's only certain places we can put the money. We're bringing in $1.5 million in investment income. We don't know if that's going to last forever. So we wouldn't want to build expenses based upon investment or our income returns on our money. But for now, the fiscal 27 will be able to ask for more money on the tax recap, which ultimately means more money for fiscal 28. Can you, I'm sorry, I didn't interrupt, but can you remind me of the mechanism of that? So I understood that essentially we have a net surplus of local receipts that's higher than the year before. But then help me understand the mechanism with DOR then that basically you go to DOR and say, look, we have this million dollars in surplus from local receipts. And because of that, they're permitting you to do what? Just can you clarify that? I think DOR wants to know that based on your budget, that if you're relying on other sources other than taxation, they want to feel comfortable that you're actually going to end up collecting that. And I think what Brian's saying is... Before you can use that money in your levy? No, this is all budget, which affects the levy in that the more you're able to pay for your budget going forward with other sources of funding, state aid, local receipts, the less you rely on taxation, the less you rely on taxation, the less levy, maximum levy you're using. That makes sense. But does DOR control the amount of local receipts that you're allowed to use towards operating expenses? Yes. Okay, thank you. For your budgeting purpose, local receipts will be whatever they are. Understood. But for budgeting... Looking forward, they sort of... Okay. As a forecasting mechanism. ...put the rate in, so I think... Okay. Thank you. What Adam Brian was just talking about, you know, I remember asking four years ago about this because for years, interest rates were, you know, half a percent. And then all of a sudden, the town's balances went up for various reasons, and interest rates, short-term interest rates went up to 4% to 5%. And so we asked Brian, well, can't we include more investment income? And he said, no, you have to... The DOR is going to look back at the last year. Well, the last year was at half a percent. So they needed to see, correct, Brian, they needed to see one year of actual saying, okay, your investment income actually went up. And then that's consistently been going up. But the question is, will rates, short-term rates, stay elevated, or are they going to retreat? And two are the balances we have, some of which are driven by borrowing for large projects that got invested before they got spent on the projects.
Council on Aging Building, for example, was $11 million sitting invested for almost a year. And so for going forward basis, I think, Brian, you're saying for DOR to look at our proposed tax levy, they'll be okay with the number you have in there, and it's 2.5% higher than the actual. But as to whether we can forecast that number for the next nine years, it's kind of questionable. You're doing that at the moment. You're leaving it at that level. But if we're uncomfortable, we could adjust that downward if we wanted to be conservative, for example. Right. I mean, we're the opposite, right? Like, I understand it's less conservative to the opposite, but if it's trending up in terms of... If short-term rates go to 6%, or somehow we add $10 million to the free cash that could be invested, yeah, I mean, we could, if we think we know that now, you could push that up. But even there, what Brian says, you might forecast that, but unless you're able to evidence the DOR based on the prior year actual, you're going to get, sure, handicapped on that. You have to prove it's been done and consistent before they give you... Well, a good example of that is if you take a look at column C, the 26th, the very first one, motor vehicle. You guys can see that. It was a $3.3 million budget. We actually committed $3.2. We did not hit our budget on motor vehicle. So going into 27th, my budget is $3.3, almost identical to what my budget was in 26th, because that went backwards. Yeah. Well, that's good. So if you also don't want to overstate your local receipts, so let's say I put in 5% in DOR, you know, drank my Kool-Aid and agreed to that, and then it didn't come to fruition, we would have a drop in fund balance, because if we got, we'd be spending money, but then not an offsetting revenue. So you don't want to be too conservative, but you've got to make sure you don't put too much on this category, where you're going to get into trouble. The next one you have to concern, this is free cash. Free cash is not free, fellows. It's the unrestricted general reserve.
Iris, you know what this button is? It can get rid of it, because it gets away tabs. Iris, kind of get rid of that.
You need to move the funds against it. Clean things. Throw it away. That's the best that can be played. Thank you.
So the next category here is, again, we're going over revenue. These are offset transfers. And what these mean is that DOR allows us to put on contributions from other funds that we call transfers, but they have to be consistent. Who's currently paying into the general fund with transfers is the ambulance fund, water, wastewater. We have a few of these school departments accounts paying into. But it has to be reoccurring revenue, reoccurring transfer revenue. What this is is accounts that run payroll or the grants that allow fringe benefit payments to the town. Once the grant runs out, the money's gone. But what I do is I scrub all of our grants and I get all the fringe and I bring that into the general fund and bring that in as unbudgeted revenue to offset the expenses. DOR does not allow us to put, for example, the OPEP grant. I'm not sure if you can see that one, but that's a grant we get. And we're paying for somebody with payroll and health insurance. So I'm able to get some money out of that grant area to offset the budget. Again, I'm not allowed to put it on. Tax recap. It is not reoccurring and it's going to run out. But this is a pretty good thing. We've picked up a lot of money to offset our Medicare tax. For those who have been around us for the first year or probably 10 years, we did not have to have a transfer of Medicare tax at the end of the end because we had all these accounts paying into the Medicare. And I'm trying to get the school to contribute more into these indirects. Are all of these recurring every year grants? Are there various state and federal grants? But you have to take a look at the grant document. Some grants do not allow fringe. Most do. And what happens is the grant comes in and it kind of slides by that we're not grabbing the fringe. So every time a grant comes in, I get the documents to see what I can take out of the fringe and then bring it to the general fund to offset the expense.
Obviously do it with the people involved. I just don't do it on my own. Some people aren't happy with it. But if we're running payroll, for example, Pegasus, that's a summer event. We're paying people. Pegasus collects fees. They should be paying the general fund back for the Medicare tax. It's basic. So most of those pay the salaries for those people. They're just not paying Medicare tax. They're not paying if they get health insurance. And that's being paid by the general fund. And so you're simply trying to say to those programs, you've got to take some of the money you got and give it back to the town. It's not really a paid by grant service, right? It's actually paid by a combination of grant and taxpayer dollars. And the next one is just a revenue table that I use in presentations. It's just a summary of the total amount of money we have available. Again, we went over one of these numbers before. It's $104 million as we're heading into. I'm sorry, the levy is $104 million. The total amount that we can raise with state aid, transfer some other funds, and local receipts is about $120 million that we can raise without an override. So next is debt. And this here is from our bank. This is all the debt service that we have currently committed. And what I have the bank do is run estimated debt service, which is on the bottom here, which I'm going to go down to. This file is enormous. There's no way I can get it on the screen. But what it does is this file includes a committed debt of principal and interest. And it also includes estimates on principal and interest on the capital projects that are in the capital plan that we have now borrowed. And what I do is I take that debt service and I map it into the five-year plan. The capital plan is pretty much married to the operating budget because debt service is a significant piece of our budget and we need to understand how much the future debt service is. Normally, we're going to have debt coming off. If you pay off loans, they're going to take them down. But we're also going to be adding in debt service. The only fault in this is that we only have a five-year capital plan at this point. So I can't go out to 10 years, maybe any years, two weeks. We can go out to 10 years and get a bigger picture. But at least I have the next four years. We'll be 28 through 31. So this is an important piece of the operating budget and it's an important piece of doing financial planning on this. I'll just go over the other ones here. This green one here, Brian put together, Brian O'Reilly, he put together an amortization of our unfunded liability with our pension. We're going to be getting a new assessment coming up and we're carrying an estimate at this point, basically off this schedule. Brian took the unfunded liability and amortized it over 10 years and came up with our projected expenses over the next 10 years. I do have that mapped into the budget. This will be updated, this file, once we get our new numbers from middle-sex retirement. So before I go to the expense side, does anybody have questions on revenue? And this, on this slide for a minute, for again, everybody's benefit, but the two new members, you know, when you look at, I don't know if I sent it to Krish and I will, but the rest of you got two slides before the last meeting. One of which showed 2027 through 2037, and it showed basically a bunch of red bars, which are, you know, structural budget deficits that mean we don't have enough levy capacity. And so either you've got to cut your budget or raise more tax revenue or get other revenue elsewhere. There's a lot of, I mean, budgets made up of all sorts of expenses, but the primary driver of not only Whelan's structural budget, but most other communities is this slide. Because the town over many, many years had an ongoing obligation to cover pensions for people that retire that work there, but they weren't funding future liabilities. The state finally said, you have to start funding that unfunded liability, which in Whelan's case was probably over $80 million at some point. And I can't see exactly, but there's probably like $50 million now. And the state said, you've got to get that fully funded to the whole Middlesex pension, not just Whelan. You have to get that fully funded by 2036. And the actuary, in turn, looks at investment returns, looks at employment, looks at wages, and then maps out how much that's going to require in annual contributions to get fully funded. And that changes every time they do that analysis, which they do every two years. But if you look at the magnitude of the numbers, you're seeing them escalate from $7 million up to $13 million, $11 million anyway. That's well in excess of, and then it drops off to basically next to nothing. Because at that point, you're fully funded on all past obligations. And now you're currently funding going forward ongoing obligations. And so if you're sitting in 2037, we don't have an override problem absent other expenses going haywire. It's the next nine years. And unless the state comes up with some relief mechanism, this is really the primary budget issue from my perspective. Others may see other budget drivers, and there are medical and other things. But order of magnitude, this one, and it's out of our control, other than through the size of the payroll, obviously. But so we have to just pay pretty close attention, but we don't have a whole lot of control over what the numbers are. And as I told Brian, we'll see probably in two or three weeks the actuaries updated report. As a result, they should have 28 and 29 assessments in there. They do two years' worth of fixed assessments. And then I should be able to update this for the projection. When I read the minutes a couple months ago when the actuary met with the board, as I read it, due to increased employment costs, probably largely wages as opposed to people. And although investment returns have generally been up, they've been a little volatile, at least. It's possible that those numbers could be higher. I just don't know if they're going to be higher in the front part of this chart or higher in the back part of the chart. And if it's higher in the front part of the chart, that just means what Brian's got currently in his model is shortchanging what we're actually going to owe for this item. So I just wanted to give this particular expense line item a little extra airtime. That's because we'll probably be talking about it again in a few weeks. So I hope that's helpful. And this is what needs to be explained eventually, right, for the whole right. Yes. Yeah. Do you know when Waylon started funding their pension obligations? 20 years so far? It wasn't there. And now? It's been funding currently. The question is when they started funding the unfunded. Correct. Yes, that's what I want. Yeah, I don't remember. It could be as far as anything. And I think, Brian, you've said the state at least once, maybe more than once, has extended the date by which municipalities and the Middlesex Pension Fund had to be fully funded. They haven't done that yet. And if most communities are under the same pressure for the same reason, the Mass Municipal Association, I know, has this issue on their radar. And hopefully they'll come up with a mechanism to either push that fully funded data out further, which would shrink the numbers, but still pay more, be more interest. But at least its impact each year on the budget would be a little less. The other approach that I think was raised was, which is Brian was talking about, excluded debt, which is debt the voters agree to not make subject to Prop 2 1⁄2. You just add it on the tax bill, kind of a separate item that eventually goes away when that project's been funded. If they treated these retirement payments similarly and you could treat these obligations as excluded, then that would take them out from the Prop 2 1⁄2 calculation. And all of a sudden we'd go from forecasted deficits to forecasted positive. But I think if they did that, the town would still have to vote, you know, presumably to do that. The third thing we started to talk about last year, but the select board decided not to pursue it at a town meeting. And I don't want to spend a lot of time on it now, is some communities, when interest rates are very low, investment returns are very low, interest rates are very low, they basically said, okay, we owe $50 million, we're going to go out and borrow that money and issue bonds, pension bonds, obligation bonds, and we're going to borrow that money at 2%, 2.5%, and we're going to invest that money, and we're going to give that money to the, you know, middle-section retirement fund, and now we're fully funded. And then we're going to invest those proceeds, you know, so they retire our obligation. But the risk is if the investment returns turn out, be lower than your borrowing costs. So it's a risky strategy, but some communities have used it across the country and Massachusetts. I think, is Arlington one of them? No. Well, there's one on the issue that they looked at. There's one on the North Shore that got that they're borrowing off at like 2% or something. But anyway, the working, budget working group had suggested that select and insert an article that you have to go to the state legislature to get permission to be able to borrow, you know, commit to have to borrow. And there was, I think, just too many other issues, and the select board didn't want to deal with that. Whether that comes back this year, maybe that's something that the budget working group brings up again. I thought it was worth getting the legislative part of it going, because you can't do anything until you get that stuff done. So some amount of time was spent trying to figure out how to deal with this big issue. Wasn't also part of the feedback the last time we got a report that, and maybe I'm mixing up a couple things, but that the pensioneers also lived longer than originally expected, that the actual renewal tables end up being... They can change. Right, but wasn't that, wasn't that actually, yeah, wasn't that actually listed in, or am I thinking about... No, but Rochelle can tell that we're telling the rates no longer. Right, and I think that was listed in our report as well. Maybe I'm thinking about the PEP. And it's the same concept, though. It's tied to payments to people often told they're no longer around, right? And it requires actuaris. By the way, Klaus is an actuary, so you can ask all your actuarial questions when Klaus comes in. What time is he here? Is he here? Is he here? Is he on the 30th? Yeah, he is. So, anyway, a little extra time on that one item, but I tend, as a financial person, I tend to focus on the big-ticket items because if there's something you can possibly do about them, because you have a limited time to focus on all this stuff, right? So, Klaus is my friend at Odyssey who was very helpful in a pension obligation discussion. So, Klaus, can you hear us? Can you wait for us to be here? Yeah. All right, so next what we're going to get into, we went over the revenue. So, this is... So, Brian, did you ask whether I was here? I just mentioned that Parker at Odyssey is very helpful in talking about pension obligation bonds in the past. Yeah, Parker's a good man. Yeah. So, this tab here is the town expenses, and it's a big tab. There's no way I can get it on the screen. But this is the only tab that you folks would need to update when you do your projections. What you see highlighted on the top is Brian took my file. The file I sent you has all 1.0s. Brian went in and started doing some kind of assumptions based on if town expenses go up 3%, if town payroll goes up 3%. If school expenses go up 5%, if school payroll goes up 4.5%, what does that mean? So, when you just update this yellow block, everything changes in your file. You don't have to do anything else in the file. Is that showing 1s right now? What's that? Is that showing all 1s? No, you got... It's got the numbers I put in? Yeah. Okay. It's for their benefit. We'll come back to it. But just click on the yellow tab at the front. All the yellows. So, all I did was Brian's file had those boxes we were just looking at, and the one that he sent out to all of us had 1s in there. And so, if you look at that, you would say we have no problem because we had surpluses in the levy. So, all I did is I created a separate little set of inputs here, and this basically just links then to his boxes. So, whatever we put in in those upper input sections will change those boxes that Brian was just showing in his tab, right? So, that's a direct link. And that way, we can tweak our own assumptions. Brian will be doing the same thing in his budget working groups. But anyway, you can continue on with your stuff, Brian. But I just thought it would be easier to focus on at least a set of assumptions as opposed to all 1s because all 1s is not realistic, right? So, Brian, what were your places to have some of the most important apples and apples and 3s? Well, we want to come back to that. And I know one of the sensitivities to doing this, which probably is why Brian shot this file with all 1s, is that only two union contracts are settled at this point. And so, to be fiddling around with increasing the personnel cost in the public meeting can be potentially problematic if it's certainly done by the town staff that's negotiating with unions. You don't want to put 6% in for, you know, over your increase and the unions watch our meeting and say, you know, you guys expected 6%. So, I understand that sensitivity. And so, but we need to be able to make some judgments as we're going to be asked some questions in the not-too-distant future. And we're not part of the negotiations with the union. And so, you'll probably hear me caveat this many times. As we go forward, these are just, you know, I'll talk about why I put in the numbers I put in, but they're not, for my perspective, not irrational. But we'll get back to that. Maybe not tonight, but go ahead. So, this file here, this tab here, is what I said, is a very large file. So, if you take a look at the left-hand side, what I did is I brought in every single town department, both payroll and expenses. The limitation on this, for the most part, is right here. If you take a look at line 52 and line 53 with the school department. So, I've been after the school for quite a long time to come up with their own five-year model. They need to do projections on their own, just like I'm doing. And the biggest driver in the budget is the school payroll. It's the biggest budget in the town. And what's driving the non-payroll side is special education. So, we've been talking to the school department about getting a little better about a number than just throwing out a 5% or a 4%. So, that's in the works. What you're seeing now is the unclassified area of the budget. So, the budget has three years. The town budget, school budget, and unclassified. So, to make it a little bit easier for you folks, I keyed in here what I think the increases are going to be for all the various unclassified areas. And you guys can go back to these once you start taking a look at your own assumptions. For example, I have insurance at 14% increase. Other insurances, which is general liability, property is 10, Medicare tax at 3. You can have the health insurance at 10, 12, but you want to make sure it's not too low or too high. It's sort of a juggling thing. One of the areas that we're seeing a large increase is bulk education. We're seeing more kids leaving the district, either going to Keefe Tech or Minuteman. And the budget is going up significantly. It used to be, you know, $50,000. Now, we're talking $250,000. I just got some information that, well, five more kids wanted to get into Minuteman at the end of the year. Minuteman will make a decision over the summer if they have room. So we don't even find out about this, how many kids we have in Minuteman or Keefe, until we get to August, which we're seeing this budget go up considerably as a percentage in in dollars in the last few years. But the unclassified areas, I would start at these numbers here, these percentage drivers. And if I go back to the top, and you guys all have this in your email, right?
They have the version you sent out, which didn't include the first tab. Carl, you're going to send out this version. I will, as soon as the end is over. So the cost drive is driving to all these years. If you see them going all up, they're all formulated. In some of the lines I have highlighted in yellow, for example, every three years we have an increase in elections. So we do have these sort of bumps in some of these budgets. And I try to highlight at least, at least bring attention to some of these budgets that are not just 2 or 3% every year, sometimes like elections. We have a bump because we have elections that are going to cycle. So you will see that in the file. But like I said before, all you really have to work with is this tab here, this town expenses. The ones in blue is what I did was I just took all of the information that's coming from the town expenses and built summary tables. And I brought in revenue, I categorized them instead of just saying, you know, each department. You know, I brought in general government expenses, general government payroll, public safety expenses, public safety payroll. Just summarizing a little bit. So for fiscal 28, I'll just follow that one down and it's in, it's in gray. Again, this would look working with Brian's numbers here. I'm bringing in all the, all the expenses that he's keyed in, which brings us to a total budget, which is line 52. If you can see that on the screen of 120 million point one. If you bring in there, continue down with the revenue, you see that the total expense, the total increase in the budget is 6.27. And for the most part, the reason why it's 6.27, which is a high number for Whalen, typically our budget increases are, you know, far less than that. If you, once you go back in the file, you're going to see that the unclassified category is automatically driving the budget up 3%. It's not the payroll. It's not the expenses. Because we're starting at a 3% increase simply because of health insurance, pension, Medicare, general insurance. So typically in the past, we would see a budget increase of 3.5%, 4%. But when you're already starting off at 3%, there's not a lot of room. You're running out of room. So the other, the other item that Brian talked about earlier, the debt service. One of the things the town did last year was came up with strategies to put off an override vote for fiscal 27. And one of the things they did is they delayed long-term bond funding, which was expected to have been done last November. And borrowed short-term instead and a couple other things. But what was going to get done last November is going to be done this November. And what was going to be done this November on the current year budget is going to be done this November. So we got basically two years' worth of debt service now hitting us in the fiscal 28, correct? And that's, you know, it's multiple hundreds, thousands of dollars that is a sort of an extra bump. So that was a consequence of kicking the can last year. It's now sort of coming back at us. So these other blue tabs is just a different way of looking at the budget. In some ways, I'm summarizing this one. Like, for example, this tab here summarizes it by town budget, school budget, unclassified. So I can sort of get more information in. And it just allows you to summarize, you know, based on Brian's projections. If you take a look at the very bottom here, you see that minus almost a million dollars in line 38. So based on Brian's just summary projections, if we had another $200,000 as a cushion, you would need an override of $1.1 million just to support the expenses that he's tentatively keyed in there. And they weren't big ones. You know, town payroll, 3% expenses, 3%. There's not a lot there. So then if you go back to Brian's sheet, what he did was he basically, again, on the top, he took the cross drivers that he came into the town expense tab. And then here, he's just making it easier on the ice to just bring it all together so you don't have to bounce around the different tabs to see what is going on. And if you can see right here, where I got my cursor with line 31, based on his projections, you're looking at a $6.8 million taxing base. 6.8%. Oh, is it? No, it's 6.5%. Yeah, the percentage of you is 6.8. So that gives you a quick look at what it means when you put in certain cross drivers. So this kind of a model gets you to where you need to be if you're going to be presenting your opinion on if the township is pursuing an override or not. In the town expenses tab, do you have a 27 actuals? Yeah, the 27 budget. Budget, we don't have actuals. But now we increase the .7. Yeah, budget increases from .6.
So everything, all the percentage increases. Again, I understand this is not the actual budget per se. That will be done over the course of the next few months, and part of it is going to be dependent on decisions made on whether people want to pursue an override or not, and be able to fund it.
But this is really a little higher level, purely, other than a few minor adjustments, strict percentages. So it's not overly precise, but it should be good enough for the working group's purposes and decision makers' purposes and our purposes. And one of my objectives of at least populating some numbers here was not this meeting, but probably the next meeting or the one after that. We're then able to start to say, okay, do we really think there's going to be an override, a need for an override, or not? And so based on these numbers, you heard Brian say, based on these assumptions, it would be, we'd need a million dollars, plus or minus. And if you're not inclined to want to pursue an override, you'd have to cut the budget by $20,000. Okay, which, where would that come from? Schools? Schools, um, so that, that, that, this should make our discussion a little more manageable. And fiscal 28 is, I think, proved in the working group as time went on. There are certain items that you really don't know the final numbers until actually next January or February. But if you put in conservative assumptions to give yourself comfort, um, you, you're going to start to see the 28 budget coming together before you ever get the town manager's budget. So, again, rather than waiting until the end of the year or January and get a budget and start reviewing it, for the next four months, we can be on and off looking at this model. And if people want to talk about specific line items or how we feel about it, we'll be able to do that for four months before we ever get an actual budget to review. You didn't have this last year. You were getting updates from the chair, uh, when these things were being done at the budget working group level. So I'm hopeful that, you know, we'll find time either every meeting or every couple meetings to revisit this and maybe pick a topic to focus on. People can come prepared with their questions and you'll all have this. So, you know, you could fiddle to your heart's content, um, but, um, I'll, I'll probably maintain for the finance committee. This model, um, Brian will feed me, I hope, as you've been doing, he'll feed me any changes you've made to your underlying assumptions in your model, just so I can keep this updated, if that makes sense. Well, yeah, we're in a limbo right now because we just finished the, uh, bulk receipts postings, and so the next, next shoe is going to drop is in November when we issue the debt service. Well, retirement could be next month. Yeah, and then right now, I believe I'm carrying 4% as the interest rate. We're going to get a real interest rate in the fall when we actually borrow the money. So the budget will be updated in, you know, in November, which we actually borrow and get the real rate. And then we'll, and then we'll get our, in December, we'll get our new growth from DOR. So that's 600,000 is either going to go up or down. And then as we get into January and February, the health insurance number comes in. And this is the state aid, state aid comes in late January. So that's what every town and city follows is that path where you get a clearer picture of where things are going to be. But as he just said, you can do your own assumptions based on history. And I think, you know, we're probably going to get a 2.5% increase in local aid. We're probably going to be 10% increase on the other insurance. And some of the other ones are pretty much, I mean, the kids actually know what's going to go up through 1.5%. So you can make pretty good assumptions on these things. And that gets you to a ballpark number of what the budget is. And then you can peel that against your revenue and go, okay, what is the deficit? Really, what is the revenue deficit? Is there any item which is like a big unknown? Excuse me? Is there any specific item which is a big unknown? Yeah, there are two or three things you just mentioned. The state aid, it's not that big other than if it has happened in the history of the town and other communities that the state went in reverse and reduced the amount of state aid to the localities, but it hasn't happened recently. But with the federal government cutting back on their funding of states, that's always a possibility. But I think the state has been in a certain band. So that's not too much of a wild card. Health insurance has kind of been a little volatile, both because health insurance is volatile, but the health insurance that we get for the town has the ability to use some surplus that they carry. That's been funded by each town, and they can buy the rate down some years, which they did a couple years ago. Two years ago. Two years ago, the rate only went up by 2.5%, 3%. Last year, it went up by 10%, roughly, right? But it's been as high. It's kind of as high as 12% or 14%. Retirement is, we'll know, pretty soon. The union contracts, all but two have not settled yet. So until we know what cost of living increases were given. Another big unknown this year, depending on the timing, is the town did a waste and classification study, which got completed last fiscal year. And it's possible that it may result in some increases to non-union staff beyond traditional cost of living. And those haven't, you know, those, we're not at that level of detail here, but that could be a surprise for fiscal 28, depending on what the town manager feels he needs to do. In my opinion, the economy is quite volatile. What happened in history could be completely different than what's going to happen now, next year. So things might, you know, we got it. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not going to, we won't get into it tonight, Carl, but you sent out another Excel spreadsheet that had two tabs in it, which tie back the two tables that are in the 2026 warrant in the FinCons report. And the point Brian was, Brian has been pretty conservative in budgeting over the last few years. Generally speaking, what, you know, the budget that passes town meeting and the assumptions that it was based on, we've ended up with generally positive surprises. So if you look at the warrant, we were projecting in the warrant showed for fiscal 27, at the end of fiscal 27, a $1.2 million profit, two and a half levy surplus. That surplus is now up to two and a half million for fiscal 27, largely driven by the local receipts that Brian talked about before, plus some extra state aid. And so what I attempted to do in that spreadsheet was take you from the assumptions that were made for building the budget and what the town saw in town meeting to where we are right at the moment. And it's generating more surplus, which means less, we've had to use less tax levy, which means we've got extra capacity, which in turn is driving us down at the moment based on these assumptions to only needing a million dollar override on this set of assumptions. If I, if I ran this two months ago, that number would have been, you know, closer to two million. So these things are going to move around and that million could easily go to a million and a half, a million seven 50. If we find that schools settle at a, you know, a higher cost of living, then some of these percentages factor in, for example. Um, and you'll see, again, a bunch of notes next to those inputs, um, I simply highlighting, um, you know, what drives those percentage increases. In addition to cost of living personnel, um, again, you look at county warrant or supplement or handout, um, uh, they get cost of living typically. And then they, they are put in a table of steps and lanes. And so they moved horizontally and they moved vertically and each time you move your salary ratchets up. Um, and so, you know, these percentages we put in for personnel have to contemplate both cost of living. That's negotiated plus the impact of employees moving up or down or sideways and steps and lanes. And, and all of that will be, um, clear as the budget process, uh, progress. So in other words, it's complicated, very, very complicated. So I'm hopeful that this one tab will make our life at least a little easier. And we don't have to spend as much time in the, in the weeds and the plumbing, but, you know, I'm pretty comfortable getting into all those other tabs. I think spent the last couple of years working with Brian, um, you know, on this model. So it's, it's a absolutely fantastic tool. I'm really glad we have it. Um, Mr. Kevenny, thank you, um, for your time and for, for putting those all together again. And Brian, thank you. Um, this is actually, in my view, our most important job, but we're going to stop doing it right now and move on. And I would like to come back to this, uh, in our next meeting and then start to get into it, right? Is that okay? Yeah. Good. So thank you. You obviously weren't welcome to stay. I'll leave you with my friend, Klaus. I was standing down patiently. Brian, will you, uh, as you had been, at least when I was serving, um, I think I'm, you'll generally be available to join us at these meetings, um, as we need your insights on stuff. Yeah. So thank you, Carl, to invite you. Seemed appropriate. Appreciate it. Yep. Thanks so much, Brian.
All right. Moving on. Mr. Stigley. Hello. How are you? Are you on mute?
No, we're not. Oh, is he on mute? No, he's on mute. No, he's on mute. Files, can you hear us? I do. Oh, can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay. Yes. And Carl, you might, you might want to talk this way so you can be picked up better. Yeah, that's a good idea. Thank you. You can look at that. Look at him over there, probably. I get rid of that. There he is. Okay. Oh. Plus, um, you and I talked to, literally about two months ago now, and, uh, more recently, um, uh, Brian Hurley, he has given us a pretty good thumbnail sketch of what the audit committee is all about, why it exists. And, uh, I've circulated some materials that you had provided to me as well. Um, but if you'd be kind enough to just take a minute and talk about, um, what it's there for and what your role has been, I think that'd be a great place to start.
Yeah. Um, so bottom line, um, uh, let me, let me start by saying that, um, when I first started on the audit committee, I, I, I did a survey of peer companies, there were, I mean, peer towns, and we looked at 11 towns and, and looked at what, whether or not they had audit committees. So it turns out that three out of 11 had audit committees, which, um, which basically kind of means that the audit committee is, is something that, that the concept got created because of Enron. And then, uh, in, in this town in particular, there were other reasons why we created a, an audit committee, uh, bottom line, you're, you're basically, uh, kind of redundant, but you're there for, you know, in order to provide some, some controls on when, when other things fail. So that, that's kind of our, our, our role. We, we, we are, I, I, I'm saying this because I want you to understand that one of the issues I have right now is that we're, we are understaffed. We have, we've had three people and three people is a quorum, but the committee is supposed to have five. We're having difficulty recruiting. Um, one of my recommendations in the report that's going to go to the select board this year will be to argue that, um, we should either fold the audit committee into the finance committee or have joint memberships, some from, you know, the audit committee or FinCom joins the audit committee and, and vice versa. It's just a solution to a problem. Uh, that said, what we do is we review the, the ACFER and, and typically you do the same thing and, and we find all the same things that you do. And, uh, and then in addition to that, we get something called the management letter. This year, we don't, you just tell folks what the ACFER is, what it stands for. Yeah. Annual Comprehensive Financial Report. And I think you guys, you guys look at the same thing. I'm pretty sure you get the same report. Uh, it's available. I'm not sure the finance committee is, at least when I've been on it has spent any time on it. Yeah. Well, I, I think when I was on the finance committee, we did do that and, and, uh, it's, it's not so large that you can't read it and, and proofread it. So that, that's one of the values we add. We, we look very closely at the, uh, the ACFER and, and generally we, we, we, uh, we offer our suggestions. Um, uh, one example, um, couple of years ago, uh, you were talking about pension plans earlier. Um, the, the ACFER has, um, it, it lists the, the pension plans, the assumptions and how they got built up. And one of those pension plans, I think it was the, the, uh, Wayland, uh, town employees pension plan had a discount rate of, of 7% and a projected investment return rate of 6.3. That's just nuts. And so those are the kind of things we would pick up. Your discount rate should never be, uh, greater than your projected investment return. So anyways, we, we go very, very closely to the, uh, to the ACFER provide, uh, suggestions. The independent auditor also provides something called a management letter, which lists, um, deficiencies. And, uh, in, in, in, uh, in about four years ago, we had several deficiencies, which for the most part they're gone. And, uh, so we, we, we, and then we report, we report our findings to the select board at the same time, the independent auditor also reports the select board. So again, this is somewhat redundant in that the, the, the, the Enron situation, the auditors reported to the, uh, to the chief, um, investment on now, uh, financial officer, but that financial officer did not report to the board. In this, in this situation, the independent auditor reports both to the, uh, select board and maybe to FinCom. I'm not sure. Anyway. So, okay. So I'm, I'm saying again that the audit committee, if you, if you look at it, you know, objectively is somewhat redundant, nevertheless, we do focus on, on the financial report and we do focus on the management letter. If there is one in, uh, in 20, uh, for fiscal 25, there was no, or actually fiscal 26, there was no, uh, no management letter, which meant that the independent auditors did not find, uh, material weaknesses as in the past. So, uh, um, so let's see. Going forward, our deliverable will be to do a report to the select board with whatever the report we did get from the independent auditor. And, and, and I guess that's, oh, and, and by the way, even though every one of us has had our terms expired, uh, I, I, I researched this issue with the town manager and we are allowed to continue, finish the deliverables. We have two deliverables. One is the report to the select board. The other is, uh, is a, is a write-up that we do for the annual report that the town does. So we'll be, we'll be meeting, we'll be trying to set up a meeting with, with the three of us that are still on the, on that, on that committee. And we will finish that deliverable. So that's kind of like where we are. Wow. So what role did, does the audit committee have in the selection of the, um, in the hiring of the independent audit firm? Yes. We, uh, we, we, we both recommended that we put on an RFP for the, for the, uh, independent auditor. And then we, uh, we filled, we filled out the, uh, kind of our, our, our, our, we had a subcommittee that filled out our preference for whom to select. And, and at the present time we've, we've engaged CBiz for another three year cycle. That's what we recommended and the town manager did that.
So one of the issues that, uh, you know, when I proposed that we, we look at joining up with the FinCom for, for practical reasons was whether we needed a town meeting. And the answer is no. It, the, the, the, the audit committee was created by a vote of the select board, which means that the select board can, you know, can choose to change the, the mission and we don't have to go to town meeting. Do you, uh, close us to that suggestion? Um, at least in my experience, um, you know, audit committees, um, generally are intended to have, uh, be independent, supposed to be independent. Um, and, and minimum give the appearance of independence. Um, do you have any concerns of, um, of connecting it to another active committee? In this case, the finance committee, um, uh, vis-a-vis how people perceive it, uh, in that regard. And then those other communities where you said three of 11 had audit committees, eight didn't. Obviously those eight are surviving without an audit committee. Uh, did you find that it basically in those communities, uh, if either the, uh, annual audit was not being reviewed by anybody other than the, uh, uh, presenting to the select board and the finance directors or did the, uh, no, frankly, I couldn't get it. I could not get into that much detail. I basically, uh, what I could do, uh, I, I, I, I got in touch with these people. I got that information, that little piece of that factoid that did, or they didn't have a committee, uh, the report, uh, I think, uh, I did a report and it, it does identify what the responsibilities are in that particular town, but I can't, I, I don't really remember the specific. Whether or not these other towns have issues, I couldn't tell you. And, uh, Klaus, uh, just from a calendar perspective, um, because I, as you recall, I was appointed to the audit committee, but never got sworn in because I was on another committee and that's something that the audit committee won't, uh, permit that you serve on another committee that possibly spends money, which is the independence concept. Um, my recollection class is that the, uh, the town's books are closed, you know,
July, August, uh, the financial report is prepared by the finance director with the auditors in September-ish, uh, they complete their work in October-ish and your committee review as the independent auditor go through it with you and anywhere from, depends on the year, anywhere from like November all the way into January. When, this past year, when did you have that meeting? Do you recall? I could, I could look at my notes. Um, yeah. I'm just wondering if, if, if, if it did fall within the purview of the finance committee, unfortunately, my, my fear is that it would fall right in the heart of the heavy ones. No, I got the answer for you. This year, this year it was December. Uh, we, we, we got a draft of the ACFA on December 31, which meant, which means basically we didn't meet until January. Other time, other years we might, this might begin in, in, uh, November. There was at least one year when this didn't happen until like April or May. And, and that was because, um, we had, um, something called cash reconciliations hadn't been, hadn't been reconciled and you can't do a financial statement unless you're, you, you have a cash reconciliation. So this was one of the reasons we had the, the material deficiency is because the, the, the treasurer at the time, uh, just failed to, to execute, uh, one of the duties of, of the treasurer and, uh, you know, long story short, the, the treasurer at the time reported to the town administrator. And, um, one of our recommendations was that that treasurer should report to the finance director, which eventually did happen. And, and I think we got, we got better results after that, but basically, uh, cash reconciliation had been a problem for about 10 years and it was not addressed just because the treasurer was, was not supervised, supervised effectively by the town administrator. And so that led to the recommendation that, that the treasurer report to the finance director, which has now happened. Anyways, to answer your question, we'd like to get this, this report, probably November. Um, we typically haven't get it, got it in November. It's been as late as, as, as, as April. And, and if, if you, if you don't get that report by April, you, there's a risk that you, you don't, you don't have a town meeting or you have to, you have to delay your town meeting. So it's kind of important that this stuff gets done. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Um, so I'm not, I don't have a feeling yet for whether combining forces makes sense. And on the one hand, we are supposed to be independent as well. Um, whether or not it makes sense to somehow combine, I think it's a different question for a different day, Klaus. Um, one I'm happy, one I'd be happy to talk about either in a meeting or just with you, as you prefer. I mean, question for the house tonight is we have the opportunity to recommend house's reappointment to the audit committee. There are only three members today. He's correct that he can stay in his role without a formal reappointment, but I think it would be in everybody's best interest to make that formal. Um, if anybody has any more questions for you, or you wouldn't have anything else to say, I'm happy to yield the floor. Otherwise, I'd like to put it to a vote. Do you want to make a motion? I think I will. Thank you. Um, I move that this committee recommended the select board, the reappointment of Klaus Schickle, um, to the town's audit committee for a three-year term expiring June 30, 2029. Seconded. All in favor. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Brian. Yes. Yes. Yes. Thanks. Thanks for your enemies. Welcome back. I know you never left. Welcome back. All right. Thank you very much. Does that mean I'm done? You're done if you want to be sure. All right. All right. Thank you very much. Have a good evening. What's left of it? Yeah. So a quick comment on the audit and finance committee to business. I think from my provisional mortgage years, the audit committee should be disconnected from the audit committee and they should audit versus being part of the audit committee, the other way it uses its meaning of audit. If it's part of the audit committee. So yeah, I'm familiar primarily with audit committees on corporate boards where they are part of the larger board, but again, I, I, I'm not pushing one way or the other right now at this point. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And that would be, uh, I mean, unless probably you thought the finance committee wanted to, uh, advocate for something like that, that would really be up to the select board at the end of the day. So maybe we never hear of it again, or maybe it is brought forward to us at which point you probably have more discussion, but I didn't put, you might be asked along the way by chair of the select board or. Well, we, we probably see this is not on the agenda for tonight. Anyway, we may want to think about this. Um, we might also just wait to see if Klaus gets any traction on that, um, before we figure out what we think about it. It's not like we don't have enough to do. Yes, exactly. Um, if they were to join us though, I'd put a right to work. Okay. Thank you. Moving on. Um, the next topic is, uh, a review and discussion of our goals and all timelines, um, for the year. Um, I think this is here. Um, Iris and I, you know, with the help from Brian created the agenda, but this is, well, it was either going to be you or Rob, correct? It's Rob. Yeah. So Rob, I know that when we left the last meeting, you had mentioned wanting to sort of put together a timeline or like a milestone view of work that is ongoing. And, um, we've added this to the agenda in case there was something that you wanted to share as a follow-up from that item. I have made marginal progress on that, but I don't know that it's quite baked enough to share yet. Should we carry that item forward to our 810 meeting? Yeah, let's do that. Okay. Thank you. Yep. No problem. We may want to talk offline, Rob, about that. Um, the more, the more that you, we can do the better, but I can't help but think that the timelines can be driven to a great degree by what the select board decides on timing, you know, for if there's going to be an override, when will that be, and then working backward from that. So it may be, and I'm not trying to tell you what you're doing because you know more about it than I do, but it might, it might be most useful to not so much fix it on the calendar, but just understand the timelines that go into whatever date that's going to be. Is that what you're thinking? I think I'm part of what I'm thinking about is trying to kind of carve it up into the point, the things that we know and have some confidence in, like the article timelines are going to be the article timelines, right? Um, the override conversation is probably the most unsettled in terms of timelines, right? But try to pencil in sort of more definition where we have more confidence and less definition, obviously where we have less. Got it. Okay. So I agree with Iris. Why don't we, um, put this back on the agenda for two weeks, three weeks, what, um, two weeks, I think, right? Well, if the next meeting is in two weeks, and actually the one after that is a joint meeting with the software, um, so we probably wouldn't be talking about it then. You're right. Sounds good. Okay, 10 it is. Um, um, next topic, um, you, you brought up yourself, Rob, Warren articles, our review process, and what we might try to be doing differently is, especially with personal card to what we're calling generic articles. Yeah. Shall I share my screen? So I circulated an article process and what I attempted to do here, um, for those of you who had a chance to look at this, or those of you who did not, is map out a flow. This is a combination of some suggestions, some things that were happening, some things that were not happening last year. So I'm hoping we can have a broader discussion of understanding what is the ideal flow from beginning to end when an article is considered done. What I think probably happened last year, and I think a lot of the feedback we got from, and Rob, feel free to chime in here, but especially from our newer members is we didn't really have any sort of living documentation around what the process should look like. Um, and what that meant is we, we essentially gave you an article and told you to go out and do it, and you figured out how to get there, but you did it frankly, probably without a process in place without support. And I think we all felt overwhelmed by, um, probably the iterations and the work that got put in. And I think maybe regardless of whether we felt overwhelmed, we probably all left, I think, questioning if we had put in the effort in the right places. And I think in my mind, this is to provide an artifact for this committee as we move forward, to try to standardize our process so we can have new people on board, people leave, and there's something to be able to say to them, here's what this should look like. And also refine our ask to the town and to others like sponsors for what our expectations are of when we will accept an article. And I think that's a big part of it, Carl, is we essentially are accepting articles in any state, they come to us. And I don't think that's correct. So theoretically, it's supposed to be done, theoretically, but they're not right. And so I think having something to point to you to say, we are going to hold everyone accountable to this level of preparedness and to this process, I think will help us. So with that in mind, that's the frame of reference, the context, let me walk you through what this looks like. And you all would, then we can open up to a broader discussion of, this doesn't look right, we need to move things around, etc. So a couple of different roles here on the left-hand side, you see that we have the town, right? It's in yellow. What do we expect the town to do? Then we have the article sponsor. I specified article sponsor here, because the article sponsor can be various different groups. It can be the select board, but could it also be an article that also came from, he had some feedback, we'll look at it in a second, article sponsor, but also it could come from a voter, a resident, right? And they could be the article sponsor. And then I also broke it out here because I really would like to look at the yearly articles, the articles that are reoccurring year in, year out, and have a slightly different flow, which hopefully should be reduced in effort and more streamlined than those, I call them new articles here, but those articles that come in every year that are unique to that year, right? And so that's who you have on the left-hand side here of these swim lanes. And the flow, I think that I wrote here, so an article is received presumably by someone in the town. I don't actually know exactly how they collect them all, but they do. I think in an ideal world, they're updating the article language. I'll be honest, sometimes we get articles where the article language itself has not been touched, right? Are you already at the max magnification? No, I'm not. Would you like me to... More for the people watching. Sure. I've looked at what you said, but that's better. Thanks. Thanks. So I think it is reasonable, and I'll open this up. We can talk about each box in line. I think it's reasonable to expect that the article language has been reviewed and updated to actually match. Like, this is where I really question, like, it seemed to me like legal council, like town council wasn't reviewing the articles until they were all done, as opposed to why isn't there any review on the actual article language, which we're not allowed to touch before we receive the article. Do you know what I mean? Are you asking me a question? I'm happy to answer if you're asking me a question. I'm asking you a question. Yes, I am. Um, the, uh, the answer is town council mostly waits for the end of the process, um, but, uh, is available for all those constituencies that might propose articles, uh, if the requests are run through the town manager. Um, um, and as you've experienced, um, um, in the unfortunate part of the, the town's bylaw process, there's a, uh, uh, opening of the warrant by the select board, and there's a closing of the warrant 30 days thereafter. And inevitably, as much as you'd like to think, people have been preparing for, since the prior town meeting and all ready to go with complete well-drafted articles, as soon as a warrant opens, they can put them in. Uh, in my experience, inevitably, there's a bunch that maybe have been talked about, maybe haven't been talked about that get thrown in, uh, to make sure they get in before the, the, you know, closing of the warrant. And, uh, that's probably the most problematic part of this. And, uh, as a result, as town council, they tend to not want to get town council involved in something that's not really well-baked. The, the most extreme example of that was three years ago, um, it was a select board article, I believe, put together at the last minute by the, uh, finance director. It had the header description of what the article was about and basically a white piece of paper as a placeholder to legally say they had an article in. But to my point, is that reasonable to expect someone on FinCom to spend the time to write a report on that? Uh, certainly the answer is no. And, um, uh, um, you know, the finance committee, the select board controls the warrant process. We are in control of our responsible end of the town bylaw. It's what we're supposed to do when presented. Sure. Um, I think really the only true options other than nudging people along or making suggestions like we're hopefully going to do here and then getting buy-in from the select board who really are the chief gatekeepers and understanding that last year, probably 70% of the articles are select board articles. Right. So they were guilty themselves. So some of these issues, um, is the only real thing we could do is say, we just can't deal with this. So we're, our comments are going to be, we don't have any comments. We'll tell you a town meeting once we know what actually is being presented and prior finance rates have had to do that, uh, a handful of times. We did that once last year. Right. Right. So the, the obligation with these warrant articles, um, is our obligation is that we are supposed to recommend for or against every article. Um, is in, in the last couple of years, we've adopted the idea that if we don't think that it has a financial impact on the town, it's material of financial impact, we would say so and that would be a full full summary of our comments. That is roughly speaking about half of them, maybe not quite that many. Um, that has helped a lot. Um, somehow though, we've also gotten into the, into the job of writing plain English descriptions of the, not about the pros and cons of the article where we do that too, but like, what does it really mean? What is this saying? Right. And then you ask, you ask probative questions typically should you yourself understand what you want to summarize in a short number of paragraphs. Right. But I'll give an example. Like we had an article last year that I know from talking to the select board member had gone through nine rounds with them before it got handed off to me. So I would suggest that they did their due diligence and trying to make sure that I got some substantive, um, article. I probably did another seven, eight drafts. And in the end, town council deemed that it was not legally permissible. Why did that not get deemed before everyone spent 20, 40 hours on it? Um, and that's the kind of things that I think we want to avoid. Yeah. So maybe, maybe your point, if you're picking tabs of possible recommendations, suggestions, or you want to characterize it to the slide board would be for hopefully short money. Would it make sense for town council once the window closes? And prior to the finance committee's hearing, or yeah, ideally it'd be prior to the finance committee. Some of the law firm at a minimum reads them all. Right. And to your point, if there's any of them that, um, conflict with state or federal law and therefore at a minimum will require changes to allow them to meet and state or federal law. They will at least flag that for the benefit of those both working on those articles, submitting them, and then the finance committee. So the finance committee could say, okay, I'm going to do a whole lot of work on it because this one's been flagged until something's presented that actually is good. We, we, we know it's personal. Not to say that any article at any time can't be pulled. And an example would be the pension obligation bond article. You had to get it in. Right. And I had drafted that in the summer and handed it to the select board and said, if you want to think about doing this, I mean, here, I drafted the whole thing. I actually drafted the finance committee's comments. I said, there it is. Someone's got it submitted. Brian Kevenny submitted it. It went into the warrant. Somebody in this committee probably was assigned that article, had to get up to speed about pension obligation bonds. But then somewhere in that process, the select board, albeit they voted to submit it, ultimately voted to unsubmit it. Right. Okay. And, and that happens. And so you feel bad because you spent a lot of time and effort in the finance committee. I'm less concerned about the things that get pulled and more concerned about... If they're well-developed. Yes. As opposed to things that are constantly moving. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Because I would... And again, Rob had to leave, but I think Rob dealt with us a lot last year, right? He did. So... In those, you know, in a absolutely boneheaded move on my part, I, I assigned to Rob a number of petitioner articles, so residents, and I, I thought they would be relatively easy, especially for new members. But they were not. Mostly because of personalities and different conflicting agendas among different petitioners. It turned out to be a lot of work for him. And then not all of them, but several of them ended up being pulled at the last minute anyway. You can't help that. That's going to happen. I mean, pulling an article will happen. But I do think there's an opportunity to get better developed articles. Um, two other things that we can do. Sorry, I'm jumping here. I mean, so that, does it, if you think it makes sense, or maybe suggesting the Slack board, albeit it'll cost the town a few hours of time to have a pre-review by town council? Yeah, if everyone's on board with that, I added it to my notes here, and I'll send, and I'll send an update. So anything that's like a bold that, like, basically, presumably, hopefully they're for you, Carl, to then go and be able to have a conversation with Slack where to say, hey, here are some things that we think would really help this process if we can get your buy-in. Um, so I, I just put it in bold. Once the window closes prior to meeting with, right, because we, and this meeting is documented in this process flow, right? When we all meet with everyone, town council reviews to confirm the reality. Yeah. No, I, sorry, another thing, uh, are we also saying before you just select board, like, can we come with this template to meet the requirements for the article? So there is a template that you will get sent to all of us. Um, and the templates, to somebody who's going to submit that if it has to have a title, body, you know, all the meaningful facts and, you know, the things that we, again, I think that's part of, I think that's part of the select board process. Brian, do you want to explain a little bit about what actually happens? That happens far upstream, right? Because we're getting it after it's submitted. Yeah, I mean, if you look on the town's website under the town meeting, uh, section, um, you'll see, um, templates for submitting articles, and, and there's also instructions on what timing and other things. Uh, just because there's a template doesn't mean that, uh, people necessarily need the template. Yeah, I mean, that, that ultimately is a select board. Well, petitioner articles are a little bit different. That, that means residents that collect enough signatures. Uh, under state law, um, if they collect the right number of signatures, the select board have to put those into the warrant. Um, doesn't mean people like the finance committee or select board have to recommend approval, but the select board can't keep those out. Select board can't control what they're asking about. Um, and the only way those can change is if those, the lead petitioner goes back out and gets the same number of signatures to actually make a change. And one of the things that the select board did do, and it was in part from a discussion like this several years ago, was there, there was no, under the town's bylaw, the petitioners could literally make changes all the way up town meeting. Um, that was due to a change made in a prior town meeting. And so the finance committee was left saying, well, we don't, you know, we don't know what they're doing as long as they got the right signatures. So the select board put an article to change the bylaw and it shortens up and gives an end point by which petitioners have to get, and other boards and committees, I think, have to get any changes in after which they can't make any other changes. So that, that was at least helpful to still leave enough time for the finance committee to say, okay, this is no longer a moving target. Um, assuming no one ends it in town meeting, right? Um, so again, these kind of housekeeping things are important, uh, to identify issues you just went through to the extent there's things in the bylaw that allows for them that maybe one of our recommendations might be to have to go look at fire, read by law and see if there's any further, you know, adjustments. Um, that by the, the thing that Carl was talking about where the finance committee identifies certain last couple of years that's made use of a bylaw change that went in three years ago, uh, it used to be the finance committee had to write comments on every article. And, and, um, and now if there's no financial impact, um, uh, in consultation with the finance director, you can write them, but the finance committee doesn't have to. And so Carl said that allowed the finance committee to basically say, okay, here's 10, 12, 15 articles. There's really no financial impact. We're focused on financial impact stuff. So we're not even going to take a position on the article. We're just telling you bylaw allows us to do this. It's up to, it's up to town meeting. So those things grew out of conversations like this. And, and so, uh, I encourage us to keep, let's keep going.
So the article comes in before we receive it. And this is a other question. I had received some articles last year that I just somehow magically received. I don't recognize how I got them. And then I received some that then I separately got the inputs that I needed for those articles from Brian Kevney, right? So how much are we actually going to fund things like OPEB? Like, and where's the source of that funding coming from? And I would make the argument that both of those things, the number and source of funding is, is material to the actual article. And to the, I mean, we can talk like we, I'm happy to debate it. Like maybe people feel like, hey, most of that has to do with generic articles that are yearly articles, right? OPEB is a, we're generally going to fund it every year, right? But the amount does sometimes vary as does the source of funding. So in my mind, those are some of the particulars that as a FinCom member, I actually need to know, especially as I'm putting together my thoughts on the article. Again, absolutely. Unfortunately,
a number of those articles, that information is not readily available or agreed upon by the end of the submission date in mid January. And, um, and so you're left with a scenario where, uh, more times than not, um, you may not know specific amounts, but, um, and, and certainly some write-ups are dependent on the amounts, you know, the variance is positive or it's negative. It depends on what the numbers say. So you're going to write, you write up differently, right? Uh, but there's some that are fairly consistent and then you could draft knowing that, okay, if they surprise me and for some explainable reason, the number's different than it's been the last 10 years, right? Directionally. Okay. I've got to edit what I spent my time for, you can wait until they tell you the numbers have stopped moving. And it's just, it's just really a question for, it seems to me, the finance committee as a whole and how it's pacing its work. Um, and individuals have been assigned, you know, six or eight articles, which ones should that prioritize? Okay. Maybe we circle back to that because maybe we can double click on when can it be reasonably available? Because part of it in my mind is if it turns out that most of those inputs are for generic articles that basically reoccur every year and we get a template in place for those and really to your point, you're just waiting for the numbers. You're familiarizing yourself with the article. You're waiting for the numbers and the out and the, I was going to say allocation, but actually just like the funding source to then tweak the article. Hopefully that overall reduces the effort where if we can understand when we expect those articles, when you're assigning them out, Carl, don't give everyone 10 articles that will be available to be done until March, right? Then you, you, you spread the love on those. Um, and then generally Brian Kevney is responsible for providing that information. Is that right? Most of the time. I mean, they're, they're, you know, the personnel wage and classification article, uh, the wage table comes from the human resource department. Typically that has to be approved by the personnel board. Okay. Typically, particularly when there's union negotiations going on, although generally that article isn't improving union contracts, but the disclosure historically has included some references to union contracts. Um, sometimes you're going to have that information by the time you have to submit the articles this year, I think was when that might've happened because of the negotiations going on. Um, so, um, yeah, so I've had that article a couple of years and I, I drafted it based on what I kind of expected based on prior years and then had to last minute tweak it and didn't bring it to the full finance committee until it was done. And there's no real sense. You know, you as a person drafting an article, didn't get 80% of the way there. So you're not starting at ground zero in March. Um, and you could do that at end, correct? With a lot of those art, which I think is ultimately what you're likely going to get to. Um, all right. The next one here, background details, including the professor's comments and finance and equations noted. My thought on this was generally when you receive an article, you'll receive a section called background, and it usually is filled in with some comments and in addition. There is a proposer's comments. My understanding of the bylaw is that the proposer's allowed always a comment of up to 150 words. And so there's a little difference in the background versus the proposer's comments. The background itself will be also potentially written by the proposer, but it'll explain why they put together the article. It can be whatever they want really to explain to you why they're submitting the article, but that's for your use generally. It doesn't go into the warrant as opposed to the proposer's comments is that 150 words that they are allowed to put into the warrant. One of the things, and, and I don't know, cause I didn't have as many of these articles, but I don't know if historically it's been very clear whether background comments sometimes are meant to be proposers comments. Would, would you say that Carl or Rob, like, do you feel like for any of your articles, perhaps where there were proposers comments, was it very clear to you on if you received an article, what was background versus an actual proposer's comments that they had hoped to have published? I think it was clear what we received. It was not always clear that that was what was intended, if that makes sense. That's what I was thinking as well. It's like, I don't know that sometimes it's very clear and I feel like sometimes the onus is put, and maybe that's just because we feel such a large level of responsibility for these articles, but I just wonder whether, like, is it us who should be then going back to the proponents and saying, do you want 150 words? Give me your words. I'll put them in. Or is that really a town function? And I think that's my point here of, in my mind, that's for the town to support the article proposer in making sure that their comments are reflected at, for that 100, 150 words, as opposed to that being onus. My experience is, um, it's not the finance committee's job to, uh, you know, pursue the submitter via the town board committee or a petitioner. Um, as a courtesy, um, you're typically at least talking to whoever the key party is at least once. And I have that documented here, so we'll get through that. But, but, um, as to the background, um, my experience varies. Um, and I've, I've been on the other side of this where, um, when I was on the housing trust, uh, and we had an article or two and I basically wrote the finance committee's comments are the finance committee's comments. They're not the proposer's comments, they're no one else's comments. That said, um, sometimes there's both an assist for the finance committee or otherwise, because you want to make sure your point is put forth as you would like it as a proponent of the article. Um, I've drafted an article for the housing trust and, and had proposer comments limited to 100 figures and then drafted what I would like to see the finance committee say. Most times, you know, thank you very much. You know, they get thrown aside and, um, I've had that done the opposite way where the water, where the DPW wrote a couple of years ago, the, um, background for the first dollar request for the long-term funding. And I read it and I said, well, thank you, helpful information. And then I went about drafting the FinCom comments. They got back, uh, typically you would get this, to share the draft. They said, well, that's nothing like what we submitted in our background comments. I said, well, that's fine. But if you've got a problem factually or something I wrote, let me know. And then at that point I said, if you want to put in your own 150 words to highlight and sell, pitch your article you're entitled to. And a lot of pressure was put to bear directly from the Board of Public Works on me and hopefully on the FinCom. And then from the Select Board on me and on the FinCom to yield to, and my view was, no, our job is, those are our comments, happy to correct something that's actually wrong. So my answer to your question is, no, background is background. Another example would be the CPA articles, Community Preservation Act articles. I know Susan Weinstein, as the chair has been out of her way to try to draft their, um, article submissions in a way that if the FinCom was so disposed, they could literally lift the background, deposit it in, cut and paste it in as, um, FinCom's write-up, right? But there's also been a press, as you know, to shorten the warrant. And the CPA in turn has been pressed to combine articles. And so I think the answer is you get all flavors, right? You get next to nothing. You get people expecting you to put in what they give you. Um, and, uh, but I think as a policy matter, uh, because we all want to please, these are all town residents, possibly volunteers, town staff. We want to be helpful, right? At least I do. Um, but I think it's helpful for all our mental sanity to at least have an agreement on how we're all going to act within a box, right? And if one wants to strata that box, they do so at their own peril, which means you may end up having done a lot of work and then come to the FinCom, and the FinCom is, you know, no, we're not going to do that. And then you feel bad that you spent all that time. And this may have happened last year with all those petition articles. Maybe people, again, not fully appreciating the process may have spent a lot of time trying to be accommodating the other town residents, which is where those came from, trying to help them understand what the right and all that. And that's great, but that's really not this committee's job. This committee is supposed to summarize, hopefully as shortly as possible, as short as possible, and then come to a recommendation. And, and, and my understanding is, and provide a balanced perspective of the impact of these decisions. That's important too. Like in my mind, that's important. Yeah, I mean, my experience is that the write-up itself generally should be factual as opposed to the pluses and minuses. The pluses and minuses really tend to appear in the pro arguments and the con arguments. I'm sure you'll talk about those too, because that's a key component. That's really where the, the mini debate's happening, if you will, or an anticipated mini debate on behalf of the town meeting. I'm going to move us along just because of time. My apologies, Carl, this might roll into our next meeting as well. But I just, I added a suggestion here, which I think sums up the point of our conversation, which is, as a matter of course, we recognize that proposer's comments are there and can be there, but are ultimately up to the proposer. So I don't think FinCom should feel the obligation to chase down proposer's comments. I think that's what I essentially took away from that. Yeah, just, I mean, last year, I mean, Rob's no longer on the call. No, he's going to be back. Well, maybe you can speak for yourself, but I know that he ended up trying to work with the proposers to make their own comments rational. And, you know, that's just not our job. It's a lovely sentiment. Would you agree, Rob? Like, we don't want to put words in your mouth, but we want to give you the chance to voice your thoughts on how we can create like a scalable process here without bogging us down. Yeah, I think ultimately, I mean, I think it's a mix, right? I think some of this is better defining the process and better defining to your point, and who's responsible for what, where, right? And what I think there were proposers who were given the impression that, you know, the job of finance committee members is to help you with your article, which probably isn't, you know, truly accurate. I think Brian had a good point in terms of like, ultimately, I do think it's going to be to some extent that committee member by committee member choice of how, how much support you want and are able to offer to article writers. But I think setting, setting some ground rules and guidelines for kind of what, what is expected and what is above and beyond, but acceptable would probably be a good idea. And I also just think in terms of the expectation setting with the article proposers is also, also important, right, about what the the role of the the finance committee is, because I had a couple of kind of controversial topics. And I found that I was actually a little surprised that one group of people on a controversial topic seemed extremely understanding of the finance committee's role and important to provide a balanced perspective. And one other set of controversial topics was was not so much that way. It was why would you put anything in that might cause someone to vote against this article. So yeah, I think I agree with everything you said, I do think ultimately some of it is just gonna be a judgment call on an article by article basis, because especially for the proposers articles, like, there's such a wide range of proposers. It's probably not realist. Yeah, I think that's fair. And I think I agree with what you said, right, we're trying to create guidelines here to set a reasonable expectation. I agree with Carl, right, if you so choose to sort of work outside those boundaries, or if your article you feel like compels it, you can use your judgment. But I think we can't start from that place. You might add a note, I mean, that maybe Rob's point about setting expectations, not necessarily, they're all invited to attend the finance committee's article hearing, which is roughly two weeks after the window closes for submission, where we walk through each and every article, asking questions. But it might be worth FinCom considering maybe five minute advertisement either at the front end of that meeting, probably at the front end of the meeting. Around our role. Yeah. Yeah, just set these expectations. And then if there's anybody that's absent, that, you know, then they could be individually dealt with. It's a really good idea. And I think, I think also part of it even before that, right, in terms of what the town puts out, because this process starts somewhere, right? Somewhere, I assume there's a guide where you say, I want to write an article and the town says, here's how to do it. But just reviewing and updating some of that as well would probably help. Yeah, it's on the town website. That's a good idea. So after that, so at this point, essentially, you've got what I'm expecting is a document that we receive. And so what ends up happening, and I wrote here article sponsor, although the way, the more I think about this, perhaps this is actually the starting point that the article sponsor is the one who's collating all the information and then sends it to the town, and maybe we're receiving it directly from the town. Like I might, I think I got this a little, a little backwards. So I'm just going to move this. Yeah, I mean, nothing's official until the warrant process, warrant window closes. Yep. And the town manager's office at that point is able to compile all articles submitted, which they then typically post on the town's website. Right. And simultaneously send a full set of articles to the finance committee and the start board. Right. That's the official initial set of articles. And it, um, When does that matter? Pardon me? What's the timeline? Uh, that's probably into the third week of January that you would see that packet of articles, because the window typically closes around January 15th. And then the article hearings at the last week, typically of January. Um, and then articles may be ultimately removed from that packet along the way, but there really shouldn't be any other articles coming from anybody else. Um, absent, um, um, boards and committees and or petitioners that make changes to their article language after the initial submission. And then the question, Iris, I think is a good one is those probably should be still only going through the town manager's office so that the Fincom is only relying on as being what we should be looking at that, which we received from the town manager's office. Right. And I think anybody submitting changes have to submit them to the town manager and even maybe the town clerk. Um, but we shouldn't be getting copies of articles from actual proposers. Right. Um, I don't think that's the problem. I don't think it has been a problem. Although, although I'll tell you last year, I got articles before everyone did and I don't have to look back. I have no idea how I got them. I don't know, but I want to know because I want the fans too. Right. Like, um, but in any case, so article sponsor, they're putting all the info together. They're sending it to the town. The town receives it. The process we just talked about takes place. Every article receives a select board sponsor. Correct. Brian. Yes. And I'm assuming they're not a select board liaison liaison. And that's identified after the, all the articles are received. Correct. It could be a member as a, the extent it's a select board sponsored article, it would be a select board member who's been assigned. Right. To that article. Right. As the all non-select board articles, they, they are assigned as liaisons. And we're generally told who those people are at this board here. At the here, right. Which, which is later in the process. So I'm just knowing SB articles, SB member assigned, and then for non SB articles and I, uh, a liaison is identified. Okay, great. And maybe that doesn't tie. Maybe that's an independent process, which then actually ties into the impact for the hearing article, which I'm gonna just tie this to the hearing article. So then what's going on here. Okay. So we usually have the articles before the hearing article though, correct? Yes. Okay. I'm just making sure as well, because I'm going to see as well. Okay. So then what's, what's happening here, just to give you all, since you're new, hopefully this makes sense. What's happening is essentially we received the articles, right? Ideally we've received them with all this information. What has happened previously is a select board liaison or member has been assigned as well. So when it comes to us, we're just getting the document. We don't yet know exactly who the select board member is. We then attend an article hearing. So this article hearing essentially ends up being all of the proponents or proposers, different boards, the select board and us. And at this meeting, we essentially go through and we say, here's who's coming in from FinCom. Here's who's coming in from select board. And we basically like enumerate all the articles and make sure that point of contacts are identified. And you know essentially who you're working with. But actually, Carl, if I think about it, from a FinCom perspective, we knew which articles we had before we went into that meeting, right? So actually it's, we, we get the articles prior to that meeting. So I actually need to change where this connection is. Yeah, that's probably a week before, and I don't know how you did it last year. Typically the chair, perhaps with the vice chair, would make a rough cut of how to allocate those articles from a workload perspective amongst FinCom members. And then I think you probably had a meeting, you may or may not have had a meeting before the hearing, but you probably caveated that, well, this is the preliminary. If any of the FinCom members, and the select board does the same thing, if any of the members have an issue with what they were assigned, there might be some modification of who was assigned. But that really is a, I mean, it's an important part of the process. But that is,
in my mind, the primary reason of a warrant hearing is assuming that FinCom has had time to review the articles. Typically they have at least a few days, is that whoever's sponsor can give a thumbnail. It's already, I'll explain what they submitted. They can give a, you know, brief, hopefully summary of what their article's about. And that gives the Finance Committee an opportunity if there are any initial questions. Is this legal? You know, and if the answer is, I don't know. Okay, so that's flagged as an issue. It's not intended to be a session where there's an immediate debate over the pros and cons. It's really meant to start the process and to start to gather open questions to just then kick off the rest of this process. And that may well happen. I think in the two years now that I've been doing that, very few proponents actually wanted to talk about their art at that moment. It was primarily this sort of organizational thing. But it may happen. Some people will. Yeah, some people will. My thought here, and just to like anchor you all again, I had two swim lanes here for Finance Committee. One in which I outlined those yearly articles, those repetitive articles, versus what I deemed new articles, but just maybe non-standard articles. The reason why I did that is because my thought here was that for the standard sort of yearly reoccurring articles, at this point, you have your select board sponsor, these articles, and we'll actually, I'll pull open the spreadsheet and show you my suggested like yearly reoccurring articles, and we can start talking through those. As I looked at those articles, a lot of them are at their meat and bones, more like finance articles, right? It's the OPEB, it's the reserve funds, it's things that are reoccurring that started one year and now are sort of reoccurring.
My suggestion on this truly from a process standpoint is that Finance Committee updates those articles, we vote on them, and then we send them off. I don't know that there's tremendous value for those kinds of articles in meeting with your select board liaison. I mean, they're sort of standard articles, and frankly, maybe I'm adding myself, I have not been, not for those articles, and you know, maybe if they've had questions on how the vote went, or if they've had particular questions, I've certainly let them reach out to me. I've always included them on my final versions, but I've never actually offered to meet with people on those, and that might be an opportunity to save some time. Yeah, nor have I. I mean, if you think about, and I'm going to use this just as an example. Yeah. OPEB. Brian, can you define OPEB? I can't, my brain's not working. Other post-employment benefits. Okay, so it's a retiree health insurance primarily, which again, the town is an unfunded liability of 50, 60 million dollars, and it's trying to work that down. Not required to, I don't think, by the state, but it's, the town was actually ahead of other communities, and working at slightly then. But anyway, so we've been putting like a half a million dollars away. And another example might be the special education reserve fund, which we fund every year. Um, I think the last couple years, it's been a half a million dollars each time? It was last year. It was less a couple years before. Yeah. 150 and then moved up to half a million. Okay. So, if I had that article this year, and it was the same number, or anywhere with five or 10 percent of plus or minus, I probably wouldn't bother to go talk to, or ask to talk to, or select board liaison. If it was double, or they decided they didn't want to put anything into it, I'd want to talk to somebody. That's my own little thumb. That's a good idea. Yeah, I mean, I would bicker slightly on that one, specifically just because it's only been around four years. Um, I don't know yet, but they may have ended up by getting some extra state circuit breaker money. They may have ended up by not having to tap into the reserve fund. So, at some point, uh, either the school committee, or the finance committee, or the select board may say, we think we have enough in there. So, at the moment, it's been a somewhat recurrent, because they've been spending everything that was in there. So, it hasn't. Right. Big Irish made this point a couple years ago. I did make this point. Yes, I did. You don't want it to be really part of the operating budget that's just off and reserve, but then you'd spend it all. Yes. But, you know, I gave your point, and, um, um, that there are a bunch of those. Um, yeah. But, but again, I think as long as you, with any of this stuff, as long, as any process, as long as you have a general footnote that says, subject to upper force, it is all subject to, and no one is saying, like, don't use your brain. Right? Like, you are a fully capable individual here. Um, we recommend you ask questions. This is just to provide something for us to, to move forward with. Um,
is there a different timeline on this? Well, I think, in an interesting note, no, they all come technically all at the same time. The interesting point here, remember, I talked, Satish, about, um, my goal and the hope is that we can normalize some of this process, right? Normalize the effort output over the course of the year. I think we start with documenting a process. If we're more comfortable with the idea that these are pretty standard, they're coming, then we can move into the second part of my item, which I don't think we're going to get to today is I went through all the articles last year and have a list of this has been generally reoccurring. And I think this is subject to us putting together essentially a template. Um, doesn't necessarily mean that it'll always, it'll always be appropriate to use a template, but I think it gets us, I mean, frankly, last year I used a lot of templates from the previous year's starting points. You two were brand new. So you might not remember, but along this vein, um, I drafted, um, probably 15 articles in October, two years ago and handed them to the rest of the finance committee members here. I've already drafted all the write-ups, numbers are missing in most of them. Here's a head start. Right. All you're talking about is exactly what was up. That's exactly my idea. Not having one person do them, we'll kind of spread it out a bit. But, uh, one, one thing you might think about because it just, it's not really helpful. I mean, at the finance committee, we weren't hearing article hearing. Um, it really isn't helpful to have the support and whoever their assigned person is on 15 to 20 standard articles say, this is a standard article. You can probably just say, all we really want to hear from you on is if there's, if it's a standard article, is there something that's different than the past? That would cut down the time of that meeting. It would help be helpful to select for it. Essentially, you're just saying like, we don't need to hear the standard, but we need to hear if there are any aberrations for that year. Yeah. Because again, that meeting's not intended to really overly educate the town, get into the pros and cons. It really is trying to, for the FinCom, identify any high level things that we really need to be focused on or answer questions that we have. Uh, and I just think that would just save a little bit of time in that meeting. Sure. Um, um, and in terms of talking to select board liaisons or other proposers of articles, um, I only talked to people when I really had to or saw a need to. Most times, if it was a template, it was a standard article. I drafted, I would certainly send it to them before I submitted it to the FinCom for consideration and said, okay, I hope this, I hope to present this to the finance committee at our next meeting. If you have any issues with this, please let me know. Okay. So your suggestion, and I want to, I want to restate that because I would love, I did not add that in here as a step. So if that's a standard step that we would generally expect someone to take, I would love to document it. What I heard you say, Brian, is essentially after FinCom basically updates the draft before it's sent and shared here for a vote, you would suggest a draft also be sent to the select board. To the member that's assigned to the liaison or, or, or other proposer. Most of the, most of the standard articles won't be coming from other than the select board. Okay. Let me talk to them. And even petitioners for that matter, right? As a, as a matter of courtesy. I have that in here for the non-standard, right? That, that absolutely I do. It's these, it's these like yearly ones that I'm trying to figure out, like how, how much can we crunch that process to give us time for the other things. Yeah. And it, and it doesn't mean that if they don't look at it and it moves along in the process and the finance committee, you know, considers it, votes it, send it in. And then the select board lays on call, you know, sends an email saying, Oh, I had a comment on that. You know, we didn't know that this changed. So you deal with it. Right. Right. Um, but most times they just said, thank you. Yeah. And it just saved you. Right. Yeah. Whatever time you actually might've spoken with them. Okay. I added that shared with the SB liaison. I, I, I maybe, maybe instead of shared, I'll say like the draft, uh, yearly review article update for cover draft and draft emailed. Right. Like, yeah. And again, it's just the way I handled it. Um, say I finished my writeup, but let's just take standard articles because they're pretty standard. Um, I'll send that. And after I sent it, um, I realized that the number changed or I wanted to word something differently. I will send a copy of the next draft red line. So select board liaison doesn't have to figure out what I changed. They can see the number that changed. They can see the words that changed. So hopefully everybody's proficient at this point with word and redlining. Um, and, um, and even for the finance committee, to accept we were to consider an article at a meeting and then have some questions, comments, suggestions, the number takes it away, works on it, brings it back to another meeting. Uh, it's part of your process. We should always be dealing with red lines. Uh, so we don't have to in orderly spend time. And in fact, I think I remember Pam Roman telling this stuff and you probably didn't, um, we really should have everybody, this gets down in the weeds, everybody should, their article templates should have the track changes on so that, uh, you can track if anybody else touched the article or it's because sometimes you send these things in and somebody, you know, that's what I put in here. Track changes. Yeah. That's an important. Yeah. It's a lot. It's a lot. It's a lot. Yeah. That's a good area. We may spare people on the capital. Uh, my apologies. I know we're running out of time. Um, well, how, how far, I don't think we should get into the individual articles. We won't be able to, but we're pretty close. So then it's just, let's talk about what's different with a non-standard article or what I'm suggesting and then maybe we wrap. Okay. The last piece here though, just, um, is who we send it to when an article is done. And this, I think maybe is up for discussion. Um, for those of us who are here who have done this process before Pam so nicely, I think last year and the year before collated all of the articles and would basically put like finishing touches or what you would consider like fit and finish on all of them before sending them to the town. And this is one where I'm just not sure if we have the capacity to do that anymore. So my recommendation here was you update there to go with the vote. We send it, we circulate obviously the guidelines, right? There is a font you're supposed to use. There is a font size. There's all of that. Yes, there is. Um, but I don't, I don't know if it's frankly like worth our time. Yeah. It's, it's really quality control. And it's a question of, um, I guess my views, if the FinCom is charged with the responsibility to put forth these, really, again, all we're responsible for is the comments, but we're asked to put it in the template that eventually finds its way into the warrant, but we can't touch the article language. We can't touch the proposer's comments. Correct. We can put in our comments, we can put on our vote, and we can put in pros and cons. Um, but that said, um, it was still our collective work product. And so, um, I just don't know how much of an effort Pam had to put in there or Steve Korea before her. All the years I was on it, it was a member, typically it was chair or vice chair that volunteer, but it doesn't have to be really someone who just, you know, maybe did one final read of the article just to see if anybody missed any typos or, but it is, it is work. It is work. Right. And, um, And can that also be distributed, like assign every article a reviewer? I, I think that's kind of tough. I mean, I, yes, we could, we absolutely could, but just, we're all going to sit and read these articles just so, just so it's clear. We have all already read them, giving you feedback. No, no, no, not about the content, but just the quality. Even quality. We sit around and I go, you made a paragraph here when you were not supposed to take that paragraph away. Like we have, right. Like I think I gave Rob that feedback multiple times. I'm like, get rid of your paragraph. Like you're starting paragraph, right? Like that's not correct. Like it's, we absolutely do it. It's a question of usually this is the last check, right? This is the last check. If the last check becomes from a process standpoint, you can do it a couple of ways, right? You can have a toll gate, a gate checker, right? Someone's checking at the gate. You could have it. What you're suggesting is we sort of share that load by sending to all of us, but then we've all also already looked at it. And I don't know if you could manage that. Yeah. I think that'd be repetitive. Yeah. I mean, there is a final quality to pull check as they put the warrant together. There's typically two or three proofreaders who have an unfortunate job of reading the warrant. It all has to get assembled and mapped out properly. Um, and, um, you know, obviously if, if based on our collected reviews and the comments at the meetings, um, it's clear to everybody that the quality of what's coming from each member in terms of the size, type, spacing, sentence spacing, paragraph spacing, um, it's not that difficult to do it. Although I find myself, you know, re-reviewing my articles three times before I submit them, you know. If the process worked last year, the collective review, then I don't think we need to change it. Maybe AI, maybe AI could do it. It's just work. You say AI, here's the font, here's this, here's that. Take this pack of articles and in 20 seconds it says, here's what has to change. Yeah. Oh yeah. Just step back for a second. I guess you can ask, why is it our job to make sure the font is correct? I mean, there are paid staff people who do this. No, I'm not saying we need to get rid of that, but it's a question. Yeah. Yeah. So I noted it as an open item just to keep us going here in the last four minutes. I, I just wanted... Can you put AI on there on that one? I'm not an AI person, but it sounds, it sounds like something AI could easily tackle. Possibly. Um, you guys are, you guys are IT guys, right? Yeah. Every day, every day. Um, so the other, the difference here, so now we're looking at the nonstandard swim lane for FinCom articles. The difference here, if you see, is that I put in here that we actually meet with the article sponsor, the SB, I, I guess I meant to say liaison here. Um, that's a physical meet? Uh, no, just a, we have a, we have a communication. Yes. And, and I think in my mind, a nonstandard article is probably worthy of a phone call at a minimum, like in my mind, as opposed to, I don't know if people manage these via email. I'm generally, for any of my real nonstandard articles, I've generally always suggested a phone call. Um, I've, I've done some phone calls in the past, like, you know, kind of depends on how well written I get the comments are and how thorough the background is. I might, my phone calls usually were people calling me because they didn't like the run it up. All right. So then I'll just change that. Communicate for the article sponsor, SB leaves, and then draft the FinCom report. Um, and then again, what you'll notice here is I have review article with FinCom. Um, and if appropriate, now somewhere in here, update article with votes, somewhere around here, probably, and this is an open question I had. If you've communicated, where in this process with nonstandard articles should, I'm going to say should as opposed to what we have been doing, should FinCom be providing a copy of their report to the article sponsor? Yeah, I would usually, again, always do it, um, prior to bringing an article to the FinCom for consideration, just because I didn't want to go through a whole article and have the sponsor chime in saying, you know, you know, you know, factually he got this wrong. Okay. Um, but I don't, I don't, I put a very, I would put a very short response time to the sponsors. I identify a meeting that I couldn't have to discuss. Got it. So basically in between these two steps, no, in between these steps, hold on, right here. You would, you would add a step. Okay. Typically how many nonstandard of a meeting here? How many, we got a lot nonstandard last year. That'll have to be in the next meeting, but, and we can discuss what that means. I mean, it varies year by year. There were probably six, seven, maybe last year, which by the way, was high in my experience. Um, no, let's differentiate between, um, a select board article or an article originating from another town board and those coming from the general public. Very, that's not all that common if they come from the general public. But you're not different experience. I mean, there might be a couple every year, but not, I think the six or seven we had last year, probably the high water mark of recent memory. Yeah. And that's just, I mean, A, it's out of everybody's control. Right. And B, it just kind of depends on, um, ones last year were unique because they were neighborhood issues. Um, it just, just depends. Um, historically there used to be a lot of particular articles dealing with process and by-law changes which were generally, you know, positive and good. Um, but, um, you know, no one can do anything to dissuade petitioners from coming forward. Okay. Thank you all so much. I guess you have one more step in between there. Scroll up for the new ones. Yeah, that one green. Yes. So, oh, yes, I did. Thank you. Okay. So instead of adding here, you know what I did? Communicate with article sponsor. And then after this, I actually had it back up in their swim line, discuss goals of articles and financial impact pros, cons, et cetera. So that was just like a, when, when you talk to them, generally, this is in my opinion, what we've discussed. Um, um, so. Yeah. Did you have, I can't see it right at the moment. Do you have the FinCom's review and determination of what may or may not have, what may have insignificant financial impact as part of that non-standard article? It's right here. Articles reviewed for financial implications. Is that in both? It's in both. Okay. It's in both swim lanes. Okay. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So I will clean this up. Anything in bold, Carl is going to be like a suggestion and a suggestion that maybe could be further circulated with like the select board or like some of these are things that maybe action items we might want to take action on. Some of them are just maybe clarifications. I also, Rob, saw your comment in the chat, um, with the next step as well. In addition to having this, um, like physio or workflow diagram is also to include best practices. So how are we going to handle articles with no financial impact, approved wording for votes, et cetera. So, um, I will also maybe spend some time putting that together unless someone else wants to do that. Rob, I don't know if that interests you at all. Um, either way, my assumption is that somebody is going to put a draft together and then we're going to review and have feedback. If you would like to put that together, that would be great for me. But if you are already doing this and would like me to do it, I'm open to it. Yeah, no worries. I can, I can do it. That's totally fine. Um, so I will put that together for our next meeting as well. And we will go through the articles to start discussing the standard ones. Okay. And also part of this is going to be, um, is there anything on that chart that you're focused on? Is there anything on that chart that possibly could be done by town staff? I honestly think, I think it's, I think it's that like, so in here, I think these template articles, like in, in my original iteration, right? I didn't even have like send a draft to anyone. Cause, um, what I had at, or actually I did, but up here you can actually see like, Hey, should yearly articles be updated by town staff? I think it's a discussion point. Like if we're putting together effectively drafts for them, like, is there a reason? I think we would still need to see them to vote on them, but like, is there any reason why we need to actually be the ones updating them? I think that's fair. It's fair. Again, put on a list of things, um, depends on their workload as well. Yes, it does. Okay. Um, I'll mark this as an open item for us to return to. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Um, I think Brian was, Brian hit it on the head. Let's confirm the capital budget discussion for next week, next three weeks out. I think the agenda for that meeting will be to start digging into the, um, to the budget model that we would copy a review of tonight, uh, start taking a look at the capital budget, um, continue this discussion, and then if Rob has had a chance to put together, um, some kind of a timeline, I mean, that'll be the fourth topic, and if anybody has any other suggestions between now and 48 hours before the meeting, please let me know. You'll, you'll include the prop two and a half process item in that one as well, the nine o'clock item. Yes. Let's do that. Yes. And actually, I just meant to say, so, um, unfortunately, I had a last minute trip gift added to my calendar, so anytime I'm not available, I will still help with the agenda, but I won't add the Vizio, like the agenda articles and stuff, I'll take that out, so you guys will have four items. Okay. Um, so that way we can tackle that when I'm back, and yeah, my apologies on that. Not like we don't have enough to talk about. Yeah. I know, right. Okay. Um, somehow, even though we skipped a lot of stuff, we're still running late, so I would like to make a motion that we adjourn. Seconded. All in favor. Iris. Hi. Rob. Yes. Carl's a yes. Yes. Yes. Brian. Yes. All right. Meeting adjourned. Thank you. Thank you all.
We have a full agenda, and I refer anyone who might be watching this now or later to a full agenda as published on the town's website. Briefly, though, we will take public comment, if any. If you want to welcome our newest member, we'll take a look at and hopefully vote to approve the minutes of the July 13th meeting. Brian Keveney, the finance director, will provide an overview of the multi-year budget model. Klaus Schindler, pardon me, who is a member of the town's audit meeting, is going to join us to discuss the possible reappointment, his possible reappointment. We'll take a few minutes to discuss our own goals and timelines for fiscal 27th. We'll take a look at the 2026 warrant articles and review our process for, and try to improve that process for dealing with the warrant articles in fiscal 2027. We'll also take a preliminary look at the fiscal 2028 capital budget. To be clear, that doesn't exist yet, but we'll be looking at the capital plan, five-year capital plan, as it exists in the, as of the 2026 annual town meeting warrant, and perhaps take a look at the, at what CPSI, the capital improvement planning committee, had recommended. Finally, if there's time, we'll be looking at the, at sort of a high overview of the proposition two and a half process, and identify those among us who will take the lead in reviewing presentations and reports for prior prop two and a half overrides, and think about what getting to prepare documentation should one be in regards this year. And with all that, we look forward to adjourning at approximately 9, 9, 10.
I have no announcements. Anybody else? No. Okay.
Ravi, are there any members of the public? I'll see you on the public online. Okay. In that case, I'd like to turn to our newest member, Krishnakanda. I think most of you, I have a chance to talk with him already, but you can give us the highest level of view. Sure. Krishnakanda, you know, new resident here. It's been like three years at Weiland. I've been in Mass for about 24 years and a half. I was primarily watered on, and we did have a middle schooler and high schooler. I've been enjoying the Weiland so far. I've decided to do lacrosse, soccer, and so on and so forth. I'm really happy to contribute in whatever shape and form I can. Very glad to have you here. Is there anybody you have met yet? Who is? Is that this? He does it. Yeah. Good to see you. Yeah, I think it's a big time to get over here. You'll get to know us all probably more than you really want to. We'll have plenty of time for that. You're welcome.
Ryan was kind enough to draft the minutes of the July 13th meeting, which you've seen. And I'd like to see if there's any discussion about those minutes.
I'll tip my hand. I thought you were great. I'm sorry. One second. Hey, Robbie. Yeah. Is there a meeting, passcode for this meeting? Passcode? Yeah. I'll go Zoom. Yeah, for the Zoom. Yeah, for the Zoom. Okay.
They text. Text or somebody? No, it's fine. For sure? Yep. There is a passcode. There is a passcode. You want that? Yes, please. 003-479. 003-479. How about that? That's correct. We're recording in progress. I didn't think those invitations came out of the passcode. All right. Are we still connected to the public? Yeah, we're still connected. Okay. Yeah, I see it. I can bring you over. I see you. Yes, thank you. Great. So you're looking at those minutes now? I'm good at the minutes. Oh, okay. I'm good at the minutes. You should move over right now. Thank you.
Rob, I can't see you, but are you okay with the minutes, or do you have comments? Yep. Well, good to me.
You're nodding. Okay.
Brian, you wrote them, so I assume you like them, but if you can't change them. I have no proposed changes. Okay. In that case, I would move the question. All in paper for approving the minutes of the July 13th meeting as drafted. We need a motion and a second person. Oh, that was a motion? I hear my move. Oh, you made the move. Oh, I'm sorry. You made the move in. I second. Okay. Got it. All in favor. You need a roll call vote with Paris. Yes. Carl's, yes. So, do you, she is?
I probably should have stated from this one again. Okay. And Rob? Yes. All right. Thank you. Yes. All right. 5-0-1. Thank you. Thank you. Frank, Kevin, I did get you in here a few minutes earlier. And was on the agenda. So, if you, you can address the multi-year budget model and tell us what the big picture looks like. I greatly appreciate it. So, the one that came up on the screen is a little variation. I had sent this file to the Finance Committee to Brian and Carla probably two weeks ago. Brian came back and added the yellow tab on the file left, which is this one here, but I'm not going to go over this one. So, what this is, this is a file that we've used for over a decade on the Finance Committee. The Finance Committee used multi-year monomer and extensively, looks like 2014 to 2018 then, kind of stopped doing it. It's an important tool to do when you're preparing a budget. You have to look at the ideas to find the impact. So, what I did was rebuild it and I gave it to Brian and Carl because you folks will most likely need to get a presentation on an override or not. This file here will help you do that. This is the same file we're going to use internally to figure out what we're doing with the fiscal 28 budget and overrides. So, let me explain it. So, if you can see it, it starts off with revenue, which is the green tabs. And what I did was, and again, this is a big file to a lot of tabs, but it's broken out into different areas. So, it starts out with the green tabs and their revenue, which is a projection of the transfers from other funds. It has the local receipts, state aid. And what I do is I project out by cost driver. For example, 1.02 means a 2% increase. So, everything in here is driven by cost drivers. So, what you have is you have the first one, all revenue. The second one here, tab, is a summary of the excluded levy, sorry, the levy limit, state aid, local receipts, and transfers from other funds. As we keep going down, I'm trying to get rid of this.
Bobby, how can I get rid of this screen here? I can move the files.
Sidebar, how do you get rid of that?
You're trying to move here. I'm trying to scroll down. All right. Thank you. So, the next tab here is the levy. And what I did was I projected out what the levy limit is going to be. So, I believe it would go to 37, probably. So, at fiscal 27, you see the red yellow, 600,000. That's not confirmed yet by DOR. So, that's a projection at this point based upon the fiscal 26 levy limit. We're expecting new growth to be around 600,000. Last year, it was higher. As you can see, it was 934. But in the past bunch of years, it's been far less than that. So, right now, we're carrying $600,000 as the new growth. And what I do here is I factor out what the levy limit is going to be for those multiple years, which does not include an override. Line 8 is the debt exclusion. You see a number in there, for example, fiscal 27 starts with $5 million. That's the expected, that is our excluded debt that we've already borrowed in our capital budget. It's in our debt right now. Can I interrupt for just one second? For Satish and Krishna's benefit. I'm sure all of this will be Greek view. So, this is probably absorbed. And then maybe, as I reached out to the two of you, maybe we can get together and I can try to reinforce some of the concepts here. And on that note, could we take a little bit of time just to pause real quick? So, for the levy, Brian, do you want to explain real quick how we get, I mean, I think it's pretty obvious here that you add the numbers, but do you want to just really quick explain prior to your levy limit, what that means, plus what Prop 2.5 increase means, and then new growth? Just real quick. To what extent do you guys understand Prop 2.5? These are brand new folks here. So, you understand the high level. So, basically, it's a state mandate, I believe, in the 1980s maybe, Prop 2.5, was it the 80s, that it was voted in in Massachusetts that communities can increase their levy limit by 2.5%. No more than that, it's also driven by new growth. So, for example, in fiscal 26, we had a levy limit of 86.7 million. What we do is we add 2.5% to that, and we add in the new growth, which in that case was $900,000. So, you're starting the next year at 89.8. And it's basically a roll forward of 2.5%. But what drives this thing beyond 2.5% is new growth. Also, what is included in the overall limit, which is called the max limit, is you add excluded debt. That is when the residents vote certain capital projects that are outside Prop 2.5. It's called excluded debt, and that's on line 8. So, for example, in fiscal 27, you see on the line 8, you see $5 million. That's the excluded debt amount. We actually have that same amount as expenses in our budget. So, we can increase the levy by $5 million because we actually have $5 million of debt expense in our budget. So, it's just simply an offset. So, what I have factored in here is the next five years of excluded debt because our capital plan only goes out five years, and it's purely assumptions at that point. So, when we look at this file, pretty much 28 and 29 are your more confident numbers. Once you start getting past 30, 31, 32, things get cloudy because you don't know ultimately what we're actually going to vote for capital budgets, and they may change, and we may have changes in our new growth. So, as of right now, our best case scenario is that we're going to start fiscal 28 with a living limit prior of 92.6. We're going to have 2.3 million, up 2.5% increase, and $600,000, which brings us to $95.6 million. To that, we add the $4.8 million. So, walking into fiscal 28's budget, we have a total of $100.4 million that we can raise without an override. Again, once we start going to the out years, things get cloudy because we're not real sure at that point. But this is our best guess at this point. And as you go through the budget cycle, it'll pick up to you what the levy limit is and why we have an override because we can't raise taxes beyond how we want it to have a big deal. Let me scroll down just a little bit further. I think I added, since you're using the file I sent you, I think I added a couple of rows to this one.
Maybe I didn't. Okay, keep going. All right, so the next revenue stream is state aid, and each year we get state, for the cherry sheet, the state gives each city and town money to run their budgets. Our money that we're projecting at fiscal 28 is, you know, the total of, and they go down to the bottom, you know, is about a little over $10 million. We're driving this as a cost increase of 2.5%. I wouldn't recommend going over 2.5%. I know internally we're not going to be going over 2.5%. It could be volatile. Seems like when the state gets pressured from municipalities that they didn't get enough aid, we end up getting a little bit more aid in the spring after we vote the budget. That's typically how it works. But for purposes of the budget, we're going to carry 2.5%. We're walking into fiscal 28 with about a $10 million budget for state aid. And with this also comes assessments, which is really expenses that offset our aid. So anytime you hear of our net aid, it's basically what the state's going to give us, and then they take some away. So through the course of the budget season, you'll hear folks referred to as net state aid, and that's what that means.
Next, we have local receipts.
And this is what various departments will sell permits, fees. Pretty much this is all driven by town departments, not the school department. So we had a very good year, fiscal 26. We were, it's hard to explain all, because everything sort of falls into one. So the DOR allows us to put on a revenue called local receipts. It's based on what you actually did the year before. So as we walk into fiscal 27, we had a total amount of local receipts of $1 million over budget. So our fiscal 26 budget was exceeded by $1 million. That means in fiscal 27, I can ask for more money. DOR looks at what I want compared to what we did in 26, and we'll agree to that. Having a good year goes a long way in bringing down our projection of an override. However, the sour point in all this is that one of the big drivers in our local receipts is on line 20, I'm not sure if you can see it. It's highlighted in yellow. It's $1.5 million. That's investment returns. When we have money, we put it into banks with CDs or presuries. There's only certain places we can put the money. We're bringing in $1.5 million in investment income. We don't know if that's going to last forever. So we wouldn't want to build expenses based upon investment or our income returns on our money. But for now, the fiscal 27 will be able to ask for more money on the tax recap, which ultimately means more money for fiscal 28. Can you, I'm sorry, I didn't interrupt, but can you remind me of the mechanism of that? So I understood that essentially we have a net surplus of local receipts that's higher than the year before. But then help me understand the mechanism with DOR then that basically you go to DOR and say, look, we have this million dollars in surplus from local receipts. And because of that, they're permitting you to do what? Just can you clarify that? I think DOR wants to know that based on your budget, that if you're relying on other sources other than taxation, they want to feel comfortable that you're actually going to end up collecting that. And I think what Brian's saying is... Before you can use that money in your levy? No, this is all budget, which affects the levy in that the more you're able to pay for your budget going forward with other sources of funding, state aid, local receipts, the less you rely on taxation, the less you rely on taxation, the less levy, maximum levy you're using. That makes sense. But does DOR control the amount of local receipts that you're allowed to use towards operating expenses? Yes. Okay, thank you. For your budgeting purpose, local receipts will be whatever they are. Understood. But for budgeting... Looking forward, they sort of... Okay. As a forecasting mechanism. ...put the rate in, so I think... Okay. Thank you. What Adam Brian was just talking about, you know, I remember asking four years ago about this because for years, interest rates were, you know, half a percent. And then all of a sudden, the town's balances went up for various reasons, and interest rates, short-term interest rates went up to 4% to 5%. And so we asked Brian, well, can't we include more investment income? And he said, no, you have to... The DOR is going to look back at the last year. Well, the last year was at half a percent. So they needed to see, correct, Brian, they needed to see one year of actual saying, okay, your investment income actually went up. And then that's consistently been going up. But the question is, will rates, short-term rates, stay elevated, or are they going to retreat? And two are the balances we have, some of which are driven by borrowing for large projects that got invested before they got spent on the projects.
Council on Aging Building, for example, was $11 million sitting invested for almost a year. And so for going forward basis, I think, Brian, you're saying for DOR to look at our proposed tax levy, they'll be okay with the number you have in there, and it's 2.5% higher than the actual. But as to whether we can forecast that number for the next nine years, it's kind of questionable. You're doing that at the moment. You're leaving it at that level. But if we're uncomfortable, we could adjust that downward if we wanted to be conservative, for example. Right. I mean, we're the opposite, right? Like, I understand it's less conservative to the opposite, but if it's trending up in terms of... If short-term rates go to 6%, or somehow we add $10 million to the free cash that could be invested, yeah, I mean, we could, if we think we know that now, you could push that up. But even there, what Brian says, you might forecast that, but unless you're able to evidence the DOR based on the prior year actual, you're going to get, sure, handicapped on that. You have to prove it's been done and consistent before they give you... Well, a good example of that is if you take a look at column C, the 26th, the very first one, motor vehicle. You guys can see that. It was a $3.3 million budget. We actually committed $3.2. We did not hit our budget on motor vehicle. So going into 27th, my budget is $3.3, almost identical to what my budget was in 26th, because that went backwards. Yeah. Well, that's good. So if you also don't want to overstate your local receipts, so let's say I put in 5% in DOR, you know, drank my Kool-Aid and agreed to that, and then it didn't come to fruition, we would have a drop in fund balance, because if we got, we'd be spending money, but then not an offsetting revenue. So you don't want to be too conservative, but you've got to make sure you don't put too much on this category, where you're going to get into trouble. The next one you have to concern, this is free cash. Free cash is not free, fellows. It's the unrestricted general reserve.
Iris, you know what this button is? It can get rid of it, because it gets away tabs. Iris, kind of get rid of that.
You need to move the funds against it. Clean things. Throw it away. That's the best that can be played. Thank you.
So the next category here is, again, we're going over revenue. These are offset transfers. And what these mean is that DOR allows us to put on contributions from other funds that we call transfers, but they have to be consistent. Who's currently paying into the general fund with transfers is the ambulance fund, water, wastewater. We have a few of these school departments accounts paying into. But it has to be reoccurring revenue, reoccurring transfer revenue. What this is is accounts that run payroll or the grants that allow fringe benefit payments to the town. Once the grant runs out, the money's gone. But what I do is I scrub all of our grants and I get all the fringe and I bring that into the general fund and bring that in as unbudgeted revenue to offset the expenses. DOR does not allow us to put, for example, the OPEP grant. I'm not sure if you can see that one, but that's a grant we get. And we're paying for somebody with payroll and health insurance. So I'm able to get some money out of that grant area to offset the budget. Again, I'm not allowed to put it on. Tax recap. It is not reoccurring and it's going to run out. But this is a pretty good thing. We've picked up a lot of money to offset our Medicare tax. For those who have been around us for the first year or probably 10 years, we did not have to have a transfer of Medicare tax at the end of the end because we had all these accounts paying into the Medicare. And I'm trying to get the school to contribute more into these indirects. Are all of these recurring every year grants? Are there various state and federal grants? But you have to take a look at the grant document. Some grants do not allow fringe. Most do. And what happens is the grant comes in and it kind of slides by that we're not grabbing the fringe. So every time a grant comes in, I get the documents to see what I can take out of the fringe and then bring it to the general fund to offset the expense.
Obviously do it with the people involved. I just don't do it on my own. Some people aren't happy with it. But if we're running payroll, for example, Pegasus, that's a summer event. We're paying people. Pegasus collects fees. They should be paying the general fund back for the Medicare tax. It's basic. So most of those pay the salaries for those people. They're just not paying Medicare tax. They're not paying if they get health insurance. And that's being paid by the general fund. And so you're simply trying to say to those programs, you've got to take some of the money you got and give it back to the town. It's not really a paid by grant service, right? It's actually paid by a combination of grant and taxpayer dollars. And the next one is just a revenue table that I use in presentations. It's just a summary of the total amount of money we have available. Again, we went over one of these numbers before. It's $104 million as we're heading into. I'm sorry, the levy is $104 million. The total amount that we can raise with state aid, transfer some other funds, and local receipts is about $120 million that we can raise without an override. So next is debt. And this here is from our bank. This is all the debt service that we have currently committed. And what I have the bank do is run estimated debt service, which is on the bottom here, which I'm going to go down to. This file is enormous. There's no way I can get it on the screen. But what it does is this file includes a committed debt of principal and interest. And it also includes estimates on principal and interest on the capital projects that are in the capital plan that we have now borrowed. And what I do is I take that debt service and I map it into the five-year plan. The capital plan is pretty much married to the operating budget because debt service is a significant piece of our budget and we need to understand how much the future debt service is. Normally, we're going to have debt coming off. If you pay off loans, they're going to take them down. But we're also going to be adding in debt service. The only fault in this is that we only have a five-year capital plan at this point. So I can't go out to 10 years, maybe any years, two weeks. We can go out to 10 years and get a bigger picture. But at least I have the next four years. We'll be 28 through 31. So this is an important piece of the operating budget and it's an important piece of doing financial planning on this. I'll just go over the other ones here. This green one here, Brian put together, Brian O'Reilly, he put together an amortization of our unfunded liability with our pension. We're going to be getting a new assessment coming up and we're carrying an estimate at this point, basically off this schedule. Brian took the unfunded liability and amortized it over 10 years and came up with our projected expenses over the next 10 years. I do have that mapped into the budget. This will be updated, this file, once we get our new numbers from middle-sex retirement. So before I go to the expense side, does anybody have questions on revenue? And this, on this slide for a minute, for again, everybody's benefit, but the two new members, you know, when you look at, I don't know if I sent it to Krish and I will, but the rest of you got two slides before the last meeting. One of which showed 2027 through 2037, and it showed basically a bunch of red bars, which are, you know, structural budget deficits that mean we don't have enough levy capacity. And so either you've got to cut your budget or raise more tax revenue or get other revenue elsewhere. There's a lot of, I mean, budgets made up of all sorts of expenses, but the primary driver of not only Whelan's structural budget, but most other communities is this slide. Because the town over many, many years had an ongoing obligation to cover pensions for people that retire that work there, but they weren't funding future liabilities. The state finally said, you have to start funding that unfunded liability, which in Whelan's case was probably over $80 million at some point. And I can't see exactly, but there's probably like $50 million now. And the state said, you've got to get that fully funded to the whole Middlesex pension, not just Whelan. You have to get that fully funded by 2036. And the actuary, in turn, looks at investment returns, looks at employment, looks at wages, and then maps out how much that's going to require in annual contributions to get fully funded. And that changes every time they do that analysis, which they do every two years. But if you look at the magnitude of the numbers, you're seeing them escalate from $7 million up to $13 million, $11 million anyway. That's well in excess of, and then it drops off to basically next to nothing. Because at that point, you're fully funded on all past obligations. And now you're currently funding going forward ongoing obligations. And so if you're sitting in 2037, we don't have an override problem absent other expenses going haywire. It's the next nine years. And unless the state comes up with some relief mechanism, this is really the primary budget issue from my perspective. Others may see other budget drivers, and there are medical and other things. But order of magnitude, this one, and it's out of our control, other than through the size of the payroll, obviously. But so we have to just pay pretty close attention, but we don't have a whole lot of control over what the numbers are. And as I told Brian, we'll see probably in two or three weeks the actuaries updated report. As a result, they should have 28 and 29 assessments in there. They do two years' worth of fixed assessments. And then I should be able to update this for the projection. When I read the minutes a couple months ago when the actuary met with the board, as I read it, due to increased employment costs, probably largely wages as opposed to people. And although investment returns have generally been up, they've been a little volatile, at least. It's possible that those numbers could be higher. I just don't know if they're going to be higher in the front part of this chart or higher in the back part of the chart. And if it's higher in the front part of the chart, that just means what Brian's got currently in his model is shortchanging what we're actually going to owe for this item. So I just wanted to give this particular expense line item a little extra airtime. That's because we'll probably be talking about it again in a few weeks. So I hope that's helpful. And this is what needs to be explained eventually, right, for the whole right. Yes. Yeah. Do you know when Waylon started funding their pension obligations? 20 years so far? It wasn't there. And now? It's been funding currently. The question is when they started funding the unfunded. Correct. Yes, that's what I want. Yeah, I don't remember. It could be as far as anything. And I think, Brian, you've said the state at least once, maybe more than once, has extended the date by which municipalities and the Middlesex Pension Fund had to be fully funded. They haven't done that yet. And if most communities are under the same pressure for the same reason, the Mass Municipal Association, I know, has this issue on their radar. And hopefully they'll come up with a mechanism to either push that fully funded data out further, which would shrink the numbers, but still pay more, be more interest. But at least its impact each year on the budget would be a little less. The other approach that I think was raised was, which is Brian was talking about, excluded debt, which is debt the voters agree to not make subject to Prop 2 1⁄2. You just add it on the tax bill, kind of a separate item that eventually goes away when that project's been funded. If they treated these retirement payments similarly and you could treat these obligations as excluded, then that would take them out from the Prop 2 1⁄2 calculation. And all of a sudden we'd go from forecasted deficits to forecasted positive. But I think if they did that, the town would still have to vote, you know, presumably to do that. The third thing we started to talk about last year, but the select board decided not to pursue it at a town meeting. And I don't want to spend a lot of time on it now, is some communities, when interest rates are very low, investment returns are very low, interest rates are very low, they basically said, okay, we owe $50 million, we're going to go out and borrow that money and issue bonds, pension bonds, obligation bonds, and we're going to borrow that money at 2%, 2.5%, and we're going to invest that money, and we're going to give that money to the, you know, middle-section retirement fund, and now we're fully funded. And then we're going to invest those proceeds, you know, so they retire our obligation. But the risk is if the investment returns turn out, be lower than your borrowing costs. So it's a risky strategy, but some communities have used it across the country and Massachusetts. I think, is Arlington one of them? No. Well, there's one on the issue that they looked at. There's one on the North Shore that got that they're borrowing off at like 2% or something. But anyway, the working, budget working group had suggested that select and insert an article that you have to go to the state legislature to get permission to be able to borrow, you know, commit to have to borrow. And there was, I think, just too many other issues, and the select board didn't want to deal with that. Whether that comes back this year, maybe that's something that the budget working group brings up again. I thought it was worth getting the legislative part of it going, because you can't do anything until you get that stuff done. So some amount of time was spent trying to figure out how to deal with this big issue. Wasn't also part of the feedback the last time we got a report that, and maybe I'm mixing up a couple things, but that the pensioneers also lived longer than originally expected, that the actual renewal tables end up being... They can change. Right, but wasn't that, wasn't that actually, yeah, wasn't that actually listed in, or am I thinking about... No, but Rochelle can tell that we're telling the rates no longer. Right, and I think that was listed in our report as well. Maybe I'm thinking about the PEP. And it's the same concept, though. It's tied to payments to people often told they're no longer around, right? And it requires actuaris. By the way, Klaus is an actuary, so you can ask all your actuarial questions when Klaus comes in. What time is he here? Is he here? Is he here? Is he on the 30th? Yeah, he is. So, anyway, a little extra time on that one item, but I tend, as a financial person, I tend to focus on the big-ticket items because if there's something you can possibly do about them, because you have a limited time to focus on all this stuff, right? So, Klaus is my friend at Odyssey who was very helpful in a pension obligation discussion. So, Klaus, can you hear us? Can you wait for us to be here? Yeah. All right, so next what we're going to get into, we went over the revenue. So, this is... So, Brian, did you ask whether I was here? I just mentioned that Parker at Odyssey is very helpful in talking about pension obligation bonds in the past. Yeah, Parker's a good man. Yeah. So, this tab here is the town expenses, and it's a big tab. There's no way I can get it on the screen. But this is the only tab that you folks would need to update when you do your projections. What you see highlighted on the top is Brian took my file. The file I sent you has all 1.0s. Brian went in and started doing some kind of assumptions based on if town expenses go up 3%, if town payroll goes up 3%. If school expenses go up 5%, if school payroll goes up 4.5%, what does that mean? So, when you just update this yellow block, everything changes in your file. You don't have to do anything else in the file. Is that showing 1s right now? What's that? Is that showing all 1s? No, you got... It's got the numbers I put in? Yeah. Okay. It's for their benefit. We'll come back to it. But just click on the yellow tab at the front. All the yellows. So, all I did was Brian's file had those boxes we were just looking at, and the one that he sent out to all of us had 1s in there. And so, if you look at that, you would say we have no problem because we had surpluses in the levy. So, all I did is I created a separate little set of inputs here, and this basically just links then to his boxes. So, whatever we put in in those upper input sections will change those boxes that Brian was just showing in his tab, right? So, that's a direct link. And that way, we can tweak our own assumptions. Brian will be doing the same thing in his budget working groups. But anyway, you can continue on with your stuff, Brian. But I just thought it would be easier to focus on at least a set of assumptions as opposed to all 1s because all 1s is not realistic, right? So, Brian, what were your places to have some of the most important apples and apples and 3s? Well, we want to come back to that. And I know one of the sensitivities to doing this, which probably is why Brian shot this file with all 1s, is that only two union contracts are settled at this point. And so, to be fiddling around with increasing the personnel cost in the public meeting can be potentially problematic if it's certainly done by the town staff that's negotiating with unions. You don't want to put 6% in for, you know, over your increase and the unions watch our meeting and say, you know, you guys expected 6%. So, I understand that sensitivity. And so, but we need to be able to make some judgments as we're going to be asked some questions in the not-too-distant future. And we're not part of the negotiations with the union. And so, you'll probably hear me caveat this many times. As we go forward, these are just, you know, I'll talk about why I put in the numbers I put in, but they're not, for my perspective, not irrational. But we'll get back to that. Maybe not tonight, but go ahead. So, this file here, this tab here, is what I said, is a very large file. So, if you take a look at the left-hand side, what I did is I brought in every single town department, both payroll and expenses. The limitation on this, for the most part, is right here. If you take a look at line 52 and line 53 with the school department. So, I've been after the school for quite a long time to come up with their own five-year model. They need to do projections on their own, just like I'm doing. And the biggest driver in the budget is the school payroll. It's the biggest budget in the town. And what's driving the non-payroll side is special education. So, we've been talking to the school department about getting a little better about a number than just throwing out a 5% or a 4%. So, that's in the works. What you're seeing now is the unclassified area of the budget. So, the budget has three years. The town budget, school budget, and unclassified. So, to make it a little bit easier for you folks, I keyed in here what I think the increases are going to be for all the various unclassified areas. And you guys can go back to these once you start taking a look at your own assumptions. For example, I have insurance at 14% increase. Other insurances, which is general liability, property is 10, Medicare tax at 3. You can have the health insurance at 10, 12, but you want to make sure it's not too low or too high. It's sort of a juggling thing. One of the areas that we're seeing a large increase is bulk education. We're seeing more kids leaving the district, either going to Keefe Tech or Minuteman. And the budget is going up significantly. It used to be, you know, $50,000. Now, we're talking $250,000. I just got some information that, well, five more kids wanted to get into Minuteman at the end of the year. Minuteman will make a decision over the summer if they have room. So we don't even find out about this, how many kids we have in Minuteman or Keefe, until we get to August, which we're seeing this budget go up considerably as a percentage in in dollars in the last few years. But the unclassified areas, I would start at these numbers here, these percentage drivers. And if I go back to the top, and you guys all have this in your email, right?
They have the version you sent out, which didn't include the first tab. Carl, you're going to send out this version. I will, as soon as the end is over. So the cost drive is driving to all these years. If you see them going all up, they're all formulated. In some of the lines I have highlighted in yellow, for example, every three years we have an increase in elections. So we do have these sort of bumps in some of these budgets. And I try to highlight at least, at least bring attention to some of these budgets that are not just 2 or 3% every year, sometimes like elections. We have a bump because we have elections that are going to cycle. So you will see that in the file. But like I said before, all you really have to work with is this tab here, this town expenses. The ones in blue is what I did was I just took all of the information that's coming from the town expenses and built summary tables. And I brought in revenue, I categorized them instead of just saying, you know, each department. You know, I brought in general government expenses, general government payroll, public safety expenses, public safety payroll. Just summarizing a little bit. So for fiscal 28, I'll just follow that one down and it's in, it's in gray. Again, this would look working with Brian's numbers here. I'm bringing in all the, all the expenses that he's keyed in, which brings us to a total budget, which is line 52. If you can see that on the screen of 120 million point one. If you bring in there, continue down with the revenue, you see that the total expense, the total increase in the budget is 6.27. And for the most part, the reason why it's 6.27, which is a high number for Whalen, typically our budget increases are, you know, far less than that. If you, once you go back in the file, you're going to see that the unclassified category is automatically driving the budget up 3%. It's not the payroll. It's not the expenses. Because we're starting at a 3% increase simply because of health insurance, pension, Medicare, general insurance. So typically in the past, we would see a budget increase of 3.5%, 4%. But when you're already starting off at 3%, there's not a lot of room. You're running out of room. So the other, the other item that Brian talked about earlier, the debt service. One of the things the town did last year was came up with strategies to put off an override vote for fiscal 27. And one of the things they did is they delayed long-term bond funding, which was expected to have been done last November. And borrowed short-term instead and a couple other things. But what was going to get done last November is going to be done this November. And what was going to be done this November on the current year budget is going to be done this November. So we got basically two years' worth of debt service now hitting us in the fiscal 28, correct? And that's, you know, it's multiple hundreds, thousands of dollars that is a sort of an extra bump. So that was a consequence of kicking the can last year. It's now sort of coming back at us. So these other blue tabs is just a different way of looking at the budget. In some ways, I'm summarizing this one. Like, for example, this tab here summarizes it by town budget, school budget, unclassified. So I can sort of get more information in. And it just allows you to summarize, you know, based on Brian's projections. If you take a look at the very bottom here, you see that minus almost a million dollars in line 38. So based on Brian's just summary projections, if we had another $200,000 as a cushion, you would need an override of $1.1 million just to support the expenses that he's tentatively keyed in there. And they weren't big ones. You know, town payroll, 3% expenses, 3%. There's not a lot there. So then if you go back to Brian's sheet, what he did was he basically, again, on the top, he took the cross drivers that he came into the town expense tab. And then here, he's just making it easier on the ice to just bring it all together so you don't have to bounce around the different tabs to see what is going on. And if you can see right here, where I got my cursor with line 31, based on his projections, you're looking at a $6.8 million taxing base. 6.8%. Oh, is it? No, it's 6.5%. Yeah, the percentage of you is 6.8. So that gives you a quick look at what it means when you put in certain cross drivers. So this kind of a model gets you to where you need to be if you're going to be presenting your opinion on if the township is pursuing an override or not. In the town expenses tab, do you have a 27 actuals? Yeah, the 27 budget. Budget, we don't have actuals. But now we increase the .7. Yeah, budget increases from .6.
So everything, all the percentage increases. Again, I understand this is not the actual budget per se. That will be done over the course of the next few months, and part of it is going to be dependent on decisions made on whether people want to pursue an override or not, and be able to fund it.
But this is really a little higher level, purely, other than a few minor adjustments, strict percentages. So it's not overly precise, but it should be good enough for the working group's purposes and decision makers' purposes and our purposes. And one of my objectives of at least populating some numbers here was not this meeting, but probably the next meeting or the one after that. We're then able to start to say, okay, do we really think there's going to be an override, a need for an override, or not? And so based on these numbers, you heard Brian say, based on these assumptions, it would be, we'd need a million dollars, plus or minus. And if you're not inclined to want to pursue an override, you'd have to cut the budget by $20,000. Okay, which, where would that come from? Schools? Schools, um, so that, that, that, this should make our discussion a little more manageable. And fiscal 28 is, I think, proved in the working group as time went on. There are certain items that you really don't know the final numbers until actually next January or February. But if you put in conservative assumptions to give yourself comfort, um, you, you're going to start to see the 28 budget coming together before you ever get the town manager's budget. So, again, rather than waiting until the end of the year or January and get a budget and start reviewing it, for the next four months, we can be on and off looking at this model. And if people want to talk about specific line items or how we feel about it, we'll be able to do that for four months before we ever get an actual budget to review. You didn't have this last year. You were getting updates from the chair, uh, when these things were being done at the budget working group level. So I'm hopeful that, you know, we'll find time either every meeting or every couple meetings to revisit this and maybe pick a topic to focus on. People can come prepared with their questions and you'll all have this. So, you know, you could fiddle to your heart's content, um, but, um, I'll, I'll probably maintain for the finance committee. This model, um, Brian will feed me, I hope, as you've been doing, he'll feed me any changes you've made to your underlying assumptions in your model, just so I can keep this updated, if that makes sense. Well, yeah, we're in a limbo right now because we just finished the, uh, bulk receipts postings, and so the next, next shoe is going to drop is in November when we issue the debt service. Well, retirement could be next month. Yeah, and then right now, I believe I'm carrying 4% as the interest rate. We're going to get a real interest rate in the fall when we actually borrow the money. So the budget will be updated in, you know, in November, which we actually borrow and get the real rate. And then we'll, and then we'll get our, in December, we'll get our new growth from DOR. So that's 600,000 is either going to go up or down. And then as we get into January and February, the health insurance number comes in. And this is the state aid, state aid comes in late January. So that's what every town and city follows is that path where you get a clearer picture of where things are going to be. But as he just said, you can do your own assumptions based on history. And I think, you know, we're probably going to get a 2.5% increase in local aid. We're probably going to be 10% increase on the other insurance. And some of the other ones are pretty much, I mean, the kids actually know what's going to go up through 1.5%. So you can make pretty good assumptions on these things. And that gets you to a ballpark number of what the budget is. And then you can peel that against your revenue and go, okay, what is the deficit? Really, what is the revenue deficit? Is there any item which is like a big unknown? Excuse me? Is there any specific item which is a big unknown? Yeah, there are two or three things you just mentioned. The state aid, it's not that big other than if it has happened in the history of the town and other communities that the state went in reverse and reduced the amount of state aid to the localities, but it hasn't happened recently. But with the federal government cutting back on their funding of states, that's always a possibility. But I think the state has been in a certain band. So that's not too much of a wild card. Health insurance has kind of been a little volatile, both because health insurance is volatile, but the health insurance that we get for the town has the ability to use some surplus that they carry. That's been funded by each town, and they can buy the rate down some years, which they did a couple years ago. Two years ago. Two years ago, the rate only went up by 2.5%, 3%. Last year, it went up by 10%, roughly, right? But it's been as high. It's kind of as high as 12% or 14%. Retirement is, we'll know, pretty soon. The union contracts, all but two have not settled yet. So until we know what cost of living increases were given. Another big unknown this year, depending on the timing, is the town did a waste and classification study, which got completed last fiscal year. And it's possible that it may result in some increases to non-union staff beyond traditional cost of living. And those haven't, you know, those, we're not at that level of detail here, but that could be a surprise for fiscal 28, depending on what the town manager feels he needs to do. In my opinion, the economy is quite volatile. What happened in history could be completely different than what's going to happen now, next year. So things might, you know, we got it. Yeah. Yeah, I'm not going to, we won't get into it tonight, Carl, but you sent out another Excel spreadsheet that had two tabs in it, which tie back the two tables that are in the 2026 warrant in the FinCons report. And the point Brian was, Brian has been pretty conservative in budgeting over the last few years. Generally speaking, what, you know, the budget that passes town meeting and the assumptions that it was based on, we've ended up with generally positive surprises. So if you look at the warrant, we were projecting in the warrant showed for fiscal 27, at the end of fiscal 27, a $1.2 million profit, two and a half levy surplus. That surplus is now up to two and a half million for fiscal 27, largely driven by the local receipts that Brian talked about before, plus some extra state aid. And so what I attempted to do in that spreadsheet was take you from the assumptions that were made for building the budget and what the town saw in town meeting to where we are right at the moment. And it's generating more surplus, which means less, we've had to use less tax levy, which means we've got extra capacity, which in turn is driving us down at the moment based on these assumptions to only needing a million dollar override on this set of assumptions. If I, if I ran this two months ago, that number would have been, you know, closer to two million. So these things are going to move around and that million could easily go to a million and a half, a million seven 50. If we find that schools settle at a, you know, a higher cost of living, then some of these percentages factor in, for example. Um, and you'll see, again, a bunch of notes next to those inputs, um, I simply highlighting, um, you know, what drives those percentage increases. In addition to cost of living personnel, um, again, you look at county warrant or supplement or handout, um, uh, they get cost of living typically. And then they, they are put in a table of steps and lanes. And so they moved horizontally and they moved vertically and each time you move your salary ratchets up. Um, and so, you know, these percentages we put in for personnel have to contemplate both cost of living. That's negotiated plus the impact of employees moving up or down or sideways and steps and lanes. And, and all of that will be, um, clear as the budget process, uh, progress. So in other words, it's complicated, very, very complicated. So I'm hopeful that this one tab will make our life at least a little easier. And we don't have to spend as much time in the, in the weeds and the plumbing, but, you know, I'm pretty comfortable getting into all those other tabs. I think spent the last couple of years working with Brian, um, you know, on this model. So it's, it's a absolutely fantastic tool. I'm really glad we have it. Um, Mr. Kevenny, thank you, um, for your time and for, for putting those all together again. And Brian, thank you. Um, this is actually, in my view, our most important job, but we're going to stop doing it right now and move on. And I would like to come back to this, uh, in our next meeting and then start to get into it, right? Is that okay? Yeah. Good. So thank you. You obviously weren't welcome to stay. I'll leave you with my friend, Klaus. I was standing down patiently. Brian, will you, uh, as you had been, at least when I was serving, um, I think I'm, you'll generally be available to join us at these meetings, um, as we need your insights on stuff. Yeah. So thank you, Carl, to invite you. Seemed appropriate. Appreciate it. Yep. Thanks so much, Brian.
All right. Moving on. Mr. Stigley. Hello. How are you? Are you on mute?
No, we're not. Oh, is he on mute? No, he's on mute. No, he's on mute. Files, can you hear us? I do. Oh, can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Yeah. Okay. Yes. And Carl, you might, you might want to talk this way so you can be picked up better. Yeah, that's a good idea. Thank you. You can look at that. Look at him over there, probably. I get rid of that. There he is. Okay. Oh. Plus, um, you and I talked to, literally about two months ago now, and, uh, more recently, um, uh, Brian Hurley, he has given us a pretty good thumbnail sketch of what the audit committee is all about, why it exists. And, uh, I've circulated some materials that you had provided to me as well. Um, but if you'd be kind enough to just take a minute and talk about, um, what it's there for and what your role has been, I think that'd be a great place to start.
Yeah. Um, so bottom line, um, uh, let me, let me start by saying that, um, when I first started on the audit committee, I, I, I did a survey of peer companies, there were, I mean, peer towns, and we looked at 11 towns and, and looked at what, whether or not they had audit committees. So it turns out that three out of 11 had audit committees, which, um, which basically kind of means that the audit committee is, is something that, that the concept got created because of Enron. And then, uh, in, in this town in particular, there were other reasons why we created a, an audit committee, uh, bottom line, you're, you're basically, uh, kind of redundant, but you're there for, you know, in order to provide some, some controls on when, when other things fail. So that, that's kind of our, our, our role. We, we, we are, I, I, I'm saying this because I want you to understand that one of the issues I have right now is that we're, we are understaffed. We have, we've had three people and three people is a quorum, but the committee is supposed to have five. We're having difficulty recruiting. Um, one of my recommendations in the report that's going to go to the select board this year will be to argue that, um, we should either fold the audit committee into the finance committee or have joint memberships, some from, you know, the audit committee or FinCom joins the audit committee and, and vice versa. It's just a solution to a problem. Uh, that said, what we do is we review the, the ACFER and, and typically you do the same thing and, and we find all the same things that you do. And, uh, and then in addition to that, we get something called the management letter. This year, we don't, you just tell folks what the ACFER is, what it stands for. Yeah. Annual Comprehensive Financial Report. And I think you guys, you guys look at the same thing. I'm pretty sure you get the same report. Uh, it's available. I'm not sure the finance committee is, at least when I've been on it has spent any time on it. Yeah. Well, I, I think when I was on the finance committee, we did do that and, and, uh, it's, it's not so large that you can't read it and, and proofread it. So that, that's one of the values we add. We, we look very closely at the, uh, the ACFER and, and generally we, we, we, uh, we offer our suggestions. Um, uh, one example, um, couple of years ago, uh, you were talking about pension plans earlier. Um, the, the ACFER has, um, it, it lists the, the pension plans, the assumptions and how they got built up. And one of those pension plans, I think it was the, the, uh, Wayland, uh, town employees pension plan had a discount rate of, of 7% and a projected investment return rate of 6.3. That's just nuts. And so those are the kind of things we would pick up. Your discount rate should never be, uh, greater than your projected investment return. So anyways, we, we go very, very closely to the, uh, to the ACFER provide, uh, suggestions. The independent auditor also provides something called a management letter, which lists, um, deficiencies. And, uh, in, in, in, uh, in about four years ago, we had several deficiencies, which for the most part they're gone. And, uh, so we, we, we, and then we report, we report our findings to the select board at the same time, the independent auditor also reports the select board. So again, this is somewhat redundant in that the, the, the, the Enron situation, the auditors reported to the, uh, to the chief, um, investment on now, uh, financial officer, but that financial officer did not report to the board. In this, in this situation, the independent auditor reports both to the, uh, select board and maybe to FinCom. I'm not sure. Anyway. So, okay. So I'm, I'm saying again that the audit committee, if you, if you look at it, you know, objectively is somewhat redundant, nevertheless, we do focus on, on the financial report and we do focus on the management letter. If there is one in, uh, in 20, uh, for fiscal 25, there was no, or actually fiscal 26, there was no, uh, no management letter, which meant that the independent auditors did not find, uh, material weaknesses as in the past. So, uh, um, so let's see. Going forward, our deliverable will be to do a report to the select board with whatever the report we did get from the independent auditor. And, and, and I guess that's, oh, and, and by the way, even though every one of us has had our terms expired, uh, I, I, I researched this issue with the town manager and we are allowed to continue, finish the deliverables. We have two deliverables. One is the report to the select board. The other is, uh, is a, is a write-up that we do for the annual report that the town does. So we'll be, we'll be meeting, we'll be trying to set up a meeting with, with the three of us that are still on the, on that, on that committee. And we will finish that deliverable. So that's kind of like where we are. Wow. So what role did, does the audit committee have in the selection of the, um, in the hiring of the independent audit firm? Yes. We, uh, we, we, we both recommended that we put on an RFP for the, for the, uh, independent auditor. And then we, uh, we filled, we filled out the, uh, kind of our, our, our, our, we had a subcommittee that filled out our preference for whom to select. And, and at the present time we've, we've engaged CBiz for another three year cycle. That's what we recommended and the town manager did that.
So one of the issues that, uh, you know, when I proposed that we, we look at joining up with the FinCom for, for practical reasons was whether we needed a town meeting. And the answer is no. It, the, the, the, the audit committee was created by a vote of the select board, which means that the select board can, you know, can choose to change the, the mission and we don't have to go to town meeting. Do you, uh, close us to that suggestion? Um, at least in my experience, um, you know, audit committees, um, generally are intended to have, uh, be independent, supposed to be independent. Um, and, and minimum give the appearance of independence. Um, do you have any concerns of, um, of connecting it to another active committee? In this case, the finance committee, um, uh, vis-a-vis how people perceive it, uh, in that regard. And then those other communities where you said three of 11 had audit committees, eight didn't. Obviously those eight are surviving without an audit committee. Uh, did you find that it basically in those communities, uh, if either the, uh, annual audit was not being reviewed by anybody other than the, uh, uh, presenting to the select board and the finance directors or did the, uh, no, frankly, I couldn't get it. I could not get into that much detail. I basically, uh, what I could do, uh, I, I, I, I got in touch with these people. I got that information, that little piece of that factoid that did, or they didn't have a committee, uh, the report, uh, I think, uh, I did a report and it, it does identify what the responsibilities are in that particular town, but I can't, I, I don't really remember the specific. Whether or not these other towns have issues, I couldn't tell you. And, uh, Klaus, uh, just from a calendar perspective, um, because I, as you recall, I was appointed to the audit committee, but never got sworn in because I was on another committee and that's something that the audit committee won't, uh, permit that you serve on another committee that possibly spends money, which is the independence concept. Um, my recollection class is that the, uh, the town's books are closed, you know,
July, August, uh, the financial report is prepared by the finance director with the auditors in September-ish, uh, they complete their work in October-ish and your committee review as the independent auditor go through it with you and anywhere from, depends on the year, anywhere from like November all the way into January. When, this past year, when did you have that meeting? Do you recall? I could, I could look at my notes. Um, yeah. I'm just wondering if, if, if, if it did fall within the purview of the finance committee, unfortunately, my, my fear is that it would fall right in the heart of the heavy ones. No, I got the answer for you. This year, this year it was December. Uh, we, we, we got a draft of the ACFA on December 31, which meant, which means basically we didn't meet until January. Other time, other years we might, this might begin in, in, uh, November. There was at least one year when this didn't happen until like April or May. And, and that was because, um, we had, um, something called cash reconciliations hadn't been, hadn't been reconciled and you can't do a financial statement unless you're, you, you have a cash reconciliation. So this was one of the reasons we had the, the material deficiency is because the, the, the treasurer at the time, uh, just failed to, to execute, uh, one of the duties of, of the treasurer and, uh, you know, long story short, the, the treasurer at the time reported to the town administrator. And, um, one of our recommendations was that that treasurer should report to the finance director, which eventually did happen. And, and I think we got, we got better results after that, but basically, uh, cash reconciliation had been a problem for about 10 years and it was not addressed just because the treasurer was, was not supervised, supervised effectively by the town administrator. And so that led to the recommendation that, that the treasurer report to the finance director, which has now happened. Anyways, to answer your question, we'd like to get this, this report, probably November. Um, we typically haven't get it, got it in November. It's been as late as, as, as, as April. And, and if, if you, if you don't get that report by April, you, there's a risk that you, you don't, you don't have a town meeting or you have to, you have to delay your town meeting. So it's kind of important that this stuff gets done. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Um, so I'm not, I don't have a feeling yet for whether combining forces makes sense. And on the one hand, we are supposed to be independent as well. Um, whether or not it makes sense to somehow combine, I think it's a different question for a different day, Klaus. Um, one I'm happy, one I'd be happy to talk about either in a meeting or just with you, as you prefer. I mean, question for the house tonight is we have the opportunity to recommend house's reappointment to the audit committee. There are only three members today. He's correct that he can stay in his role without a formal reappointment, but I think it would be in everybody's best interest to make that formal. Um, if anybody has any more questions for you, or you wouldn't have anything else to say, I'm happy to yield the floor. Otherwise, I'd like to put it to a vote. Do you want to make a motion? I think I will. Thank you. Um, I move that this committee recommended the select board, the reappointment of Klaus Schickle, um, to the town's audit committee for a three-year term expiring June 30, 2029. Seconded. All in favor. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Brian. Yes. Yes. Yes. Thanks. Thanks for your enemies. Welcome back. I know you never left. Welcome back. All right. Thank you very much. Does that mean I'm done? You're done if you want to be sure. All right. All right. Thank you very much. Have a good evening. What's left of it? Yeah. So a quick comment on the audit and finance committee to business. I think from my provisional mortgage years, the audit committee should be disconnected from the audit committee and they should audit versus being part of the audit committee, the other way it uses its meaning of audit. If it's part of the audit committee. So yeah, I'm familiar primarily with audit committees on corporate boards where they are part of the larger board, but again, I, I, I'm not pushing one way or the other right now at this point. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. And that would be, uh, I mean, unless probably you thought the finance committee wanted to, uh, advocate for something like that, that would really be up to the select board at the end of the day. So maybe we never hear of it again, or maybe it is brought forward to us at which point you probably have more discussion, but I didn't put, you might be asked along the way by chair of the select board or. Well, we, we probably see this is not on the agenda for tonight. Anyway, we may want to think about this. Um, we might also just wait to see if Klaus gets any traction on that, um, before we figure out what we think about it. It's not like we don't have enough to do. Yes, exactly. Um, if they were to join us though, I'd put a right to work. Okay. Thank you. Moving on. Um, the next topic is, uh, a review and discussion of our goals and all timelines, um, for the year. Um, I think this is here. Um, Iris and I, you know, with the help from Brian created the agenda, but this is, well, it was either going to be you or Rob, correct? It's Rob. Yeah. So Rob, I know that when we left the last meeting, you had mentioned wanting to sort of put together a timeline or like a milestone view of work that is ongoing. And, um, we've added this to the agenda in case there was something that you wanted to share as a follow-up from that item. I have made marginal progress on that, but I don't know that it's quite baked enough to share yet. Should we carry that item forward to our 810 meeting? Yeah, let's do that. Okay. Thank you. Yep. No problem. We may want to talk offline, Rob, about that. Um, the more, the more that you, we can do the better, but I can't help but think that the timelines can be driven to a great degree by what the select board decides on timing, you know, for if there's going to be an override, when will that be, and then working backward from that. So it may be, and I'm not trying to tell you what you're doing because you know more about it than I do, but it might, it might be most useful to not so much fix it on the calendar, but just understand the timelines that go into whatever date that's going to be. Is that what you're thinking? I think I'm part of what I'm thinking about is trying to kind of carve it up into the point, the things that we know and have some confidence in, like the article timelines are going to be the article timelines, right? Um, the override conversation is probably the most unsettled in terms of timelines, right? But try to pencil in sort of more definition where we have more confidence and less definition, obviously where we have less. Got it. Okay. So I agree with Iris. Why don't we, um, put this back on the agenda for two weeks, three weeks, what, um, two weeks, I think, right? Well, if the next meeting is in two weeks, and actually the one after that is a joint meeting with the software, um, so we probably wouldn't be talking about it then. You're right. Sounds good. Okay, 10 it is. Um, um, next topic, um, you, you brought up yourself, Rob, Warren articles, our review process, and what we might try to be doing differently is, especially with personal card to what we're calling generic articles. Yeah. Shall I share my screen? So I circulated an article process and what I attempted to do here, um, for those of you who had a chance to look at this, or those of you who did not, is map out a flow. This is a combination of some suggestions, some things that were happening, some things that were not happening last year. So I'm hoping we can have a broader discussion of understanding what is the ideal flow from beginning to end when an article is considered done. What I think probably happened last year, and I think a lot of the feedback we got from, and Rob, feel free to chime in here, but especially from our newer members is we didn't really have any sort of living documentation around what the process should look like. Um, and what that meant is we, we essentially gave you an article and told you to go out and do it, and you figured out how to get there, but you did it frankly, probably without a process in place without support. And I think we all felt overwhelmed by, um, probably the iterations and the work that got put in. And I think maybe regardless of whether we felt overwhelmed, we probably all left, I think, questioning if we had put in the effort in the right places. And I think in my mind, this is to provide an artifact for this committee as we move forward, to try to standardize our process so we can have new people on board, people leave, and there's something to be able to say to them, here's what this should look like. And also refine our ask to the town and to others like sponsors for what our expectations are of when we will accept an article. And I think that's a big part of it, Carl, is we essentially are accepting articles in any state, they come to us. And I don't think that's correct. So theoretically, it's supposed to be done, theoretically, but they're not right. And so I think having something to point to you to say, we are going to hold everyone accountable to this level of preparedness and to this process, I think will help us. So with that in mind, that's the frame of reference, the context, let me walk you through what this looks like. And you all would, then we can open up to a broader discussion of, this doesn't look right, we need to move things around, etc. So a couple of different roles here on the left-hand side, you see that we have the town, right? It's in yellow. What do we expect the town to do? Then we have the article sponsor. I specified article sponsor here, because the article sponsor can be various different groups. It can be the select board, but could it also be an article that also came from, he had some feedback, we'll look at it in a second, article sponsor, but also it could come from a voter, a resident, right? And they could be the article sponsor. And then I also broke it out here because I really would like to look at the yearly articles, the articles that are reoccurring year in, year out, and have a slightly different flow, which hopefully should be reduced in effort and more streamlined than those, I call them new articles here, but those articles that come in every year that are unique to that year, right? And so that's who you have on the left-hand side here of these swim lanes. And the flow, I think that I wrote here, so an article is received presumably by someone in the town. I don't actually know exactly how they collect them all, but they do. I think in an ideal world, they're updating the article language. I'll be honest, sometimes we get articles where the article language itself has not been touched, right? Are you already at the max magnification? No, I'm not. Would you like me to... More for the people watching. Sure. I've looked at what you said, but that's better. Thanks. Thanks. So I think it is reasonable, and I'll open this up. We can talk about each box in line. I think it's reasonable to expect that the article language has been reviewed and updated to actually match. Like, this is where I really question, like, it seemed to me like legal council, like town council wasn't reviewing the articles until they were all done, as opposed to why isn't there any review on the actual article language, which we're not allowed to touch before we receive the article. Do you know what I mean? Are you asking me a question? I'm happy to answer if you're asking me a question. I'm asking you a question. Yes, I am. Um, the, uh, the answer is town council mostly waits for the end of the process, um, but, uh, is available for all those constituencies that might propose articles, uh, if the requests are run through the town manager. Um, um, and as you've experienced, um, um, in the unfortunate part of the, the town's bylaw process, there's a, uh, uh, opening of the warrant by the select board, and there's a closing of the warrant 30 days thereafter. And inevitably, as much as you'd like to think, people have been preparing for, since the prior town meeting and all ready to go with complete well-drafted articles, as soon as a warrant opens, they can put them in. Uh, in my experience, inevitably, there's a bunch that maybe have been talked about, maybe haven't been talked about that get thrown in, uh, to make sure they get in before the, the, you know, closing of the warrant. And, uh, that's probably the most problematic part of this. And, uh, as a result, as town council, they tend to not want to get town council involved in something that's not really well-baked. The, the most extreme example of that was three years ago, um, it was a select board article, I believe, put together at the last minute by the, uh, finance director. It had the header description of what the article was about and basically a white piece of paper as a placeholder to legally say they had an article in. But to my point, is that reasonable to expect someone on FinCom to spend the time to write a report on that? Uh, certainly the answer is no. And, um, uh, um, you know, the finance committee, the select board controls the warrant process. We are in control of our responsible end of the town bylaw. It's what we're supposed to do when presented. Sure. Um, I think really the only true options other than nudging people along or making suggestions like we're hopefully going to do here and then getting buy-in from the select board who really are the chief gatekeepers and understanding that last year, probably 70% of the articles are select board articles. Right. So they were guilty themselves. So some of these issues, um, is the only real thing we could do is say, we just can't deal with this. So we're, our comments are going to be, we don't have any comments. We'll tell you a town meeting once we know what actually is being presented and prior finance rates have had to do that, uh, a handful of times. We did that once last year. Right. Right. So the, the obligation with these warrant articles, um, is our obligation is that we are supposed to recommend for or against every article. Um, is in, in the last couple of years, we've adopted the idea that if we don't think that it has a financial impact on the town, it's material of financial impact, we would say so and that would be a full full summary of our comments. That is roughly speaking about half of them, maybe not quite that many. Um, that has helped a lot. Um, somehow though, we've also gotten into the, into the job of writing plain English descriptions of the, not about the pros and cons of the article where we do that too, but like, what does it really mean? What is this saying? Right. And then you ask, you ask probative questions typically should you yourself understand what you want to summarize in a short number of paragraphs. Right. But I'll give an example. Like we had an article last year that I know from talking to the select board member had gone through nine rounds with them before it got handed off to me. So I would suggest that they did their due diligence and trying to make sure that I got some substantive, um, article. I probably did another seven, eight drafts. And in the end, town council deemed that it was not legally permissible. Why did that not get deemed before everyone spent 20, 40 hours on it? Um, and that's the kind of things that I think we want to avoid. Yeah. So maybe, maybe your point, if you're picking tabs of possible recommendations, suggestions, or you want to characterize it to the slide board would be for hopefully short money. Would it make sense for town council once the window closes? And prior to the finance committee's hearing, or yeah, ideally it'd be prior to the finance committee. Some of the law firm at a minimum reads them all. Right. And to your point, if there's any of them that, um, conflict with state or federal law and therefore at a minimum will require changes to allow them to meet and state or federal law. They will at least flag that for the benefit of those both working on those articles, submitting them, and then the finance committee. So the finance committee could say, okay, I'm going to do a whole lot of work on it because this one's been flagged until something's presented that actually is good. We, we, we know it's personal. Not to say that any article at any time can't be pulled. And an example would be the pension obligation bond article. You had to get it in. Right. And I had drafted that in the summer and handed it to the select board and said, if you want to think about doing this, I mean, here, I drafted the whole thing. I actually drafted the finance committee's comments. I said, there it is. Someone's got it submitted. Brian Kevenny submitted it. It went into the warrant. Somebody in this committee probably was assigned that article, had to get up to speed about pension obligation bonds. But then somewhere in that process, the select board, albeit they voted to submit it, ultimately voted to unsubmit it. Right. Okay. And, and that happens. And so you feel bad because you spent a lot of time and effort in the finance committee. I'm less concerned about the things that get pulled and more concerned about... If they're well-developed. Yes. As opposed to things that are constantly moving. A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Because I would... And again, Rob had to leave, but I think Rob dealt with us a lot last year, right? He did. So... In those, you know, in a absolutely boneheaded move on my part, I, I assigned to Rob a number of petitioner articles, so residents, and I, I thought they would be relatively easy, especially for new members. But they were not. Mostly because of personalities and different conflicting agendas among different petitioners. It turned out to be a lot of work for him. And then not all of them, but several of them ended up being pulled at the last minute anyway. You can't help that. That's going to happen. I mean, pulling an article will happen. But I do think there's an opportunity to get better developed articles. Um, two other things that we can do. Sorry, I'm jumping here. I mean, so that, does it, if you think it makes sense, or maybe suggesting the Slack board, albeit it'll cost the town a few hours of time to have a pre-review by town council? Yeah, if everyone's on board with that, I added it to my notes here, and I'll send, and I'll send an update. So anything that's like a bold that, like, basically, presumably, hopefully they're for you, Carl, to then go and be able to have a conversation with Slack where to say, hey, here are some things that we think would really help this process if we can get your buy-in. Um, so I, I just put it in bold. Once the window closes prior to meeting with, right, because we, and this meeting is documented in this process flow, right? When we all meet with everyone, town council reviews to confirm the reality. Yeah. No, I, sorry, another thing, uh, are we also saying before you just select board, like, can we come with this template to meet the requirements for the article? So there is a template that you will get sent to all of us. Um, and the templates, to somebody who's going to submit that if it has to have a title, body, you know, all the meaningful facts and, you know, the things that we, again, I think that's part of, I think that's part of the select board process. Brian, do you want to explain a little bit about what actually happens? That happens far upstream, right? Because we're getting it after it's submitted. Yeah, I mean, if you look on the town's website under the town meeting, uh, section, um, you'll see, um, templates for submitting articles, and, and there's also instructions on what timing and other things. Uh, just because there's a template doesn't mean that, uh, people necessarily need the template. Yeah, I mean, that, that ultimately is a select board. Well, petitioner articles are a little bit different. That, that means residents that collect enough signatures. Uh, under state law, um, if they collect the right number of signatures, the select board have to put those into the warrant. Um, doesn't mean people like the finance committee or select board have to recommend approval, but the select board can't keep those out. Select board can't control what they're asking about. Um, and the only way those can change is if those, the lead petitioner goes back out and gets the same number of signatures to actually make a change. And one of the things that the select board did do, and it was in part from a discussion like this several years ago, was there, there was no, under the town's bylaw, the petitioners could literally make changes all the way up town meeting. Um, that was due to a change made in a prior town meeting. And so the finance committee was left saying, well, we don't, you know, we don't know what they're doing as long as they got the right signatures. So the select board put an article to change the bylaw and it shortens up and gives an end point by which petitioners have to get, and other boards and committees, I think, have to get any changes in after which they can't make any other changes. So that, that was at least helpful to still leave enough time for the finance committee to say, okay, this is no longer a moving target. Um, assuming no one ends it in town meeting, right? Um, so again, these kind of housekeeping things are important, uh, to identify issues you just went through to the extent there's things in the bylaw that allows for them that maybe one of our recommendations might be to have to go look at fire, read by law and see if there's any further, you know, adjustments. Um, that by the, the thing that Carl was talking about where the finance committee identifies certain last couple of years that's made use of a bylaw change that went in three years ago, uh, it used to be the finance committee had to write comments on every article. And, and, um, and now if there's no financial impact, um, uh, in consultation with the finance director, you can write them, but the finance committee doesn't have to. And so Carl said that allowed the finance committee to basically say, okay, here's 10, 12, 15 articles. There's really no financial impact. We're focused on financial impact stuff. So we're not even going to take a position on the article. We're just telling you bylaw allows us to do this. It's up to, it's up to town meeting. So those things grew out of conversations like this. And, and so, uh, I encourage us to keep, let's keep going.
So the article comes in before we receive it. And this is a other question. I had received some articles last year that I just somehow magically received. I don't recognize how I got them. And then I received some that then I separately got the inputs that I needed for those articles from Brian Kevney, right? So how much are we actually going to fund things like OPEB? Like, and where's the source of that funding coming from? And I would make the argument that both of those things, the number and source of funding is, is material to the actual article. And to the, I mean, we can talk like we, I'm happy to debate it. Like maybe people feel like, hey, most of that has to do with generic articles that are yearly articles, right? OPEB is a, we're generally going to fund it every year, right? But the amount does sometimes vary as does the source of funding. So in my mind, those are some of the particulars that as a FinCom member, I actually need to know, especially as I'm putting together my thoughts on the article. Again, absolutely. Unfortunately,
a number of those articles, that information is not readily available or agreed upon by the end of the submission date in mid January. And, um, and so you're left with a scenario where, uh, more times than not, um, you may not know specific amounts, but, um, and, and certainly some write-ups are dependent on the amounts, you know, the variance is positive or it's negative. It depends on what the numbers say. So you're going to write, you write up differently, right? Uh, but there's some that are fairly consistent and then you could draft knowing that, okay, if they surprise me and for some explainable reason, the number's different than it's been the last 10 years, right? Directionally. Okay. I've got to edit what I spent my time for, you can wait until they tell you the numbers have stopped moving. And it's just, it's just really a question for, it seems to me, the finance committee as a whole and how it's pacing its work. Um, and individuals have been assigned, you know, six or eight articles, which ones should that prioritize? Okay. Maybe we circle back to that because maybe we can double click on when can it be reasonably available? Because part of it in my mind is if it turns out that most of those inputs are for generic articles that basically reoccur every year and we get a template in place for those and really to your point, you're just waiting for the numbers. You're familiarizing yourself with the article. You're waiting for the numbers and the out and the, I was going to say allocation, but actually just like the funding source to then tweak the article. Hopefully that overall reduces the effort where if we can understand when we expect those articles, when you're assigning them out, Carl, don't give everyone 10 articles that will be available to be done until March, right? Then you, you, you spread the love on those. Um, and then generally Brian Kevney is responsible for providing that information. Is that right? Most of the time. I mean, they're, they're, you know, the personnel wage and classification article, uh, the wage table comes from the human resource department. Typically that has to be approved by the personnel board. Okay. Typically, particularly when there's union negotiations going on, although generally that article isn't improving union contracts, but the disclosure historically has included some references to union contracts. Um, sometimes you're going to have that information by the time you have to submit the articles this year, I think was when that might've happened because of the negotiations going on. Um, so, um, yeah, so I've had that article a couple of years and I, I drafted it based on what I kind of expected based on prior years and then had to last minute tweak it and didn't bring it to the full finance committee until it was done. And there's no real sense. You know, you as a person drafting an article, didn't get 80% of the way there. So you're not starting at ground zero in March. Um, and you could do that at end, correct? With a lot of those art, which I think is ultimately what you're likely going to get to. Um, all right. The next one here, background details, including the professor's comments and finance and equations noted. My thought on this was generally when you receive an article, you'll receive a section called background, and it usually is filled in with some comments and in addition. There is a proposer's comments. My understanding of the bylaw is that the proposer's allowed always a comment of up to 150 words. And so there's a little difference in the background versus the proposer's comments. The background itself will be also potentially written by the proposer, but it'll explain why they put together the article. It can be whatever they want really to explain to you why they're submitting the article, but that's for your use generally. It doesn't go into the warrant as opposed to the proposer's comments is that 150 words that they are allowed to put into the warrant. One of the things, and, and I don't know, cause I didn't have as many of these articles, but I don't know if historically it's been very clear whether background comments sometimes are meant to be proposers comments. Would, would you say that Carl or Rob, like, do you feel like for any of your articles, perhaps where there were proposers comments, was it very clear to you on if you received an article, what was background versus an actual proposer's comments that they had hoped to have published? I think it was clear what we received. It was not always clear that that was what was intended, if that makes sense. That's what I was thinking as well. It's like, I don't know that sometimes it's very clear and I feel like sometimes the onus is put, and maybe that's just because we feel such a large level of responsibility for these articles, but I just wonder whether, like, is it us who should be then going back to the proponents and saying, do you want 150 words? Give me your words. I'll put them in. Or is that really a town function? And I think that's my point here of, in my mind, that's for the town to support the article proposer in making sure that their comments are reflected at, for that 100, 150 words, as opposed to that being onus. My experience is, um, it's not the finance committee's job to, uh, you know, pursue the submitter via the town board committee or a petitioner. Um, as a courtesy, um, you're typically at least talking to whoever the key party is at least once. And I have that documented here, so we'll get through that. But, but, um, as to the background, um, my experience varies. Um, and I've, I've been on the other side of this where, um, when I was on the housing trust, uh, and we had an article or two and I basically wrote the finance committee's comments are the finance committee's comments. They're not the proposer's comments, they're no one else's comments. That said, um, sometimes there's both an assist for the finance committee or otherwise, because you want to make sure your point is put forth as you would like it as a proponent of the article. Um, I've drafted an article for the housing trust and, and had proposer comments limited to 100 figures and then drafted what I would like to see the finance committee say. Most times, you know, thank you very much. You know, they get thrown aside and, um, I've had that done the opposite way where the water, where the DPW wrote a couple of years ago, the, um, background for the first dollar request for the long-term funding. And I read it and I said, well, thank you, helpful information. And then I went about drafting the FinCom comments. They got back, uh, typically you would get this, to share the draft. They said, well, that's nothing like what we submitted in our background comments. I said, well, that's fine. But if you've got a problem factually or something I wrote, let me know. And then at that point I said, if you want to put in your own 150 words to highlight and sell, pitch your article you're entitled to. And a lot of pressure was put to bear directly from the Board of Public Works on me and hopefully on the FinCom. And then from the Select Board on me and on the FinCom to yield to, and my view was, no, our job is, those are our comments, happy to correct something that's actually wrong. So my answer to your question is, no, background is background. Another example would be the CPA articles, Community Preservation Act articles. I know Susan Weinstein, as the chair has been out of her way to try to draft their, um, article submissions in a way that if the FinCom was so disposed, they could literally lift the background, deposit it in, cut and paste it in as, um, FinCom's write-up, right? But there's also been a press, as you know, to shorten the warrant. And the CPA in turn has been pressed to combine articles. And so I think the answer is you get all flavors, right? You get next to nothing. You get people expecting you to put in what they give you. Um, and, uh, but I think as a policy matter, uh, because we all want to please, these are all town residents, possibly volunteers, town staff. We want to be helpful, right? At least I do. Um, but I think it's helpful for all our mental sanity to at least have an agreement on how we're all going to act within a box, right? And if one wants to strata that box, they do so at their own peril, which means you may end up having done a lot of work and then come to the FinCom, and the FinCom is, you know, no, we're not going to do that. And then you feel bad that you spent all that time. And this may have happened last year with all those petition articles. Maybe people, again, not fully appreciating the process may have spent a lot of time trying to be accommodating the other town residents, which is where those came from, trying to help them understand what the right and all that. And that's great, but that's really not this committee's job. This committee is supposed to summarize, hopefully as shortly as possible, as short as possible, and then come to a recommendation. And, and, and my understanding is, and provide a balanced perspective of the impact of these decisions. That's important too. Like in my mind, that's important. Yeah, I mean, my experience is that the write-up itself generally should be factual as opposed to the pluses and minuses. The pluses and minuses really tend to appear in the pro arguments and the con arguments. I'm sure you'll talk about those too, because that's a key component. That's really where the, the mini debate's happening, if you will, or an anticipated mini debate on behalf of the town meeting. I'm going to move us along just because of time. My apologies, Carl, this might roll into our next meeting as well. But I just, I added a suggestion here, which I think sums up the point of our conversation, which is, as a matter of course, we recognize that proposer's comments are there and can be there, but are ultimately up to the proposer. So I don't think FinCom should feel the obligation to chase down proposer's comments. I think that's what I essentially took away from that. Yeah, just, I mean, last year, I mean, Rob's no longer on the call. No, he's going to be back. Well, maybe you can speak for yourself, but I know that he ended up trying to work with the proposers to make their own comments rational. And, you know, that's just not our job. It's a lovely sentiment. Would you agree, Rob? Like, we don't want to put words in your mouth, but we want to give you the chance to voice your thoughts on how we can create like a scalable process here without bogging us down. Yeah, I think ultimately, I mean, I think it's a mix, right? I think some of this is better defining the process and better defining to your point, and who's responsible for what, where, right? And what I think there were proposers who were given the impression that, you know, the job of finance committee members is to help you with your article, which probably isn't, you know, truly accurate. I think Brian had a good point in terms of like, ultimately, I do think it's going to be to some extent that committee member by committee member choice of how, how much support you want and are able to offer to article writers. But I think setting, setting some ground rules and guidelines for kind of what, what is expected and what is above and beyond, but acceptable would probably be a good idea. And I also just think in terms of the expectation setting with the article proposers is also, also important, right, about what the the role of the the finance committee is, because I had a couple of kind of controversial topics. And I found that I was actually a little surprised that one group of people on a controversial topic seemed extremely understanding of the finance committee's role and important to provide a balanced perspective. And one other set of controversial topics was was not so much that way. It was why would you put anything in that might cause someone to vote against this article. So yeah, I think I agree with everything you said, I do think ultimately some of it is just gonna be a judgment call on an article by article basis, because especially for the proposers articles, like, there's such a wide range of proposers. It's probably not realist. Yeah, I think that's fair. And I think I agree with what you said, right, we're trying to create guidelines here to set a reasonable expectation. I agree with Carl, right, if you so choose to sort of work outside those boundaries, or if your article you feel like compels it, you can use your judgment. But I think we can't start from that place. You might add a note, I mean, that maybe Rob's point about setting expectations, not necessarily, they're all invited to attend the finance committee's article hearing, which is roughly two weeks after the window closes for submission, where we walk through each and every article, asking questions. But it might be worth FinCom considering maybe five minute advertisement either at the front end of that meeting, probably at the front end of the meeting. Around our role. Yeah. Yeah, just set these expectations. And then if there's anybody that's absent, that, you know, then they could be individually dealt with. It's a really good idea. And I think, I think also part of it even before that, right, in terms of what the town puts out, because this process starts somewhere, right? Somewhere, I assume there's a guide where you say, I want to write an article and the town says, here's how to do it. But just reviewing and updating some of that as well would probably help. Yeah, it's on the town website. That's a good idea. So after that, so at this point, essentially, you've got what I'm expecting is a document that we receive. And so what ends up happening, and I wrote here article sponsor, although the way, the more I think about this, perhaps this is actually the starting point that the article sponsor is the one who's collating all the information and then sends it to the town, and maybe we're receiving it directly from the town. Like I might, I think I got this a little, a little backwards. So I'm just going to move this. Yeah, I mean, nothing's official until the warrant process, warrant window closes. Yep. And the town manager's office at that point is able to compile all articles submitted, which they then typically post on the town's website. Right. And simultaneously send a full set of articles to the finance committee and the start board. Right. That's the official initial set of articles. And it, um, When does that matter? Pardon me? What's the timeline? Uh, that's probably into the third week of January that you would see that packet of articles, because the window typically closes around January 15th. And then the article hearings at the last week, typically of January. Um, and then articles may be ultimately removed from that packet along the way, but there really shouldn't be any other articles coming from anybody else. Um, absent, um, um, boards and committees and or petitioners that make changes to their article language after the initial submission. And then the question, Iris, I think is a good one is those probably should be still only going through the town manager's office so that the Fincom is only relying on as being what we should be looking at that, which we received from the town manager's office. Right. And I think anybody submitting changes have to submit them to the town manager and even maybe the town clerk. Um, but we shouldn't be getting copies of articles from actual proposers. Right. Um, I don't think that's the problem. I don't think it has been a problem. Although, although I'll tell you last year, I got articles before everyone did and I don't have to look back. I have no idea how I got them. I don't know, but I want to know because I want the fans too. Right. Like, um, but in any case, so article sponsor, they're putting all the info together. They're sending it to the town. The town receives it. The process we just talked about takes place. Every article receives a select board sponsor. Correct. Brian. Yes. And I'm assuming they're not a select board liaison liaison. And that's identified after the, all the articles are received. Correct. It could be a member as a, the extent it's a select board sponsored article, it would be a select board member who's been assigned. Right. To that article. Right. As the all non-select board articles, they, they are assigned as liaisons. And we're generally told who those people are at this board here. At the here, right. Which, which is later in the process. So I'm just knowing SB articles, SB member assigned, and then for non SB articles and I, uh, a liaison is identified. Okay, great. And maybe that doesn't tie. Maybe that's an independent process, which then actually ties into the impact for the hearing article, which I'm gonna just tie this to the hearing article. So then what's going on here. Okay. So we usually have the articles before the hearing article though, correct? Yes. Okay. I'm just making sure as well, because I'm going to see as well. Okay. So then what's, what's happening here, just to give you all, since you're new, hopefully this makes sense. What's happening is essentially we received the articles, right? Ideally we've received them with all this information. What has happened previously is a select board liaison or member has been assigned as well. So when it comes to us, we're just getting the document. We don't yet know exactly who the select board member is. We then attend an article hearing. So this article hearing essentially ends up being all of the proponents or proposers, different boards, the select board and us. And at this meeting, we essentially go through and we say, here's who's coming in from FinCom. Here's who's coming in from select board. And we basically like enumerate all the articles and make sure that point of contacts are identified. And you know essentially who you're working with. But actually, Carl, if I think about it, from a FinCom perspective, we knew which articles we had before we went into that meeting, right? So actually it's, we, we get the articles prior to that meeting. So I actually need to change where this connection is. Yeah, that's probably a week before, and I don't know how you did it last year. Typically the chair, perhaps with the vice chair, would make a rough cut of how to allocate those articles from a workload perspective amongst FinCom members. And then I think you probably had a meeting, you may or may not have had a meeting before the hearing, but you probably caveated that, well, this is the preliminary. If any of the FinCom members, and the select board does the same thing, if any of the members have an issue with what they were assigned, there might be some modification of who was assigned. But that really is a, I mean, it's an important part of the process. But that is,
in my mind, the primary reason of a warrant hearing is assuming that FinCom has had time to review the articles. Typically they have at least a few days, is that whoever's sponsor can give a thumbnail. It's already, I'll explain what they submitted. They can give a, you know, brief, hopefully summary of what their article's about. And that gives the Finance Committee an opportunity if there are any initial questions. Is this legal? You know, and if the answer is, I don't know. Okay, so that's flagged as an issue. It's not intended to be a session where there's an immediate debate over the pros and cons. It's really meant to start the process and to start to gather open questions to just then kick off the rest of this process. And that may well happen. I think in the two years now that I've been doing that, very few proponents actually wanted to talk about their art at that moment. It was primarily this sort of organizational thing. But it may happen. Some people will. Yeah, some people will. My thought here, and just to like anchor you all again, I had two swim lanes here for Finance Committee. One in which I outlined those yearly articles, those repetitive articles, versus what I deemed new articles, but just maybe non-standard articles. The reason why I did that is because my thought here was that for the standard sort of yearly reoccurring articles, at this point, you have your select board sponsor, these articles, and we'll actually, I'll pull open the spreadsheet and show you my suggested like yearly reoccurring articles, and we can start talking through those. As I looked at those articles, a lot of them are at their meat and bones, more like finance articles, right? It's the OPEB, it's the reserve funds, it's things that are reoccurring that started one year and now are sort of reoccurring.
My suggestion on this truly from a process standpoint is that Finance Committee updates those articles, we vote on them, and then we send them off. I don't know that there's tremendous value for those kinds of articles in meeting with your select board liaison. I mean, they're sort of standard articles, and frankly, maybe I'm adding myself, I have not been, not for those articles, and you know, maybe if they've had questions on how the vote went, or if they've had particular questions, I've certainly let them reach out to me. I've always included them on my final versions, but I've never actually offered to meet with people on those, and that might be an opportunity to save some time. Yeah, nor have I. I mean, if you think about, and I'm going to use this just as an example. Yeah. OPEB. Brian, can you define OPEB? I can't, my brain's not working. Other post-employment benefits. Okay, so it's a retiree health insurance primarily, which again, the town is an unfunded liability of 50, 60 million dollars, and it's trying to work that down. Not required to, I don't think, by the state, but it's, the town was actually ahead of other communities, and working at slightly then. But anyway, so we've been putting like a half a million dollars away. And another example might be the special education reserve fund, which we fund every year. Um, I think the last couple years, it's been a half a million dollars each time? It was last year. It was less a couple years before. Yeah. 150 and then moved up to half a million. Okay. So, if I had that article this year, and it was the same number, or anywhere with five or 10 percent of plus or minus, I probably wouldn't bother to go talk to, or ask to talk to, or select board liaison. If it was double, or they decided they didn't want to put anything into it, I'd want to talk to somebody. That's my own little thumb. That's a good idea. Yeah, I mean, I would bicker slightly on that one, specifically just because it's only been around four years. Um, I don't know yet, but they may have ended up by getting some extra state circuit breaker money. They may have ended up by not having to tap into the reserve fund. So, at some point, uh, either the school committee, or the finance committee, or the select board may say, we think we have enough in there. So, at the moment, it's been a somewhat recurrent, because they've been spending everything that was in there. So, it hasn't. Right. Big Irish made this point a couple years ago. I did make this point. Yes, I did. You don't want it to be really part of the operating budget that's just off and reserve, but then you'd spend it all. Yes. But, you know, I gave your point, and, um, um, that there are a bunch of those. Um, yeah. But, but again, I think as long as you, with any of this stuff, as long, as any process, as long as you have a general footnote that says, subject to upper force, it is all subject to, and no one is saying, like, don't use your brain. Right? Like, you are a fully capable individual here. Um, we recommend you ask questions. This is just to provide something for us to, to move forward with. Um,
is there a different timeline on this? Well, I think, in an interesting note, no, they all come technically all at the same time. The interesting point here, remember, I talked, Satish, about, um, my goal and the hope is that we can normalize some of this process, right? Normalize the effort output over the course of the year. I think we start with documenting a process. If we're more comfortable with the idea that these are pretty standard, they're coming, then we can move into the second part of my item, which I don't think we're going to get to today is I went through all the articles last year and have a list of this has been generally reoccurring. And I think this is subject to us putting together essentially a template. Um, doesn't necessarily mean that it'll always, it'll always be appropriate to use a template, but I think it gets us, I mean, frankly, last year I used a lot of templates from the previous year's starting points. You two were brand new. So you might not remember, but along this vein, um, I drafted, um, probably 15 articles in October, two years ago and handed them to the rest of the finance committee members here. I've already drafted all the write-ups, numbers are missing in most of them. Here's a head start. Right. All you're talking about is exactly what was up. That's exactly my idea. Not having one person do them, we'll kind of spread it out a bit. But, uh, one, one thing you might think about because it just, it's not really helpful. I mean, at the finance committee, we weren't hearing article hearing. Um, it really isn't helpful to have the support and whoever their assigned person is on 15 to 20 standard articles say, this is a standard article. You can probably just say, all we really want to hear from you on is if there's, if it's a standard article, is there something that's different than the past? That would cut down the time of that meeting. It would help be helpful to select for it. Essentially, you're just saying like, we don't need to hear the standard, but we need to hear if there are any aberrations for that year. Yeah. Because again, that meeting's not intended to really overly educate the town, get into the pros and cons. It really is trying to, for the FinCom, identify any high level things that we really need to be focused on or answer questions that we have. Uh, and I just think that would just save a little bit of time in that meeting. Sure. Um, um, and in terms of talking to select board liaisons or other proposers of articles, um, I only talked to people when I really had to or saw a need to. Most times, if it was a template, it was a standard article. I drafted, I would certainly send it to them before I submitted it to the FinCom for consideration and said, okay, I hope this, I hope to present this to the finance committee at our next meeting. If you have any issues with this, please let me know. Okay. So your suggestion, and I want to, I want to restate that because I would love, I did not add that in here as a step. So if that's a standard step that we would generally expect someone to take, I would love to document it. What I heard you say, Brian, is essentially after FinCom basically updates the draft before it's sent and shared here for a vote, you would suggest a draft also be sent to the select board. To the member that's assigned to the liaison or, or, or other proposer. Most of the, most of the standard articles won't be coming from other than the select board. Okay. Let me talk to them. And even petitioners for that matter, right? As a, as a matter of courtesy. I have that in here for the non-standard, right? That, that absolutely I do. It's these, it's these like yearly ones that I'm trying to figure out, like how, how much can we crunch that process to give us time for the other things. Yeah. And it, and it doesn't mean that if they don't look at it and it moves along in the process and the finance committee, you know, considers it, votes it, send it in. And then the select board lays on call, you know, sends an email saying, Oh, I had a comment on that. You know, we didn't know that this changed. So you deal with it. Right. Right. Um, but most times they just said, thank you. Yeah. And it just saved you. Right. Yeah. Whatever time you actually might've spoken with them. Okay. I added that shared with the SB liaison. I, I, I maybe, maybe instead of shared, I'll say like the draft, uh, yearly review article update for cover draft and draft emailed. Right. Like, yeah. And again, it's just the way I handled it. Um, say I finished my writeup, but let's just take standard articles because they're pretty standard. Um, I'll send that. And after I sent it, um, I realized that the number changed or I wanted to word something differently. I will send a copy of the next draft red line. So select board liaison doesn't have to figure out what I changed. They can see the number that changed. They can see the words that changed. So hopefully everybody's proficient at this point with word and redlining. Um, and, um, and even for the finance committee, to accept we were to consider an article at a meeting and then have some questions, comments, suggestions, the number takes it away, works on it, brings it back to another meeting. Uh, it's part of your process. We should always be dealing with red lines. Uh, so we don't have to in orderly spend time. And in fact, I think I remember Pam Roman telling this stuff and you probably didn't, um, we really should have everybody, this gets down in the weeds, everybody should, their article templates should have the track changes on so that, uh, you can track if anybody else touched the article or it's because sometimes you send these things in and somebody, you know, that's what I put in here. Track changes. Yeah. That's an important. Yeah. It's a lot. It's a lot. It's a lot. Yeah. That's a good area. We may spare people on the capital. Uh, my apologies. I know we're running out of time. Um, well, how, how far, I don't think we should get into the individual articles. We won't be able to, but we're pretty close. So then it's just, let's talk about what's different with a non-standard article or what I'm suggesting and then maybe we wrap. Okay. The last piece here though, just, um, is who we send it to when an article is done. And this, I think maybe is up for discussion. Um, for those of us who are here who have done this process before Pam so nicely, I think last year and the year before collated all of the articles and would basically put like finishing touches or what you would consider like fit and finish on all of them before sending them to the town. And this is one where I'm just not sure if we have the capacity to do that anymore. So my recommendation here was you update there to go with the vote. We send it, we circulate obviously the guidelines, right? There is a font you're supposed to use. There is a font size. There's all of that. Yes, there is. Um, but I don't, I don't know if it's frankly like worth our time. Yeah. It's, it's really quality control. And it's a question of, um, I guess my views, if the FinCom is charged with the responsibility to put forth these, really, again, all we're responsible for is the comments, but we're asked to put it in the template that eventually finds its way into the warrant, but we can't touch the article language. We can't touch the proposer's comments. Correct. We can put in our comments, we can put on our vote, and we can put in pros and cons. Um, but that said, um, it was still our collective work product. And so, um, I just don't know how much of an effort Pam had to put in there or Steve Korea before her. All the years I was on it, it was a member, typically it was chair or vice chair that volunteer, but it doesn't have to be really someone who just, you know, maybe did one final read of the article just to see if anybody missed any typos or, but it is, it is work. It is work. Right. And, um, And can that also be distributed, like assign every article a reviewer? I, I think that's kind of tough. I mean, I, yes, we could, we absolutely could, but just, we're all going to sit and read these articles just so, just so it's clear. We have all already read them, giving you feedback. No, no, no, not about the content, but just the quality. Even quality. We sit around and I go, you made a paragraph here when you were not supposed to take that paragraph away. Like we have, right. Like I think I gave Rob that feedback multiple times. I'm like, get rid of your paragraph. Like you're starting paragraph, right? Like that's not correct. Like it's, we absolutely do it. It's a question of usually this is the last check, right? This is the last check. If the last check becomes from a process standpoint, you can do it a couple of ways, right? You can have a toll gate, a gate checker, right? Someone's checking at the gate. You could have it. What you're suggesting is we sort of share that load by sending to all of us, but then we've all also already looked at it. And I don't know if you could manage that. Yeah. I think that'd be repetitive. Yeah. I mean, there is a final quality to pull check as they put the warrant together. There's typically two or three proofreaders who have an unfortunate job of reading the warrant. It all has to get assembled and mapped out properly. Um, and, um, you know, obviously if, if based on our collected reviews and the comments at the meetings, um, it's clear to everybody that the quality of what's coming from each member in terms of the size, type, spacing, sentence spacing, paragraph spacing, um, it's not that difficult to do it. Although I find myself, you know, re-reviewing my articles three times before I submit them, you know. If the process worked last year, the collective review, then I don't think we need to change it. Maybe AI, maybe AI could do it. It's just work. You say AI, here's the font, here's this, here's that. Take this pack of articles and in 20 seconds it says, here's what has to change. Yeah. Oh yeah. Just step back for a second. I guess you can ask, why is it our job to make sure the font is correct? I mean, there are paid staff people who do this. No, I'm not saying we need to get rid of that, but it's a question. Yeah. Yeah. So I noted it as an open item just to keep us going here in the last four minutes. I, I just wanted... Can you put AI on there on that one? I'm not an AI person, but it sounds, it sounds like something AI could easily tackle. Possibly. Um, you guys are, you guys are IT guys, right? Yeah. Every day, every day. Um, so the other, the difference here, so now we're looking at the nonstandard swim lane for FinCom articles. The difference here, if you see, is that I put in here that we actually meet with the article sponsor, the SB, I, I guess I meant to say liaison here. Um, that's a physical meet? Uh, no, just a, we have a, we have a communication. Yes. And, and I think in my mind, a nonstandard article is probably worthy of a phone call at a minimum, like in my mind, as opposed to, I don't know if people manage these via email. I'm generally, for any of my real nonstandard articles, I've generally always suggested a phone call. Um, I've, I've done some phone calls in the past, like, you know, kind of depends on how well written I get the comments are and how thorough the background is. I might, my phone calls usually were people calling me because they didn't like the run it up. All right. So then I'll just change that. Communicate for the article sponsor, SB leaves, and then draft the FinCom report. Um, and then again, what you'll notice here is I have review article with FinCom. Um, and if appropriate, now somewhere in here, update article with votes, somewhere around here, probably, and this is an open question I had. If you've communicated, where in this process with nonstandard articles should, I'm going to say should as opposed to what we have been doing, should FinCom be providing a copy of their report to the article sponsor? Yeah, I would usually, again, always do it, um, prior to bringing an article to the FinCom for consideration, just because I didn't want to go through a whole article and have the sponsor chime in saying, you know, you know, you know, factually he got this wrong. Okay. Um, but I don't, I don't, I put a very, I would put a very short response time to the sponsors. I identify a meeting that I couldn't have to discuss. Got it. So basically in between these two steps, no, in between these steps, hold on, right here. You would, you would add a step. Okay. Typically how many nonstandard of a meeting here? How many, we got a lot nonstandard last year. That'll have to be in the next meeting, but, and we can discuss what that means. I mean, it varies year by year. There were probably six, seven, maybe last year, which by the way, was high in my experience. Um, no, let's differentiate between, um, a select board article or an article originating from another town board and those coming from the general public. Very, that's not all that common if they come from the general public. But you're not different experience. I mean, there might be a couple every year, but not, I think the six or seven we had last year, probably the high water mark of recent memory. Yeah. And that's just, I mean, A, it's out of everybody's control. Right. And B, it just kind of depends on, um, ones last year were unique because they were neighborhood issues. Um, it just, just depends. Um, historically there used to be a lot of particular articles dealing with process and by-law changes which were generally, you know, positive and good. Um, but, um, you know, no one can do anything to dissuade petitioners from coming forward. Okay. Thank you all so much. I guess you have one more step in between there. Scroll up for the new ones. Yeah, that one green. Yes. So, oh, yes, I did. Thank you. Okay. So instead of adding here, you know what I did? Communicate with article sponsor. And then after this, I actually had it back up in their swim line, discuss goals of articles and financial impact pros, cons, et cetera. So that was just like a, when, when you talk to them, generally, this is in my opinion, what we've discussed. Um, um, so. Yeah. Did you have, I can't see it right at the moment. Do you have the FinCom's review and determination of what may or may not have, what may have insignificant financial impact as part of that non-standard article? It's right here. Articles reviewed for financial implications. Is that in both? It's in both. Okay. It's in both swim lanes. Okay. Yeah, absolutely. All right. So I will clean this up. Anything in bold, Carl is going to be like a suggestion and a suggestion that maybe could be further circulated with like the select board or like some of these are things that maybe action items we might want to take action on. Some of them are just maybe clarifications. I also, Rob, saw your comment in the chat, um, with the next step as well. In addition to having this, um, like physio or workflow diagram is also to include best practices. So how are we going to handle articles with no financial impact, approved wording for votes, et cetera. So, um, I will also maybe spend some time putting that together unless someone else wants to do that. Rob, I don't know if that interests you at all. Um, either way, my assumption is that somebody is going to put a draft together and then we're going to review and have feedback. If you would like to put that together, that would be great for me. But if you are already doing this and would like me to do it, I'm open to it. Yeah, no worries. I can, I can do it. That's totally fine. Um, so I will put that together for our next meeting as well. And we will go through the articles to start discussing the standard ones. Okay. And also part of this is going to be, um, is there anything on that chart that you're focused on? Is there anything on that chart that possibly could be done by town staff? I honestly think, I think it's, I think it's that like, so in here, I think these template articles, like in, in my original iteration, right? I didn't even have like send a draft to anyone. Cause, um, what I had at, or actually I did, but up here you can actually see like, Hey, should yearly articles be updated by town staff? I think it's a discussion point. Like if we're putting together effectively drafts for them, like, is there a reason? I think we would still need to see them to vote on them, but like, is there any reason why we need to actually be the ones updating them? I think that's fair. It's fair. Again, put on a list of things, um, depends on their workload as well. Yes, it does. Okay. Um, I'll mark this as an open item for us to return to. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Um, I think Brian was, Brian hit it on the head. Let's confirm the capital budget discussion for next week, next three weeks out. I think the agenda for that meeting will be to start digging into the, um, to the budget model that we would copy a review of tonight, uh, start taking a look at the capital budget, um, continue this discussion, and then if Rob has had a chance to put together, um, some kind of a timeline, I mean, that'll be the fourth topic, and if anybody has any other suggestions between now and 48 hours before the meeting, please let me know. You'll, you'll include the prop two and a half process item in that one as well, the nine o'clock item. Yes. Let's do that. Yes. And actually, I just meant to say, so, um, unfortunately, I had a last minute trip gift added to my calendar, so anytime I'm not available, I will still help with the agenda, but I won't add the Vizio, like the agenda articles and stuff, I'll take that out, so you guys will have four items. Okay. Um, so that way we can tackle that when I'm back, and yeah, my apologies on that. Not like we don't have enough to talk about. Yeah. I know, right. Okay. Um, somehow, even though we skipped a lot of stuff, we're still running late, so I would like to make a motion that we adjourn. Seconded. All in favor. Iris. Hi. Rob. Yes. Carl's a yes. Yes. Yes. Brian. Yes. All right. Meeting adjourned. Thank you. Thank you all.