June 3, 2026 – Capital Improvement Planning Committee – Video & Transcript
June 3, 2026 - Capital Improvement Planning Committee
June 3rd at 6.30 p.m., and this is the Capital Improvement Planning Committee meeting.
I'm calling the meeting to order.
We are in the Whelan Commons room at the Whelan Town Building and also on Zoom.
This statement, this meeting may be recorded, and if recorded, will be made available to the public on white canvas as soon as possible after the meeting. Public will be excluded from executive sessions. Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, this meeting will be conducted in person and remotely. In accordance with the political law.
So, because we're participating in both places, you can participate either here at the Town Building or online at the link that's found on the Town's website.
When a person is wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting, which is like we'll do that here, and public comment should be limited to two minutes per person.
I have in person Brad, Brian, and Kelly. We know John and Liz were not able to join, so we will not need to do roll call vote because we are all here in person. As long as they don't pop up. As long as they don't pop up. I'm going to say we're pretty comfortable. That's not going to happen. All right, and let's review the agenda. So, 630 is call to order. Review the agenda for public and announcements. 635 is public comment and members' response. 640, discuss comparison by your plan from the Town Meeting Warrant versus CIPC's Fiscal 27-31 report, which was amended most recently on April 29th. Including related questions with any ex-officio CIPC members, including but not limited to the Town Manager and Finance Director as available. And the Town Manager will be here shortly, and he has invited Nick from our IT department. Yes, we are going to talk about some of the IT projects. 730, discuss next steps to advance future CIPC report process, including but not limited to those that are trying to report. 730, which could be potential evidence to the draft CIPC submission form, outstanding capital project status, and the CIPC project plan for the remainder of 2026. 8 o'clock, discuss discussion planning. CIPC chair and vice chair will finance and school committee designates. And we're probably going to table that topic, since we don't have a poll committee tonight, we're kind of hard unless Brad gets to do everything.
And then 820, we're going to vote to approve the minutes of May 27th, available, which they are. 825, 7 in the 10th, so our next meeting, so 830 adjourned. So, I don't have any other announcements. Does anybody else have any announcements? Yes, and Robbie, I'm assuming there's no one in, hold on. No, no one, no one in line. I see we have our board of selectmen liaisers, our select board liaisers, Carol in the room with us. Hi, Carol. Hi. All right. So, we can go ahead and get started then on the comparison, which I did just send out. I don't, Brian, you probably didn't get a chance. Yeah, I got it. Okay. It's the same question. It's similar, but a lot of the questions, a lot of the questions, the members of the committee submitted to me to consolidate were consistent with each other, which was somewhat comforting. We were coming to the same conclusions independently about what we needed to ask about. So, I did share those with Michael and with Brian Keveney. I assume he's shared them with you as well, Nick. And so, I could put that up on screen. Where did you do that? Quick question. Is the finance director coming or not coming? He is not coming. And any of the other ex-official members? Are you interested? I did not invite anybody else. All right. So, yeah.
That's going to take me a minute to get myself in the same way.
Congratulations on your election, Carol. Thank you. Thank you. Another year of extra duty. I don't know, Michael. Do you have anything you want to say before we get started while I try and pull this up? I've got to find our timeline. Well, good evening, Madam Chair, members of the committee. And I want to thank my IT director, Nick Bombardi. He and I have been working on a lot of things together. As you know, there was a lot of discussion at annual time meeting. And I had circulated the comparison to my staff. Albeit, you said it to me on Monday. We had a lot going on. I didn't get to get to some of them until today. But they did their best to answer. And Nick said, you know, right around the court, I can just pop over and join me. So, I thank him for coming. I think this year would probably be a little more smooth than last year because everybody got to a late start. I mean, it was inaugural year for this process. And, you know, I think a lot of assumptions made. We all did our best to try and work together, get something that we could all agree on, get it to town, meaning this year we'll have a little bit more time. And I think that's something we can focus on, especially this evening talking about how we're going to do that, because typically the way the cycle would work is usually around September. We would send things to our department heads asking them for input, you know, late August, early September. And by the new code, you're supposed to have a report done by October 15th to me. And actually, I was looking, going back today and trying to muffle with some of the answers here, and I think in our financial policies, it says beginning in October, the town manager and the finance director will reach out to the department heads. Well, I think we already have to amend that because under the code, if you're going to have a recommendation for us, we have to have those department heads talking with us and sending you forms a lot sooner. And so that's, I guess, where we start our discussion about, you know, how we're going to kick off this next year. As some of you may know, we've already had two informal meetings with some department heads and the school administration and some select board members and other elected officials to start talking about potential overwork. We had a budget working group last year. I anticipate we will convene one of those, but we also have to look at, you know, the reality that this year we don't, at least on all the initial forecasts and conversations we've had, that it's going to be extremely unlikely that we can pull off what we've done in the last two years and get through without asking for assistance. Now, that doesn't mean you get it automatically, the town will have to work on an informational campaign. I just want to hold one second. Robbie? Yes. Can we just look under panelists? It has two up there. Is there one of our... No, that's Kelly. That's Kelly. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. And the challenge, and it may be a challenge so much for you folks as well, is we'll have to produce what is often referred to as an A and B budget. A, you pick one, you should be A is assuming the override passes and B is assuming it doesn't and what stays and what goes. So, I think we may face it. I had a challenge, although, you know, the other is funded out at the tax levy. We do fund a portion of our capital plan using levy debt. So, there could be an impact on the capital plan. You could use more free cash. You could make some adjustments. But, you know, if we're trying to eliminate the impact on services, we may have to keep that in mind as we go through this process this year. So, it'll be the first full year, but I think we'll have that challenge of trying to anticipate what will happen when we have a ballot question. And that's one of the things we're already trying to decide the sequence of events when we have a ballot question. Do we wait until next April, May time frame to have it? Do we have it earlier? There's various schools of thought, and those are the exercises we're going through right now. Okay. Do we want to, I can start with general questions, but I think since Nick's here, do we want to start with some of the IT-related items, or do you want to start? Well, you know, I looked, it's kind of a theme, you know, in these questions about how we will try and get things done. I mean, I was talking to Brian Kebany today, our finance director, you know, I reached out to him, he was kind enough to give me some time while he was on his days off.
I think one thing we, to avoid problems that happened last year, there'll have to be some checks and balances that when we're done with this process, whatever goes to print has to be reviewed by the individual department heads. But you gave me your comparison, and I appreciate some of the spreadsheets that Mr. O'Hurley has created, and I was thinking, I was talking with Mr. Kebany how we could improve things, and he had talked about putting together a shared file that the department heads could edit, and that maybe we can share with this committee, so that we're all working off the same basic template, rather than having multiple versions of things out there, so that we can make this a much smoother process again. And, you know, coming together on agreed upon form that we give to the staff, we used one in the past, but maybe there's some questions that this committee would like to have that we could add before we send those out. Yeah, so we've already started modifying that CIP form because we think there's a lot of questions on it that no one fills out and don't get used. We think that it's confusing how it's laid out, which was evidence, I think, Nick, right? You filled it out the way logically you would think, but it's actually not how it was intended from what year it's appropriated for versus, like, a capital spend plan. So we have a draft of that. If we have time, we can take a look at it after we talk through the questions, but I think we all agree the form's not doing the job right, and it's not getting the job done, and it's tedious to fill out, right? So it's sort of a lose-lose situation. So we think there's improvement that can be made there, and I think I like what you were saying about there may be a way, and maybe with the help of the IT director, right, to make the filling of that out even easier from a consolidation standpoint. I don't know what we have access to from, like, a Google Form standpoint, but where you're filling out that's populating the master versus collecting spreadsheets from everybody that then manually have to be pulled together into a consolidated spreadsheet. Like, there's a better, less tedious way to produce the consolidation than what we're doing today as well. That's aside from asking the right questions. And I think that's the benefit of this committee and why, in my last committee, I advocated for one week. My initial experience was when I was on the finance committee and on the select board, I participated in capital planning, not as a full member, but from time to time. I attended for various reasons, and there was a process in place when I got here. I'm not saying it was a perfect process, but sometimes you don't, there's, as many of you know, there's cycles in town government, and you're always in one mode or another budget time, meaning collective bargaining and things, and you don't always have the luxury of stepping back and looking at the process and seeing how to make it more efficient. By having this committee, I think it allows for a proper review of the process, and we're taking time to look at these forms. It's additional work, but I think it makes it more efficient in the long run. You get a better end product, hopefully. And I always thought that there should be a group of citizens rather than just the town manager and the finance director, which is often the case in many towns, putting it together. I think the citizens should have some say in what we're spending money on. And, you know, I like to think we can make reasonable decisions, but a lot of what we do is driven by the department heads. And to that end, you know, when I was talking with Mr. Kevin and one of your questions, most of what's in 28 through 31 was really just decisions to put a lot of that in. And we're driven by requests and conversations with the department heads. So, and I may be giving you things out of order, but I'm just speaking generally about the process.
Okay. So do we want to start with IT? However you want. I think it probably makes sense to start with IT. I have one more. Go ahead. Could we invite Carol to sit at the table so she can hear better? We can. Absolutely. Carol Martin, would you like to sit at the table with us? Oh, sure. I always love company. The more the merrier. Don't, don't worry about it. Every time we see someone, this is amazing. Carol Martin, oops, Lake Road, chair of the select board and liaison to the SIPC committee. Thank you for inviting me. So I don't, Nick, I don't know if you have these doubting. I don't know if you can see. I can make it bigger. I can make it bigger. I can make it bigger. Yes. All right. So the first one was the data center infrastructure replacement or migration. I just want to talk about the urgency of this. I think we had it in 2013 and I think the town manager had it in 2008. I don't remember correctly. Let's see. Yeah. Right. And then the secondary question, this is probably true across all, there's a lot of open capital in IT or there was, right? We want to make sure that there's sufficient resources. And if broad, broad overarching, if there's a bunch of projects that capital has been appropriated for that are now, because the IT world changes quickly, that are no longer needed or obsolete and need to be different, like then we should talk about returning that surplus capital and appropriating for the things that are needed, right? Yes. And we should note, Nick, you've been here about a year now. Yeah, 10 months. Yeah. And I think you've been doing a great job, fantastic job. That feels like a lifetime. What was that? I said that it feels like a lifetime. Well, we talk almost daily, I think some days, at least several times a week about a variety of different issues. And as you say, the environment, the threat environment to us and the technology, it's constantly changing. And, you know, it's difficult because we're a municipality. Private industry can spend a lot more and they can get, you know, they have money on the line if they lose their trade secrets and different things. And so I think they'll spend a lot more than we can. And so we do the best we can and Nick took a different approach when he came in. And the reason I wanted to mention this is some of the things that are in that five-year plan may not have been things that Nick originally asked for because the predecessor may have put them in those latter years and they're coming down. So with that, I'll turn it over to you, you know, you may want to make changes in those other years based on what you're seeing since you've arrived.
Thank you for having me and allowing me to give me the opportunity to talk here. Um, before we dive into these, but I have a few minutes to just talk. Um, so, um, when we made the, when I made the capital submission in September, I had only been here a month. Um, and at that point in time, I made a request for cybersecurity remediation for $450,000. Um, and, um, the board requested that I split out of it for, um, three years. Um, and so this year, uh, sorry, this year in FY27, what we discussed, what I had submitted was for cybersecurity remediation. I believe it was $250,000. Okay. Um, based on the change of the description, that $250,000 is now being split with the school system to do the video cameras. So I've gone from a request of $450,000 to roughly $100,000. Okay. Now, what I'd like to just briefly talk about is since my time being here, I have taken advantage of state grants to do analysis of our environments. I have three vendors that I've worked with where we have done, completed internal, uh, security, uh, assessments, external security assessments, network assessments. And I'm currently working on our server environment assessment. Okay. These assessments, um, are recommending, uh, quite a bit of, uh, improvements. And I think I spoke before at the town meeting that we have some systems that are quite old. Um, and with those systems, if you think about the cars that we drive, our cars are more recent than some of the, the, uh, that I, okay. Um, so that just gives you a sense of, um, our infrastructure in some respects, knowing that our cybersecurity threats are increasing every single day. Okay. And without remediating those and at a grand scale, we have to make a decision on risk. Okay. What are we willing to risk with our cybersecurity, our data, okay, and how we want to manage this going forward. We can implement a lot of different things and I can ask for a lot of money, but at the same time, we have to focus on what's important. Okay. There are quite a bit of systems that need to be changed, right? Because they're older, because they don't, um, meet the needs of the current threat, um, receiving roughly $100,000 out of $450,000 request, um, is, um, significantly impacting my ability to do some of this remediation. Um, so, um, the, the point of my coming to this meeting today is to show you that I've done the research. This is outside vendors research, identifying what we have in our environment, okay. And the information contained within these reports is not shareable, okay, for security reasons. Okay. Um, but what this has shown me is we have risks that need to be addressed. And with the current funding that I have in my department, um, I'm not able to remediate these, okay. And I'll give you an example as to why my operating budget for fiscal year 26 was $628,000 a year. Okay. And we're thinking that's a good chunk of change, right? Let's just talk about three products that I have. So, Munis, which is our finance system, the annual this year subscription is $160,000. Okay. OpenGov, which is our permitting system, is $80,000.
That's roughly, um, $240,000 out of $628,000. That does not give me room, uh, to do remediation because there are lots of things that we need to do that we're not able to. For example, we are not able to implement multi-factor authentication, which is a requirement by Maya for us to have this in place. Okay. And it's part of our insurance, the inability to, um, upgrade that is also reflected in the sharing of documents, right? We were talking at the beginning about how do we share a document? Okay. Microsoft has a product. It's called Office 365. This product is the direction that we're going in. Okay. This product is going to cost us roughly $50,000 a year. All right. And it gives us all of the capabilities that you're looking for as far as sharing documents and, um, um, how do I say this? Uh, collaboration, right? So two people can be editing a document at the same time, which is really kind of cool from my perspective. Um, so I understand the situation we're in financially. Okay. At the same time, I'm coming to you saying we have a risk and we need to make a decision as to whether or not we're going to invest in remediating our cybersecurity or we are going to stay at risk. Right. So we can now go through these line items to talk about what these projects are. Okay. One macro question. Um, as you assess risk, um, uh, I assume there's different types of risks, there's different parts of your systems that, um, contribute to the overall risk. Um, have you sort of gone through and prioritized, you know, what, what would be the most damaging to the town, uh, to accept we have an exposure and sort of try to prioritize, uh, what your needs are and what, you know, what you would be asking for? Sure. I have gone through that exercise. Um, the firewall, which we have two, um, line items here for a hundred thousand dollars each, um, is the top priority. The firewall is our door to the outside world and outside world into our environment. That is the number one priority and I'm currently working through that project. That is going to cost us roughly somewhere between $160,000 and $108,000 revenue based on the, uh, quotes that I've received. Moving along with this, I've got two vendors that we've selected. We're going through the process of, um, defining, uh, at a very fine, uh, level for what this project will look like. Um, it is a significant project because we're basically replacing the door being, um, that's our number one. Without looking back at my notes, um, there were 10 to 12 prior appropriations before you got here. Over the span of two or three years, uh, were any of those, um, targeted at firewall? One of them was targeted at firewall. And so you have those funds, at least that they haven't been fully expended and you have the $100,000 that made it through the capital budget, um, so do you have enough money for the firewall if that's your top risk? Yes. And when do you think you'll complete closing that risk down? Um, it's going to take roughly six months. This is a, a significant project. I'm, you know, ideally I'd like to make it happen a lot faster. But at the same time, uh, it impacts the entire network and everybody that uses our environment. Um, so I want to do this in a careful process and that is why we're working through contracts right now. Yeah. I think, um, I mean, personally, I'm not opposed where, you know, you as the expert are saying we have exposures wherever they may be, um, without digging in the weeds, it's hard to assess is it big exposure and a little exposure, um, and getting to zero risk is great, but unrealistic, um, both in terms of money, time, um, uh, but, you know, had you come, and I understand you were new, but had you come to us last year and said, here's, without getting too deep in the risk levels, I don't want to necessarily be articulating all that in the public domain. Um, but I think the extent going forward, this upcoming cycle, which is upon us, um, if you could take all the projects that have previously been approved, uh, that have money left unexpended and money that's now in the five-year plan and to extent there's more money you think that's not in the five-year plan in fiscal 28, my ask would be to put those in a format that we could assess on your risk profile, you know, top 25% risk next point, whatever you think makes sense, uh, just to the extent that we have to make decisions to push things out, uh, you know, I certainly wouldn't want to inadvertently, you know, push something out that is a significant risk to be mitigated. And I'd be more inclined to push other things out unrelated to IT if, if all those things are in the top 25%. Uh, so anyway, that, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm less concerned tonight. I wasn't expecting to get down into the weeds of IT tonight. Uh, no, I wasn't either, but that's, that's okay because it's, we're going to have to get in the weeds of all of them anyway, but I think just to echo, I want to make sure we set the record state straight on, on, on the tape, right? Um, I don't think this committee asked to decrease the IT spend. I think what we asked was, uh, can you get to these projects, right? Are you asking for what you can get to so that we're not because, and their concern was based on the fact that I, if I remember correctly, I think there was a million dollars of IT capital outstanding that hadn't been done. And so the ask was, are we going to get to this? If we're not going to get to it, we can't, we shouldn't appropriate it. If I don't think any, I'm going to speak for everybody. I don't think anybody on this committee wants to have, you know, wild unmitigated risk, but we also want to make sure we understand how the money, um, that's outstanding already is being spent. So I think I agree with what Brian said with one more caveat, which is to the extent those outstanding projects, some of them are money you're using, right? To, to mitigate and do things that you need to do. That's fine. I'm going to understand that to the extent some of them are now have been outstanding so long that the technology or what they were intended to do is obsolete. You want to know to send that back, right? Because that's a funding source for the things that are a priority. And so I think if you can rank the priority of the projects that need to be done and give a good assessment on what's outstanding and whether it's going to get used or not used, right? We're going to be in a much better place to prioritize. And I think if you heard some of our meetings last year, we prioritized right safety and we prioritize security. And so I don't think that's the issue. I think it's really just making sure that we've got a good handle on what's outstanding. And when we're asking the taxpayers, right? A town meeting to appropriate money that it's going to get used in relatively short order, or at least we're saying like, Hey, this project is big. It's going to take 18 months to implement or two years to implement, but we need funding a lot. We need funding for the full project appropriated at the beginning, or we can't start, right? Because particularly on an IT project, if you start without enough funding and you can't finish, right, the thing's going to be obsolete before you can get funding for the next piece of it. So I think that's our ask as a committee. If we have that, we're going to be in better shape, right? In prioritizing with less. And also at least the, you know, the draft form that we're working on actually addresses that in terms of the priority. So it gives you the ability to say, you know, what's the top priority? What's the second, third? In fact, we request in that form those kinds of rankings, which I think would help you. So you can tell us, you know, what is the most important also? And it does, if it is a five-year project, a three-year project, the form that we've drafted also addresses those concerns. So I think if we use the type of form we're talking about, I think it's going to be beneficial all the way around. Yep. Yeah, agreed. And that's certainly something I can put together. I do have some line items here where the money has been encumbered. There is an OpenGov permitting for $64,000 roughly. That will be exhausted by the end of this. Yeah, and we don't need to go through them all right now. I think it's, you know, take the list out of munis of what you got open, right? What's the status? When do we expect it complete? Is there going to be anything that you don't need, right, for those projects? So one additional comment is I spent nine years working for the state of Massachusetts, Massachusetts, and I'm very familiar with the funding process. I requested capital dollars year after year. And if I didn't spend all of those dollars by the June 30th, those funds disappeared. And if I asked for those funds in the following year, I would get less. Yeah. Michael's going to kick you under the table. I can get right here. So my point is, I understand the need to spend funds when we receive them and articulate that. Yeah. I will say capital is meant to be different than operating. It's not meant necessarily to be spent all in one year. But I do think there's a happy medium. We've had challenges because of COVID whatnot. But there's a happy medium of like, our ask as a committee to all the departments is when you request the money to tell us when you think you're going to spend it, right? And to have an expectation so that then if it's, and we've got some, right, that are years, years and years since they were appropriated, that there's not 12 months and it's taken back, but that there's a period of time before it's like, all right, you know, this, this ship has sailed, this has to come back. So I appreciate that. But if you want to go through your, the ones on the actual list and I will, the other thing I want to clarify is when you said, you know, 250 was what was requested, you know, ultimately went to town meeting and then it ended up being less. That was nothing to do with CIPC. That's because the amounts in the, in the warrant didn't align with the description of the project they were intended to. So that, that happened after the fact. It was not a CIPC reduction to a lower amount. Yeah, no, I, I, I fully understand that. These things happen. I'm just trying to be clear about the funds that I actually get to use this year. Understood. Okay. So you want to go through these? Sure. We can go through these. And I can provide if you would like me to go back in prior time. Before we do that, I just pick up, Nick, on what you just said. So we're clear for the record. We had three items in the budget. Eight, nine, and ten. So $250,000 that you thought you were being asked, you were asking for, for cybersecurity remediation modernization of that item that was approved by town meeting given the description. At this point in time, how much of that do you think you can spend on cybersecurity remediation and modernization? I can probably spend roughly $100,000, $150,000. So on what basis are you making that determination? I am basing that right now on estimates that I have for the cameras that are needed. Um, I don't have, uh, specific dollars. So I can come back to you once I have the quotes. I'm sorry. So I'm clear. So your answer was you think you can spend $100,000, $150,000 for what was described in the warrant, i.e. the video monitoring, which will therefore leave unspent funds, which Kelly's point would then hopefully get reclaimed and push back out to you as we plan for fiscal 28. Um, the second item, which was labeled public safety, regional emergency system, $150,000 had the description for the cybersecurity stuff that you wanted. Uh, how much of that do you think you can spend on cybersecurity? All of it? All of it. Yep. And we've talked with town council about some of these definitions and yeah, I just want to make sure that he's the one that's got to understand how much he has available to spend, right? Well, I also want to have to chime in because I figure I'm the one who gets blamed when I tell him to spend it. So, so, but we did, we did take time to, to double check the town council about those definitions and how they appeared and what we could feel comfortable with spending in this year. So, you know, so So what's the answer on that? That he should be able to spend the $150,000 that's in number nine, because it actually had the actual description of the cybersecurity and remediation. Yeah, that same is correct. And the, under number eight, we do, the video is part of our security system and that some of the wording in there is broad enough to encapsulate the, some of the devices and equipment necessary to, to support that video that would be part of the overall cybersecurity. So we feel that... I don't, I don't know what that means. It means that I can spend money. I think you could spend, I thought you said you couldn't, you didn't think you could spend $250,000. Not all of it. No, no. You said roughly $100,000. Yeah, I'm sorry. I, I wasn't very clear. Right. I can spend $150,000 on remediation and I can spend roughly $100,000 on cameras for the school system. Okay. So you think of the, so you think item nine is what's giving $150,000 for the cybersecurity remediation? Yeah. And of the $250,000 in item eight, you think you're only going to be able to spend, just because that's the arrestment of the cost, $100,000 to $150,000 for the video monitoring part of it, which was to leave unspent funds that were appropriated for that item. We all understand that? Sure. That, that's, that was my expectation, given the language. Yeah. So that, to me, says to us, which you started out at the very beginning, you're going to be short from what you thought you needed, not counting the fact that you started at $450,000. Mm-hmm . And so we should just anticipate that you're going to be looking to probably increase your fiscal 28 ask over what's in the five-year point. Was that? That's correct. That's correct. And just to touch on the video cameras, this is, you know, I, I, I found out the hard way that I need to go through the school committee for the cameras and work a little more closely with um, the board there. I know that with the systems we have today, there are many broken cameras. The system, um, is outdated and some of, some of those things don't work. So right off the bat, I know I can spend about $100,000 and $150,000 out of that. That is only to replace the cameras that we currently have in place. That is not, you know, if, when we start to go down the road of adding cameras to cover buildings, that will increase. Okay. And, um, depending on my conversations with the school committee will determine whether or not how far I go with, um, those funds. So I, I, I'm not sitting here telling you that I won't spend that $250,000. What I'm saying is I can spend $150,000 to replace the systems that we have. And then if there are additional asks, which I know there are, um, for example, at, um, Happy Hollow, they have, um, dumpsters on the side of the building and we hadn't planned on putting cameras there, but that seems to be a problem. Um, and so, um, you know, those would be additional cameras that I hadn't initially anticipated. But, but, but within the scope of what was described. Within the scope of what. And you had unspent, I don't know where your balance is these days, but you had unspent money from an appropriation, uh, in fiscal 24 for video monitoring. And you had asked for 160,000, um, which we approved for fiscal 27. Town manager's budget, put it out in fiscal 2031. Um, and it's one of our questions, not quite sure. So, um, 160 sounds like had to, if you're able to do a do over that 160 probably would be a bit higher, even though you still have other unspent funds. Correct. And then the coordination part of it's kind of the process. Yes. And it's our understanding, looking back, that part of the description of that request that pushed out to the latter year made it into the current year's request. That's why it's asking for video monitoring under the cyber security mediation. So there was an, a mix-up as it went to print, or at least. So that last sentence, that last sentence got added to Nick's description in item nine, which was. No, no, item, item eight. The description under item eight was not the original description. The. No, the original description for item eight is actually shown in item nine. In item nine. Yes. Except for someone added a sentence at the end that said funding will support video monitoring management systems for the library building. And I assumed that that maybe was because there had been some discussion that the 160 was being pushed out, that somehow you needed some funds to finish the library, and that's how that got there. But it was, that language wasn't, that sentence wasn't in your original submission to us. So, right. So anyway, it sounds like technically under that $150,000 item, albeit it's below what you need to deal with cybersecurity. You have a little bit of money in there that could be used for video, but it sounds like you're not going to use any of that for video. No. Because you have more than enough in the $250,000 to deal with video, right? Yeah. And $160,000 in 2031, you'll need to sort of talk amongst yourselves about whether that's really needed. I don't know why it was put in 2031 other than a default that was the last year. It could have been just pushed off, off the page. But I think we're going to be hoping to put a little more emphasis on getting more detail beyond just the next fiscal year. We're intending to get a CIP form, unless there's pushback, for every year, which is more work initially. But once it's done, then you just start updating your CIP forms. So I want to caution you about the cost of items and getting estimates. And the example that I use is we have a product that in FY25 cost $44,000. This year, it's $86,000. So costs are increasing at a ridiculous rate. That's true everywhere. So I think all we can ask of every department is to include an assumption for inflation. And if that assumption ends up not being reality, which will be the case, that's always the case, right? At least we know we made an assumption. I think one of the pitfalls of prior capital plans still is the amounts are in today's dollars, today's pricing for all the years. And then we inevitably have a problem when we get to that year because we didn't even anticipate the most basic of inflation, right? And then inflation ends up being double, triple, quite a little bit, right? Depending on the product area. So understandable, just we got to anticipate what we can.
Okay. So can we, I think we've probably talked about video monitoring sufficiently. Um, so I'm going to go back to the, the data center infrastructure replacement or migration. Um, that was, I mean, we had it in 2030. You had it in 20, uh, town manager pulled it to 2028. Um, and that's, if it's just, that's the priority in your priority list, that's fine. We can leave it at that. I don't think we need to rehash it. Um, and then, um, the telephone system replacement. What the question was, is that a priority for FY29? And I don't know who, I don't remember which committee member asked it. And if there was something behind it, um, it might have been stemming from discussion about whether or not there was a change in telephone systems, but I don't remember. So it's just a basic, is that still a priority for FY29? Yeah, I think I probably asked that question that there were, that was one of a number of items that were in the five-year plan that got brought forward, um, in the town manager's budget. And when we asked, when we met with you in the fall, we said, okay, you're giving us your new request based on your one month review, but we need more, as Kelly said earlier, we need more input on all this other stuff that's been previously appropriated, or that was in the five-year plan, because your predecessor kind of put it there. So I think, I think I was just asking, is that a project that you, you know, feel is, is still needed at all? Is it's needed? Is fiscal 29 the right year? We don't need an answer tonight, but that's what some of these questions are trying to get at. That's helpful. We're just flying blind on that. So cybersecurity, I think we also talked about
at length here, um, but there was, because you had broken it up into pieces, um, there was 25,000, you had enough by 29, but it didn't come through at all in the town manager's um, recommendation, because I think you're going to split it up, right? 250, 150, 25. It wasn't in there at all. So I don't know if it was a change in the total amount, or if it just got missed, but assuming you're going to re rejigger that all together.
The cybersecurity again, because that's... Yeah. When, when Nick broke it up, he broke it into three pieces. And the third piece was missing from your five-year plan. And that's why it would have been beneficial to him, Mr. Kevin, here, although not ideal. I think part of the challenge, given our short time last year, too, is he said, you know, as he moves things around, he has to rebalance funding sources and things. So I think some things he may have pushed out towards the end, just for the convenience sake of getting through the FY27 budget. I can't answer 100% for him, but you know, we did have some conversations that we, he didn't want to disrupt other things in place at 28, so if we feel we'll readdress some of them. Yeah, this one is 29, but that's, it's okay. It's... No, I know that, and I think that's to the earlier conversation, I think the part of the description might have been from the FY29 that made it in. And, you know, that happened during the editing process. I know none of us at the table did that. And that's why I think it's part of post-mortem when we're discussing things. We're going to have to have some other checks and balances. So if, if the finance committee can use, look at those same shared files that we talked about, so that everybody's dealing from the same, you know, dealing with the same source, there shouldn't be any text confusion. And if that can then migrate, I know other towns just put the CFPC request forms for the current fiscal year into their warrant book as an appendancy. So you have kind of the table with the dollars. And then you see the appendix at the back and you actually have the forms. So there's never a cut and paste. And that might be something you want to consider. I'm not, not that we want to make that book any larger than... I was going to say, that's going to add a lot of pages to the warrant. So there may be a way, or maybe we put it... Well, I think there's an easy way to do it. Just having, we can talk about it later, but having done this section of the warrant for five years, the new CIP form, I think we will make sure that these questions are answered directly in the form so that they can be pulled in again automatically versus having to redraft. Right now there's a spreadsheet with a macro that pulls in that, but not all the information's in the CIP form. So you have to add additional information to get there. So I think we can fix the, the logistical challenges relatively easy, probably without putting the entire form in the warrant, because that'll add like
good 30 pages to the, to the line. So. I am, excuse me if I may add, I remember, I think when Dave Watkins was chairing, he's very IT oriented, what have you. We were doing our own docs. And I was the vice chair to his chair ship, and therefore was handling the capital. And he built a document, a spreadsheet that literally took the forms and pre-populated them. So we had it. Yes. And I enhanced that, but the CIP forms are not filled out completely. And so a lot of the fields that Dave built in the macro to be populated, no one was populating. So they weren't, if they're blank on the CIP form, they don't populate anything in the macro because there's nothing to pull. So it became a finance committee task to then collect all the additional information that fills out this, the rest of this. But that can be, like I said, that can be relatively easily fixed. And I was the person for three years doing that, filling in. Yeah. I was calling everyone filling in. Right. That was all of the specific questions on the comparison. Does anybody have any additional IT related questions? No. Brian? I guess the public safety regional emergency system, which you had asked for 150,000. That sound right? Yeah. That description never found its way in the warrant. So again, you might want to look at that and you may have to, if that's still something that's needed, I assume it is, if you can ask for it in fiscal 27, that you might want to consider that in fiscal 28.
The only other question I have, Nick, there were, and again, it would be helpful if the finance director was here, but there were a number of capital closeouts that the finance director negotiated with stakeholders. And one of them was $100,000 from an appropriation from two or three years ago for the school network. Do you get involved at all in the school side of IT or no? Yes. And it just seemed inconsistent to me that we're hearing from you relative to the town. I assume the schools have their own issues to deal with if they're somehow disconnected from the town's IT. It just seemed inconsistent that we're hearing from you on the one hand that you need even more money that's being asked for, and yet we're grabbing back 100,000 that was supposed to be used to deal with something to do with the school network. Do you have any color on that item or were you consulted? I don't have any color on that item at the moment. I can certainly get that. One of the things that I like to use analogies and for IT for both schools and the town, think of it as a square box. Okay. And in that square box, there is an L and then there's another square box. So you have a square box and you have an L, all right? And the base of that L is the infrastructure, which is what I own. The school primarily is focused on the Google platform and the school technologies. So I own the network for the schools. And the security of the school, like network including the security. All the network, right. Yeah. Do they run their own network separate from the town network or there's one town network? One town network. So when it referenced, maybe you could look into it from the standpoint. I mean, it's history at this point. Yeah. I suppose if there actually is, it was still a need there that now is short funded, you know, you best find out what was that work supposed to be. But I'm assuming the finance director talked to Kirstein, who I know informed the school committee of certain, you know, turnbacks that the schools were being asked to do to help pay for some of their new requests in fiscal 27. It just seemed inconsistent when it referenced network and you're talking about network. And so, yeah, I, I'll find out about that and get back to you. Okay. Yeah. Again, just if it's still there as a need, it just needs to be reappropriated at some point. And maybe it was a discrete project that was done and there really was, you know, money left, which is also inconsistent with what you're saying about, uh, you know, ongoing escalating costs. Yeah. I, um, I have a different approach
than my predecessor. So examining some of these things is really new. I need, I need to spend a little more time looking at some of these prior, uh, capital requests. That's one that I was not familiar with, which I will go research. Um, only other thing I would say is manage mixed expectation. This would be the same for all other departments. Um, uh, if we're to meet our obligations to produce a report on October 15th, at least we believe, um, the request of all of you to provide us with information has to go out later than July 1st, which means during the month of July, you're going to have to be doing all this research start now and, and then, uh, meetings with us probably in August. Um, and so we're going to ask all these same questions. So, yeah, since it's not the best time of year to begin with that, but anyway, make that advertisement. Yeah. That's subject to the town manager, of course, agreeing that that can happen. Um, can't happen. I don't have a complete our report of standouts. Yeah. I anticipate we'll be sending out a letter to everybody before the end of this fiscal year to get them geared up to be thinking about their requests. And I think just the mere conversations that we started having relative to you are asking these questions is jogging the minds of the largest capital budgets. You know, it, it probably a half dozen big players. It's police, fire, DPW, IT, um, and then there's facilities. Yeah. And schools. And in schools. And that's, and schools is part of facilities. But then those are the people that really have all the requests. You might get a small request here and there for one of the other departments, but most everybody's aware of what's going on because we've been talking almost every day we talk about something. And just total aside, you may find it interesting, you may not. I mean, we had an impromptu meeting today. Nick was present in my, my room to try and fix something on my desktop, but we're meeting, uh, just to go over ARPA funds and where we are on the ARPA related projects to ensure that we're spending down all those funds and looking at how we can potentially reallocate any, uh, closeouts that we have in ARPA. There's a mechanism under the, uh, the final rule to do that. And we're going to be working with our auditor to make sure that we're spending everything. And we don't want to leave any money on the table and we don't want to have to be asking for additional monies from the taxpayers to, you know, this process. So, you know, we're, we're always reviewing things, I should say. So he's a witness to that because we spend all the money. So there's a good thing. Cybersecurity might qualify for some of that. No, no. Strangely. Well, not strangely. The only way you can reallocate ARPA money is to a previously authorized, uh, project. We're in the last. That's on the list. Right. You had to make all of those authorizations or to those projects before December 31st of last year. Now you have to spend all the money. If you finish a project and you have money left over, there is a mechanism. I don't know who's tried it yet, but we're going to, we're going to ask, and we're going to ask our auditors who are helping us, um, with their reports to transfer some money slips. For instance, we use, just to give you an example, when we took down the property on Sherman's Bridge Road and 212 constituent, we asked for some ARPA money to, to raise the bill. In the end, the, uh, the actual bill was less than the estimate and we asked it. So we have, let's say $5,000 in one of those accounts. We would like to move that over and apply it to one of the open projects. So it's a stage for dam or something else. Long-term water project. Yes. The MWRA. No, no, no, no, no. They had that for funding. Oh, that was emergency only, right? Um, no, that included, that included the long-term. There was more, excuse me, there was also funding for design, because the design project, they're doing itself to talk to my head, Brian, you'll know it better than I, I think they need to let two, two million for design. And there was contribution from the ARPA funds towards the design. So then the balance was what was requested at time. So that sounds like that could soak up everything. Yeah. So come back, but it won't be it. Sorry. We're constantly talking about, you know, how money is being spent, how to ensure that we're maximizing our dollars. And so it's not part of what we're doing here, but we're always trying to figure out how to ensure the money's getting spent and it, you know, working on the closeouts. And that's why it's good to have Nick here. And he's putting a fresh set of eyes on all those older projects. State legislator earmarks. I know you've already probably gotten the calls and they're probably already in the system, but is there any things like IT infrastructure? I think we did. I'd happen to check my emails. I think the requests already came through and I think, I do believe Mr. Lombardi gave me some that I forwarded on. They start a little earlier. They come out in March and April, I can see. I usually share them with all of our legislators. That's fine. So it sounds like I'm just trying to figure out if there's other ways to get the money that you didn't get. There was some allocation for some, I forgot about my spreadsheet, some IT work, I think, at the COA, audio and what have you. Yes. Why do I think it was $250,000? Yeah, I don't want to, I want to keep moving from a meeting perspective. I think Well, we apply for every grant we can get. Every time I get an email, I share it with every department. Which is, which is great. I think it's just, it would be of value to your ultimate ability to get some of the things you, if you've come up with what the priorities are and there's money left over in projects that are no longer needed, that's going to enhance the ability to get those new things, right, that are high risk funded. So I think it's worth a little bit of time on what's there to see if you can close that out. Okay. Can we release? Nick, thank you for coming. Thanks very much for your time. We're holding it. Well, we keep talking, we are. We asked, just for the record, we asked for hybrid meeting equipment for boards and committees, emergency generators for a library and the COA, and monies for the TOW website. So those are some things. Usually the one from the ARPA line? No, from the ARPA line. Okay, we go back to
the questions. Do you want to do general questions first? I'll do, we can. I think the general questions are about how we work together. So for the most part. Now, and under that first question I had, you know, something we pretty much talked about already was coming up with a mechanism that we can all access shared files. So it's easier for us to share information back and forth.
Mr. Kemeny did ask a question as we start working on things, whether or not, you know, are we, are you anticipating the changes to significant changes to the 28, 29, 30, and 31? Are you focusing on there's just 28 and 32 this year, the incoming request for the future and what's in here? Well, I think that was part of our questions, right, was we would like to come to a common understanding, given the time that we're going to have, a common understanding on the existing FY 28 to FY 31. So that's where those questions that we gave by project came from, like, can we get on the same page as to why things are not there, they're moving, you know, we can get on the same page, then we're starting from that. And we can then spend our time on 28, 32, and beyond, right, and not be debating too much if we're in agreement when we start, except with the exception of the departments are going to come in with new requests, new priorities, and that's going to shift everything. But we'd like to at least be on the same page with you and Brian going into that, right? Because we weren't, by virtue of being a new committee, and the committee feeling it was our responsibility to fresh, right, fresh look at everything, not just rely on what the previous plan was, we weren't on the same page. But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I think that's... Yeah, it's a different set of eyes, like I said, on a process that had just been on autopilot, and not everybody had the luxury and the time to go back and look, and that this committee is designed to go back and look at that and make their recommendations. So, yeah. Yeah, so that's where a lot of those questions came from. It's like getting us in a place of understanding why things that we might have pushed back get pulled forward so that we're in that common place. If we can get there, then the question was, which one are we starting with? Hopefully, we're starting with something, right, that we mutually agree on, and then we roll in the department's changes and requests. Go ahead. Yeah, I think at a minimum, there are...we don't need to get in tonight. There are really more things that the finance director is going to have to go back and look through each one of these. I think there is four or five items that were in your recommended budget that either just were amounts that turned out not...they were not asked for by department heads, or they were the wrong numbers because they were pulled from a wrong line item. So, at a minimum, we would expect that we would take your recommended budget and have the finance director correct those four or five line items so that at least that's the worst case starting point. And then I think the only question for us is, you know, to you, ultimately we're advising to you, do you see any value or merit in us trying to come to agreement that certain items, whatever they may be, that were in your budget in a particular year that we happen to feel strongly about based on our interaction with the department heads, you know, should be shown in a different year than they currently are in your five-year plan. Is that worth the time and effort, in which case those changes could also be made, and then we either have a starting point or we could start wherever we want, right? And we'll just, we're just going to end up with, you know, automatic variances out of the box that, you know, items that we just, for whatever reason, place a higher priority. So, it's really your call. We can do whatever we want, but it's your call if we're going to try to coalesce around the... Well, there's a couple things I think we can do if we're going to send out this letter. And again, I'm not trying to be too critical of the system that was in place, but oftentimes how capital budget came to be after I arrived is typically we would meet with every department head, review their current year, try and review if there was any significant changes to their budget going out, prioritize things and land them in there based on the finances. I, based on some feedback I got today, I agree and I don't think as things move around in the five-year plan, the requests are being adjusted for inflation based on, I got a comment from the fire sheet that the dollar values associated with some of his vehicles have already changed for this coming year, the FY28. So, those things have to be made. So, I think as part of this, we have to ask every department head to review and we do, but I think they have to make a better effort to look at the numbers, not just the project, but look at if the numbers have changed, if the priorities have changed and it can't just be perfunctory to say, okay, here's my FY28 one. Yeah, I looked, I still want all these things, but it has to be, yeah, the price has changed on that and also, you know, this is more of a priority. So, I think it becomes part of the process of making sure the department heads are looking at it appropriately. The new CIP form that we drafted asks them to prioritize each department to prioritize their projects for every year. So, they're going to prioritize, we would ask, they prioritize within their department ultimately, right? You're going to decide which department gets in front of another, but at least within their department, because we know the answer is going to be, yeah, these are the things I want, right? We prefer that the expert in that particular area is putting their own projects in order versus us or you. Like, it makes more sense for them to give that input for their individual departments, and then you still have to do the, do the balancing across departments, but that's on the new draft.
Okay. We still have to answer the question here of getting these four or five items that don't dovetail pay to sort it out. Brian, is that what you said? Yeah. That's a minimum is to have a finance director look at their, there's questions for them, but to say, these just don't look right based on... They're in, so, and we don't have to go through every single one of them right now. They're in, they're in the questions that we sent, right? Both the things where we've noted... On the project side or in the... On the project questions. Okay. I just put the project questions to the department heads, so I didn't get an opportunity to go through. You can put them to the department heads, but I think in many cases it wasn't anything to do with the department. It was, it was how it got consolidated. So, I think... And I'm going to tell you tonight, I may not be able to answer all those because... That's okay. I don't think we need to answer them here, right? I think the ask, and I agree with Brian, the minimum is some of these questions, and I didn't classify them, but some of them are, hey, this doesn't look right. It's not a question of, we wanted this and you wanted that. It's, this doesn't line up with what we got as a request, which can either be, it was a mistake or you got information from the department that we never got right after the fact and changed it. We got to answer those questions. That's the bare minimum. Yeah. Some of the questions are, hey, let's, can we talk about difference in timing here from what we prioritized? It may be, we just don't understand, right, that why it's a priority. Kind of like we're just, not that I didn't understand, but it's nice to have Nick say, like, here's, you know, I've worked on this and I've prioritized and here's why this should be prioritized over, right, some other IT project. So what may be beneficial is almost all of those key departments wrote back to me in line, and maybe what I can do is work with them to cut and paste those answers and send them back to you folks so that you can see the individual responses. But then, have Mr. Keveney try and answer how he's slotted some of those in. Yeah, I would think it'd be more efficient for you. What you just tried to have the department had to see answers go to the finance director, have him look at our specific questions that are simply, we think, the wrong numbers. Have him at least produce what he considers to be a revised town manager, five-year plan. Understanding it's still going to have lots of variances with what we proposed, but that at least would clean it up. And then we could then decide, are there any line items that we want to have further discussion before we settle on what we think our starting point is? And I would say the the other the other challenge, and it's it's question, general question number four, but we take it out of order. We did two things that I'm not sure were done on your side, at least this go around. We attached pretty rudimentary priorities to each request, low, medium, high. And as Kelly said, somewhere in this meeting already, public safety and security, those were all labeled high. There's a lot of them that were medium that we're going to try to get a bit more granular in this next cycle, because one medium to another, who knows. But really, when it came down to a lot of the timing issues anyway, and I don't feel that strongly about the timing issues that exist, is that we were operating in a vacuum in terms of funding sources. So we relied on the FinCom's financing guidelines as sort of a maximum limit, and just one project through all of our analysis off. For example, we showed the wastewater as levy debt, and while ultimately your plan shows it as levy debt, my understanding is the select board has generally agreed that it will be a debt service we paid for annually out of the debt stabilization fund, as long as Town Meeting approves it every year. But that $2 million soaked up a lot of financial resource in fiscal 27, which caused us to have to push a lot of things out in the years. We were taking six, eight, ten projects and constantly moving them out. It appears the finance director basically took mostly the five-year plan that had been improved in the prior year, worked in the brand new request of which there were many for fiscal 27, and then had the benefit of capital closeouts that he managed to go look at. And so if you're trying to go at this both with the ask on the one hand and how much can you afford to pay and from what sources, unless we have a better sense on the front end, we're just going to always be off. And so one of our, I think, requests is whether, I understand it'll change. Capital closeouts typically don't get done by the finance director until January, February. But even if we could get an initial cut, and also some general agreement on what are our upside targets for levy debt fees or free cash. Because again, as we looked at the comparisons between what we did and what your budget finally showed, some of them were in line. And in the aggregate, other than that one $2 million project for the septic, we weren't off really in terms of that. So I just don't know how you how we can get a better handle on that, other than do our best. And then maybe we talked about last week, come back, you know, in late December, when hopefully you're issuing to the finance committee your recommended capital budget. Maybe just before that, take a look at it and reassess and do an addendum to our report or something. Yeah, we discussed, we've got to meet the bylaws, we're going to issue by October 15. But that doesn't preclude us from doing an amended recommendation based on, you know, whatever information it is comes of capital closeouts, stuff like that. But I do think there was a different way we could have handled capital closeouts, which was, and we tried to do it, we listed a couple of projects that like, if there's money, this is where these are the next things on the priority list. That's a way to do it as well, like you might not know it. And we do that, we used to do that in the operating budget, right? We used to say, we're not going to fund this, but if medical comes in less and there's room, then we can, then we can do that in that order. But that's probably, um, may I just ask one quick question? Did you send me this list of questions or anything? Uh, I can send it to you right now. Thank you. I mean, the questions are embedded in an Excel file that shows side by side by ear. I'd just like to see them just to know, but I do think the surplus capital is, um, I've already talked about this a little bit. It's really interesting because, as you said, it's a dynamic process. As we're going through the capital, the finance director is really, and I've done it with them before, we used to call it tin cupping, going around trying to get these projects close. You don't necessarily have the same dollar amount available in September that you have in December. But as, to your point, as this occurs, sharing of information would be, it would end up with a more, a project that you're more in alignment with. Yeah, it's better than, anything better is better than zero. Because if we're left with zero availability, then we're going to prioritize in a certain way to hit those, not exceed those targets. And then once you come up with the extra money, all of a sudden, you know, we may have made different decisions, which may align with what... But I think that you've got a good, it's not the solution, but it's a good part of the solution to say that we would say, if there's one funds available, these would be the next four, five, six and a half. But it's not, we need to have the number as we go along. And I think, you know, part of that, this is an unusual, that was not,
I think that capital, if I recall correctly, the capital request for the high school that had originally been way out, because we weren't going to do anything. And then, as Ms. Charest, our engineer got involved, it became more of a priority, and we wanted to move it up, and we wanted to save money on the pumping, it was a variety. I think there was a confluence of events that brought it up. And I know originally, the finance director, we had talked, we were trying to pursue it as an exclusive. Yeah, no, I wasn't referring to the ball field, I was referring to the septic system. Yeah, but that wasn't originally, I think, in the five-year plan. Yes, it was. But not in the... It was, but it got pushed out, it got pushed... That's what I'm saying, it was pushed out. But it was only pushed for purposes of figuring out how to make the 5.5 million be something less. It wasn't, like, pushed into infinity. It was... But I... It was, hey, we got to figure out, we think we can do a different plan here. Yeah. It was being pushed out, like, a year at a time. The subject? The subject, the, the wastewater. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, the wastewater was always on the radar screen. It was on the radar, but then it was accelerated by Ms. Charest, so I don't know how Brian intended it to come in, because I don't think... They were, at one point, looking at overhauling the whole plant, and this was a different solution, so I... It came up differently. That's all I'm talking about. That doesn't address the how we... How do we have the communication channel flowing in terms of as surplus capital becomes available to spend in a particular fiscal year's capital budget. That's what we need to smooth out here. You don't know that when... We're not going to know that when we're building the plan. It's too early. We won't know. We absolutely won't know that. So the only thing we can do is say, hey, we funded with the funding sources available. These are the next priorities if there's money that becomes available. But the other thing I would say is getting aligned on... We, we followed, right, as close as we could, the policies laid out and approved by the board, by the select board, right? The ultimate budget that went to town meeting went beyond those. And that's, that's a choice, right? But I think unless we're instructed otherwise, we're going to do that again, right? Those are the policies. The decision to spend beyond that, right? If you guys want to share, hey, we think it's okay to go beyond because, right? And it's, it's not every year that we're doing that, it's fine. But without other guidance, right? That's, that's what we did. And that's what I would do again, right? I wouldn't go outside the policy. I would say either, either, right, the policy has to be amended or we have the state of town meeting, the reason we're going outside policy is because x, y, z. So I think also the committee can, it behooves us to share this information, but it certainly doesn't prevent you from requesting as you're going through and finalizing your plan. Are you aware of any surplus funds that are going to be available for it? Why would be on 28th, for example, plan? Maybe we work in that there has to be a review for closeouts. I think it's the same request I made, right? Every department's got to look at what they have. When do you expect it to be done? Is there anything that, that, you know, can be closed out, you think, right, this year? And at least if they could narrow down like, okay, I've got 10 projects and no, eight of them are not going to be closed out this year. There's no chance of that being money. And two of them, maybe there's x dollars left, right? At least then we have a parameter on it's zero to, you know, 500, whatever, right? When you have a sense of what it can mean, that's going to let us get closer out of the gate. And the other thing is, I think I would caution being very careful. There seemed to be a lot of trading going on last year of like, somebody wants this project, so we're going to close out another project on their list. Personally, the committee talked about this. I think that should be disclosed at town meeting when we're closing a capital project that was approved at town meeting and we're not doing it, right? I think they should know that that that's where the surplus capital came from. Well, no. Well, the motion, the motion, capital motion contains a bunch of line items that show where the capital is coming from. There's no color that's added. That's what I'm saying though. I think, I think there's a difference between when we did the project, it came in under budget, there's money left over. Yeah. We appropriated a project that we didn't do, or we didn't do all of what we said we were going to do. I think that should be called out. Yeah. I mean, another example, we talked about the school network before. Another one that's on our list of questions, make it in this list, but we talked about it. I don't think you have it in detail, but we talked at our last meeting. There were, you know, four or five very large capital closeouts that were most of the money came from. And two or three of them were appropriations for district-wide school flooring, district-wide school windows. We're all scratching our heads saying, the reason that we went to the district-wide was that you didn't want to tie it to one school. You spend, you don't spend all the money. Now you got to turn it back. The idea was, if it was district-wide, you had a pot of money, you could do floors at the middle school. And if you didn't spend it all, you go to another school. And so it was, it was curious that those would be projects that were closed out. When then you look at the five-year capital plan, there's more requests for district-wide flooring and district-wide. So why are you closing out money that's already been appropriated just to reappropriate? I mean, that, that made no sense to us. And so that, again, is probably a question that the finance director needs to sort of chime in on. And again, we understand that there was a bunch of new requests and there were school contributed a couple of high priority new requests. And it sounded like, to Kelly's point, he said, okay, we'll include them, but we need you to pay for them, or you need to pay for a good chunk of them. And that's, he then grabbed, you know, 600 grand from three or four big projects. And, and I just, I don't know why you would close those out. So I think we liked it. That confused me, the district-wide, because when we were doing district-wide, when I was on finance committee, and then when the waste was in, she said, you know, it's a lot of money, you know, to do a little bit. And I mean, they're trying to be equitable and do a little bit in every school, but it's better to just do one set up and do one school and then go. So we were allocating them at one point, happy hollow flooring, you know, clay pit flooring. Yeah. And now we're back to district-wide. Yeah, but we stopped, Carol, because you inevitably run into an issue where you either don't quite have enough, but you're, you're, it's a, these are, these are not things that are once every 10 years. It's like, there's a, you're in a continuous cycle, right? You're going to be replacing flooring continuously across the buildings the whole time. It makes sense to do district-wide. It doesn't make sense to close out a district-wide funding and be asking for it the next, right, in the rest of the five years of capital. That's true. That's the issue, right? Yeah. I don't have an issue with district-wide pots for things that are constant, right? I have, it's the issue is closing it up only to ask for it again somewhere else. Okay. Well, we have limited time and while they're, while they're both here, the probably one of the biggest variances that we, you'll see when you look the side-by-side is this building. I think the unofficial five-year plan from the prior year had five and a half million below the line to be funded with excluded debt. And we met with the facilities director and said, we just don't see doing all that until the town select board, whoever decides, you know, are we coming or going or what are we doing, right? And so the facilities director, at our direction went away and came back and said, okay, here's my, my, uh, priority needs. A couple of which were new elevators apparently needed upgrading and on two plus million dollars of roof replacement. He said, okay, the first phase has to be over the gym and, you know, had a certain amount for that. And, uh, and then on the roof anyway, he spread it out over four years. It was a little less than $2 million to do all of the roofs with the understanding that there, hopefully there's going to be some sort of dialogue, which I know, you know, the town manager and the support have had an initial discussion about how do we get our arms around it? Is there a, is there a committee, an advisory committee, a working group? Um, but, um, you know, the finance director putting the other town manager's budget appears to have not picked up the facilities director's million, eight plus or minus for doing the roofs over four years and rather took five and a half million that was originally slated for fiscal 27 with excluded debt and bumped it to fiscal 28. Whereas we put it in a separate bucket bucket that I call purgatory, but I was told that's probably inappropriate. So we had a separate bucket and it's in our memo that says, here's some, uh, fairly substantial items that we can't put anywhere in the plan yet because we need more information. And the town building was one of them. Whereas in, in the, uh, in the town manager's five-year budget, the five and a half million got reduced by what was asked for for the gymnasium roof and otherwise kind of pushed to the next year. So that one item is the largest item that we have to deal with in the capital budget. And we're likely going to be in exactly the same position in a month from now or two months from now, because I assume you haven't had yet the ability to start to formulate how you're going to answer the question. Well, yes and no. Um, we did meet with the facilities director to start this process just to get it, get our arms wrapped around what the scope was. And cause he has the information from the insight onsite report. But when we met, they weren't able to, and they gave us a little chart of all the, most of the major buildings, but there was no chart available for the town building because it was still distilling the info. So I am going to say, I am going to, I have this, we were discussing this the other day, actually, as well. I need to get this on a, um, just reach back out to his fair and see if I can come in and give us that main scope from which we then will have a conversation about establishing a visioning committee. I don't think you can send someone off to vision and discuss it. We don't have a scope of what the cost is. Yeah. And that's not going to happen in the next two months. Well, you can't get this. I mean, it's not going to reach a conclusion in the next few months. You know, at least we can maybe get started. So it's not going to reach a conclusion. So I would ask just between the town manager and the facilities director, I think because it's not going to reach a conclusion, there's really, right. There's three options, right? None of them are fund the whole, uh, amount in FY28. I think we can probably get there pretty quickly. It's do nothing at all, have nothing in the plan at all. Right. Which I don't think is necessarily a good idea. It's, you know, Michael Fea, right. Is what the plan you laid out piecemealing, you know, on a, on a sort of urgent basis, is that still good? Right. That's second option. And the third is, um, that combined with some future project, right. To do a larger overhaul and putting that in some year out in the future for now, just because I wouldn't want to put nothing because whether it's this building or it's somewhere else, there's going to be costs associated with having a town building. So I think that's the ask in the short term is which of those paths should we be taking on the, on the plan while the visioning goes on? Cause you're not going to have an answer, like you said, from the visioning. And he may have answered that because he sent me something late today, which just due to a couple of developments at town hall, I was not able to go through his responses, but, um, you know, it, we may have something that we can share with you on it. Some of it, but it sounds like the answer to that question has to start first with town manager. And what, what is your view of which of those options makes most sense? And the extent you think you need to list them? There's too many options on the table. Uh, so I still think the town has to make a decision as to what they want to do with this building. And I know Mr. Faze brought it up, the vision with me. I know there's certain information you want to know about the costs associated with, you know, making this building right. But I, I think most people, if they spend any time in this building, will realize that there's, there's problems with this building that are just forever, you know, you talk about, uh, um, structural deficit. This has structural issues in that just the way the building is built, these windows are not standard size. Anytime we make a repair, it's going to cost us a lot more money than we want to. There's problems with the substructure here. When it is warm and hot, the swampy water from being so close to the river, the boards swell, the floors crack. You know, I think this could be, I know people want to see it as maybe housing and there's, there's questions about the deed restriction on this property, but we could purchase property. We could lease a property. We have some limit, but I'd want input on that. I could propose a laundry list of things, but I think the board should be part of that. And that's why I've met him several times. We should have a visioning committee to make a determination, but there's short term fixes. And I agree that I can work with Mr. Fayette to say, okay, it's, we're not going to solve that first question right away. So the next one to three, one to four years, what would be the plan to just keep this building sustained? Yes. I agree. Yeah. Okay. So that's, that's all I'm looking for. I, we're not going to have an answer. It's the, is the option that we have to go with right now, the hobble long plan, right? That's, that's what it is. The hobble long plan, right? That keeps the building functioning while you figure out what you're going to do with it. And don't get me wrong. I didn't disagree with why you didn't want to spend on it because yes, I think it, we need to make a decision on the longterm, whether we're staying here or doing something different. We could do, see if the board is amendable to have one of those, like one hour on one off in July, like a Thursday morning. And this can be the topic. I will propose that, not Monday, the next time it will be, but the next Monday with that. But I'll work with Michael fair. And again, he may have given me that, um, some of those answers in there. That's the, uh, I think Kelly, you mentioned this, uh, and I know we talked to Michael about it. Um, you know, as that evaluation occurs, inevitably, someone's got to come up with, we, we see this five and a half million is his best guess. And it's more than a best guess. He's done a fair amount of work, try to identify the scope. Uh, and I think even that scope, I think my sense is he's tried to limit it to things that really need to get done at some point without worrying about the building collapsing or whatever. But we've asked, well, if the town decides after this process, this is where town hall is going to be, how much more money is going to be need to spend in the next next year, six through 15, because when you're going to inevitably have to look at that as compared to these other options, Michael leasing, uh, selling and buying, you know, or building a new property. Um, we're not so concerned about that longer term piece right at the moment, but I'm just saying that the largest variance between what we did and the reason we ended up having to make certain decisions we did and prioritizing which year things went is how we dealt with the town building and how the finance director dealt with it in, in what the town manager produced. And that, that and the septic really drove all the other, most of the other variances other than numbers that were just not making sense, I think. Yeah. So I, there's a couple here left, they don't have to be answered right now in the general question. For project questions, Michael, what we can get with Brian and the department heads and send back, just add a column next to the, you know, next to the question and put the answer in there, um, would be the best, but a couple of the general questions, um, this one's mine, right? Can we establish an agreement on how to consistently assign project owners for capital project, project purpose, budget purposes? And the reason I say that is because there's a bunch of projects last year that got duplicated when they came over, right? They were on recreation and DPW or schools and DPW. Um, and I think there's a difference between capital project project owner, right? And who the stakeholders are. So who's owning the project is who should be submitting the project. That may be, well, there's other stakeholders, there's other boards that have to approve it, but I'd like to avoid, there was a fair amount of, wait a minute, is this the same project as this project, right? They're come, they were coming from more than one place. And so I think it would be helpful with among the department managers, right? There's only, there should only be one owner. Um, and then there may be other departments often, right? With schools, facilities, owns, getting the work done, but it's school building, right? Who's, who's submitting that? They were pretty good. That was facilities, but there were some rec, um, DPW, recreation and facility. Like there was something that crossed kind of multiple up to three or four different boards. I think if we just get a consistent understanding in town among the department heads, who owns it versus input stakeholders, that would be helpful, um, to the level of work it takes to get this all organized. Because even in reconciling, when you reconciled, when I reconciled, it's like, well, wait a minute, you've got this project under this department, and I've got this project under another department that it would just make it a lot easier and clearer, um, where they belong. And I think that dovetails into another general question. What is the, what was the intended function of ex officio members of this committee? Um, my own view is that the purpose of having ex ex officio members was to create a forum with which open communication could occur, so there's collaboration and, and, and people are all pointing in the same direction. Um, I don't, I don't, I can't remember we've had any meetings where all ex officio members attended the meeting. Right. And, uh, and is it a, is an issue that we meet at night and it's too much to ask of, you know, town employees to be out yet another night. Um, but there's limitations on committee members as to their ability to meet. Right. So we might be able to meet in the middle, right, where not the whole, we get a forum that can be present. Right. Maybe it's not all of us, but there, there may be a beat in the middle. And I think that was my ask. And the question is, how can we enhance the likelihood, right? What's the expectation of ex officio members? Set that out first. And then how can we enhance the likelihood that we've got that? Because the other, the other issue that I think flagged us both last year was we had conversations with ex officio members who were department heads. You guys separately had conversations. They weren't at the same point in time, so we got different information. Not, not the ready fault of the department managers because time had gone by, but we weren't all on the same page about what was going on. And so how can, how can we alleviate some of that? I mean, we're not going to meet with department managers as much as you guys do, right? There's no way that's going to happen, but how can we make sure that we're on the same page and it's a little more of a collaborative process versus, you know, we met with everybody, we gave it to you. And then independently you met with everybody. Cause that to me, that wastes, right? For sure. Waste the department manager's time. We've had to do it twice. And I don't think that I thought our intent in the working group of having ex officio members was to try and avoid that duplication. Right? So if it's a, Hey, we've got to have some meetings at a different time. If we've got to do zoom, if we've got to get closer to, you know, the end of the work day, right? Whatever that is, I just want to hear it from, from you, the recommendation from you. Well, I think as we talked about the working group, most of the capital planning meetings that I've even been involved in, helped put my other town and have looked at along the way. Most meetings are on the shoulders of the day, either seven or eight in the morning, zoom participation, or right around four o'clock, maybe four to five, three to four. And that way it's easier to get staff in. When you get into nighttime meetings, you know, not everybody lives here. Some people have been logged in. A lot of these departments are at multiple meetings. And I know there are times when my meetings schedule overlap with other meetings. So it's, it gets tricky, um, in that space. Um, I don't know if I was too keen on the ex officios when we talked about it, because most of the other towns that I know do it. They don't usually the finance director manager show up upon request or just attend from time to time. It may take a while for, for rhythm to be established, which, because we're relatively new, we have new financial policies in 25 that this file out of 25. Some of the others function. They don't have as many, like my hometown just meets when the, uh, requests come in for a little bit, particularly in the budget. And they don't have to meet. I understand you're newer, you're going to be meeting. Bill, you go through the five year plan. Um, I think if meeting in the middle of a little bit would allow more participation rather than the evenings, I think that could probably broach a lot of that. It's much easier to get department heads who just walk in. If Michael comes down about a problem and Tom, uh, holder comes in and it's an overlapping problem. Like you said, and I can just say, hey, Brian, just come down. We're talking about this and we get things. It just kind of happens sometimes organically that we might have those conversations that you aren't privy to. And I don't think it's anybody doing anything that not to share information. It just kind of happens. I didn't see it once I'm saying that it was. But I, I, and I'm not saying that people can't come to night meetings, but I think if it, it was closer to the end of the day or beginning of the day and we did it zoom, you might get a little more frequency out of some of us who are at other meetings because it's not just, um, select order fincom. I'm expected to go to other meetings. I sit as a board member on, so it gets harder after a while in certain crunch times of the year where you're out almost every night of the week and it gets difficult, you know, for some of us. Yeah. And understand that. I think the, I think the ask is what is that I then, then tell us, right. What those, Hey, I've got, I've got select board every Monday night. That's never going to happen. Right. What's, what's the time of day or, um, you know, uh, location, whatever it may be that makes it more likely. And I'm not saying I didn't necessarily think that the ex officio people members would be here at every meeting. Um, but I did think there'd be a little more participation overall, um, so that we weren't doing exactly what I feared. And I think the parking managers feared is that they were going to be doing it once for you and once for us, or right, or twice for you and twice for us. So they, now they have, they're doing it four times instead of might, might be three times because the fincom and their debrief said, geez, we probably need to meet with department heads on capital because we were left in the dark until, you know, February or whatever it was. So I will be honest. There are times that I watched and didn't watch under my name when different department heads are speaking. You know, I, um, I'll have it on the background because I don't always want to be on camera. I like to listen to see what, you know, the question. Uh, yeah, I was, I was just curious is what, for those of you that were on the working group, kind of what, what was your expectation and intention? And if, if it's not living up to what you thought and other approaches, I think I would amend the bio and get rid of the ex officio members. Well, I'm here a lot. And, um, I think you've, you've met with us maybe four times and, and, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, in this building. No, I know, but I'm, I'm, I'm just asking if, if there, if ultimately, if ultimately we can't, if whatever value proposition that was intended isn't going to happen, for whatever the reason, you know, we try. I would be interested, for example, uh, do ex officio, you know, when we send out the draft minutes to go to all the members, that includes the ex officio members, I'd be interested if any of the ex officio members read the minutes, at least, because, because the minutes at the moment are pretty detailed and, uh, there's ample opportunity for those folks to see what our questions are, might be, and, and take the opportunity to kind of weigh in. And I've got to talk to, you know, I'm the school committee's designee. You know, I, I know I reached out to the school finance operations director a couple of times. And unfortunately it was in the middle of her working on the school budget, uh, hoping to get, you know, response to something that was in the plan on MSBA. And it, and it just never happened. I just didn't want to, you know, be chasing after her. But, um, uh, anyway, I just, I just think that that if, if it ultimately doesn't serve whatever purpose you thought it was supposed to serve, um, we just should know that. And then you worry about whether you change the bylaw. So one, one, well, just one last call. Yeah. What might be, it may not always be ideal for everybody on your committee too. We do have a late night where all the staff has to stay until seven o'clock and it's Monday. And, you know, they're all here. And if somehow you're, it wouldn't always conflict with select works. They start around 630, but you have people staying there from four to 630 and they're all here, you know, it might not be the best night of the week for you folks, but they're always going to be here every Monday during that time. Like they had a skin room. What? Hard part of getting a room. I'm just going to say that's going to be your next challenge, but maybe with a large area. Well, we don't need the solid, right? No, it's like, like in Miami's town, it's like 8 a.m. on Fridays in one of my towns that way. And it could be done by zoom so that there's many, um, everybody participated and they always had a pretty good attendance. So Brian, I think that I understand the frustration, but I think Michael actually, when he said something, I went, Oh, Ben, this, you know, we're transitioning. It's a concert change. Prior to when you came in with your capital, you came before the finance committee, where you went before the department. So it was a one-on-one experience. And so it may take a couple cycles before they, you know, as ex officios, you're welcome to come and participate. You're welcome, for example, my fair, it's welcome to come and Tom Holder's doing his things and then all fine. The same with the schools. When you have these ones that cross over, like this one project is owned by X, but there's two or three stakeholders, that's when you probably would want to see folks. So maybe we, we need to see if we can communicate that, that, you know, you're welcome to go and you should go when there are projects that you're a stakeholder to. It's that's being presented rather than just the care. There's really two times in my mind, right? It's early on when you're let's understand what the projects are. Yeah. Right. And then it's okay. We've got all the projects. We're trying to slot everything and we're trying to, it's at the end, we're doing the trading, right? The in-between, it took us some time to get our arms around it, get it organized. But those were the two points. I think, honestly, the department managers, in my opinion, did a great job of that early part. We got them all in here. We answered a lot of questions, right? It was the back end, like, okay, now what, right? We've been through everything. We're trying to, we're trying to figure out how to decide between the departments, right? And that's really where it fell apart. We talked about that earlier. I think that's when you need Michael and Brian to come in though. But that's usually the same time where a lot of everybody else is looking for us. Well, hopefully, if we have an October, I think this is why, Carol, we asked, you know, why did we do October 15th? I thought that was why we did October 15th. But see, last year was not on the... I know. So this year, we won't have that experience. We're going to see. Might I suggest we have a meeting scheduled for June 27th? Wednesday? We'll be on the precipice of getting out, hopefully, or asking you to get out, the request for... 24th. 24th? Yeah. On the precipice of getting out, the request for a CIP formula branch, right? Yeah. Maybe I could ask the chair, our committee, if we invite the ex officio members to join us at the next meeting, we could do two things. We could talk about the same issue. Right. We could use that as a way to go through the new CPI form, assuming it meets with account managers. When's the next meeting? 24th of June? Yeah, I just said I'm not here. He's out. Oh. So...
Week before, week after, I... But if we get all the others, I mean, you've now heard... Oh, yeah. Well, I mean... You're out that week. The other alternative to doing that, although I always prefer in person, is to ask if the ex officio members, again, if this was intended to be part of their job function, they could watch the WCAM video and listen to this 10-minute conversation about what's the role of an ex officio member, for example. And, but I still think it'd be nice at this, what's going to be a much earlier start time. And those three are the three largest capital, which is why they're ex officio members, I presume, requesters of capital. I think it'd be nice to have them with us.
And I don't know if we could start, if we have a room, I don't know if we could get at least three of this year to start earlier than 6.30 that night, on the 24th. Yeah, I mean, Michael can't be here. I'm saying, but if we could get the finance director and the other three... There's more than three of us, but there's something... There's five of them. There's five ex officio? Oh, no. Ex officio? No, it's not. Five. It's five ex officio? Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's three, sorry, three department heads and then Michael and Brian. So, if between now and then... And Susan and the school, right? It's the schools, DTW, facilities, and Michael and Brian. Oh, okay. So, I don't know if we're having enough time to go through the draft of the CFP one, but if between now and then you were able to vet that with the account manager and the finance director... That they took people to... At least we could then use that as a discussion, just a suggestion. So... It may all be on vacation. I don't know. Yeah, we can send... I can send a note to you, Michael, with the draft of the CIP form. And it's open for suggestions that it's whatever and to the committee. And we can send... I can send that to the ex officio member. Don't I send it to you first? And then we can send it... Me and Brian. Yeah. Okay.
And me. So, the other thing... You copied Carol. Yeah.
The... The other thing we could try to do if there was availability is move our meeting from the 24th to the Monday of that week. Select was not meeting on the 22nd, so there should be a room.
I don't think finance committee is either because I think they're joining us on the 29th.
And try and do that way at the end of the Monday. Yeah, that's fine. So, we have a forum. Can you do it? I... As it looks like we can. Let me check the other... Let me check the other calendar that really matters. So, at least we'd have a forum and we can obviously let the other two know. And then it'd be just subject to getting to jail and on the room and try to start that.
You're pretty flexible. Yeah. Yeah. Could we try for like 5.30 start by now? Yeah. That's a Monday night. So, they're here until 6.30 typically? He's not here that week. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, we were trying to get the ex officio numbers in. Right. We'll give him, we'll give Michael the preview of the forum. Right. Well, Brian was asking. So, I said, no, we're not just on that. So, right. But that's Monday. You said Monday is the night that they're here. Yes. Until what time? 6.30. 7. 6.30. 7. 7. 7. 7. 7. 7. Okay. I probably could zoom in just to listen. So, if you think that's a good idea, then at a minimum, if you get an advanced warning out to the other four, to copy to Michael and just say, you know, would you be available? And unfortunately, you know, a lot of the staff have to use their vacation up at the end of the fiscal year. Yeah. So, is that going to be, like, impossible? I don't know. Well, then maybe some people are on the quiz. There may be some men. Yeah, but they have to use. Like me, they have to use all their... Anyway, all we can do... ...dover days have to go somewhere. All we can do is try. Yeah. So, before we... It sounds like we've come to the end of the questions. Before we go off the topic, I feel indulged me to say this. You know, I worked on the working group steering committee or whatever it is that helped react to the language. I went to a town meeting and, you know, talked about this language. I proposed it to get it through. So, I really believe in this committee. And I have to tell you that as a committee, you may not feel about it. You've really surpassed expectations of what you could get done in such a short amount of time. It really was terrific. And the professionalism that you bring to the table with your approach. And when I listen to some of these meetings, I'm like, wow, what a lot of fun is that. So, I really thank you very much and I appreciate all the efforts of support. But I think that, personally, I'm sure this list seems like there's all these issues. But I don't think there's, you know, we're talking a half a dozen issues here, maybe. That's not too bad for the first go-around. And I'm sure Michael and I will... Carol, that's just the general question. No, I'm kidding. That's just the general question. There's a whole list of project-by-project questions. But you know my point here. Thank you. Since we have them both here, can I indulge you for 30 seconds on one of our agenda items that you said we weren't going to talk about? Yes. Just so you're both in the loop, I think you know Kelly is not going to seek re-appointment, which she told us back in September of last year. I'm questionable as to whether I'm going to finish out my two years, for a couple different reasons, which have been documented in the minutes. And at the moment, I think we're both committed to be around,
hopefully through the October 15th report date. But, you know, I know... Provided we're not, provided we're not replacing it earlier. And or I decide to go do something different. And you can speak to yourself, Brad. But, Brad, we've been thankful that this committee started out. And I don't think it was intentional that there were two folks that happened to have served on the FinCom in or at other positions in the town who were able to provide, you know, a fair amount of institutional background for the other three members. And hopefully, after one full cycle, some of that's rubbed off, right? Well, I think there's a hope that in replacing at least one of the two of us, if I happen to go off sooner than my two years, that it'd either be someone that has previously served on the FinCom, or at least someone that's probably served on another committee of substance. Maybe a former school committee member would be a good one, because they have to deal with budgets and, you know, just how stuff gets done in town. But just wanted to plant that seed while you're both here. Well, we don't like seed planting. Thank you. No, I think it's really important. You're both professional now, right? They don't like seed planting. Yeah, I think it's very important to have FinCom experience. I mean, I don't. The other two members who weren't here don't. And, you know, these guys have done most of the work, and they've done a phenomenal job. And I don't see how you can necessarily be really effective on this committee, unless you have some of that FinCom experience. You know, after another year, I have picked up quite a lot. But there's still a lot of institutional knowledge I don't have that these two have. So I think that on a going forward basis, it's important to have that type of experience. And what I try to give comfort to Brad is that I thought in part having the ex-official members, in particular the finance director, that much as the finance director over the years has supported the FinCom, getting through budgets and the type of stuff that we were able to do without them having to rely on the finance director, that if both of us weren't here tomorrow, that, you know, you felt that the finance director would be in a position to actually step up and plug that hole, ranging from, you know, putting the analysis together to, you know, dealing with town financial policies. It's all that stuff that, you know, we've been exposed to over the years. And in part, I thought, you know, because the description of who would be on this committee and what was advertised at town meeting, nowhere in that did it say, you know, thou must have FinCom experience. In fact, there was more attention on an engineer, you know, people involved in capital tech projects. And I thought that, I thought that was fine because if the finance director is an active participant, he's got just not just as much, if not more knowledge in the kinds of things that we were doing. So, again, I just plant that as a seed since Michael, he reports to you and, you know, I know Brian's flat out dealing with everything he's got to deal with. So, I just don't know how much time you would have and et cetera. But in the near term, if you're unable to, and I've asked one former, soon-to-be former FinCom member, if she might have an interest and she didn't think so. That was April.
It was coming home. Yeah. So, there may be others. I doubt Pam wants to do it. So, I think I'm going to go to the solar board and we're going to have a new policy next. meeting and that is, you need to find your own replacement. Thank you. Or you may not leave. Good luck with that. No, no, no. No, that's not how this works. Just sorry. I can quit the job I get paid for. I can quit the job I don't get paid for. All I need is town clerk's email address. There's my capital. No, I appreciate the difficulty. I mean, speaking from a distance, it seems to be a growing problem in getting volunteers interested. It's always been challenging. A little bit challenging. It's been 25 years I've been doing it and somehow we've always managed to find people. They just don't normally kind of walk forward and say, oh, I'm a perfect trip for that committee. So, and certainly coming off the FinCom, I understand you can feel pretty burned out. So, trying to convince a recent departee that they want to sign up for this. I did deals with succession and I forgot to put it in the minutes. I apologize for that. From a couple of meetings ago, one of our members had asked when we were talking about town meeting activity, what had happened with the article that was brought forward by petitioner, Carol Plum on the asset management thing. And I suggested that we might want to invite Carol to a meeting to get insights from her about what she was after. Because I believe at the time of meeting, Carol, you or Martin said, geez, we kind of think that's a lot of what you're asking for. We think that's going to happen at the capital planning committee. But I also thought she might be an interesting person to volunteer for this committee just because she seems to be interested in that. But if you know her, I mean, I know her, but not that well. If you know her, you could reach out to her. Now, she's not a former FinCom person, but she's got, I think she's got some good, yeah. We're, we're, well, it's, it's succession planning, but I think that's, it's a, that's a conversation you can have outside succession. But anyway, it's on, it's on the agenda. I'll just make a general comment. But we see not just this committee, all committees. And what people may not also realize is we're seeing it higher than folks on employees. You know, I don't, I try and follow the economic news, what's going on in the general job market. But the lure of working in municipal government, I don't think it is what it was a decade or two ago for some folks, the idea of pensions, health insurance, that used to be a big seller. I don't think for younger people, it's nearly the draw that working remotely three or three weeks out of the month. I have two kids right now, one who used to work in municipal government, financial sector, call them, gets to work three weeks from home, comes in the office one week. We can't compete with what they offer them in bonuses or stock. And, you know, we've tried to come up with a few things. And so it's just, I'm adding on to what Brian's saying, it's a challenge not only for volunteers, but, you know, we have positions that go vacant for quite a while. And when you look sometimes on the MMA's website, we constantly look, there are a lot of towns competing for the same positions and the finance positions are harder and harder to fill these days. Although we are pretty fully, we're close to full employment. We were last year, like 98%. We're pretty close. All right. Yeah. Now we're, now we're up. Now we're up. I want to correct that because I don't believe we're up. However it is, we do have a lot of volunteer positions in town because we're very unusual, have so many committees in town. So you're aware of our, where we are as a committee and what we think is necessary. So I'm going to, I'm going to close our discussion. Well, thank you. And, you know, I can come back and get another interview with Brian and have some answers, hopefully for you. That would be helpful. Thank you.
All right. I'm not going to do the CIP form given where we are, but I will send out the draft. I said I would send out over the weekend. I will send out. What else did I do? You're going to send it to the time manager of the finance director. I'm going to send it to, I'm going to send it to. The whole CIPC and Carol. Yeah. Yeah. Not the official members because he wants to see it first. Okay. Yeah.
Okay. So moving on to minutes.
Questions? No questions for me. Shortest minutes. Yeah. That was our shortest meeting. Yeah. No questions or comments. Can I get a motion? So moved. Second. Thank you. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Those are approved. Thank you. Three, zero, zero. We talked about the next meeting. I'll see if I can get us, well, as long as we can get a room, I'll send out a note to the Brian, I know Michael can't, Brian, Michael, Carol, I'll include you on that and the ex-officio members, let's see. At 530. At 530 on the 22nd of June, provided we can get a room. And that would be in lieu of 624. In lieu of 624, yes. If you have time and I can do it if you want, if you fire an email off to Jaylen tonight, she'll I'm sure respond to you first thing in the morning. Yep. And availability. Okay. All right. And so can I get a motion to adjourn? So moved. So moved. Second. Thank you. All in favor of adjourning? Aye. Aye. Aye. We're going to pass this 3-0-0. We are adjourned at 8-30.
This statement, this meeting may be recorded, and if recorded, will be made available to the public on white canvas as soon as possible after the meeting. Public will be excluded from executive sessions. Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, this meeting will be conducted in person and remotely. In accordance with the political law.
So, because we're participating in both places, you can participate either here at the Town Building or online at the link that's found on the Town's website.
When a person is wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting, which is like we'll do that here, and public comment should be limited to two minutes per person.
I have in person Brad, Brian, and Kelly. We know John and Liz were not able to join, so we will not need to do roll call vote because we are all here in person. As long as they don't pop up. As long as they don't pop up. I'm going to say we're pretty comfortable. That's not going to happen. All right, and let's review the agenda. So, 630 is call to order. Review the agenda for public and announcements. 635 is public comment and members' response. 640, discuss comparison by your plan from the Town Meeting Warrant versus CIPC's Fiscal 27-31 report, which was amended most recently on April 29th. Including related questions with any ex-officio CIPC members, including but not limited to the Town Manager and Finance Director as available. And the Town Manager will be here shortly, and he has invited Nick from our IT department. Yes, we are going to talk about some of the IT projects. 730, discuss next steps to advance future CIPC report process, including but not limited to those that are trying to report. 730, which could be potential evidence to the draft CIPC submission form, outstanding capital project status, and the CIPC project plan for the remainder of 2026. 8 o'clock, discuss discussion planning. CIPC chair and vice chair will finance and school committee designates. And we're probably going to table that topic, since we don't have a poll committee tonight, we're kind of hard unless Brad gets to do everything.
And then 820, we're going to vote to approve the minutes of May 27th, available, which they are. 825, 7 in the 10th, so our next meeting, so 830 adjourned. So, I don't have any other announcements. Does anybody else have any announcements? Yes, and Robbie, I'm assuming there's no one in, hold on. No, no one, no one in line. I see we have our board of selectmen liaisers, our select board liaisers, Carol in the room with us. Hi, Carol. Hi. All right. So, we can go ahead and get started then on the comparison, which I did just send out. I don't, Brian, you probably didn't get a chance. Yeah, I got it. Okay. It's the same question. It's similar, but a lot of the questions, a lot of the questions, the members of the committee submitted to me to consolidate were consistent with each other, which was somewhat comforting. We were coming to the same conclusions independently about what we needed to ask about. So, I did share those with Michael and with Brian Keveney. I assume he's shared them with you as well, Nick. And so, I could put that up on screen. Where did you do that? Quick question. Is the finance director coming or not coming? He is not coming. And any of the other ex-official members? Are you interested? I did not invite anybody else. All right. So, yeah.
That's going to take me a minute to get myself in the same way.
Congratulations on your election, Carol. Thank you. Thank you. Another year of extra duty. I don't know, Michael. Do you have anything you want to say before we get started while I try and pull this up? I've got to find our timeline. Well, good evening, Madam Chair, members of the committee. And I want to thank my IT director, Nick Bombardi. He and I have been working on a lot of things together. As you know, there was a lot of discussion at annual time meeting. And I had circulated the comparison to my staff. Albeit, you said it to me on Monday. We had a lot going on. I didn't get to get to some of them until today. But they did their best to answer. And Nick said, you know, right around the court, I can just pop over and join me. So, I thank him for coming. I think this year would probably be a little more smooth than last year because everybody got to a late start. I mean, it was inaugural year for this process. And, you know, I think a lot of assumptions made. We all did our best to try and work together, get something that we could all agree on, get it to town, meaning this year we'll have a little bit more time. And I think that's something we can focus on, especially this evening talking about how we're going to do that, because typically the way the cycle would work is usually around September. We would send things to our department heads asking them for input, you know, late August, early September. And by the new code, you're supposed to have a report done by October 15th to me. And actually, I was looking, going back today and trying to muffle with some of the answers here, and I think in our financial policies, it says beginning in October, the town manager and the finance director will reach out to the department heads. Well, I think we already have to amend that because under the code, if you're going to have a recommendation for us, we have to have those department heads talking with us and sending you forms a lot sooner. And so that's, I guess, where we start our discussion about, you know, how we're going to kick off this next year. As some of you may know, we've already had two informal meetings with some department heads and the school administration and some select board members and other elected officials to start talking about potential overwork. We had a budget working group last year. I anticipate we will convene one of those, but we also have to look at, you know, the reality that this year we don't, at least on all the initial forecasts and conversations we've had, that it's going to be extremely unlikely that we can pull off what we've done in the last two years and get through without asking for assistance. Now, that doesn't mean you get it automatically, the town will have to work on an informational campaign. I just want to hold one second. Robbie? Yes. Can we just look under panelists? It has two up there. Is there one of our... No, that's Kelly. That's Kelly. Oh, I'm sorry. Okay. And the challenge, and it may be a challenge so much for you folks as well, is we'll have to produce what is often referred to as an A and B budget. A, you pick one, you should be A is assuming the override passes and B is assuming it doesn't and what stays and what goes. So, I think we may face it. I had a challenge, although, you know, the other is funded out at the tax levy. We do fund a portion of our capital plan using levy debt. So, there could be an impact on the capital plan. You could use more free cash. You could make some adjustments. But, you know, if we're trying to eliminate the impact on services, we may have to keep that in mind as we go through this process this year. So, it'll be the first full year, but I think we'll have that challenge of trying to anticipate what will happen when we have a ballot question. And that's one of the things we're already trying to decide the sequence of events when we have a ballot question. Do we wait until next April, May time frame to have it? Do we have it earlier? There's various schools of thought, and those are the exercises we're going through right now. Okay. Do we want to, I can start with general questions, but I think since Nick's here, do we want to start with some of the IT-related items, or do you want to start? Well, you know, I looked, it's kind of a theme, you know, in these questions about how we will try and get things done. I mean, I was talking to Brian Kebany today, our finance director, you know, I reached out to him, he was kind enough to give me some time while he was on his days off.
I think one thing we, to avoid problems that happened last year, there'll have to be some checks and balances that when we're done with this process, whatever goes to print has to be reviewed by the individual department heads. But you gave me your comparison, and I appreciate some of the spreadsheets that Mr. O'Hurley has created, and I was thinking, I was talking with Mr. Kebany how we could improve things, and he had talked about putting together a shared file that the department heads could edit, and that maybe we can share with this committee, so that we're all working off the same basic template, rather than having multiple versions of things out there, so that we can make this a much smoother process again. And, you know, coming together on agreed upon form that we give to the staff, we used one in the past, but maybe there's some questions that this committee would like to have that we could add before we send those out. Yeah, so we've already started modifying that CIP form because we think there's a lot of questions on it that no one fills out and don't get used. We think that it's confusing how it's laid out, which was evidence, I think, Nick, right? You filled it out the way logically you would think, but it's actually not how it was intended from what year it's appropriated for versus, like, a capital spend plan. So we have a draft of that. If we have time, we can take a look at it after we talk through the questions, but I think we all agree the form's not doing the job right, and it's not getting the job done, and it's tedious to fill out, right? So it's sort of a lose-lose situation. So we think there's improvement that can be made there, and I think I like what you were saying about there may be a way, and maybe with the help of the IT director, right, to make the filling of that out even easier from a consolidation standpoint. I don't know what we have access to from, like, a Google Form standpoint, but where you're filling out that's populating the master versus collecting spreadsheets from everybody that then manually have to be pulled together into a consolidated spreadsheet. Like, there's a better, less tedious way to produce the consolidation than what we're doing today as well. That's aside from asking the right questions. And I think that's the benefit of this committee and why, in my last committee, I advocated for one week. My initial experience was when I was on the finance committee and on the select board, I participated in capital planning, not as a full member, but from time to time. I attended for various reasons, and there was a process in place when I got here. I'm not saying it was a perfect process, but sometimes you don't, there's, as many of you know, there's cycles in town government, and you're always in one mode or another budget time, meaning collective bargaining and things, and you don't always have the luxury of stepping back and looking at the process and seeing how to make it more efficient. By having this committee, I think it allows for a proper review of the process, and we're taking time to look at these forms. It's additional work, but I think it makes it more efficient in the long run. You get a better end product, hopefully. And I always thought that there should be a group of citizens rather than just the town manager and the finance director, which is often the case in many towns, putting it together. I think the citizens should have some say in what we're spending money on. And, you know, I like to think we can make reasonable decisions, but a lot of what we do is driven by the department heads. And to that end, you know, when I was talking with Mr. Kevin and one of your questions, most of what's in 28 through 31 was really just decisions to put a lot of that in. And we're driven by requests and conversations with the department heads. So, and I may be giving you things out of order, but I'm just speaking generally about the process.
Okay. So do we want to start with IT? However you want. I think it probably makes sense to start with IT. I have one more. Go ahead. Could we invite Carol to sit at the table so she can hear better? We can. Absolutely. Carol Martin, would you like to sit at the table with us? Oh, sure. I always love company. The more the merrier. Don't, don't worry about it. Every time we see someone, this is amazing. Carol Martin, oops, Lake Road, chair of the select board and liaison to the SIPC committee. Thank you for inviting me. So I don't, Nick, I don't know if you have these doubting. I don't know if you can see. I can make it bigger. I can make it bigger. I can make it bigger. Yes. All right. So the first one was the data center infrastructure replacement or migration. I just want to talk about the urgency of this. I think we had it in 2013 and I think the town manager had it in 2008. I don't remember correctly. Let's see. Yeah. Right. And then the secondary question, this is probably true across all, there's a lot of open capital in IT or there was, right? We want to make sure that there's sufficient resources. And if broad, broad overarching, if there's a bunch of projects that capital has been appropriated for that are now, because the IT world changes quickly, that are no longer needed or obsolete and need to be different, like then we should talk about returning that surplus capital and appropriating for the things that are needed, right? Yes. And we should note, Nick, you've been here about a year now. Yeah, 10 months. Yeah. And I think you've been doing a great job, fantastic job. That feels like a lifetime. What was that? I said that it feels like a lifetime. Well, we talk almost daily, I think some days, at least several times a week about a variety of different issues. And as you say, the environment, the threat environment to us and the technology, it's constantly changing. And, you know, it's difficult because we're a municipality. Private industry can spend a lot more and they can get, you know, they have money on the line if they lose their trade secrets and different things. And so I think they'll spend a lot more than we can. And so we do the best we can and Nick took a different approach when he came in. And the reason I wanted to mention this is some of the things that are in that five-year plan may not have been things that Nick originally asked for because the predecessor may have put them in those latter years and they're coming down. So with that, I'll turn it over to you, you know, you may want to make changes in those other years based on what you're seeing since you've arrived.
Thank you for having me and allowing me to give me the opportunity to talk here. Um, before we dive into these, but I have a few minutes to just talk. Um, so, um, when we made the, when I made the capital submission in September, I had only been here a month. Um, and at that point in time, I made a request for cybersecurity remediation for $450,000. Um, and, um, the board requested that I split out of it for, um, three years. Um, and so this year, uh, sorry, this year in FY27, what we discussed, what I had submitted was for cybersecurity remediation. I believe it was $250,000. Okay. Um, based on the change of the description, that $250,000 is now being split with the school system to do the video cameras. So I've gone from a request of $450,000 to roughly $100,000. Okay. Now, what I'd like to just briefly talk about is since my time being here, I have taken advantage of state grants to do analysis of our environments. I have three vendors that I've worked with where we have done, completed internal, uh, security, uh, assessments, external security assessments, network assessments. And I'm currently working on our server environment assessment. Okay. These assessments, um, are recommending, uh, quite a bit of, uh, improvements. And I think I spoke before at the town meeting that we have some systems that are quite old. Um, and with those systems, if you think about the cars that we drive, our cars are more recent than some of the, the, uh, that I, okay. Um, so that just gives you a sense of, um, our infrastructure in some respects, knowing that our cybersecurity threats are increasing every single day. Okay. And without remediating those and at a grand scale, we have to make a decision on risk. Okay. What are we willing to risk with our cybersecurity, our data, okay, and how we want to manage this going forward. We can implement a lot of different things and I can ask for a lot of money, but at the same time, we have to focus on what's important. Okay. There are quite a bit of systems that need to be changed, right? Because they're older, because they don't, um, meet the needs of the current threat, um, receiving roughly $100,000 out of $450,000 request, um, is, um, significantly impacting my ability to do some of this remediation. Um, so, um, the, the point of my coming to this meeting today is to show you that I've done the research. This is outside vendors research, identifying what we have in our environment, okay. And the information contained within these reports is not shareable, okay, for security reasons. Okay. Um, but what this has shown me is we have risks that need to be addressed. And with the current funding that I have in my department, um, I'm not able to remediate these, okay. And I'll give you an example as to why my operating budget for fiscal year 26 was $628,000 a year. Okay. And we're thinking that's a good chunk of change, right? Let's just talk about three products that I have. So, Munis, which is our finance system, the annual this year subscription is $160,000. Okay. OpenGov, which is our permitting system, is $80,000.
That's roughly, um, $240,000 out of $628,000. That does not give me room, uh, to do remediation because there are lots of things that we need to do that we're not able to. For example, we are not able to implement multi-factor authentication, which is a requirement by Maya for us to have this in place. Okay. And it's part of our insurance, the inability to, um, upgrade that is also reflected in the sharing of documents, right? We were talking at the beginning about how do we share a document? Okay. Microsoft has a product. It's called Office 365. This product is the direction that we're going in. Okay. This product is going to cost us roughly $50,000 a year. All right. And it gives us all of the capabilities that you're looking for as far as sharing documents and, um, um, how do I say this? Uh, collaboration, right? So two people can be editing a document at the same time, which is really kind of cool from my perspective. Um, so I understand the situation we're in financially. Okay. At the same time, I'm coming to you saying we have a risk and we need to make a decision as to whether or not we're going to invest in remediating our cybersecurity or we are going to stay at risk. Right. So we can now go through these line items to talk about what these projects are. Okay. One macro question. Um, as you assess risk, um, uh, I assume there's different types of risks, there's different parts of your systems that, um, contribute to the overall risk. Um, have you sort of gone through and prioritized, you know, what, what would be the most damaging to the town, uh, to accept we have an exposure and sort of try to prioritize, uh, what your needs are and what, you know, what you would be asking for? Sure. I have gone through that exercise. Um, the firewall, which we have two, um, line items here for a hundred thousand dollars each, um, is the top priority. The firewall is our door to the outside world and outside world into our environment. That is the number one priority and I'm currently working through that project. That is going to cost us roughly somewhere between $160,000 and $108,000 revenue based on the, uh, quotes that I've received. Moving along with this, I've got two vendors that we've selected. We're going through the process of, um, defining, uh, at a very fine, uh, level for what this project will look like. Um, it is a significant project because we're basically replacing the door being, um, that's our number one. Without looking back at my notes, um, there were 10 to 12 prior appropriations before you got here. Over the span of two or three years, uh, were any of those, um, targeted at firewall? One of them was targeted at firewall. And so you have those funds, at least that they haven't been fully expended and you have the $100,000 that made it through the capital budget, um, so do you have enough money for the firewall if that's your top risk? Yes. And when do you think you'll complete closing that risk down? Um, it's going to take roughly six months. This is a, a significant project. I'm, you know, ideally I'd like to make it happen a lot faster. But at the same time, uh, it impacts the entire network and everybody that uses our environment. Um, so I want to do this in a careful process and that is why we're working through contracts right now. Yeah. I think, um, I mean, personally, I'm not opposed where, you know, you as the expert are saying we have exposures wherever they may be, um, without digging in the weeds, it's hard to assess is it big exposure and a little exposure, um, and getting to zero risk is great, but unrealistic, um, both in terms of money, time, um, uh, but, you know, had you come, and I understand you were new, but had you come to us last year and said, here's, without getting too deep in the risk levels, I don't want to necessarily be articulating all that in the public domain. Um, but I think the extent going forward, this upcoming cycle, which is upon us, um, if you could take all the projects that have previously been approved, uh, that have money left unexpended and money that's now in the five-year plan and to extent there's more money you think that's not in the five-year plan in fiscal 28, my ask would be to put those in a format that we could assess on your risk profile, you know, top 25% risk next point, whatever you think makes sense, uh, just to the extent that we have to make decisions to push things out, uh, you know, I certainly wouldn't want to inadvertently, you know, push something out that is a significant risk to be mitigated. And I'd be more inclined to push other things out unrelated to IT if, if all those things are in the top 25%. Uh, so anyway, that, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm less concerned tonight. I wasn't expecting to get down into the weeds of IT tonight. Uh, no, I wasn't either, but that's, that's okay because it's, we're going to have to get in the weeds of all of them anyway, but I think just to echo, I want to make sure we set the record state straight on, on, on the tape, right? Um, I don't think this committee asked to decrease the IT spend. I think what we asked was, uh, can you get to these projects, right? Are you asking for what you can get to so that we're not because, and their concern was based on the fact that I, if I remember correctly, I think there was a million dollars of IT capital outstanding that hadn't been done. And so the ask was, are we going to get to this? If we're not going to get to it, we can't, we shouldn't appropriate it. If I don't think any, I'm going to speak for everybody. I don't think anybody on this committee wants to have, you know, wild unmitigated risk, but we also want to make sure we understand how the money, um, that's outstanding already is being spent. So I think I agree with what Brian said with one more caveat, which is to the extent those outstanding projects, some of them are money you're using, right? To, to mitigate and do things that you need to do. That's fine. I'm going to understand that to the extent some of them are now have been outstanding so long that the technology or what they were intended to do is obsolete. You want to know to send that back, right? Because that's a funding source for the things that are a priority. And so I think if you can rank the priority of the projects that need to be done and give a good assessment on what's outstanding and whether it's going to get used or not used, right? We're going to be in a much better place to prioritize. And I think if you heard some of our meetings last year, we prioritized right safety and we prioritize security. And so I don't think that's the issue. I think it's really just making sure that we've got a good handle on what's outstanding. And when we're asking the taxpayers, right? A town meeting to appropriate money that it's going to get used in relatively short order, or at least we're saying like, Hey, this project is big. It's going to take 18 months to implement or two years to implement, but we need funding a lot. We need funding for the full project appropriated at the beginning, or we can't start, right? Because particularly on an IT project, if you start without enough funding and you can't finish, right, the thing's going to be obsolete before you can get funding for the next piece of it. So I think that's our ask as a committee. If we have that, we're going to be in better shape, right? In prioritizing with less. And also at least the, you know, the draft form that we're working on actually addresses that in terms of the priority. So it gives you the ability to say, you know, what's the top priority? What's the second, third? In fact, we request in that form those kinds of rankings, which I think would help you. So you can tell us, you know, what is the most important also? And it does, if it is a five-year project, a three-year project, the form that we've drafted also addresses those concerns. So I think if we use the type of form we're talking about, I think it's going to be beneficial all the way around. Yep. Yeah, agreed. And that's certainly something I can put together. I do have some line items here where the money has been encumbered. There is an OpenGov permitting for $64,000 roughly. That will be exhausted by the end of this. Yeah, and we don't need to go through them all right now. I think it's, you know, take the list out of munis of what you got open, right? What's the status? When do we expect it complete? Is there going to be anything that you don't need, right, for those projects? So one additional comment is I spent nine years working for the state of Massachusetts, Massachusetts, and I'm very familiar with the funding process. I requested capital dollars year after year. And if I didn't spend all of those dollars by the June 30th, those funds disappeared. And if I asked for those funds in the following year, I would get less. Yeah. Michael's going to kick you under the table. I can get right here. So my point is, I understand the need to spend funds when we receive them and articulate that. Yeah. I will say capital is meant to be different than operating. It's not meant necessarily to be spent all in one year. But I do think there's a happy medium. We've had challenges because of COVID whatnot. But there's a happy medium of like, our ask as a committee to all the departments is when you request the money to tell us when you think you're going to spend it, right? And to have an expectation so that then if it's, and we've got some, right, that are years, years and years since they were appropriated, that there's not 12 months and it's taken back, but that there's a period of time before it's like, all right, you know, this, this ship has sailed, this has to come back. So I appreciate that. But if you want to go through your, the ones on the actual list and I will, the other thing I want to clarify is when you said, you know, 250 was what was requested, you know, ultimately went to town meeting and then it ended up being less. That was nothing to do with CIPC. That's because the amounts in the, in the warrant didn't align with the description of the project they were intended to. So that, that happened after the fact. It was not a CIPC reduction to a lower amount. Yeah, no, I, I, I fully understand that. These things happen. I'm just trying to be clear about the funds that I actually get to use this year. Understood. Okay. So you want to go through these? Sure. We can go through these. And I can provide if you would like me to go back in prior time. Before we do that, I just pick up, Nick, on what you just said. So we're clear for the record. We had three items in the budget. Eight, nine, and ten. So $250,000 that you thought you were being asked, you were asking for, for cybersecurity remediation modernization of that item that was approved by town meeting given the description. At this point in time, how much of that do you think you can spend on cybersecurity remediation and modernization? I can probably spend roughly $100,000, $150,000. So on what basis are you making that determination? I am basing that right now on estimates that I have for the cameras that are needed. Um, I don't have, uh, specific dollars. So I can come back to you once I have the quotes. I'm sorry. So I'm clear. So your answer was you think you can spend $100,000, $150,000 for what was described in the warrant, i.e. the video monitoring, which will therefore leave unspent funds, which Kelly's point would then hopefully get reclaimed and push back out to you as we plan for fiscal 28. Um, the second item, which was labeled public safety, regional emergency system, $150,000 had the description for the cybersecurity stuff that you wanted. Uh, how much of that do you think you can spend on cybersecurity? All of it? All of it. Yep. And we've talked with town council about some of these definitions and yeah, I just want to make sure that he's the one that's got to understand how much he has available to spend, right? Well, I also want to have to chime in because I figure I'm the one who gets blamed when I tell him to spend it. So, so, but we did, we did take time to, to double check the town council about those definitions and how they appeared and what we could feel comfortable with spending in this year. So, you know, so So what's the answer on that? That he should be able to spend the $150,000 that's in number nine, because it actually had the actual description of the cybersecurity and remediation. Yeah, that same is correct. And the, under number eight, we do, the video is part of our security system and that some of the wording in there is broad enough to encapsulate the, some of the devices and equipment necessary to, to support that video that would be part of the overall cybersecurity. So we feel that... I don't, I don't know what that means. It means that I can spend money. I think you could spend, I thought you said you couldn't, you didn't think you could spend $250,000. Not all of it. No, no. You said roughly $100,000. Yeah, I'm sorry. I, I wasn't very clear. Right. I can spend $150,000 on remediation and I can spend roughly $100,000 on cameras for the school system. Okay. So you think of the, so you think item nine is what's giving $150,000 for the cybersecurity remediation? Yeah. And of the $250,000 in item eight, you think you're only going to be able to spend, just because that's the arrestment of the cost, $100,000 to $150,000 for the video monitoring part of it, which was to leave unspent funds that were appropriated for that item. We all understand that? Sure. That, that's, that was my expectation, given the language. Yeah. So that, to me, says to us, which you started out at the very beginning, you're going to be short from what you thought you needed, not counting the fact that you started at $450,000. Mm-hmm . And so we should just anticipate that you're going to be looking to probably increase your fiscal 28 ask over what's in the five-year point. Was that? That's correct. That's correct. And just to touch on the video cameras, this is, you know, I, I, I found out the hard way that I need to go through the school committee for the cameras and work a little more closely with um, the board there. I know that with the systems we have today, there are many broken cameras. The system, um, is outdated and some of, some of those things don't work. So right off the bat, I know I can spend about $100,000 and $150,000 out of that. That is only to replace the cameras that we currently have in place. That is not, you know, if, when we start to go down the road of adding cameras to cover buildings, that will increase. Okay. And, um, depending on my conversations with the school committee will determine whether or not how far I go with, um, those funds. So I, I, I'm not sitting here telling you that I won't spend that $250,000. What I'm saying is I can spend $150,000 to replace the systems that we have. And then if there are additional asks, which I know there are, um, for example, at, um, Happy Hollow, they have, um, dumpsters on the side of the building and we hadn't planned on putting cameras there, but that seems to be a problem. Um, and so, um, you know, those would be additional cameras that I hadn't initially anticipated. But, but, but within the scope of what was described. Within the scope of what. And you had unspent, I don't know where your balance is these days, but you had unspent money from an appropriation, uh, in fiscal 24 for video monitoring. And you had asked for 160,000, um, which we approved for fiscal 27. Town manager's budget, put it out in fiscal 2031. Um, and it's one of our questions, not quite sure. So, um, 160 sounds like had to, if you're able to do a do over that 160 probably would be a bit higher, even though you still have other unspent funds. Correct. And then the coordination part of it's kind of the process. Yes. And it's our understanding, looking back, that part of the description of that request that pushed out to the latter year made it into the current year's request. That's why it's asking for video monitoring under the cyber security mediation. So there was an, a mix-up as it went to print, or at least. So that last sentence, that last sentence got added to Nick's description in item nine, which was. No, no, item, item eight. The description under item eight was not the original description. The. No, the original description for item eight is actually shown in item nine. In item nine. Yes. Except for someone added a sentence at the end that said funding will support video monitoring management systems for the library building. And I assumed that that maybe was because there had been some discussion that the 160 was being pushed out, that somehow you needed some funds to finish the library, and that's how that got there. But it was, that language wasn't, that sentence wasn't in your original submission to us. So, right. So anyway, it sounds like technically under that $150,000 item, albeit it's below what you need to deal with cybersecurity. You have a little bit of money in there that could be used for video, but it sounds like you're not going to use any of that for video. No. Because you have more than enough in the $250,000 to deal with video, right? Yeah. And $160,000 in 2031, you'll need to sort of talk amongst yourselves about whether that's really needed. I don't know why it was put in 2031 other than a default that was the last year. It could have been just pushed off, off the page. But I think we're going to be hoping to put a little more emphasis on getting more detail beyond just the next fiscal year. We're intending to get a CIP form, unless there's pushback, for every year, which is more work initially. But once it's done, then you just start updating your CIP forms. So I want to caution you about the cost of items and getting estimates. And the example that I use is we have a product that in FY25 cost $44,000. This year, it's $86,000. So costs are increasing at a ridiculous rate. That's true everywhere. So I think all we can ask of every department is to include an assumption for inflation. And if that assumption ends up not being reality, which will be the case, that's always the case, right? At least we know we made an assumption. I think one of the pitfalls of prior capital plans still is the amounts are in today's dollars, today's pricing for all the years. And then we inevitably have a problem when we get to that year because we didn't even anticipate the most basic of inflation, right? And then inflation ends up being double, triple, quite a little bit, right? Depending on the product area. So understandable, just we got to anticipate what we can.
Okay. So can we, I think we've probably talked about video monitoring sufficiently. Um, so I'm going to go back to the, the data center infrastructure replacement or migration. Um, that was, I mean, we had it in 2030. You had it in 20, uh, town manager pulled it to 2028. Um, and that's, if it's just, that's the priority in your priority list, that's fine. We can leave it at that. I don't think we need to rehash it. Um, and then, um, the telephone system replacement. What the question was, is that a priority for FY29? And I don't know who, I don't remember which committee member asked it. And if there was something behind it, um, it might have been stemming from discussion about whether or not there was a change in telephone systems, but I don't remember. So it's just a basic, is that still a priority for FY29? Yeah, I think I probably asked that question that there were, that was one of a number of items that were in the five-year plan that got brought forward, um, in the town manager's budget. And when we asked, when we met with you in the fall, we said, okay, you're giving us your new request based on your one month review, but we need more, as Kelly said earlier, we need more input on all this other stuff that's been previously appropriated, or that was in the five-year plan, because your predecessor kind of put it there. So I think, I think I was just asking, is that a project that you, you know, feel is, is still needed at all? Is it's needed? Is fiscal 29 the right year? We don't need an answer tonight, but that's what some of these questions are trying to get at. That's helpful. We're just flying blind on that. So cybersecurity, I think we also talked about
at length here, um, but there was, because you had broken it up into pieces, um, there was 25,000, you had enough by 29, but it didn't come through at all in the town manager's um, recommendation, because I think you're going to split it up, right? 250, 150, 25. It wasn't in there at all. So I don't know if it was a change in the total amount, or if it just got missed, but assuming you're going to re rejigger that all together.
The cybersecurity again, because that's... Yeah. When, when Nick broke it up, he broke it into three pieces. And the third piece was missing from your five-year plan. And that's why it would have been beneficial to him, Mr. Kevin, here, although not ideal. I think part of the challenge, given our short time last year, too, is he said, you know, as he moves things around, he has to rebalance funding sources and things. So I think some things he may have pushed out towards the end, just for the convenience sake of getting through the FY27 budget. I can't answer 100% for him, but you know, we did have some conversations that we, he didn't want to disrupt other things in place at 28, so if we feel we'll readdress some of them. Yeah, this one is 29, but that's, it's okay. It's... No, I know that, and I think that's to the earlier conversation, I think the part of the description might have been from the FY29 that made it in. And, you know, that happened during the editing process. I know none of us at the table did that. And that's why I think it's part of post-mortem when we're discussing things. We're going to have to have some other checks and balances. So if, if the finance committee can use, look at those same shared files that we talked about, so that everybody's dealing from the same, you know, dealing with the same source, there shouldn't be any text confusion. And if that can then migrate, I know other towns just put the CFPC request forms for the current fiscal year into their warrant book as an appendancy. So you have kind of the table with the dollars. And then you see the appendix at the back and you actually have the forms. So there's never a cut and paste. And that might be something you want to consider. I'm not, not that we want to make that book any larger than... I was going to say, that's going to add a lot of pages to the warrant. So there may be a way, or maybe we put it... Well, I think there's an easy way to do it. Just having, we can talk about it later, but having done this section of the warrant for five years, the new CIP form, I think we will make sure that these questions are answered directly in the form so that they can be pulled in again automatically versus having to redraft. Right now there's a spreadsheet with a macro that pulls in that, but not all the information's in the CIP form. So you have to add additional information to get there. So I think we can fix the, the logistical challenges relatively easy, probably without putting the entire form in the warrant, because that'll add like
good 30 pages to the, to the line. So. I am, excuse me if I may add, I remember, I think when Dave Watkins was chairing, he's very IT oriented, what have you. We were doing our own docs. And I was the vice chair to his chair ship, and therefore was handling the capital. And he built a document, a spreadsheet that literally took the forms and pre-populated them. So we had it. Yes. And I enhanced that, but the CIP forms are not filled out completely. And so a lot of the fields that Dave built in the macro to be populated, no one was populating. So they weren't, if they're blank on the CIP form, they don't populate anything in the macro because there's nothing to pull. So it became a finance committee task to then collect all the additional information that fills out this, the rest of this. But that can be, like I said, that can be relatively easily fixed. And I was the person for three years doing that, filling in. Yeah. I was calling everyone filling in. Right. That was all of the specific questions on the comparison. Does anybody have any additional IT related questions? No. Brian? I guess the public safety regional emergency system, which you had asked for 150,000. That sound right? Yeah. That description never found its way in the warrant. So again, you might want to look at that and you may have to, if that's still something that's needed, I assume it is, if you can ask for it in fiscal 27, that you might want to consider that in fiscal 28.
The only other question I have, Nick, there were, and again, it would be helpful if the finance director was here, but there were a number of capital closeouts that the finance director negotiated with stakeholders. And one of them was $100,000 from an appropriation from two or three years ago for the school network. Do you get involved at all in the school side of IT or no? Yes. And it just seemed inconsistent to me that we're hearing from you relative to the town. I assume the schools have their own issues to deal with if they're somehow disconnected from the town's IT. It just seemed inconsistent that we're hearing from you on the one hand that you need even more money that's being asked for, and yet we're grabbing back 100,000 that was supposed to be used to deal with something to do with the school network. Do you have any color on that item or were you consulted? I don't have any color on that item at the moment. I can certainly get that. One of the things that I like to use analogies and for IT for both schools and the town, think of it as a square box. Okay. And in that square box, there is an L and then there's another square box. So you have a square box and you have an L, all right? And the base of that L is the infrastructure, which is what I own. The school primarily is focused on the Google platform and the school technologies. So I own the network for the schools. And the security of the school, like network including the security. All the network, right. Yeah. Do they run their own network separate from the town network or there's one town network? One town network. So when it referenced, maybe you could look into it from the standpoint. I mean, it's history at this point. Yeah. I suppose if there actually is, it was still a need there that now is short funded, you know, you best find out what was that work supposed to be. But I'm assuming the finance director talked to Kirstein, who I know informed the school committee of certain, you know, turnbacks that the schools were being asked to do to help pay for some of their new requests in fiscal 27. It just seemed inconsistent when it referenced network and you're talking about network. And so, yeah, I, I'll find out about that and get back to you. Okay. Yeah. Again, just if it's still there as a need, it just needs to be reappropriated at some point. And maybe it was a discrete project that was done and there really was, you know, money left, which is also inconsistent with what you're saying about, uh, you know, ongoing escalating costs. Yeah. I, um, I have a different approach
than my predecessor. So examining some of these things is really new. I need, I need to spend a little more time looking at some of these prior, uh, capital requests. That's one that I was not familiar with, which I will go research. Um, only other thing I would say is manage mixed expectation. This would be the same for all other departments. Um, uh, if we're to meet our obligations to produce a report on October 15th, at least we believe, um, the request of all of you to provide us with information has to go out later than July 1st, which means during the month of July, you're going to have to be doing all this research start now and, and then, uh, meetings with us probably in August. Um, and so we're going to ask all these same questions. So, yeah, since it's not the best time of year to begin with that, but anyway, make that advertisement. Yeah. That's subject to the town manager, of course, agreeing that that can happen. Um, can't happen. I don't have a complete our report of standouts. Yeah. I anticipate we'll be sending out a letter to everybody before the end of this fiscal year to get them geared up to be thinking about their requests. And I think just the mere conversations that we started having relative to you are asking these questions is jogging the minds of the largest capital budgets. You know, it, it probably a half dozen big players. It's police, fire, DPW, IT, um, and then there's facilities. Yeah. And schools. And in schools. And that's, and schools is part of facilities. But then those are the people that really have all the requests. You might get a small request here and there for one of the other departments, but most everybody's aware of what's going on because we've been talking almost every day we talk about something. And just total aside, you may find it interesting, you may not. I mean, we had an impromptu meeting today. Nick was present in my, my room to try and fix something on my desktop, but we're meeting, uh, just to go over ARPA funds and where we are on the ARPA related projects to ensure that we're spending down all those funds and looking at how we can potentially reallocate any, uh, closeouts that we have in ARPA. There's a mechanism under the, uh, the final rule to do that. And we're going to be working with our auditor to make sure that we're spending everything. And we don't want to leave any money on the table and we don't want to have to be asking for additional monies from the taxpayers to, you know, this process. So, you know, we're, we're always reviewing things, I should say. So he's a witness to that because we spend all the money. So there's a good thing. Cybersecurity might qualify for some of that. No, no. Strangely. Well, not strangely. The only way you can reallocate ARPA money is to a previously authorized, uh, project. We're in the last. That's on the list. Right. You had to make all of those authorizations or to those projects before December 31st of last year. Now you have to spend all the money. If you finish a project and you have money left over, there is a mechanism. I don't know who's tried it yet, but we're going to, we're going to ask, and we're going to ask our auditors who are helping us, um, with their reports to transfer some money slips. For instance, we use, just to give you an example, when we took down the property on Sherman's Bridge Road and 212 constituent, we asked for some ARPA money to, to raise the bill. In the end, the, uh, the actual bill was less than the estimate and we asked it. So we have, let's say $5,000 in one of those accounts. We would like to move that over and apply it to one of the open projects. So it's a stage for dam or something else. Long-term water project. Yes. The MWRA. No, no, no, no, no. They had that for funding. Oh, that was emergency only, right? Um, no, that included, that included the long-term. There was more, excuse me, there was also funding for design, because the design project, they're doing itself to talk to my head, Brian, you'll know it better than I, I think they need to let two, two million for design. And there was contribution from the ARPA funds towards the design. So then the balance was what was requested at time. So that sounds like that could soak up everything. Yeah. So come back, but it won't be it. Sorry. We're constantly talking about, you know, how money is being spent, how to ensure that we're maximizing our dollars. And so it's not part of what we're doing here, but we're always trying to figure out how to ensure the money's getting spent and it, you know, working on the closeouts. And that's why it's good to have Nick here. And he's putting a fresh set of eyes on all those older projects. State legislator earmarks. I know you've already probably gotten the calls and they're probably already in the system, but is there any things like IT infrastructure? I think we did. I'd happen to check my emails. I think the requests already came through and I think, I do believe Mr. Lombardi gave me some that I forwarded on. They start a little earlier. They come out in March and April, I can see. I usually share them with all of our legislators. That's fine. So it sounds like I'm just trying to figure out if there's other ways to get the money that you didn't get. There was some allocation for some, I forgot about my spreadsheet, some IT work, I think, at the COA, audio and what have you. Yes. Why do I think it was $250,000? Yeah, I don't want to, I want to keep moving from a meeting perspective. I think Well, we apply for every grant we can get. Every time I get an email, I share it with every department. Which is, which is great. I think it's just, it would be of value to your ultimate ability to get some of the things you, if you've come up with what the priorities are and there's money left over in projects that are no longer needed, that's going to enhance the ability to get those new things, right, that are high risk funded. So I think it's worth a little bit of time on what's there to see if you can close that out. Okay. Can we release? Nick, thank you for coming. Thanks very much for your time. We're holding it. Well, we keep talking, we are. We asked, just for the record, we asked for hybrid meeting equipment for boards and committees, emergency generators for a library and the COA, and monies for the TOW website. So those are some things. Usually the one from the ARPA line? No, from the ARPA line. Okay, we go back to
the questions. Do you want to do general questions first? I'll do, we can. I think the general questions are about how we work together. So for the most part. Now, and under that first question I had, you know, something we pretty much talked about already was coming up with a mechanism that we can all access shared files. So it's easier for us to share information back and forth.
Mr. Kemeny did ask a question as we start working on things, whether or not, you know, are we, are you anticipating the changes to significant changes to the 28, 29, 30, and 31? Are you focusing on there's just 28 and 32 this year, the incoming request for the future and what's in here? Well, I think that was part of our questions, right, was we would like to come to a common understanding, given the time that we're going to have, a common understanding on the existing FY 28 to FY 31. So that's where those questions that we gave by project came from, like, can we get on the same page as to why things are not there, they're moving, you know, we can get on the same page, then we're starting from that. And we can then spend our time on 28, 32, and beyond, right, and not be debating too much if we're in agreement when we start, except with the exception of the departments are going to come in with new requests, new priorities, and that's going to shift everything. But we'd like to at least be on the same page with you and Brian going into that, right? Because we weren't, by virtue of being a new committee, and the committee feeling it was our responsibility to fresh, right, fresh look at everything, not just rely on what the previous plan was, we weren't on the same page. But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I think that's... Yeah, it's a different set of eyes, like I said, on a process that had just been on autopilot, and not everybody had the luxury and the time to go back and look, and that this committee is designed to go back and look at that and make their recommendations. So, yeah. Yeah, so that's where a lot of those questions came from. It's like getting us in a place of understanding why things that we might have pushed back get pulled forward so that we're in that common place. If we can get there, then the question was, which one are we starting with? Hopefully, we're starting with something, right, that we mutually agree on, and then we roll in the department's changes and requests. Go ahead. Yeah, I think at a minimum, there are...we don't need to get in tonight. There are really more things that the finance director is going to have to go back and look through each one of these. I think there is four or five items that were in your recommended budget that either just were amounts that turned out not...they were not asked for by department heads, or they were the wrong numbers because they were pulled from a wrong line item. So, at a minimum, we would expect that we would take your recommended budget and have the finance director correct those four or five line items so that at least that's the worst case starting point. And then I think the only question for us is, you know, to you, ultimately we're advising to you, do you see any value or merit in us trying to come to agreement that certain items, whatever they may be, that were in your budget in a particular year that we happen to feel strongly about based on our interaction with the department heads, you know, should be shown in a different year than they currently are in your five-year plan. Is that worth the time and effort, in which case those changes could also be made, and then we either have a starting point or we could start wherever we want, right? And we'll just, we're just going to end up with, you know, automatic variances out of the box that, you know, items that we just, for whatever reason, place a higher priority. So, it's really your call. We can do whatever we want, but it's your call if we're going to try to coalesce around the... Well, there's a couple things I think we can do if we're going to send out this letter. And again, I'm not trying to be too critical of the system that was in place, but oftentimes how capital budget came to be after I arrived is typically we would meet with every department head, review their current year, try and review if there was any significant changes to their budget going out, prioritize things and land them in there based on the finances. I, based on some feedback I got today, I agree and I don't think as things move around in the five-year plan, the requests are being adjusted for inflation based on, I got a comment from the fire sheet that the dollar values associated with some of his vehicles have already changed for this coming year, the FY28. So, those things have to be made. So, I think as part of this, we have to ask every department head to review and we do, but I think they have to make a better effort to look at the numbers, not just the project, but look at if the numbers have changed, if the priorities have changed and it can't just be perfunctory to say, okay, here's my FY28 one. Yeah, I looked, I still want all these things, but it has to be, yeah, the price has changed on that and also, you know, this is more of a priority. So, I think it becomes part of the process of making sure the department heads are looking at it appropriately. The new CIP form that we drafted asks them to prioritize each department to prioritize their projects for every year. So, they're going to prioritize, we would ask, they prioritize within their department ultimately, right? You're going to decide which department gets in front of another, but at least within their department, because we know the answer is going to be, yeah, these are the things I want, right? We prefer that the expert in that particular area is putting their own projects in order versus us or you. Like, it makes more sense for them to give that input for their individual departments, and then you still have to do the, do the balancing across departments, but that's on the new draft.
Okay. We still have to answer the question here of getting these four or five items that don't dovetail pay to sort it out. Brian, is that what you said? Yeah. That's a minimum is to have a finance director look at their, there's questions for them, but to say, these just don't look right based on... They're in, so, and we don't have to go through every single one of them right now. They're in, they're in the questions that we sent, right? Both the things where we've noted... On the project side or in the... On the project questions. Okay. I just put the project questions to the department heads, so I didn't get an opportunity to go through. You can put them to the department heads, but I think in many cases it wasn't anything to do with the department. It was, it was how it got consolidated. So, I think... And I'm going to tell you tonight, I may not be able to answer all those because... That's okay. I don't think we need to answer them here, right? I think the ask, and I agree with Brian, the minimum is some of these questions, and I didn't classify them, but some of them are, hey, this doesn't look right. It's not a question of, we wanted this and you wanted that. It's, this doesn't line up with what we got as a request, which can either be, it was a mistake or you got information from the department that we never got right after the fact and changed it. We got to answer those questions. That's the bare minimum. Yeah. Some of the questions are, hey, let's, can we talk about difference in timing here from what we prioritized? It may be, we just don't understand, right, that why it's a priority. Kind of like we're just, not that I didn't understand, but it's nice to have Nick say, like, here's, you know, I've worked on this and I've prioritized and here's why this should be prioritized over, right, some other IT project. So what may be beneficial is almost all of those key departments wrote back to me in line, and maybe what I can do is work with them to cut and paste those answers and send them back to you folks so that you can see the individual responses. But then, have Mr. Keveney try and answer how he's slotted some of those in. Yeah, I would think it'd be more efficient for you. What you just tried to have the department had to see answers go to the finance director, have him look at our specific questions that are simply, we think, the wrong numbers. Have him at least produce what he considers to be a revised town manager, five-year plan. Understanding it's still going to have lots of variances with what we proposed, but that at least would clean it up. And then we could then decide, are there any line items that we want to have further discussion before we settle on what we think our starting point is? And I would say the the other the other challenge, and it's it's question, general question number four, but we take it out of order. We did two things that I'm not sure were done on your side, at least this go around. We attached pretty rudimentary priorities to each request, low, medium, high. And as Kelly said, somewhere in this meeting already, public safety and security, those were all labeled high. There's a lot of them that were medium that we're going to try to get a bit more granular in this next cycle, because one medium to another, who knows. But really, when it came down to a lot of the timing issues anyway, and I don't feel that strongly about the timing issues that exist, is that we were operating in a vacuum in terms of funding sources. So we relied on the FinCom's financing guidelines as sort of a maximum limit, and just one project through all of our analysis off. For example, we showed the wastewater as levy debt, and while ultimately your plan shows it as levy debt, my understanding is the select board has generally agreed that it will be a debt service we paid for annually out of the debt stabilization fund, as long as Town Meeting approves it every year. But that $2 million soaked up a lot of financial resource in fiscal 27, which caused us to have to push a lot of things out in the years. We were taking six, eight, ten projects and constantly moving them out. It appears the finance director basically took mostly the five-year plan that had been improved in the prior year, worked in the brand new request of which there were many for fiscal 27, and then had the benefit of capital closeouts that he managed to go look at. And so if you're trying to go at this both with the ask on the one hand and how much can you afford to pay and from what sources, unless we have a better sense on the front end, we're just going to always be off. And so one of our, I think, requests is whether, I understand it'll change. Capital closeouts typically don't get done by the finance director until January, February. But even if we could get an initial cut, and also some general agreement on what are our upside targets for levy debt fees or free cash. Because again, as we looked at the comparisons between what we did and what your budget finally showed, some of them were in line. And in the aggregate, other than that one $2 million project for the septic, we weren't off really in terms of that. So I just don't know how you how we can get a better handle on that, other than do our best. And then maybe we talked about last week, come back, you know, in late December, when hopefully you're issuing to the finance committee your recommended capital budget. Maybe just before that, take a look at it and reassess and do an addendum to our report or something. Yeah, we discussed, we've got to meet the bylaws, we're going to issue by October 15. But that doesn't preclude us from doing an amended recommendation based on, you know, whatever information it is comes of capital closeouts, stuff like that. But I do think there was a different way we could have handled capital closeouts, which was, and we tried to do it, we listed a couple of projects that like, if there's money, this is where these are the next things on the priority list. That's a way to do it as well, like you might not know it. And we do that, we used to do that in the operating budget, right? We used to say, we're not going to fund this, but if medical comes in less and there's room, then we can, then we can do that in that order. But that's probably, um, may I just ask one quick question? Did you send me this list of questions or anything? Uh, I can send it to you right now. Thank you. I mean, the questions are embedded in an Excel file that shows side by side by ear. I'd just like to see them just to know, but I do think the surplus capital is, um, I've already talked about this a little bit. It's really interesting because, as you said, it's a dynamic process. As we're going through the capital, the finance director is really, and I've done it with them before, we used to call it tin cupping, going around trying to get these projects close. You don't necessarily have the same dollar amount available in September that you have in December. But as, to your point, as this occurs, sharing of information would be, it would end up with a more, a project that you're more in alignment with. Yeah, it's better than, anything better is better than zero. Because if we're left with zero availability, then we're going to prioritize in a certain way to hit those, not exceed those targets. And then once you come up with the extra money, all of a sudden, you know, we may have made different decisions, which may align with what... But I think that you've got a good, it's not the solution, but it's a good part of the solution to say that we would say, if there's one funds available, these would be the next four, five, six and a half. But it's not, we need to have the number as we go along. And I think, you know, part of that, this is an unusual, that was not,
I think that capital, if I recall correctly, the capital request for the high school that had originally been way out, because we weren't going to do anything. And then, as Ms. Charest, our engineer got involved, it became more of a priority, and we wanted to move it up, and we wanted to save money on the pumping, it was a variety. I think there was a confluence of events that brought it up. And I know originally, the finance director, we had talked, we were trying to pursue it as an exclusive. Yeah, no, I wasn't referring to the ball field, I was referring to the septic system. Yeah, but that wasn't originally, I think, in the five-year plan. Yes, it was. But not in the... It was, but it got pushed out, it got pushed... That's what I'm saying, it was pushed out. But it was only pushed for purposes of figuring out how to make the 5.5 million be something less. It wasn't, like, pushed into infinity. It was... But I... It was, hey, we got to figure out, we think we can do a different plan here. Yeah. It was being pushed out, like, a year at a time. The subject? The subject, the, the wastewater. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, the wastewater was always on the radar screen. It was on the radar, but then it was accelerated by Ms. Charest, so I don't know how Brian intended it to come in, because I don't think... They were, at one point, looking at overhauling the whole plant, and this was a different solution, so I... It came up differently. That's all I'm talking about. That doesn't address the how we... How do we have the communication channel flowing in terms of as surplus capital becomes available to spend in a particular fiscal year's capital budget. That's what we need to smooth out here. You don't know that when... We're not going to know that when we're building the plan. It's too early. We won't know. We absolutely won't know that. So the only thing we can do is say, hey, we funded with the funding sources available. These are the next priorities if there's money that becomes available. But the other thing I would say is getting aligned on... We, we followed, right, as close as we could, the policies laid out and approved by the board, by the select board, right? The ultimate budget that went to town meeting went beyond those. And that's, that's a choice, right? But I think unless we're instructed otherwise, we're going to do that again, right? Those are the policies. The decision to spend beyond that, right? If you guys want to share, hey, we think it's okay to go beyond because, right? And it's, it's not every year that we're doing that, it's fine. But without other guidance, right? That's, that's what we did. And that's what I would do again, right? I wouldn't go outside the policy. I would say either, either, right, the policy has to be amended or we have the state of town meeting, the reason we're going outside policy is because x, y, z. So I think also the committee can, it behooves us to share this information, but it certainly doesn't prevent you from requesting as you're going through and finalizing your plan. Are you aware of any surplus funds that are going to be available for it? Why would be on 28th, for example, plan? Maybe we work in that there has to be a review for closeouts. I think it's the same request I made, right? Every department's got to look at what they have. When do you expect it to be done? Is there anything that, that, you know, can be closed out, you think, right, this year? And at least if they could narrow down like, okay, I've got 10 projects and no, eight of them are not going to be closed out this year. There's no chance of that being money. And two of them, maybe there's x dollars left, right? At least then we have a parameter on it's zero to, you know, 500, whatever, right? When you have a sense of what it can mean, that's going to let us get closer out of the gate. And the other thing is, I think I would caution being very careful. There seemed to be a lot of trading going on last year of like, somebody wants this project, so we're going to close out another project on their list. Personally, the committee talked about this. I think that should be disclosed at town meeting when we're closing a capital project that was approved at town meeting and we're not doing it, right? I think they should know that that that's where the surplus capital came from. Well, no. Well, the motion, the motion, capital motion contains a bunch of line items that show where the capital is coming from. There's no color that's added. That's what I'm saying though. I think, I think there's a difference between when we did the project, it came in under budget, there's money left over. Yeah. We appropriated a project that we didn't do, or we didn't do all of what we said we were going to do. I think that should be called out. Yeah. I mean, another example, we talked about the school network before. Another one that's on our list of questions, make it in this list, but we talked about it. I don't think you have it in detail, but we talked at our last meeting. There were, you know, four or five very large capital closeouts that were most of the money came from. And two or three of them were appropriations for district-wide school flooring, district-wide school windows. We're all scratching our heads saying, the reason that we went to the district-wide was that you didn't want to tie it to one school. You spend, you don't spend all the money. Now you got to turn it back. The idea was, if it was district-wide, you had a pot of money, you could do floors at the middle school. And if you didn't spend it all, you go to another school. And so it was, it was curious that those would be projects that were closed out. When then you look at the five-year capital plan, there's more requests for district-wide flooring and district-wide. So why are you closing out money that's already been appropriated just to reappropriate? I mean, that, that made no sense to us. And so that, again, is probably a question that the finance director needs to sort of chime in on. And again, we understand that there was a bunch of new requests and there were school contributed a couple of high priority new requests. And it sounded like, to Kelly's point, he said, okay, we'll include them, but we need you to pay for them, or you need to pay for a good chunk of them. And that's, he then grabbed, you know, 600 grand from three or four big projects. And, and I just, I don't know why you would close those out. So I think we liked it. That confused me, the district-wide, because when we were doing district-wide, when I was on finance committee, and then when the waste was in, she said, you know, it's a lot of money, you know, to do a little bit. And I mean, they're trying to be equitable and do a little bit in every school, but it's better to just do one set up and do one school and then go. So we were allocating them at one point, happy hollow flooring, you know, clay pit flooring. Yeah. And now we're back to district-wide. Yeah, but we stopped, Carol, because you inevitably run into an issue where you either don't quite have enough, but you're, you're, it's a, these are, these are not things that are once every 10 years. It's like, there's a, you're in a continuous cycle, right? You're going to be replacing flooring continuously across the buildings the whole time. It makes sense to do district-wide. It doesn't make sense to close out a district-wide funding and be asking for it the next, right, in the rest of the five years of capital. That's true. That's the issue, right? Yeah. I don't have an issue with district-wide pots for things that are constant, right? I have, it's the issue is closing it up only to ask for it again somewhere else. Okay. Well, we have limited time and while they're, while they're both here, the probably one of the biggest variances that we, you'll see when you look the side-by-side is this building. I think the unofficial five-year plan from the prior year had five and a half million below the line to be funded with excluded debt. And we met with the facilities director and said, we just don't see doing all that until the town select board, whoever decides, you know, are we coming or going or what are we doing, right? And so the facilities director, at our direction went away and came back and said, okay, here's my, my, uh, priority needs. A couple of which were new elevators apparently needed upgrading and on two plus million dollars of roof replacement. He said, okay, the first phase has to be over the gym and, you know, had a certain amount for that. And, uh, and then on the roof anyway, he spread it out over four years. It was a little less than $2 million to do all of the roofs with the understanding that there, hopefully there's going to be some sort of dialogue, which I know, you know, the town manager and the support have had an initial discussion about how do we get our arms around it? Is there a, is there a committee, an advisory committee, a working group? Um, but, um, you know, the finance director putting the other town manager's budget appears to have not picked up the facilities director's million, eight plus or minus for doing the roofs over four years and rather took five and a half million that was originally slated for fiscal 27 with excluded debt and bumped it to fiscal 28. Whereas we put it in a separate bucket bucket that I call purgatory, but I was told that's probably inappropriate. So we had a separate bucket and it's in our memo that says, here's some, uh, fairly substantial items that we can't put anywhere in the plan yet because we need more information. And the town building was one of them. Whereas in, in the, uh, in the town manager's five-year budget, the five and a half million got reduced by what was asked for for the gymnasium roof and otherwise kind of pushed to the next year. So that one item is the largest item that we have to deal with in the capital budget. And we're likely going to be in exactly the same position in a month from now or two months from now, because I assume you haven't had yet the ability to start to formulate how you're going to answer the question. Well, yes and no. Um, we did meet with the facilities director to start this process just to get it, get our arms wrapped around what the scope was. And cause he has the information from the insight onsite report. But when we met, they weren't able to, and they gave us a little chart of all the, most of the major buildings, but there was no chart available for the town building because it was still distilling the info. So I am going to say, I am going to, I have this, we were discussing this the other day, actually, as well. I need to get this on a, um, just reach back out to his fair and see if I can come in and give us that main scope from which we then will have a conversation about establishing a visioning committee. I don't think you can send someone off to vision and discuss it. We don't have a scope of what the cost is. Yeah. And that's not going to happen in the next two months. Well, you can't get this. I mean, it's not going to reach a conclusion in the next few months. You know, at least we can maybe get started. So it's not going to reach a conclusion. So I would ask just between the town manager and the facilities director, I think because it's not going to reach a conclusion, there's really, right. There's three options, right? None of them are fund the whole, uh, amount in FY28. I think we can probably get there pretty quickly. It's do nothing at all, have nothing in the plan at all. Right. Which I don't think is necessarily a good idea. It's, you know, Michael Fea, right. Is what the plan you laid out piecemealing, you know, on a, on a sort of urgent basis, is that still good? Right. That's second option. And the third is, um, that combined with some future project, right. To do a larger overhaul and putting that in some year out in the future for now, just because I wouldn't want to put nothing because whether it's this building or it's somewhere else, there's going to be costs associated with having a town building. So I think that's the ask in the short term is which of those paths should we be taking on the, on the plan while the visioning goes on? Cause you're not going to have an answer, like you said, from the visioning. And he may have answered that because he sent me something late today, which just due to a couple of developments at town hall, I was not able to go through his responses, but, um, you know, it, we may have something that we can share with you on it. Some of it, but it sounds like the answer to that question has to start first with town manager. And what, what is your view of which of those options makes most sense? And the extent you think you need to list them? There's too many options on the table. Uh, so I still think the town has to make a decision as to what they want to do with this building. And I know Mr. Faze brought it up, the vision with me. I know there's certain information you want to know about the costs associated with, you know, making this building right. But I, I think most people, if they spend any time in this building, will realize that there's, there's problems with this building that are just forever, you know, you talk about, uh, um, structural deficit. This has structural issues in that just the way the building is built, these windows are not standard size. Anytime we make a repair, it's going to cost us a lot more money than we want to. There's problems with the substructure here. When it is warm and hot, the swampy water from being so close to the river, the boards swell, the floors crack. You know, I think this could be, I know people want to see it as maybe housing and there's, there's questions about the deed restriction on this property, but we could purchase property. We could lease a property. We have some limit, but I'd want input on that. I could propose a laundry list of things, but I think the board should be part of that. And that's why I've met him several times. We should have a visioning committee to make a determination, but there's short term fixes. And I agree that I can work with Mr. Fayette to say, okay, it's, we're not going to solve that first question right away. So the next one to three, one to four years, what would be the plan to just keep this building sustained? Yes. I agree. Yeah. Okay. So that's, that's all I'm looking for. I, we're not going to have an answer. It's the, is the option that we have to go with right now, the hobble long plan, right? That's, that's what it is. The hobble long plan, right? That keeps the building functioning while you figure out what you're going to do with it. And don't get me wrong. I didn't disagree with why you didn't want to spend on it because yes, I think it, we need to make a decision on the longterm, whether we're staying here or doing something different. We could do, see if the board is amendable to have one of those, like one hour on one off in July, like a Thursday morning. And this can be the topic. I will propose that, not Monday, the next time it will be, but the next Monday with that. But I'll work with Michael fair. And again, he may have given me that, um, some of those answers in there. That's the, uh, I think Kelly, you mentioned this, uh, and I know we talked to Michael about it. Um, you know, as that evaluation occurs, inevitably, someone's got to come up with, we, we see this five and a half million is his best guess. And it's more than a best guess. He's done a fair amount of work, try to identify the scope. Uh, and I think even that scope, I think my sense is he's tried to limit it to things that really need to get done at some point without worrying about the building collapsing or whatever. But we've asked, well, if the town decides after this process, this is where town hall is going to be, how much more money is going to be need to spend in the next next year, six through 15, because when you're going to inevitably have to look at that as compared to these other options, Michael leasing, uh, selling and buying, you know, or building a new property. Um, we're not so concerned about that longer term piece right at the moment, but I'm just saying that the largest variance between what we did and the reason we ended up having to make certain decisions we did and prioritizing which year things went is how we dealt with the town building and how the finance director dealt with it in, in what the town manager produced. And that, that and the septic really drove all the other, most of the other variances other than numbers that were just not making sense, I think. Yeah. So I, there's a couple here left, they don't have to be answered right now in the general question. For project questions, Michael, what we can get with Brian and the department heads and send back, just add a column next to the, you know, next to the question and put the answer in there, um, would be the best, but a couple of the general questions, um, this one's mine, right? Can we establish an agreement on how to consistently assign project owners for capital project, project purpose, budget purposes? And the reason I say that is because there's a bunch of projects last year that got duplicated when they came over, right? They were on recreation and DPW or schools and DPW. Um, and I think there's a difference between capital project project owner, right? And who the stakeholders are. So who's owning the project is who should be submitting the project. That may be, well, there's other stakeholders, there's other boards that have to approve it, but I'd like to avoid, there was a fair amount of, wait a minute, is this the same project as this project, right? They're come, they were coming from more than one place. And so I think it would be helpful with among the department managers, right? There's only, there should only be one owner. Um, and then there may be other departments often, right? With schools, facilities, owns, getting the work done, but it's school building, right? Who's, who's submitting that? They were pretty good. That was facilities, but there were some rec, um, DPW, recreation and facility. Like there was something that crossed kind of multiple up to three or four different boards. I think if we just get a consistent understanding in town among the department heads, who owns it versus input stakeholders, that would be helpful, um, to the level of work it takes to get this all organized. Because even in reconciling, when you reconciled, when I reconciled, it's like, well, wait a minute, you've got this project under this department, and I've got this project under another department that it would just make it a lot easier and clearer, um, where they belong. And I think that dovetails into another general question. What is the, what was the intended function of ex officio members of this committee? Um, my own view is that the purpose of having ex ex officio members was to create a forum with which open communication could occur, so there's collaboration and, and, and people are all pointing in the same direction. Um, I don't, I don't, I can't remember we've had any meetings where all ex officio members attended the meeting. Right. And, uh, and is it a, is an issue that we meet at night and it's too much to ask of, you know, town employees to be out yet another night. Um, but there's limitations on committee members as to their ability to meet. Right. So we might be able to meet in the middle, right, where not the whole, we get a forum that can be present. Right. Maybe it's not all of us, but there, there may be a beat in the middle. And I think that was my ask. And the question is, how can we enhance the likelihood, right? What's the expectation of ex officio members? Set that out first. And then how can we enhance the likelihood that we've got that? Because the other, the other issue that I think flagged us both last year was we had conversations with ex officio members who were department heads. You guys separately had conversations. They weren't at the same point in time, so we got different information. Not, not the ready fault of the department managers because time had gone by, but we weren't all on the same page about what was going on. And so how can, how can we alleviate some of that? I mean, we're not going to meet with department managers as much as you guys do, right? There's no way that's going to happen, but how can we make sure that we're on the same page and it's a little more of a collaborative process versus, you know, we met with everybody, we gave it to you. And then independently you met with everybody. Cause that to me, that wastes, right? For sure. Waste the department manager's time. We've had to do it twice. And I don't think that I thought our intent in the working group of having ex officio members was to try and avoid that duplication. Right? So if it's a, Hey, we've got to have some meetings at a different time. If we've got to do zoom, if we've got to get closer to, you know, the end of the work day, right? Whatever that is, I just want to hear it from, from you, the recommendation from you. Well, I think as we talked about the working group, most of the capital planning meetings that I've even been involved in, helped put my other town and have looked at along the way. Most meetings are on the shoulders of the day, either seven or eight in the morning, zoom participation, or right around four o'clock, maybe four to five, three to four. And that way it's easier to get staff in. When you get into nighttime meetings, you know, not everybody lives here. Some people have been logged in. A lot of these departments are at multiple meetings. And I know there are times when my meetings schedule overlap with other meetings. So it's, it gets tricky, um, in that space. Um, I don't know if I was too keen on the ex officios when we talked about it, because most of the other towns that I know do it. They don't usually the finance director manager show up upon request or just attend from time to time. It may take a while for, for rhythm to be established, which, because we're relatively new, we have new financial policies in 25 that this file out of 25. Some of the others function. They don't have as many, like my hometown just meets when the, uh, requests come in for a little bit, particularly in the budget. And they don't have to meet. I understand you're newer, you're going to be meeting. Bill, you go through the five year plan. Um, I think if meeting in the middle of a little bit would allow more participation rather than the evenings, I think that could probably broach a lot of that. It's much easier to get department heads who just walk in. If Michael comes down about a problem and Tom, uh, holder comes in and it's an overlapping problem. Like you said, and I can just say, hey, Brian, just come down. We're talking about this and we get things. It just kind of happens sometimes organically that we might have those conversations that you aren't privy to. And I don't think it's anybody doing anything that not to share information. It just kind of happens. I didn't see it once I'm saying that it was. But I, I, and I'm not saying that people can't come to night meetings, but I think if it, it was closer to the end of the day or beginning of the day and we did it zoom, you might get a little more frequency out of some of us who are at other meetings because it's not just, um, select order fincom. I'm expected to go to other meetings. I sit as a board member on, so it gets harder after a while in certain crunch times of the year where you're out almost every night of the week and it gets difficult, you know, for some of us. Yeah. And understand that. I think the, I think the ask is what is that I then, then tell us, right. What those, Hey, I've got, I've got select board every Monday night. That's never going to happen. Right. What's, what's the time of day or, um, you know, uh, location, whatever it may be that makes it more likely. And I'm not saying I didn't necessarily think that the ex officio people members would be here at every meeting. Um, but I did think there'd be a little more participation overall, um, so that we weren't doing exactly what I feared. And I think the parking managers feared is that they were going to be doing it once for you and once for us, or right, or twice for you and twice for us. So they, now they have, they're doing it four times instead of might, might be three times because the fincom and their debrief said, geez, we probably need to meet with department heads on capital because we were left in the dark until, you know, February or whatever it was. So I will be honest. There are times that I watched and didn't watch under my name when different department heads are speaking. You know, I, um, I'll have it on the background because I don't always want to be on camera. I like to listen to see what, you know, the question. Uh, yeah, I was, I was just curious is what, for those of you that were on the working group, kind of what, what was your expectation and intention? And if, if it's not living up to what you thought and other approaches, I think I would amend the bio and get rid of the ex officio members. Well, I'm here a lot. And, um, I think you've, you've met with us maybe four times and, and, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, in this building. No, I know, but I'm, I'm, I'm just asking if, if there, if ultimately, if ultimately we can't, if whatever value proposition that was intended isn't going to happen, for whatever the reason, you know, we try. I would be interested, for example, uh, do ex officio, you know, when we send out the draft minutes to go to all the members, that includes the ex officio members, I'd be interested if any of the ex officio members read the minutes, at least, because, because the minutes at the moment are pretty detailed and, uh, there's ample opportunity for those folks to see what our questions are, might be, and, and take the opportunity to kind of weigh in. And I've got to talk to, you know, I'm the school committee's designee. You know, I, I know I reached out to the school finance operations director a couple of times. And unfortunately it was in the middle of her working on the school budget, uh, hoping to get, you know, response to something that was in the plan on MSBA. And it, and it just never happened. I just didn't want to, you know, be chasing after her. But, um, uh, anyway, I just, I just think that that if, if it ultimately doesn't serve whatever purpose you thought it was supposed to serve, um, we just should know that. And then you worry about whether you change the bylaw. So one, one, well, just one last call. Yeah. What might be, it may not always be ideal for everybody on your committee too. We do have a late night where all the staff has to stay until seven o'clock and it's Monday. And, you know, they're all here. And if somehow you're, it wouldn't always conflict with select works. They start around 630, but you have people staying there from four to 630 and they're all here, you know, it might not be the best night of the week for you folks, but they're always going to be here every Monday during that time. Like they had a skin room. What? Hard part of getting a room. I'm just going to say that's going to be your next challenge, but maybe with a large area. Well, we don't need the solid, right? No, it's like, like in Miami's town, it's like 8 a.m. on Fridays in one of my towns that way. And it could be done by zoom so that there's many, um, everybody participated and they always had a pretty good attendance. So Brian, I think that I understand the frustration, but I think Michael actually, when he said something, I went, Oh, Ben, this, you know, we're transitioning. It's a concert change. Prior to when you came in with your capital, you came before the finance committee, where you went before the department. So it was a one-on-one experience. And so it may take a couple cycles before they, you know, as ex officios, you're welcome to come and participate. You're welcome, for example, my fair, it's welcome to come and Tom Holder's doing his things and then all fine. The same with the schools. When you have these ones that cross over, like this one project is owned by X, but there's two or three stakeholders, that's when you probably would want to see folks. So maybe we, we need to see if we can communicate that, that, you know, you're welcome to go and you should go when there are projects that you're a stakeholder to. It's that's being presented rather than just the care. There's really two times in my mind, right? It's early on when you're let's understand what the projects are. Yeah. Right. And then it's okay. We've got all the projects. We're trying to slot everything and we're trying to, it's at the end, we're doing the trading, right? The in-between, it took us some time to get our arms around it, get it organized. But those were the two points. I think, honestly, the department managers, in my opinion, did a great job of that early part. We got them all in here. We answered a lot of questions, right? It was the back end, like, okay, now what, right? We've been through everything. We're trying to, we're trying to figure out how to decide between the departments, right? And that's really where it fell apart. We talked about that earlier. I think that's when you need Michael and Brian to come in though. But that's usually the same time where a lot of everybody else is looking for us. Well, hopefully, if we have an October, I think this is why, Carol, we asked, you know, why did we do October 15th? I thought that was why we did October 15th. But see, last year was not on the... I know. So this year, we won't have that experience. We're going to see. Might I suggest we have a meeting scheduled for June 27th? Wednesday? We'll be on the precipice of getting out, hopefully, or asking you to get out, the request for... 24th. 24th? Yeah. On the precipice of getting out, the request for a CIP formula branch, right? Yeah. Maybe I could ask the chair, our committee, if we invite the ex officio members to join us at the next meeting, we could do two things. We could talk about the same issue. Right. We could use that as a way to go through the new CPI form, assuming it meets with account managers. When's the next meeting? 24th of June? Yeah, I just said I'm not here. He's out. Oh. So...
Week before, week after, I... But if we get all the others, I mean, you've now heard... Oh, yeah. Well, I mean... You're out that week. The other alternative to doing that, although I always prefer in person, is to ask if the ex officio members, again, if this was intended to be part of their job function, they could watch the WCAM video and listen to this 10-minute conversation about what's the role of an ex officio member, for example. And, but I still think it'd be nice at this, what's going to be a much earlier start time. And those three are the three largest capital, which is why they're ex officio members, I presume, requesters of capital. I think it'd be nice to have them with us.
And I don't know if we could start, if we have a room, I don't know if we could get at least three of this year to start earlier than 6.30 that night, on the 24th. Yeah, I mean, Michael can't be here. I'm saying, but if we could get the finance director and the other three... There's more than three of us, but there's something... There's five of them. There's five ex officio? Oh, no. Ex officio? No, it's not. Five. It's five ex officio? Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's three, sorry, three department heads and then Michael and Brian. So, if between now and then... And Susan and the school, right? It's the schools, DTW, facilities, and Michael and Brian. Oh, okay. So, I don't know if we're having enough time to go through the draft of the CFP one, but if between now and then you were able to vet that with the account manager and the finance director... That they took people to... At least we could then use that as a discussion, just a suggestion. So... It may all be on vacation. I don't know. Yeah, we can send... I can send a note to you, Michael, with the draft of the CIP form. And it's open for suggestions that it's whatever and to the committee. And we can send... I can send that to the ex officio member. Don't I send it to you first? And then we can send it... Me and Brian. Yeah. Okay.
And me. So, the other thing... You copied Carol. Yeah.
The... The other thing we could try to do if there was availability is move our meeting from the 24th to the Monday of that week. Select was not meeting on the 22nd, so there should be a room.
I don't think finance committee is either because I think they're joining us on the 29th.
And try and do that way at the end of the Monday. Yeah, that's fine. So, we have a forum. Can you do it? I... As it looks like we can. Let me check the other... Let me check the other calendar that really matters. So, at least we'd have a forum and we can obviously let the other two know. And then it'd be just subject to getting to jail and on the room and try to start that.
You're pretty flexible. Yeah. Yeah. Could we try for like 5.30 start by now? Yeah. That's a Monday night. So, they're here until 6.30 typically? He's not here that week. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, we were trying to get the ex officio numbers in. Right. We'll give him, we'll give Michael the preview of the forum. Right. Well, Brian was asking. So, I said, no, we're not just on that. So, right. But that's Monday. You said Monday is the night that they're here. Yes. Until what time? 6.30. 7. 6.30. 7. 7. 7. 7. 7. 7. Okay. I probably could zoom in just to listen. So, if you think that's a good idea, then at a minimum, if you get an advanced warning out to the other four, to copy to Michael and just say, you know, would you be available? And unfortunately, you know, a lot of the staff have to use their vacation up at the end of the fiscal year. Yeah. So, is that going to be, like, impossible? I don't know. Well, then maybe some people are on the quiz. There may be some men. Yeah, but they have to use. Like me, they have to use all their... Anyway, all we can do... ...dover days have to go somewhere. All we can do is try. Yeah. So, before we... It sounds like we've come to the end of the questions. Before we go off the topic, I feel indulged me to say this. You know, I worked on the working group steering committee or whatever it is that helped react to the language. I went to a town meeting and, you know, talked about this language. I proposed it to get it through. So, I really believe in this committee. And I have to tell you that as a committee, you may not feel about it. You've really surpassed expectations of what you could get done in such a short amount of time. It really was terrific. And the professionalism that you bring to the table with your approach. And when I listen to some of these meetings, I'm like, wow, what a lot of fun is that. So, I really thank you very much and I appreciate all the efforts of support. But I think that, personally, I'm sure this list seems like there's all these issues. But I don't think there's, you know, we're talking a half a dozen issues here, maybe. That's not too bad for the first go-around. And I'm sure Michael and I will... Carol, that's just the general question. No, I'm kidding. That's just the general question. There's a whole list of project-by-project questions. But you know my point here. Thank you. Since we have them both here, can I indulge you for 30 seconds on one of our agenda items that you said we weren't going to talk about? Yes. Just so you're both in the loop, I think you know Kelly is not going to seek re-appointment, which she told us back in September of last year. I'm questionable as to whether I'm going to finish out my two years, for a couple different reasons, which have been documented in the minutes. And at the moment, I think we're both committed to be around,
hopefully through the October 15th report date. But, you know, I know... Provided we're not, provided we're not replacing it earlier. And or I decide to go do something different. And you can speak to yourself, Brad. But, Brad, we've been thankful that this committee started out. And I don't think it was intentional that there were two folks that happened to have served on the FinCom in or at other positions in the town who were able to provide, you know, a fair amount of institutional background for the other three members. And hopefully, after one full cycle, some of that's rubbed off, right? Well, I think there's a hope that in replacing at least one of the two of us, if I happen to go off sooner than my two years, that it'd either be someone that has previously served on the FinCom, or at least someone that's probably served on another committee of substance. Maybe a former school committee member would be a good one, because they have to deal with budgets and, you know, just how stuff gets done in town. But just wanted to plant that seed while you're both here. Well, we don't like seed planting. Thank you. No, I think it's really important. You're both professional now, right? They don't like seed planting. Yeah, I think it's very important to have FinCom experience. I mean, I don't. The other two members who weren't here don't. And, you know, these guys have done most of the work, and they've done a phenomenal job. And I don't see how you can necessarily be really effective on this committee, unless you have some of that FinCom experience. You know, after another year, I have picked up quite a lot. But there's still a lot of institutional knowledge I don't have that these two have. So I think that on a going forward basis, it's important to have that type of experience. And what I try to give comfort to Brad is that I thought in part having the ex-official members, in particular the finance director, that much as the finance director over the years has supported the FinCom, getting through budgets and the type of stuff that we were able to do without them having to rely on the finance director, that if both of us weren't here tomorrow, that, you know, you felt that the finance director would be in a position to actually step up and plug that hole, ranging from, you know, putting the analysis together to, you know, dealing with town financial policies. It's all that stuff that, you know, we've been exposed to over the years. And in part, I thought, you know, because the description of who would be on this committee and what was advertised at town meeting, nowhere in that did it say, you know, thou must have FinCom experience. In fact, there was more attention on an engineer, you know, people involved in capital tech projects. And I thought that, I thought that was fine because if the finance director is an active participant, he's got just not just as much, if not more knowledge in the kinds of things that we were doing. So, again, I just plant that as a seed since Michael, he reports to you and, you know, I know Brian's flat out dealing with everything he's got to deal with. So, I just don't know how much time you would have and et cetera. But in the near term, if you're unable to, and I've asked one former, soon-to-be former FinCom member, if she might have an interest and she didn't think so. That was April.
It was coming home. Yeah. So, there may be others. I doubt Pam wants to do it. So, I think I'm going to go to the solar board and we're going to have a new policy next. meeting and that is, you need to find your own replacement. Thank you. Or you may not leave. Good luck with that. No, no, no. No, that's not how this works. Just sorry. I can quit the job I get paid for. I can quit the job I don't get paid for. All I need is town clerk's email address. There's my capital. No, I appreciate the difficulty. I mean, speaking from a distance, it seems to be a growing problem in getting volunteers interested. It's always been challenging. A little bit challenging. It's been 25 years I've been doing it and somehow we've always managed to find people. They just don't normally kind of walk forward and say, oh, I'm a perfect trip for that committee. So, and certainly coming off the FinCom, I understand you can feel pretty burned out. So, trying to convince a recent departee that they want to sign up for this. I did deals with succession and I forgot to put it in the minutes. I apologize for that. From a couple of meetings ago, one of our members had asked when we were talking about town meeting activity, what had happened with the article that was brought forward by petitioner, Carol Plum on the asset management thing. And I suggested that we might want to invite Carol to a meeting to get insights from her about what she was after. Because I believe at the time of meeting, Carol, you or Martin said, geez, we kind of think that's a lot of what you're asking for. We think that's going to happen at the capital planning committee. But I also thought she might be an interesting person to volunteer for this committee just because she seems to be interested in that. But if you know her, I mean, I know her, but not that well. If you know her, you could reach out to her. Now, she's not a former FinCom person, but she's got, I think she's got some good, yeah. We're, we're, well, it's, it's succession planning, but I think that's, it's a, that's a conversation you can have outside succession. But anyway, it's on, it's on the agenda. I'll just make a general comment. But we see not just this committee, all committees. And what people may not also realize is we're seeing it higher than folks on employees. You know, I don't, I try and follow the economic news, what's going on in the general job market. But the lure of working in municipal government, I don't think it is what it was a decade or two ago for some folks, the idea of pensions, health insurance, that used to be a big seller. I don't think for younger people, it's nearly the draw that working remotely three or three weeks out of the month. I have two kids right now, one who used to work in municipal government, financial sector, call them, gets to work three weeks from home, comes in the office one week. We can't compete with what they offer them in bonuses or stock. And, you know, we've tried to come up with a few things. And so it's just, I'm adding on to what Brian's saying, it's a challenge not only for volunteers, but, you know, we have positions that go vacant for quite a while. And when you look sometimes on the MMA's website, we constantly look, there are a lot of towns competing for the same positions and the finance positions are harder and harder to fill these days. Although we are pretty fully, we're close to full employment. We were last year, like 98%. We're pretty close. All right. Yeah. Now we're, now we're up. Now we're up. I want to correct that because I don't believe we're up. However it is, we do have a lot of volunteer positions in town because we're very unusual, have so many committees in town. So you're aware of our, where we are as a committee and what we think is necessary. So I'm going to, I'm going to close our discussion. Well, thank you. And, you know, I can come back and get another interview with Brian and have some answers, hopefully for you. That would be helpful. Thank you.
All right. I'm not going to do the CIP form given where we are, but I will send out the draft. I said I would send out over the weekend. I will send out. What else did I do? You're going to send it to the time manager of the finance director. I'm going to send it to, I'm going to send it to. The whole CIPC and Carol. Yeah. Yeah. Not the official members because he wants to see it first. Okay. Yeah.
Okay. So moving on to minutes.
Questions? No questions for me. Shortest minutes. Yeah. That was our shortest meeting. Yeah. No questions or comments. Can I get a motion? So moved. Second. Thank you. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Those are approved. Thank you. Three, zero, zero. We talked about the next meeting. I'll see if I can get us, well, as long as we can get a room, I'll send out a note to the Brian, I know Michael can't, Brian, Michael, Carol, I'll include you on that and the ex-officio members, let's see. At 530. At 530 on the 22nd of June, provided we can get a room. And that would be in lieu of 624. In lieu of 624, yes. If you have time and I can do it if you want, if you fire an email off to Jaylen tonight, she'll I'm sure respond to you first thing in the morning. Yep. And availability. Okay. All right. And so can I get a motion to adjourn? So moved. So moved. Second. Thank you. All in favor of adjourning? Aye. Aye. Aye. We're going to pass this 3-0-0. We are adjourned at 8-30.