March 2, 2026 – Finance Committee – Video & Transcript

March 2, 2026 - Finance Committee

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Welcome all. It is now 7.04. 7 o'clock. 7 o'clock. 7 o'clock. I watched as fast. 7 o'clock right on the nose. This is perfect. Welcome to the Finance Committee meeting. This meeting is being recorded and will be made available to the public on WACAM as soon as possible after the meeting. Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025, this meeting will be conducted in person and via remote access in accordance with applicable law. One may want to participate remotely with the meeting link that can be found at www.wayland.ma.us slash public body meeting information virtual in person and hybrid. You might be able to find that more easily by going to the town website by clicking on the link website calendar glitching for public meetings and you'll find the link there. When required by law or allowed by the chair, persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise may participate in the meeting. They do so at the meeting location in personal remote access and public comments and public comments should be limited to two minutes per person. And I don't think I actually convened the meeting so I will if I call the meeting to water. We have a fairly limited agenda tonight to talk about all things related to the budgets and to review. We have someone on. Oh, thank you. Sorry. You're just reading through the agenda, right? And then we have. Well, yeah. We would normally do public comments first, I think. So if there's somebody here, that's why we invite them to speak. I can't read that from here. Do you have a public comment? Hello, Jim? Might just be listening in. Jim's, I think, come to a couple meetings just to watch. Do you have an indication of comment files? Oh, it's hands raised. Hi, Jim. Hi there. I just wanted to let you know that two things, sorry about the noise, two things, the chat on this webinar chat is disabled. And the other thing is that that website you listed at the very beginning about how to connect does not work. You have to go through the calendar. Well, that's good to know. I tried it this afternoon. It seemed to be fine. Yeah, I tried it 15 minutes ago and it was like, don't do it. You have to go through the calendar entry. Anyway, that's all I wanted to say. Thank you very much for recognizing me. Thank you, Jim. I appreciate it. Okay. To have people paying attention. I started to review the agenda. There'd be no more public comments. Apparently we can, you know, take a look at the minutes of the meeting of November 25th. Thank you, April. I captured all your edits. Yeah, I thought it was in really good shape. Thank you. Anybody else have any comments to offer? I just had a couple of really tiny edits. Here's a small one. In the vote to approve the minutes. Available members review the drafts. C Barnes, you did a comma instead of a period after C. Sorry. I didn't catch that. Can I make the motion? I'm not sure. You still reading the minutes? I'm still reading. Sorry. I hadn't seen them before. I hadn't put them on. Thank you. Any questions? I have one question. Sorry. At the top of page three or towards the top, you say Wayland expressed support for moving forward with the project due to potential cost savings. None. Wayland expressed support for moving with Wayland should be Fincom. Okay. We are Wayland. Okay. Motion to approve the minutes as amended. Second that. 5-0-0. Next on the agenda is to continue our discussion on the budgets. And I think what I was contemplating last week when we talked about this is simply a free-for-all to raise any issues you've got. Maybe we can answer them. Maybe we can't. But at least we'll know on Wednesday. The town manager of the finance director and Kelly will all be here to talk about the capital budget and particularly the differences between the capital budget and the SIPC recommendation. So we can certainly talk about that tonight. But we might want to delay some of that or most of that until we actually have a chance to meet with us. Maybe focus on the capital, probably on the town budget and the school budget. I had a couple just quick things. Looking at the FY27 budget tab that was sent. Sorry. Before I get into this, do we have articles on them first on the agenda? I apologize. They're later? Yeah. Okay. Sorry. I looked before and I saw there. Okay. There's the review of the outline of the finance committee as like after articles, if maybe that's what you were thinking of. Continue review discussion possible, but on the one or more. I'm meeting one articles at 710. Oh, that's for the fourth. My apologies. Sprawling. I'm trying to. All right. Yeah. I actually did fill those in the fourth. You've got... Okay. Agendas. Yeah. It's good to have some set of eyes. Sorry about that. Okay. See you. Yeah. So, and I apologize because I hadn't brought this up previously, so I just want to make sure. I noticed for fiscal 27 for highway and park and cemetery, the costs are zero. Are those representative of costs that are part of the union bargaining and are on hold, or how did we go from a million dollars spent all the way to zero? Sorry. I'm looking at the fiscal 27 budget in the latest spreadsheet that was sent. Am I, so this is... No, I've got a few of these open. I do too. Which is the problem. Yeah. I can comment on that. We terminated the highway and parks departments a couple of years ago, and it's now under public works. Got it. Thank you for clarifying. Okay. And that then explains why public works went from zero and zero to then essentially a similar amount of money moved over. That makes sense. Thank you for clarifying. That answers that question. Brian, I had some questions on a couple of the different, so well budgets. I'm not saying like the lines, but like with public works, purchases, like purchase services increased quite a bit. And in snow, it went down, but supplies went up by the same amount. So I'm just curious, like what's considered purchase services under public works and snow. Well, it's a whole line item detail of different contractual services would be in at professional services, training meetings. Are you guys looking at the file now? There's another tab right next to it that says FY 27. Do you see that tab? I see FY 27 budget. It's red. Yeah. Go to the one right next to it to the right. The new model. Yeah. So I sent you, I sent you this model about two months ago because it's come up numerous times. What is the point of putting all of this purchase services and supplies information in there if the school itself doesn't even have the information? So back in 2012, there was an article at town meeting to provide more information in the warrant. And what became of that was the spreading out of purchase services and supplies. And, you know, over the last 10 years, we've talked about possibly eliminating all this. That's why I put in the second tab for the finance committee to make a determination because this is your article. Do you want you just to give the totals or why is it important to split everything out to purchase services and supplies when we certainly don't do that with the school department. So that's why that tab is in there. But to answer your original question, you know, purchase services is probably 15 different categories from professional services, contractuals, training. I don't have it right in front of me, the whole category, but then the next category would be supplies. So if you take a look at the other files we sent out, you'll see all the detail within each one of the departments is split out into purchase services and supplies by line item in the big file I sent out. It's a PDF that has every department and it has their proposed fiscal 27 budget, the fiscal 26 budget, and then three years of actual spending on the bottom right section of each one of the departments. And it depicts their actual expenditures per line item. And when did you send that email out? Sorry. Is that the on the 30th? Around that. Yeah. 29th, 30th. Thank you. I had a problem emailing because the files were so large that the email crashed and I had to send them individually. And Brian is the only difference between the so called new model and the tab to the left of it. Just that your, your new model puts purchased, purchase whatever it was. It just, it just gives it purchase of services and supplies together. Is that the only difference? Expenses. Yeah, that would be the difference. We would not detail all of the line items in there. It would be an effort to cut down the warrant. What you're looking at in the new model is what typically what other towns do. They don't split out purchase services and supplies. Um, particularly going back four years. So it was an effort to take a look at a different way of doing things. Like I said, it's, it's come up numerous times in the past, uh, with different finance committees. In other words, what is the value of putting in all this purchase services and supplies data. If the largest department in the school doesn't even have it. Well, I think there, I mean, part of it is there, we do get a full separate schools budget that can be reviewed. Right. I mean, there's, there's a lot more detail behind it. I know it's not in the warrant, but it is publicly available. Um, I, I, my sense is that the requests stemmed from a desire for people to have a better sense of what the personnel costs were and what those increases were. Because we always get the same request every year, um, for number of FTEs as well. So I think that, that has been a focus area of the town. Well, why wouldn't that apply to the school as well? Because wouldn't town meeting want to know what the payroll has been for the last four years and purchase services and supplies? I thought we did. I thought it was. Don't we usually break it out for schools? No, they, they only vote one number in, in, in on, uh, as you look in the left-hand side, you see all the numbers. Town meeting is just voting those numbers. The purchase services and supplies is just additional disclosure. So in the case of the school, it's just one number that town is voting, but you could identify the different components of that. We see the breakdown between expenses and personnel also. The town meeting does. Well, no, wait a minute though. It's not personnel, right? Personnel is still being shown separately, right? No, the school budget is one number. I'm talking about your, your new model. You're still showing personnel and then. Yeah, you, yeah, you would have to vote personnel as one budget and expense as one budget. That's, that's typically what towns do. And that's what Wayland does. Wayland does not vote to purchase services and supplies numbers. They simply vote the payroll number and the expense number. The other. Purchase services and supplies is just additional disclosure. This is total. Yes. I just wanted a bit in the report. We've always broken it out separately too, because I know we have those numbers. So it has been, it has been disclosed. I guess the question always took my head. I mean, I think, well, the numbers are so small in the town that it's like, I could be wrong. I think adding the detail is important, but do we need to have it in the one? I guess is more of Brian's point? I think yes. I think it's nice to have that additional detail. I think it's important to those who are reading the word very closely. And, and I guess I'll use myself as an example. I'm here because I read the word cover to cover and had a lot of questions. And I, I. Do you think we should have more detail than on the schools? And the VOTEC? Like, shouldn't we have that listed? Frankly. I do think that. It's in the report. If you look at table three of the report, we include it every year. Of our report, the actual on-the-vice budget. I know. Well, I'm assuming that's a legality. When you do that, then the schools typically do stand up as part of the budget. I mean, that's, if you recall, when we do that article, the FinCom chair kind of presents highlights and then schools usually stands to kind of present their budget as well. So they give a little bit more, but yes, I hear you. There's one in, in that, the article itself, the budget article, it's one lines. And my understanding is that that's what the requirement is. So that's why they've done it. But there is a lot of detail elsewhere. So I, I guess my sense would be, or preference would be not to, to, you know, to, to amend everything just because the schools will only requires a one-liner for that budget article. Is that, I mean, is that the issue that we would just fold up for each of the, um, departments, put it into one line item between, so it combined how it's personnel and expenses? That's what it appears to do, just personal expenses. It's like schools have total schools, total votech. I mean, I think it should go there. I guess it's like, I want to continue to see. I, I, I, as a resident would want to continue to see that information. So if FinCon breaks it out and it's available in re, in the FinCon report, it's fine. I'm missing something. I don't think we broke it out last year. I don't see that. Table three breaks it out. Okay. Whatever page 12 of last year's. Okay. Payroll and spending for town. It just, it's just for town and for school. Right. But that's. And then voc-ed. But spending. All the other. Right. Am I wrong? Spending is a combination of purchase services and other expenses, right? Right. So that's the comparable number. Did you hear that question? Sorry. No, I didn't. Okay. In, in table three, which is what was being cited of last year, of last year's warrant, the FinCon report last year, using the town as the example, it gave, it gave payroll numbers, a total number, a total spending number, and then the total of those two. And it looks to me, I haven't done the math yet, but it looks to me like what we call spending is going to be the combination of expenses and purchase services. Is that right? I think I actually saw that as well. I think spending meant expenses. Right. Because it's a smaller number. But I think in terms of where we got now, we're probably going to have to go with the larger format, because this is something we would have talked about earlier in the fall, that we would change the format and get feedback. I mean, to, to make the change now, I think it's too late. I think for next year, we need to think about, at least talk about coming up with a different format. If that's, if that's, if that's, if that's productive for town meeting. I personally don't think having the information in the fourth year is relevant. Having expenses for the COA with supplies and purchase services. I don't think it's relevant to the person sitting at town meeting. If they're not even knowing what the school is. And then I think that that's a good argument to ask us to share that information. I mean, I generally, we would say if 90% of people are doing it one way, suggest that everyone changes to accommodate the 10% is perhaps not how we would generally go. We would usually say there's a reason why the bulk is being presented in one way. And we would make the ask that those that are non-conforming conform to a standard. Well, it even went further because we talked about having all this stuff on the website and not in the warrant. Every year, what we see is, you know, in some years, the warrant is very large. And what we have in the appendix is you have salary tables for only town staff, nothing for the school. The FTE chart for the town is about four pages where the school is half a page. So we talked about taking all that information and putting it on the website simply to make it available for the residents. But but at the same time, making the warrant more productive that, you know, maybe this information is better off served on a website, cutting down the cost of the warrant and the paper. You know, the combination of the salary tables for all the different town side employees, which is, you know, 30% of the payroll. In other words, if you're only seeing 30% of the payroll and you're missing 70%, what's the point of seeing 30? So you're better off having all of this some other location, which in my guess would be somewhere on the website. It's just an effort to make the town meeting warrant a little bit more efficient and user friendly, because when you look at that warrant page for the, you know, the town budget. There's a lot of numbers that hit you and you open up the book. It's there's just a lot of numbers. So we like I said, this has come up many times in the past. I think it's too late now, but it may be something we work, work forward to for next year. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry. I was looking at this now, looking at the article and condensing that I, I, I can see that point. I hear you. I think at this point. But it changes. Right. Yes. With the yellow. I hear you. My, my two cents is that going into next year, there will be additional scrutiny and additional questions posed by the public as to the spending. And to move in a direction of providing larger numbers that are less broken down because that's what the schools are providing. I don't think helps us make a strong argument for why people should then be in support of an override. And, and I think the other thing I'll say is we have articles in the right this year around trying to send out and disseminate more communication directly into people's homes because we're trying to get folks more involved. While online approach is great because it certainly, I think Democrats that is, is like the information. We know that people don't always go in search or we get feedback that people are challenged to really find the right information. And the warrant gets sent to everyone. We know it's at least one time a year where everyone is given the same information and whether they choose to read it at that point is obviously at their own discretion. But I, I hear you, Brian, and I hear everyone else. I, I guess I am still in support of, I think this is relevant information. And when people take the opportunity to consume it, I think it helps paint a picture of what's going on. You get also, you know, it memorializes that information. So it's, it's, it's available somewhere. Sometimes I think on a website things change and it's no longer available. I keep warrants for a number of years so you can go back and you have, you have a lot of information to compare. So in that respect, support here. Personally, I think it's overkill, but I'm only one person. I guess I, I'm a little bit on that side, but in general, I'm wondering if the right answer here is just table this whole conversation and say, after we do this year's warrant, let's come back. Yeah. Cause I think there are a bunch of, one of the things to actually focus on tonight. Cause like one of the things on my mind is like the, I don't know how the order of the budgets is determined, but it seems haphazard. So I guess in general, just putting something for after we get this warrant out to say, how do we want to improve the presentation of next year's warrant? It's fine with me. And actually I like the idea of doing that as soon as possible after town meeting while it's all fresh in our minds, or maybe even while the warrant is printed so that we have a plan for next year and we're not doing it two weeks before the deadline. And we can also at that point, I think Brian was making, but we can get feedback and do all that. Okay. And this discussion just so those of us who are a little slower, we're talking about the actual budget, not, not the summary table. Right. We're talking about this. Yeah. The actual budget articles. Because article three does not break it out. Correct. It's a total for the town. Okay. I guess my point is I was looking back saying we do for the schools, we do break out our expenses. Got a plan there. So I have one question, Brian, in regards to, from a dollar standpoint, I was just curious. I noticed that health insurance went up eight and a half percent, but retiree health insurance went up like 18%. So I was just curious what was driving that. I couldn't tell, like, I'm assuming the numbers in parentheses in the health and life insurance are not how many people. It's probably a code for whatever fund it's hitting, but I was curious what, why that was going up so much faster. So I don't have that right in front of me, but I can say that the, the mixed health insurance come out of West Suburban. It was about 8.3%. When we ran the numbers, we came up with a 10% year over year increase. The driver of that was simply because we have, people have retired and moved into the non-Medicare lines or plans. At the same time, we've hired new people. So we have simply more people on the plan this year than last year. This is what we struggled with all week was the fact that we had an 8.3% cost increase, but yet the health insurance number is going up 10. So it's broken out by active employees, non-Medicare employees and Medicare retirees. So when you add up all the people on each one of the plans, we have more people today on the plans than we did a year ago at this time. So what we do is we get the rates now in March, and we usually use the most latest West Suburban bill, because that gives us the actual run rate. And that's how we calculated. For the most part, it's worked extremely well. I would say in the last 10 years, when I first got here, we were returning about 500,000 to 700,000 of unspent appropriations and health insurance. That number has come way down. Where we're trending today is that the health insurance number is around a $20,000 surplus. Usually we're seeing $200,000 to $300,000 or $250,000. Because the budget was so tight in 26, we're only seeing a very small surplus, if any, in the health insurance budget. So I'd have to go back and take a look at the actual plan to plan. But the reason why the driver in all this was the fact that we have simply more people on each one of the plans. For example, the active employees, we've had eight more people on the family insurance this year than we did last year. So that's significant. So that's really the drive, but I would have to go back and get more detail on that. And just so the retiree health insurance, Brian, right? So these are the premiums for the current retirees that we're paying through the operating budget. And then the OPEB article, which I think FinCon will review tonight. That is the trust fund that we're building, which once it's fully funded, if I'm understanding correctly, then these premiums would get paid out of that trust fund. Is that correct? Right. Well, the trust fund would then at that point become a funding source for the budget. We will bring in the money to offset the budget and fund it that way. Yes. Okay. I just want to make sure I understood that correctly. You could theoretically fund health care insurance out of the... That's what the OPEB, that's what the OPEB trust is for. Just retiree. It's just retiree. Yeah. Okay. And then... We have this big gap that we have to fill in the next slide. That we have to fill in the next 10 years is not just... It's not quite like that, right? It's actually more like basically we're going to fund it until it's fully funded. And the timeline for that actually changes depending on how everything's doing. And so right now it's 2047. So we've got about 20 years. That's not just in the health care. That's actually for pensions and... No, OPEB is just as for... It's just as for... It's just for... Yes. I think it's just retiree health care. It's just retiree health care. Yeah. Yeah. It's just retiree health care. So... And then did the other piece, Brian, here... I was doing some reading today and I assume this also applies to Weyland, but my understanding in Massachusetts is that once retirees turn 65, they are required by law to sign up for Medicare Part A and Part B. Is that correct? Yeah. And I can attest to that because I just signed up for A. Okay. Although I'm an active employee. Got it. I don't sign up for B. Yeah. Yeah. And then for retirees though, once they sign up for Medicare Part A and Part B, they can still opt to keep their retiree health insurance as essentially like a supplemental or like a secondary health plan. Right. So you have non-Medicare retirees, people who retired before 65. Before 65. Yep. And so they're on the same plans that active employees are on. So, and they're paying the same co-payments. When they become 65 and they're not working anymore, then they become on the, you know, the Medicare plans, which is a 50-50 split with the town. So it's, what we did see is a spike in the non-Medicare and the retiree, in the Medicare retiree lines where people, you know, have retired. So that again, which helped drive up this health insurance cost. But you are required by law. I think you've got three months before your birthday when you turn 65 and three months after your birthday, before you, after you've turned 65 to sign up for at least Medicare A. If you don't, if you're not working, then you get to sign up for Medicare B as well. But if you are actively working on a health insurance plan, you do not have to sign up for Medicare B. And then the other piece for the OPEB, I guess, related to OPEB and related to these retiree health insurance costs that are going up. Brian, you mentioned that the OPEB trust fund. My assumption is that if we continue to see close to double digits in increases year over year for health insurance, the expected liabilities will increase too, right? Like it's not the projected amounts will probably increase, correct? Yeah, they'll ebb and flow. I think the average growth rate of the health insurance budget has been around 5%. I know we have had, like last year, it was less than 3%. And the year before that, it was 10%. This year, it's 10%. But over the course of 10 years, the average growth rate has been much less than that. So I think that it just ebbs and flows. You know, in a couple of years, it may go back to 4% and then spike up to 10%. Who knows? It's like the future insurance rates. You don't really know. I know that the town has gone through a lot of plan changes and increased the deductibles and whatnot. So that's why we've been able to maintain a lower growth rate than what you're seeing this year with 10%. It's really been averaging around 5%. Okay. And I think the OPEB will adjust to that when they do the actual evaluation. They take a look at the rates, you know, how many people on the plan, who's projected to retire, you know, the mortality rates, people living longer, things like that all get calculated into it. Yeah. And healthcare costs, I think in general, like corporate and everyone has been a common. And so, but I, I do wonder too, I mean, I hear you on the 5% what it's been historically, but if the cost of healthcare is rising much faster, it may be, we may have to consider that it'll be higher than 5% looking forward to me. And then Brian, are you aware, sorry, this last one is also related to that OPEB, just because we're talking about the retiree health insurance. And to me, in my mind, they're pretty related. Um, uh, when did the town, do you know, like the original Genesis state of the OPEB trust fund? It started around, um, I think 2009 or 10. Okay. And, um, then there was an article at town meeting that you could only appropriate OPEB by a separate article. It was at one time it was included in the general fund budget. Okay. You can only appropriate now as a separate article. Correct. Right. Starting in, I think in 2019 that then, then that's why I was curious about when did we actually start funding it? So, okay. Thank you. I have one other quick question, question on retirement on the purchase of services. What is that as like a retirement? And then it says purchase of services. I think that because it's, because it's put into one line, I think it's a contractual amount that we pay. It's part of contractual services. Is that pensions? That's why you probably have the, if you're looking at your sheet, does it have purchase services? It's retirement. And then underneath purchase of services for 7.3 million. Yeah. That's it's just category categorized that way, but there was no relevance to it. We could even get away with the whole purchase services line. Cause it is one appropriation for one assessment. We don't have an expense line for assessments, a category, a categories are purchase services in supplies. So there's no category for assessment. That is the OPEB funding is what I'm hearing. Okay. So what, what's a 7.3? What is that number? Like, like, where does that number go? Are you talking about the, the retirement, retirement number? Yeah. Yeah. That comes from middle sex retirement. That's an assessment we get from middle sex retirement. Okay. Which thing goes to pay for the pension. Right. It's pension funding. And that's pension funding. Yes. Thank you. Which is separate from the OPEB trust fund. Right. Sure. And that includes the schools. And that includes the schools. Right. Brian. But it, it, it includes school employees who are not part of teacher retirement. Okay. So it does not include the teachers pensions, but it includes school employees who are not on the teachers pension fund. Exactly. Okay. Thank you. Kyle. Can I make a couple of comments about where we are on the budget? Please. Okay. So we are, we, uh, I did send out a file Saturday afternoon. And, um, today we finally calculated the fire, um, salary line. So what's going to happen is that the salary line in the, in the fire department is going to go up $277,000. The salary reserve line is going to go down by the same amount. So the overall budget is not changing as far as Michael and I are, um, um, can calculate is that this is the final budget from us. There is no more open items. So your budget for fiscal 27, the recommended budget is $112,964,253, which is a 4.63% increase over last year's budget. The tax increase is 4.89%. So as we sit today, we know of no other budget changes that will be, will be, uh, changing. We're not waiting for any more information. This is really a final budget. And I will send out a revised budget, um, that will show the, you know, the reduction on the salary reserve and the increase in the fire department. I also had one question on that tax pay work paperwork. And it's comes from like the meeting that we had with select board when she, when Carol said she wanted the update for new growth to be 900 and it's at 400. I'm just wondering. Cause I saw the new growth in here at 400 and I was wondering, should that be 900? Or was that a different scenario? No, no, we're being more conservative and keeping 400. You're better off having a lower number. If for example, you put $900,000 in there and then you approved expenses thinking you're going to have a $900,000 new growth. And it came in at 5% or 4%, then your unused levy would dramatically come down. We don't know a new growth number until many months from now. It's really, we don't even know it till the end of November, 2026. So although we vote a budget in May and we use assumptions like new growth, we don't get our number for, you know, six months later. So we're staying with the $400,000 in new growth. It's more conservative and keeps us out of trouble. Um, we may be understating or oversetting a little bit, the unused levy. The budget as you see in front of you has an unused levy of 1.2 million. So I don't think it would be prudent at all to put 900,000. That would just allow people to spend more money. So the least you have in the new growth, the better off you are. And at some point will Moody's or whoever looking at these projections and says you're averaging based off of new growth, the previous three years around 900. They won't call that out to ask us to update that. I don't know. Moody's won't typically look at the new growth. Okay. It would be great. Don't get me wrong. It would be great if we continue to get $900,000 of new growth. That'll go a long way to reducing our overall override number. The more money you have in new growth, the higher your max levy increases or your levy limit increases. So Moody's would not be concerned about new growth. They're always interested in a new project when we've had like River's Edge. We talked to them about that and the MWRA. There are numerous large products we talked to Moody's about when we're issuing bonds. We do give them some information on new growth, but it's not one of their, you know, metrics that they use to judge the town. Brian, I did like that. I just, I'm wondering on the, on the actual increase, it seems like the tax increase is less because in the past we always have presented it versus the approved from the prior year, not the actual. Like you've got the 91, 821, but we approved 92 million 529 last year. But that value looking at PM goes, you know, 15 years back, it was a finance committee file. And what, what happens is it's created like we're doing now with an assumption of what the tax is going to be. Once we get through the tax recap, that number is adjusted. So you're getting a true comparison year to year. So the number you have now for taxation is compared against what was actually on. The fiscal 26 tax recap, not with, not with the finance committee brought to town meeting, because what happens is you bring the budget to town meeting in May with an assumption on state aid. But later on the final governance budget, when it comes out in June or early July may give us more state aid money, which will then change the tax rate. It will also change the use of taxation that we use. And once we get to the page for the recap, where it's the local receipts. Again, the assumptions we use in May would possibly go up that we were able to put more money on local receipts in December and again, bring down the use of tax. So that file is always updated with the actual tax recap final numbers. I understand that what the actual tax differs from what we estimated or approved. But what we've always presented so that people can go back is we presented what we're proposing versus what we approved in the prior year. I don't think that's the case. If you take a look at your file. I'm looking at if you look at the Warren last year. And but how would that be? I'm just saying I'm just saying for when we've talked about what the tax increase is, we've always talked about it as being a percentage based on the prior year's approved tax number. Like so looking at last year's warrant table 2 and we talked about throughout this report, we talked about a 3.61 percentage increase in tax proposed increase in tax. And that was based on our proposed budget last year of 92 million and we compared that to the fiscal 25 approved 89 million 305 in tax. So I guess I understand when you're looking at the levy and where we stand, we want to look at the actuals because those are real numbers. But when we're presenting it to town meeting, we want to be consistent also in how we presented it previously. And in the past, we've shown proposed versus approved, not proposed versus actual. Well, you can change it if you want. I would I would not support that. I think it's I think what you want to bring to town meeting is the actually show the increase of taxation of the twenty seven verse what was actually on the twenty six. The changes in tax versus budget. So it's a three point six one there. Yeah. Three point six one percent. That was our proposal for last year, the five point right for. No, what I'm saying is the three point six one is a calculation. It's based on the proposed budget for twenty six over a twenty five number twenty five number that we use has always been the approved budget. So if you go back to table two in the warrant or anywhere else, really, see, that's the five twenty. So it's proposed twenty six which is approved twenty five. OK. So when you look back here, right, the twenty five, we said the tax that we came in that is one four. And that was that does match Brian's chart. Right. And let's say that when you look at that going back, it it looks like it we're looking at. Actuals there. And I think we're looking at approved budgets because that matches Brian's actual numbers by five point one. We don't think that that was actually I think that that was an approved number. I don't know that the number in the warrant matches the number of Brian's chart. Yeah, four to five. And we may have gone back. Yeah. And like for that chart, we've done the historical. We may have looked at the actual stuff. But just just something to note as we're because those are that's what we're just to be consistent on what we're talking about is our proposed tax increase. Just to be clear. I want to be clear on what the base is. And just for my understanding, the tax work paper is not in any way attached to. Because I guess when we talk about the nuance of how we present these things, I just want to be clear. That question is one that should come up in the context of which tables we prepare to put in the Finance Committee summary. Right. So Brian can give us ideally, Brian, probably both numbers and we pick which one we think is most relevant for us to present to the town. Well, I think we've I think you've present. I think you've prepared some of these in the past, right? You typically prepare a lot of these the files that go the tables that go in there. I'm glad you mentioned that. The table one is here. The blue tabs are already updated with all the new information. But more importantly, and I think you've been doing this for us, sort of having it here, Brian, but table two in the in the budget file. Yes. Uses the approved numbers. Okay. Okay. I don't know how that. But that's the 9181 is the difference, right? So looking at taxation, it says 26 approved, and that's 91821. Are you looking at his table two tab? Yes, I am. I was looking at uses. But that's actually, yeah, so that's in the sources for taxation. But that's an actual, and it says above, approved. And so someone who goes and looks at, that's not the way we presented, presented it before. So. And then fiscal 25 is, that is, I think, what the approved number was, was 89305. I don't know what the actual taxation came out to be, but that's what we also have is. It's locally approved. It looks like it went up as well as state aid in FY26, which is why your taxation is coming down. Okay. I'm just saying numbers that change. I'm just trying to figure out why they're different, but that's what brought the taxation number down. Right. But fair contention is that we should make sure that what we say is true. So to your point, we have a few columns that have headers of approved. We should make sure that any column that says approved at the top of it is approved numbers and not actual numbers. Right. And it sounds like you're flagging that you think the FY26 approved column is full of actual numbers. So I'm just saying 8970. Well, if the conclusion is that you want that column to change, it's not that hard to find the information. Your state aid came in higher and your local receipts came in higher. Yeah. And your tax rate went down. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so depending upon, you know, what your base is, it'll affect your tax rate. Yeah. The other stuff came in higher. Taxation is less. Your increase is going to be. So I guess maybe. Higher. Take away from this for me is that Brian, can you just go back and double check that the charts that say approved on them are approved numbers and not actual numbers. No, the ones that I have in there are all actual. It says proposed and actual, then the word proposed needs to be removed. Oh yeah. I guess I, when I look at. When you look at table two that you've provided on that latest, what you sent us, version three. Yeah. Table number two. It says approved. It says approved. It says 26 approved, but it's actually, instead of saying approved, shouldn't it say actuals. I think there are two questions, right? One is in the past that has always set up. It has set up. We want to change it to actuals. And then if you do great, it's already done. And if you don't, we should make it say. Make it say actual. You can say approved per tax recap. If you want to put the word tax recap in there, because that's the actual. That's where the document numbers are coming from. Yeah. I'm saying that would probably say actuals per tax recap, right? I think the average readers can find that most confusing of all. Yeah. What does that mean? Yep. Yep. Yeah. Should then this chart be FY26 technically approved, FY26 actuals so that you see the difference? The taxation. That you see the increase in taxation. That's a lot. I don't know. I mean, I think at some point we have to, it's not practical to give all of the data. And I think knowing the difference between 25 and 26 is probably more interesting to people than knowing that 26 actual and 26 approved were, you know, a few percent different. Yeah. I'm just, it's not, I mean, it's just, we should be clear what we're saying because if, if we're saying it's approved and it's an actual and someone goes back and looks at it, the numbers don't foot. So we should just explain why because in the past we have shown. Yeah. I'm on board with changing it actual personally. Cause I guess for me, what's most interesting to me is that like, I should expect to spend 5% more on my taxes than I did last year. And if my actual taxes last year were. Right. But if you look at approved, you're spending less. Right. Because the approved was 16, 19 from a tax rate and it's going down to 15, 55. Well, I guess notionally, maybe I'm crazy about this or I'm thinking about this wrong. I assumed the taxes I paid last year were based on, you know, my actuals. Right. So if I'm, if, if the approved is correct this year, I would pay some amount more than last year. Then you would expect to get a 5%. Knowing that theoretically I was going to pay, you know, $10 last. Theoretically you would pay 16, 19 and you ended up paying 14, 83. Yeah. And I guess I'm more interested in knowing that I paid 14, 83 last year. I'm going to pay 15, 55. Yes. This year. Then that theoretically I was supposed to pay more last year in my paying. Right. That's why I'm wondering, should we be showing what was approved? What was approved at the 16, 19? What's actuals at the 14, 83? And then what's proposed for FY 27? I agree. I think, I think it, I think it's almost too confusing. I think we should just say, just say actuals for prior years. I guess it was like, maybe say for taxation, say actual taxes or, you know, because everything else under that column was what was approved. The operating budgets, the global, the cash, the OPEB. So then that under taxation, maybe we say actual fiscal 25 and 26 are actual tax numbers. So then should that note go into the FinCom report where it's recommended operating budget of like actuals came in a little bit higher in state aid and local receipts. And that's why the weight came down. I mean, if people are comparing and they want to know why, then is it the blurb in what we say here that should be calculated? And it should be what Brian has as actuals. And then it's just noted in the report. And I guess, I guess we should do it. We should just be, my point being, and I think that's probably a good way to do it, but we should just be clear about what the numbers are. So Brian, you said it was actual tax recap. Is that what you said? Tax recap. Yes. On a related note, maybe this isn't, this is the place for it. I've just, I've clicked over to table three and it looks like maybe we didn't update one of the cells. Do you need to worry about that now? Or can we worry about that later? And then what's the cell? The comparison cells in I and J says FY 26 versus 25. And I think those are 27 plus 26 numbers now. Oh yeah. I caught that. Cool. Thank you. Brian, did you hear that? No, I had to step away for a second. Can you repeat it? It looks like maybe in all of the, in table three and table six, it looks like the, the person that changed columns still say FY 26, 25 in the header and say 27, 26. So column eight in table six and I J in table three. I changed that in my copy. Yeah. I'll make the change guys. Okay. Well, I, sorry. That was what I was gonna say. I guess. Again, just want to let you know. Yeah. And I guess just from a process perspective, right now, I guess, I, I just, I, I just am not quite quite clear if I could be asking questions about how much we should be asking questions about the budget numbers or the presentation of the numbers or like details of the spreadsheet right now. I think you've got questions on. Okay. Should we go? I guess, do we want to like approach it in that perspective and say, do we have any more questions about the numbers or do we feel like we understand the budget? I think we maybe go through, um, by, by, by department and just so that we have done that. And we feel like we've done a comprehensive and it doesn't have to be. So the FY 27 town. Yeah. That's the one that I was, that's where I was asking about retirement and that kind of stuff. So I can say, which town are you here? F27. FY 27 town. FY 27. Budget. Thank you. Yeah. There's an FY 27 one over there. Sorry. Um, and there's the master schedule into the, the master schedule one shows the variance. So maybe that's, is that easier to look at? The third town. Either way. I just added the percentages. I did the same thing. Did I? I just added the percentages and the differences. Oh, you did it on that one? Okay. I'll go to that one and do it. Either way. I guess the select board. I mean. Okay. So which tab are you on? I am on the 27 tab and I was just going to go from. FY 27 budget. So the select board, I have no questions about their budget. Didn't change. They shifted $500. Like I'm, I'm not overly concerned about that. Is anyone concerned about the select board? Cool. Yeah. The town office. Town office. Finance. I think I asked about that one. There was some movement of personnel. It's a, um, Brian had answered that question. One of my earlier, you can go back and find the assistant, the assistant, and then it was, I think, a part-time change. So that's lower. For personnel. No particular questions about the town office budget. Finance. There was an audit. The expenses. And personnel. That's a little bit. We're good. Moving to personnel board. We have questions about town office budget. Going once. Going twice. To the personnel board. I have no questions about the personnel board budget. That changes. Yeah. I think Pam said finance was all the other expenses. Is that what you said? I think there was a 9,000 increase for purchases. I think Brian, he said that there was something about, um, change an auditor was higher, at higher rates. Somebody comes in to do extra work. We just did a new RFP, a three year RFP. So that's really. purchase of services i think brian we said that there was something about um change in auditor who's higher at higher rates somebody comes in to do extra work well we just did a new rfp a three rfp so that the uh price went up 18 uh 89 at all the contract expired so we just did a reissue with our current auditor for another three years yeah so i have no other questions about the finance budget the assessors department has a bunch of small is this assessors because he's fully staffed now and there's not turnover uh he was in the past staffed at four he only has three so that's currently where he's at but it's um it's more than he had in previous years he was down to two at one time i'm not expecting in the near future to add another fte there they seem to be doing okay it's three point three percent increase yeah yeah it's not a lot but that's welcome to the party
the treasurer you're welcome glad you're here it's a little bit of a little more than you might think uh the treasurer i you know there's a four thousand hour increase in supplies but i'm not i'm not overly worried about that then we're not questions about the treasurer
town council um
10 000 i think this was due to this was on the report that we talked about before this is it's just is that legal yeah um yeah is that any anything specific brian i think it's the labor council is going up because of all the open contracts so there's a small increase that we've uh we've been pretty much held that budget tight around you know a hundred and you know forty nine thousand dollars but we have to do bring it up by ten thousand because i've expected uh increases that we got from kp law so that's it that's more more work or just higher yeah okay we're looking at the budget file that brian sent out on saturday i'll find that and specifically a tab f y 27 budget i'll take a look the information technology has more significant changes i think okay so that that is a question the personnel that is 37 000 but really i thought we brought the the new person on from contracting it looks like that happened from 25 to 26 right okay so then what's the 37 000 increase it's all the employees and they're eligible for steps and they had some they had um this i believe there's six people in that department and they're all eligible eligible for multiple steps during the the next 26 into 27 that's why you see it up 37 000 and and the supplies that went up 100 grand so that's not any of like the software and everything that was all up right no because that's all in capital the upgrading of software firewalls there were two different okay so some of it's sitting in capital and some of it's sitting here i think that the school there was a school um in the software i felt their package in the cap in the capital budget and i think the towns is is new software that's in the expensive line item for tech iot capital also had a number of it related things yes yes right like i think that was i think someone maybe michael told us that they thought that that was a software versus hardware division and that there was new hardware capital and new software okay for rating but i do think that was a soft answer we got i think someone who wasn't sure told us that was what they thought not not a firm ryan i think it would be good to just understand all right there's 100 grand here there's more in the capital we get it there was a you know a new it director and he found a bunch of gaps that need to be addressed but it would be good to just understand that's a significant chunk of change between this plus the capital updates and we get to know where it's going well we did talk about that before a lot of it has to do with the microsoft software is out of out of um not out of code but it's out of um support the firewall is out of support um so there's a lot of upgrades he needs to do on the support side that have been elected in the last couple of years he actually wanted more than 107. so these are um annual costs that he needs to spend and and also i believe we're going to be doing the email change i guess okay so this is all 100 grand in microsoft office licenses there are other things firewalls there are other things involved then what's i'll have the it director send an email out on if you could have the it director send an email and just break it down into like software versus hardware and referring firewall is in firewalls listed in capital capital i think the answer to brian's brian's understandably not sure if you can just get the it director to send us the breakdown i think we have unfortunately many it people in on this committee so we can weigh in i mean i think it's worth it because it's also interesting that in the capital it's about 100 grand for the firewall so it's pretty similar bottom line okay thank you brian yeah thank you now up and running with the file so which you can tell me what line we're on we are on line 91 we're going to the town clerk's budget um so the main thing there was an increase in purchase of services and we said that was related to the fact that it's an election year i believe is that a true statement brian right it's it's uh the cost of the um election workers for the most part we have the election coming up in november yep makes sense and that tracks that two years ago the higher number so um conservation conservation has high percentage increases on relatively small numbers um anything really of note for the only thing i know would be some replacing with some of them always that they use and some of the uh tools they use in doing the land management yeah really it's driven in the supplies budget okay yeah i see supplies is up supplies and purchase of services are up and then i think there are also some capital items conservation yeah or they're not i think so i don't remember any capital i don't know i saw some like because i maybe i just saw maybe there's public work stuff i know i recognize some tractors in there um unless you're thinking field maintenance which is completely separate uh any questions about um it was it was that was also 4.8 percent for personnel is that that's more steps than lanes steps you want conservation yes yes they're all they're all steps so all in in all of the payroll except for um facilities which has the one fte all of the increases are related to steps that's i mean steps are before cola that's just seems like there are a few of them that are pretty notable yeah they can run between three four it depends upon the the the um i mean some of these departments would have multiple unions unions in them so it depends upon the salary tables all right you said facilities is the only one that doesn't have it could you repeat that the only one that has an fte had it right right that's what he was saying sorry to say that again facilities um is the only one that had an fte and where is that custodian for coa i thought we had done the coa custodian i i thought we did that in 24 and then in 25 no we put 2.5 atm so 25 or 20 budgets yeah we put um 0.5s in them so right now they're you know today we only have one fte for the for the um custodian they're going to bring in another 1.0 fte and 27 for a total of two so then in 25 we went up like 156 000 what was that did we add more ftus for facilities actually just i'm sorry on the i'm looking back at the 20 the 2024 atm warrant which is the fiscal 25 budget and we have 2.5s for coacc so that was for the fiscal 25 and then last year for the 26 budget
i thought we added another we end up adding we added a facilities a custodian one custodian in facilities and i thought that was also for the coacc so this is a third custodian no we added one previously the 27 is adding a second one well we had we had 0.5 and 0.5 for fiscal 25 then we had one in fiscal 26 and now we're adding another in fiscal 27. we didn't add it would have been for something else we didn't add two point we didn't add 0.5 and 24.5 and 25 and then another one in 26 for custodian at the coa we only have added one coa custodian so far all right that's what that's what we had planned for in the fiscal 25 and then 26 budgets wasn't it because i don't even think it was built in 25 didn't open it not too long ago it didn't and it didn't open but i think we budgeted in 24 25 to have 2.5s and we had like in the in the warrant we noted that it was for the coacc so maybe it went to something else but that's i don't have an answer that i can have kate and hr drill out the fte counts and show you the differentials in those okay i don't want to hold that up but it's a question so i think we skipped over planning the facilities we've got the custodian the facilities i have no questions about planning about planning does anyone have questions about planning um smaller increases yeah i mean they're large percentage increases but like we're talking about um so we're just talking about facilities we talked about why the personnel services line is going up um the purchase of services is up we know is there something like cyclical there because it looks like 24 and 6 or similar and 25 and 27 or similar are you referring to facilities yeah yes you have to go to the the the information we said in the pdf for the line item detail with the within each one of those okay building maintenance you said on there there was 36 000 for building maintenance yeah within hvac building repairs there's at least 36 000 in there for increases
no questions about the miscellaneous committee's budget no questions about the police budget i'm just gonna keep going stop me if you've heard of this one um i have no questions about the joint communications budget a little bit of flux but it's up by less than a percent fire and als again a little bit of some ups and downs but overall only up by like a percent voting and zoning um no questions there uh supplies skyrocketed there but it just offset by the skyrocketed by fifteen hundred dollars but it was 94 percent increase i know but it's fifteen hundred dollars and it was down by three thousand so it's somebody needed a new laptop you know um sixteen hundred schools schools is its own is its own thing um but just to remind us most of that increase or a large amount of the increase is driven by increased special ed costs i believe um vocational schools that just tracks with the number of students going to vocational schools and we expect more of them this year and that was actually down from what we'd sorry an increased tuition those numbers of people i think the bigger driver was more kids right tuition's up by yes this number's up by 160 percent tuition is up by i think tuition i knew they're like four times as many kids such that like the number and then that extra bit is the tuition brian what was the change that was one of the things you noted um um was a change from the original budget what changed invoke ed from what we anticipated earlier we voted the budget with one kid in minuteman and in a a family moving into town in last february around this time that that child went to asapid valley and it was the understanding that the student that went to asapid valley was going to come back and go to whaling public what we have today is now three kids in minuteman and two kids have now enrolled in keith okay um yeah so we've gone from one kid to four kids and correspondingly our number has gone up but i think this is in this change from an earlier version of this of brian's um yeah i think that was that was in your notes from the amount came down from 250 to the amount came down because we're expecting fewer than we thought it might be no because the transportation right now the kids uh keep tech and not using transportation okay so that so it's lower than we thought it might be right okay dpw engineering personnel services up by eight percent there is that just a lot of steps again you want public public works uh dpw engineering yeah that and part of the fact that the um one of the employees it's complicated with this one one of the employees the project manager part of his salary is targeted towards um projects so he gets his salary charged to capital projects that's how this budget was originally appropriated and we've had to bring up this budget a little bit because the amount of capital that we can assign that to has gone down a little bit so i was hoping to get this you know one this amount to come down but right now the number for that project manager is it is what it is i don't have any other capital projects to charges um you know salary to at this point so that's why you see the spike in that so it is the combination of him being charged to capital as well as the steps that the individual are entitled to okay i'm going to say charge to capital versus this you know it's not an increase in total expense just where it's accounted for where you can allocate it yeah limitations on allocating yep and then purchase services eight thousand dollars 38 percent eight thousand dollars for that's what we've done other questions about bbw engineering the highway budget is that was highway budget is nothing promoting them in public works so those are all um highway and parks and cemetery are all zero and then public works is where you see it that change is not oh yeah so public works is reasonably steady so up three percent
biggest driver percentage increase is higher purchase services by six percent do we have any color on that brian uh i would have to pull out the sheet on that i mean you're talking about probably the biggest department yeah that uses expenses uh it's going up 3.8 a lot of that due to inflation they're not really bringing anything dramatically new into the department yeah it's one of the bigger departments with respect to um expenses yep i had one question that's actually back to total schools does the 55 million include everything because i thought schools this is only showing about 50 percent of the total budget being schools and i thought it was closer to 70 when they say the school department is 70 that means a lot of what's in unclasified unclassified classified if you allocated that all right thanks
no questions about the land code department no questions about the snow
this isn't the side but how are we doing on snow i was just going to say and maybe that's another discussion but um i do we have to imagine our budget is we're over so we're looking at a four hundred thousand dollar deficit i mean it's you know we've been um we've been lucky in the last five years we've talked about bringing this up we've only brought it up marginally i mean really it's a budget that hasn't been maintained over the year because of the budgets have been so tight but we do we do now have that year over four hundred thousand dollars in deficit and we're gonna have to figure it out so brian i was curious on it'll come up on wednesday i'm assuming but there was that comment from cipc about the they had pulled the dpw budget down for roads by about four hundred thousand for road improvements in their proposal because they said there was a balance there i'm just curious is that stuff that can be utilized is that how can the road improvements be utilized for snow removal or no no tom eating votes the capital budgets for specific purposes and you you can't commingle them if you wanted to do that you'd have to go back to town meeting and have that redone okay so how do we find this 400 how do you guys find 400 000 that they for snow removal well it's one of my pet peeves there's a lot of categories within a classified that fall into deficit like medicare we haven't had health insurance snow and ice in some towns is an unclassified budget typically this falls in the backs of the town budgets to find unexpended appropriations it's to me it's it's kind of unfair um that you know that the school does not participate in funding these unclassified amounts even though snow and ice is technically a dbw budget you really could be viewed as unclassified it's really a budget you don't have much control over i mean you're going to have your winters where you don't get a lot of snow but in the case where we got to now we got four hundred thousand dollars and i'm going to have to scrape all of the town budgets to come up with this i don't want to raise this on the tax recap in 27. we've never done that that is a that is a possibility we can do that and that is allowed but we're going to have to come up with four hundred thousand dollars of town departmental um unspent budgets to fix this and um we're still figuring that out
are those current year transfers is that would that come up in that article possibly it's possibly
and then that reduces our free cash too yes okay thanks that's another uh board of health i have no significant questions about veteran services no significant questions board of health with steps and lanes and payroll i'm assuming which department first uh board of health yes they have the nurses in there in um a lot of the individuals they've had a lot of turnover nurses so the lot are they eligible for the step and lane increases not the lane but the steps and is that where the the nurse for the children's way is in the board of health yes the nurses are funded through the town's board of health budget although they work directly with the schools and yes that nurse in the coa i mean sorry the children's way is funded out of this budget okay the council on aging um and sorry and so the so the nurse for the children's is funded through this but so the tuition that's paid for the children's way does not come back to the town as like a reimbursement she's effectively excluded out of the operational costs upon which tuition is calculated for the children's way no they're the children's way this year is paying 78 000 to the general fund in fiscal uh 27 they're paying 58 000 the nurse has not been calculated into that because the nurse does take care of uh kids that are eligible to go there under the school umbrella that do not pay so it's it's a difficult thing to assess a charge that coa i'm sorry children's way for the nurse we haven't done that the nurse has been there about two years not not long um yeah but we we are getting an indirect out of the children's way okay is that is that typically how that's i i i i'm just curious like is that obviously positions new and like i can understand obviously there are some kids in children's way who are publicly funded students right um but i assume the majority of kids are paying tuition so is that typically what happens for i guess what's primarily a private preschool i think these children's ways now is an actual location under the law of the whalen public schools so i don't know the split between the amount of students that are paying students and the amount that are not i don't know that percentage i i do know that um we are required to put a nurse in there because you know wayland wants a nurse in every school um the allocating some of that back to the town has never been discussed with the children's way they've been in financial you know challenges since covid um their revenues are way down their enrollment is down we used to get a lot more money out of the indirects it's down now to 78 000 we're getting 58 000 i believe in in 27 so their enrollment is down and it gets to the point where how much do you want to take out of them their fund balance you you wouldn't want to drain it down to a point where they wouldn't they're never you know funds to pay their their teachers so at this point we're not taking any allocation on the nurse
so sounds like an interesting topic to talk about at some point yeah no it it's a new position and i remember when the position came up so it's one of those things where it's just kind of interesting because and i think it's topic for a later time but it's an interesting thing because it's you know you send your kid there you're paying tuition the children's way has changed since over the past you know four or five years where it was brought in to be now it's one of the regular schools like funded as part of the schools and it hadn't been like three or four years ago right brian um yeah it was when dr easy was here it was been three or four years so so it's it is probably a good topic to discuss at some point because there have been changes within there and it sounds like the the composition and maybe you know just it's just a interesting question of you know so um doing pretty ready to move on to yes veterans which i think what we no i i i in my mind you're already passed better than that's coa um yeah coa uh coa i assume the five percent on personnel is the usual the custodian yes there's new employees in there they had three uh three uh two retired one quit so there's all new staff in there the increase in the coa expenses is due to transportation julie's had a hard time keeping that transportation number down so it's going up almost seven percent because they do transport a lot of the um folks around so the transportation is the driver in the expense line and then transportation's under personnel services no no he's giving it the next part it says purchase of services that 15 and then supplies is also yeah 1500 but the personnel service is five percent you said it's just staff turnover at new salaries essentially and steps in those folks getting steps yeah steps um youth services again um so again it's the four percent just steps again yes yeah so that i'll do some math on that i understand i feel like there are a bunch of reasonably large to the earlier point because we've got a bunch of reasonably large increases in personnel services from steps and then there's also potentially more from cola right i'm just curious but yeah i don't know that was my question it seems like we've got like a lot of those are four percent for steps and then looking at i just kind of wonder yeah what the growth of the personnel services bucket across the town across the whole budget right what does personnel services been over the last 10 years or whatever because if it's growing at six percent a year that's the cola isn't baked in here where is it it's it's it's right now it's in the um the salaries line until it gets allocated for yes for both for both the town and for the um the schools uh for the times that participate in like for the unions that are up for yeah negotiation five and a half percent increase from eighteen hundred to nineteen hundred dollars seems very suspicious um library budget uh no real questions there at least on my end recreation budget no real questions on my end debt and interest we're lucky we have a three hundred thousand reduction in debt this year yeah always good gives room for unless that was primarily because turnbacks in partners closed down i think it was there's the reduction in debt is just um was that paid off something about people something was being paid down yeah it seems to be just being paid down if you look at it year over year it's just been going down by about 300 what was that something came off fell off it had to do more with the fact that we issue bands instead of issuing bonds so we could produce the budget retirement and then those so those will the first payments are due when for the bands is it just that it got pushed out the band the bands will expire in november uh well once one set of bands will retire in june those will be reissued for four months and then they'll all be retired in november when we do long-term financing with all the projects
so so june we'll have a payment in june and then november is well it won't affect the next time we have an increase in debt payments would be um in the fiscal 28 budget when we issue the bonds in november of 26 which is fiscal 27 the debt service won't hit till 28. okay so the so the band doesn't we're not paying we're just paying the interest on that so right paying the interest in november on the bands yes got it okay thank you retirement um we kind of discussed that that's sort of non-discretionary yeah yep yep but if you like it's not it's going up it's going up probably by more than we would like but it's not really a whole lot we can do about that hey brian i have a question for you um do we match 403b contributions or do we just are you laughing because it's so preposterous thing sorry i just asked the question i'm just asking okay so the answer that's no right okay no so okay all right we do the pension funding we don't do any 403b funding right employees have about 11 taken out of their pay every time they get paid they paid into the uh middle sex retirement yep the town also has uh funds it as well we're we're expected to be fully funded in about 10 years we're on a amortization schedule that will get us here in 10 years you know a lot of it could be wishful thinking usually depend upon the investment markets to do well over the next 10 years so that's the current plan as we sit now does that also account for a set amount of growth in town so as we add more ftes does it account for some continued growth or is there an expectation that we're holding steady with total number of yeah they they when they do the actuarial study it's done every two years they look at the wage growth mortality rates ages when people are retiring um a whole gamut of things insurance rates so a lot of seagull is the major player in that market middlesex hires them i believe middlesex is the fourth largest retirement system in the state so again we get that assessment every two years so this is this is a hard number and we do make the payment in july to take the discount so this this budget here you're looking at is net of the discount on energy and that five percent is basically just kind of a placeholder right all right i lost you only where are you uh sorry i've been moving from retirement to energy and the five percent sort of based on an estimate of what we think energy costs will be right yep um school do we have actually do we have um any um year-to-date figures on where we are for fiscal 26 on energy we can send them out yes thank you um unclassified you know insurance is up by a lot but we already talked about that in this session um you know property casualty insurance is up but again that's that's what's in the other expenses under health and life insurance uh there's the um incentive to not take insurance there's a life insurance category and other expenses category there's it's about a half a million dollars in total yep what is other what is it because we see you're paying unexpected fees um benefits fears i'm just thinking off the top of my head we do an opeb study that's charged out of this account we have the opeb fund audited that's taken out of this account insurance the reserve for salary adjustments we've discussed that lying
it's us mostly to the bottom except for a bunch of things that had zero change
property and casualties just that's estimated on where we anticipated that not to be well originally started at 10 percent my has brought that down to eight percent um but you know this as we're seeing this fiscal year we've gotten some unexpected claims and deductibles that we've had to pay so we do have a tight budget in general insurance i don't know if that's going to be going on in the current transfer article at town meeting but we appropriate this budget based upon what maya tells us will be their estimate of insurance premium and so that's that's what this one is at eight percent we originally started back in july with this number being at ten percent and then i know what their reserve for salary settlement is but what's just the line below at 64 reserve fund budget that looks that's the the um go ahead brian and this if there are other unforeseen things that come up and fincom approves them so for 26 what did we end up using because we appropriated 200 grand did we use 200 grand no i did send out recently a transfer that you you know you get to put it on agenda at some point the finance committee authorizes transfers out of this fund for unanticipated unexpected expenses only so that uh you didn't receive one for the vocab yes the money expenses don't get charged against this account what happens is this account transfers the funds to other countries okay slash for unexpected expenses i saw that um request and uh right thanks to y'all did um timing is that something you need done by time the budget goes to bed or you can you can do it next week i noticed you know you mentioned the employee health insurance going up by eight percent which is reflected in these numbers of the retiree health insurance went up by 18 is that because we have more retirees yes yeah we talked about that earlier drivers non-medicare plans for retirees all right so that gets us through all the departments any last questions or comments or we're generally aligned on this i think the main outstanding question was just getting more detail on the it budget it budget and then i think cam asked for updates on energy for energy costs here today no thank you all that was your division for that fine item on the agenda excellent it's a good uh decision but yes that that works for me the other one i just wanted to clarify did you want brian to pull ftes for differentials and facilities to confirm what you were asking about on cioi that would be helpful just i i i guess that the question came up because i've we've seen this in the report for the last two years so i'm surprised i don't know if it was for something else in in fiscal 25 but we did budget a 0.5 and a 0.5 for fiscal 25 and as i said i mean you'll see it you can see it in the war um so that was the question i'll have hr do the analysis on it so there was three action items basically that we want the additional information on and you did address this and i'm still confused um you're 400 grand in the whole on snow removal so far right and the weight of the way that gets funded is straight through town budgets and find costs that won't be incurred or that we will not incur there's 200 grand in reserve fund budget but some of it's going to low tech is going to take it from 2026. no we didn't use it in 2026. right but the snow is in 26 too so oh okay fair point there's only so much yeah there's no i thought i thought i thought you had it for 27. okay now this is yeah we should have there might be more than 200 000 i guess no no it's not a reason it starts every fresh every year okay it doesn't it's not it it sounds like it's just question and brian you keep me honest it sounds like the snow could get funded by some portion of the reserve fund whatever we're not using provoke tech by some portion of unused budgets across other other towns other town departments and then failing that you can sort of put it on the tax recap in some capacity is just sort of a also we spent more money what is that and it comes out of like free cash yes it all comes out of free cash yes and you're right if we we can't find other sources to fund this the only default is the the tax recap that dr allows and the tax recap basically means it comes out of free cash and just there's a note on the tax amount of tax tax you'd have to raise tax in the fiscal 27 recap oh we we it only use free cash for everything that gets transferred comes out of fiscal year 26 budget and beyond that we'll have to go into tax for raise tax for next year okay to cover it so then just out of curiosity if we adjusted capital down for dpw would then that offset that or now for next year capital for the road improvements it just basically goes back to that road improvement question is this because then that would be using free cash right because that capital line item would have been using free cash um yeah if we want to conserve free cash right
yeah i don't know how far we are in free cash like yeah that was another um request it's just on on free cash and um because it sounds like now one of the i'm working on the enterprise um funds so now we're having another we hadn't anticipated 50 000 transfer or subsidy basically from the town to transfer station that'll be included but can you give us a total on on articles and use of free cash
i'll update the file when i send it out tomorrow with that update right now we got i believe about two points well at least our plan tom manages plan i believe has 2.1 or 2.2 or free cash we've got 250 000 going to capital stabilization 300 000 going to sped um 50 000 going to transfer station probably 25 or 30 going to surface water quality um so that quickly brings us up over 2.5 million and um so that's only sustainable if we can only only replenish that so we're we're having that tough year on free cash because we have to fund these on deficits but um those are the pending amounts and i will update the file with that tab when i send it out later this week it'll be tomorrow okay thank you thank you for this topic thank you thank you name me anymore i think you're right
the time you've spent with us yes so i got the i.t budget energy numbers facility um ftes and the free cash update um uh energy costs energy added in there uh did you say that yeah yeah they were three things and then also the free cash and then sorry brian white here just because i've articulated the enterprise to select board have to vote um that the transfer from the general fund to the transfer station well the select board support the article tell me anything will you know do the vote but that's how it's going to be presented with the uh transfer of fifty thousand dollars of free cash however you know the transfer station is going to give the general fund eighty one thousand dollars and an indirect right upset okay um i wasn't sure why i guess that's another conversation but
you're you're giving them fifty thousand but they're giving back eighty thousand so why why did they agree to that not willingly um so five years ago they became an enterprise fund and we kind of knew that they would be in this position because expenses were exceeding revenues at the time louise and i did not support the transfer station becoming an enterprise fund we wanted as a line item dbw budget however it became an enterprise fund and so what we did was we seeded it with seventy five thousand dollars in each of the first three years um we again gave it seventy five thousand dollars in the fourth year and i told them last year they would they would get fifty thousand dollars of a free cash should then stop in 27 and um right now the fund has three hundred thousand dollars in the fund most of that money is because the general fund gave them the subsidy over the five-year period if you take a look at their actual activity expenses have outpaced revenues um which is a problem and then talking to the staff um one other thing the transfer station about 10 years ago used to pay an indirect to the town just like the recreation fund does the ambulance fund school accounts pay the transfer station stopped paying about 10 years ago because they didn't have the funds to pay it so for the last 10 years they have not been paying the indirect so we made the agreement that they would stop paying the indirect starting in 27 which is 81 000 and um they would get the 75 50 000 from the town in free cash they do have a study being done um it was hoped that the study would be done prior to the um finalizing the fiscal 27 budget but that did not happen so where we are today is we are going to give them this 50 000 and they're going to give us the 81 000 as an indirect which brings down the use of tax okay so that's that that is the latest version and that's the recommendation right now yeah so that would be the recommendation for the selectmen it's up to them to decide they can um change in any way they wish just like with the water fund i'm not recommending the water fund use any level of retained earnings um the selectmen have the authority to change that it's only our job michael's and i's job to give them our advice and if they they choose to do something else they they're entitled to do that do you know when they're discussing that or voting that um i heard i'm going there on the 9th which is a week from tonight okay but i would think pam from what you received as long as you get those answers from um sarah and anita on the different um specific questions on the you know the increases in cross the numbers are final so the numbers uh will be going to still um select board as the final numbers okay great thank you that was sort of separate but still related to them before you drop brian um this is related actually to article hh so we just wanted to confirm the number so the water supply costs listed in the article is 38 million six hundred thousand and then i i know we've been talking a lot from a capital perspective the number being 34 million is is 36 uh everything that includes some of the previous money spenders or was 34 just an outdated number the number i got about three hours ago was 38.6 million i i've had for i've heard for the discussions about some 10 percent retainer that okay he may bring the number down okay i i'm having the bank run the numbers at 38.6 million okay so that's new set not completely okay okay so that defy article will be updated too because that was where we were seeing the 34 in the spreadsheet
it says defy article tab and it just showed 34 so we just want to make sure that we're on the same page with the number you're talking about in the capital file we sent you michael and i okay yep yep
thank you and then the last thing i wanted to ask was in regards to the fields project and that proposal has that gone to select board for consideration and um do we do it differently this round or we wait to see if they want us to propose how it should be funded or how is that working well since it's in the omnibus budget you do have the authority to say how it's funded i believe their agenda tonight at the select board was to talk about um excluded debt i know dbw and tom holder were going to specifically talk about wastewater the the wastewater in the field weren't specifically listed on the agenda so i don't know if they talked about the fields tonight i know they did talk about wastewater so i being here i don't know what happened over at the select board but if they did talk about it then they and if they supported it then in fact they would ask for an opinion from you folks just like previously with the wastewater i wasn't there either probably assuming but i don't think they voted on tonight just based on one of the conversations i had prior to that meeting right now it's four and a half excluded okay all right sir thank you thank you brian okay we'll get the information out there tomorrow but just to summarize there's going to be no more changes on the budget all the numbers are in there's no open items so what you have before you is um the budget as we talked about before both tax and year-over-year budget is under five percent thank you appreciate it all right good night good thank you thanks ryan budget's enough for now a school's the only one we really haven't dug into yeah we'll do capital on wednesday obviously so you want to talk articles or do you want to start well if we're if we're ready to move on because it's implicit in what april has said is we need to do that we need to talk about school at some point um we can work it into next week or sorry wednesday but more likely i think if it's not tonight it's probably a week which is getting late but so should we i think we should all um if we have just make sure that we go through and i know i haven't spent as much time with it as i would have normally but because there's a lot of other things flying around um you do have the file right not just the url that has pdf that makes it easier um so i think if we have questions are we going through one person or going directly to christine um well i think we should coordinate questions and somebody can just ask them rather than five or six of us each bombarded yeah um essentially have one point person if we have schools related questions i think we should but why don't we see who has the most questions and see how that goes okay if if we have questions and we want some her to answer them should not discuss them as a group no well i mean i wonder if we do kind of a preliminary if we have questions as we're looking through it in the next few days if we're not going to discuss it for another week i think it would be for a photo have some of those questions answered and then we can discuss we can certainly do that on wednesday if you'd like okay so maybe we do one thing it just gets to be a very long meeting but yeah i think yeah i think it makes sense yeah moving on to articles then you're up if you'd like to yeah let's do it okay so i sent article d the opeb funding article um last year this article was written by brian oherley he had a beautifully written article from which i started from um and then i did my best to provide i think what i would consider more plain language to help those who are less familiar like myself with how um trust funds work and and sort of both the funding sources how the amount is deemed and then um really what's the goal so what i learned in doing all this is that this particular trust fund is only for retiree health benefits so essentially in order to yeah in in order to and so current retiree health care benefits are paid again through the operating budget which we all just saw but in addition to that the um town votes for this article we're also making an additional funding into the trust fund and then the goal here is essentially in 2047 um we would be effectively fully funded and then we would have that trust fund from which we would then be able to actually pay for the retiree health care premiums um a couple things the amount has stayed the same it's the 500 000 uh plus a little bit from um from the enterprise and revolving funds um the one thing that is a bit interesting and and i had to go back to brian kevney today back and forth a couple times and actually um as well with the odyssey advisors to understand what was going on with the numbers so our total liability increased pretty substantially um over five million dollars between um the last time this metric was taken and and this year um effectively that means we now have to fund and somehow get an additional five and a half million dollars um the plan assets did grow um you'll notice that because the plan assets grew even though the total liability grew our funding ratio or funded ratio increased slightly um like a percent and a half um and you'll notice i actually included the fiscal year 23 numbers as well because i thought that was interesting comparison here where between fiscal year 23 and 24 you can see our funded ratio increase substantially um five percent and then from 24 to 25 it's about one and a half percent this was because of a variety of things happening which i also did my best to explain so um there was a uh decrease in the plan's discount rate from 6.97 to 6.25 that alone is responsible for the increase in our total um liability increase that five and a half million dollar number that i mentioned um and typically what you see if we see a drop in the discount rate is an increase in the general unfunded liability and therefore a decrease in funding status what we actually saw is an increase in the unfunded liability that five and a half million dollars but we didn't actually realize a true decrease in our funding status we our funding status actually still went up by one and a half percent and i confirmed with them that that is in fact because of strong investment results growth yeah the growth in the market so we lucked out in that way however i do want to point out that the funding date moved back three years still all the same even with that strong growth and in fist and fiscal year 24 they had estimated 2044 so there's still a substantial impact here as far as i can tell um and in addition to that the last paragraph here i kept directly actually frankly i did not make an adjustment i made adjustments everywhere else but this last list last paragraph i kept because i thought this last paragraph interestingly enough and the key assumptions paragraph that maybe i could outline in there people think it's appropriate of me explaining like as far as i can tell we are due for potential high amount of variability here um that the key assumptions and this is why i brought it up with brian kevin tonight as well you can see that part of what's baked into their key assumption is a five percent medical cost trend that ultimately decreases to 3.6 percent in the next 30 years and i i honestly don't know how we're getting to that like i i don't know how that's real how that's meaningful and granted i'll be honest like i didn't push on that too much other than to say am i understanding this correctly um but i'm just a bit surprised and and what that makes me think is what i see and granted i know this last handful of years has been very challenging in terms of premium increases and variability but what i see is the numbers that were quoted in 23 and then again in 24 and then this last time we took it in 25 they're they're moving up they're everything's sort of moving um or certainly there's change let me say that differently there's a lot of change from one of those robots i'm running to get down to 3.6 so so it's just tough i mean it's tough these are large numbers um and and i it is tough for me to maybe fully appreciate um you know when when you look at the arguments in favor and arguments opposed i did not touch these the arguments in favor and arguments opposed still make sense um but certainly you know it gave me having walked through this and again attempting to put perhaps a more plain english speak to what's going on it helped me appreciate um the cost of of doing this and and frankly a continued cost um that we're going to have in continuing to fund this trust fund so i can do my best to help answer any questions or take any feedback that you guys i'm curious it's a little bit off from what you wrote but how does medicare interface and at some point retirees go on medicare they can keep their retiree health plan yeah that's what that's what brian told us tonight they can keep it i also was under the impression that they would move over to medicare they are required to sign up for medicare but what i understood is they can still keep their retiree health plan as well right i could be wrong um in frequent am but i thought he was talking about employees i thought he was active employees i thought that's what he was saying too is active employees can sign up for plan a but not plan b and then when they retire then it's going to be this whole world might be different but that's the way the rest of the world works i thought you can have yeah okay i mean is most of this money for people who are retired but under 65 yes yes so people retire early early 55 and then they get at least 10 years right about how the medicare works okay right but i thought that doesn't make any sense then because part of why all the premiums went up is because people are living so long right right so like i actually think you can have we keep hearing from him like oh all of the numbers are changing because people are living longer than we expected and so therefore we need more funding as opposed to if you could effectively say like okay you're eligible for this benefit having worked for the town for 20 30 years there is a cap on the benefit and my understanding is like we are essentially there's no cap on this benefit we're tied into once you qualify for it you qualify for the rest of your life so while medicare and maybe we can clarify this point but i don't think i am i don't think i am difference between the to me i could understand if we paid for the medicare premiums but uh but yeah perhaps to not to ignore medicare would be costing the town a lot of money well anyway just a question i misunderstood but like absolutely not just payment of medicare premiums or the medicare premiums yeah that would make sense yeah i mean right my apologies i don't know the answer no i thought i understood it one but now i'm i just have just curious trust would become a funding source to offset retiree health insurance right but required by law once turning 65 you sign up for med plan a if not not actively working sure right if not actively working you also have to sign up for people everyone has to sign up but i don't think so being on medicare doesn't prevent you from having other health insurance you can still buy another health insurance plan and have right exactly so that's where like i don't i that's how i understood the retiree health plan work essentially as like a secondary yeah according to the internet well gemini you're right for other post-employment benefits typically at the secondary coverage medicare for retirees age 65 or older or with medicare paying first and you put the plan covering remain deductibles copayments or gaps like dental and vision like i hate to say i i work with benefits and like a lot of the companies that offer retiree health benefits when you retire you have the option to opt in and some of them will do things like if you ever opt out you can't get back in because they're trying to over time reduce this benefit um but you can have both it's it's not that's what i understood and that's what i understood we were offering part a is the part that's free so that's probably why you have to sign up for that and that comes first like what rob's saying essentially and uh and then basically we're paying i guess the part b premium and then plus a supplement premium so our total cost is probably less for somebody 65 or it's still there and and a reasonable supplement is a third of what my employer was paying for health insurance um you know before i retired but it's crazy how right so i mean it would i would i really hope that that employees can't retire employees can't elect to stay on it's going to be a very expensive thing but but i don't know anyway i didn't mean to get off because you know what you wrote trust with it i guess one related question you know these dates are far away right like 2047 is is not soon it to your point about the growth in health care costs like health care probably can't continue to grow to eight percent a year for the next 20 years realistically right things are going to have to change at some point um do we know what happens to that money right like if the u.s goes to a single-payer system does this money ever get recouped from this trust fund so i isis this is a very theoretical conversation but perhaps that's better like i'm supposed to bring that up as like if there's a world where this money gets bought in some vault we can never touch but also we aren't using it because there's a single-payer system so i think if you look at other benefits that have effectively been reduced and moved out of for example private sector that now pretty much exclusively exist within the public sector right what you see is that even if those benefits are more efficient um or potentially better for the recipients of those benefits
there is still a group that holds on right like so so you never fully migrate everyone right i think the main question is just is there a world where we put however many millions and millions of dollars into this trust fund and then both don't use it for its purpose but also can't get that money back out later i think that is a good question because i and i am like the last person with great knowledge and benefits but um kelly has worked and worked on that in the past and i know that one of her issues that she had brought up a number of times is at this point and we're still building this fund but we don't have a mechanism for for how many are dispersing it so i mean yes it's years away but it's something that should be considered and and i think as part of that is if it for whatever reason system work because which it's so surprising but you know you might want to have a clause in there um on how or what happens or how to recoup that money otherwise though i thought that was an excellent excellent explanation so i'm curious if that's something that should go in the finance report the main thing for me is like if if there's a world where this money becomes lost to the town with no benefit that should go in the comments you can always imagine a world i don't think that's something that we need to worry about in the next 10 years i would rather not put something like that in it yeah that just seems so i mean it's something to to be discussed and be like you know guys at some point you're gonna have to do this but i don't even think it because i don't get the only reason i bring it up right is i have no idea like i know that there are things called irrevocable trusts right and i know there there is a world where right now the money we put in 27 might be lost to us forever in a way we can't recoup it i don't know if that's true or not but if that is true right if putting that money in there means that we cannot be right you could probably answer it but i would be surprised if you're putting millions away that you can't get back i'd assume i'd assume there's something right and if the answer is like the talent that needs to vote then like i don't know like a savings account you know right you can't touch it's like an it's like an ira well like take it right at that point but there are penalties that money back in some you say that right but if we were to look at retiree benefits like different kinds of retiree benefits right things like 457s couldn't be taken away from you in the event of a bankruptcy right like there are different kind of accounts that i'm just pointing out like that if you wanted to use retiree benefits as an example there are different kinds of accounts that like if we're investing in cases but there are like these we're putting money in an organ you know we're putting money in an organization that could go bankrupt because everybody could do well but i guess they're like hsa fsa accounts right they're accounts where you put money in and you use it or you lose it yeah if this were a similar situation where we put this money into this crust and it can only pay for this thing and if we don't need that thing anymore then the money's just stuck there but you're also managing a completely different world with a single payer system it's an interesting you know you have you know umpteen you know 100 million people for sure put arms with pitchforks and all the municipalities let's let's let's let's it's an easy question i think we can ask the question i don't think it does it prevent you from being able to vote on this article no i moved to vote my motion to please recommend article d hope have funded second all in favor bye bye no i'm opposed oh you're opposed okay you're opposed do you want to um i think it probably should be funded um i'm not comfortable with the amount given how tight the rest of the budget is um so i i think i you know in seeing the arguments opposed i guess fall more on the side that the how is it expressed here the current generation of taxpayers are being asked to deal with a larger burden and i would be more comfortable if the amount were lowered all right no it's okay so i did my best to try to really understand this so thank you thank you for
no that was it um i do have one more coming next week it does look like that there are um cars or vehicles um again my thought on that is if we really run out of time that could be one we flex um but part of that is i don't actually have the complete list of all the vehicles yet so i only have a couple more are coming um well i've got two um and i sent them to you all the first is xx long-term facilities they change one word what you know called walker facilities inventory to match the the text of the article and the gist of this is the practitioner is does not think that the select board is paying enough attention and communicating well enough about the long-term facilities needs of the the town and the task is that the select board create and maintain a list of all facilities and update it um going out you know 20 years or more to uh so that the residents of the town have easy access to it and so it can inform their decisions on how to vote for articles and um pan projects in the context of other things right if you put an article in front of somebody and they'll say okay i like it or i don't but if they knew what else was coming down the bank that might inform their decision so that's the pass and um um i've talked with the petitioner um email with petitioner a couple of times about uh with um uh with carol martin the chair of the select board and my liaison here um information is information and it's good right it's hard to argue with that that's one of the arguments for it um and it will in theory make people better informed however all of this is already under the purview of the town manager um and they can do that um if they wish to um equally important another another review they've got to do this because we now have a capital planning and capital improvement planning committee and they've just gotten started they did a what i think is a terrific job on the next five years in very short order i think from what i've heard directly from them they would like to be doing a longer run and people get closer to this guy but i think they fully expect to be doing longer periods so it to me it seems both unnecessary and perhaps redundant but it also i don't think has a financial impact in the town it requires some people to do some more work and every small one they might want to hire a consultant to step in but i don't think it's a financial article it's one that we decided to write up because it's kind of complicated you know it's not not something um what i didn't see in your arguments or for your comments was mention of the cicc
i saw the needs for capital improvements but i didn't see anything maybe it was earlier version i have one from last week when i was on that one this is probably as a saturday or friday i see it yeah i don't know i see it i suppose xx long-term facility planning so the second paragraph of the command of the announcement comments sunday it was sent on 3-1 i'm looking at it let me give you one and it wasn't really one it would have what it now said while you're looking at the town's capital improvement planning committee ah we buried it in the uh the long email sorry that's where it's from when it turns out longing for the response okay now this is you this crazy thing i can't find it because it's not under i think we went back and forth so it's it's not showing up as 3-1 so okay
thank you and you do have an argument suppose thank you so i was reading the older version you do have that an argument suppose i'm reading the updated one now thank you so my recommendation if i get to make one is either that we we take the opposition because it's not a financial article or if we feel comfortable doing it i would say that we don't need this article you know but i think that might honestly be a little bit beyond our burden so we can't yeah we just just can say that if you were not taking no position you know i'm fine with that but i agree with your comments so if we take no position we're going to remove your whole write-up no well we can't we are not the game shifts every day with carol carol and the select board is asking for these comments but then don't we have to vote
but if we're not doing arguments in favor or opposed it has to be less than 150 words
oh yeah even though we don't and we're taking no position okay all right i think i mean these these serve two purposes and well maybe it's one single purpose the idea is just tell the people in the town who are going to vote on this and look what it's all about yeah i don't have any problem carl i'm just a bit surprised so i'm just trying to understand so is the motion then that like we're going to take no position so then when you have the little part here where it says recommendation the finance committee recommends blank you replace that with the finance committee takes no position position and then probably use the language that like the language from okay but don't like regardless we have to approve this article as written and that's what our vote is that's what i thought too because all the non-negligible has a number for vote so we have the recommendation and then it says vote right but what does the vote say what is the vote seven zero zero honestly if we're writing it up why would we not take a position i i do don't have a position so i think if you have a position i think we should have a position if we've taken the time to write it up and we've got pros and cons so the position if you recommend approval and say we cannot apply people you can vote no to be zero five zero right like right so you can approve it i i i could just talk to me personally i would then either abstain or take no condition okay so then in that case that's a vote which is interesting right it looks beautiful carl so i'm going to make a motion i'm going to make a motion that the finance committee move to approve the article as written the article right because they have to move forward moving the article no now now you now you get to vote vote on whether i approve the article that's nothing to do with whether i recommend the article or whether i think the article has a financial no it's whether it is if do we recommend the article do you support the article what do we use the language we recommend so that people don't recommend it's not me saying i think this article is well written or draft it's a good idea all right so i can i'll second thank you what was the question can you repeat the wording the same motion always right so even before and and i'll give an example article d that we just passed carl said motion to approve the article the language is also motion to approve the article it got seconded and then and then we actually take a vote you don't actually have to approve it right you can abstain you can right but we're not approving the article we're recommending approval it's a recommend approval okay sorry motion to recommend approval the articles is the technical piece okay thank you pam that's in the the warrant language okay so do we want to that's the motion for all if for all who vote in favor to recommend approval you have a second i seconded so then it's a roll call that we use yeah no we don't have to work here we can no but when it when all articles we do local votes that's what we did last year so i do record all article uh that's how it's been so then on the last one okay we did we just did because i got iris says no everyone else sorry i'm writing down if somebody was on the if someone's on the um on other views yes but on articles i think last year it was like we had to write them down okay that was how or however he did it so i just followed okay okay okay all right so that is the motion it's been seconded yeah how do you vote all in favor aye just one eye then fine all opposed opposed aye two three one i'm facing in position
okay one two three to two one three two okay i'm sorry i just second oh you're in no two i'm sorry you're helping them on all sides of this yeah i think it's whatever you want so just um just make sure i understand why i think it would say the finance committee recommends approval no i don't think so the finance committee no i think you say recommends no it says i think it says recommends approval no i think this is one to three to two because it infers like you're not you're not you're not recommend i thought it's all the vote it's i can't vote i thought i didn't have many articles last year i thought so not last year but the previous year we absolutely you guys absolutely had some that oh i can fight we don't have this i would make it up as well so yeah that someone will i think we put it in as recommends approval and then someone can fix it if they don't like it because then you flip you have to flip the votes around um which i don't think we do i can't think of any place where we've ever used language to the effect of just recommend that we don't include it or something right i thought it was we rec we do not recommend yeah or something i thought that's yeah right i am ends up doing that and then like we all voted against it seems like it'd be incredibly misleading any other articles yeah i was just looking to see if there's an example oh again all right so the other article i have for you you've seen before it's hh you mentioned it earlier the total amount does not change none of the none of the expenditures have changed on what's changed is the funding source let's just say we don't have one um the sorry i i i cannot find this can you let me send it to you why don't i just show you my give you my laptop um i'll just written the please read asap right we have that one it's buried in that sending it right right now back up here yesterday comes up as for me i took back and forth yeah problem because i'm just saying mm oh sorry it was with all the other attachments that's that's what i just didn't so look for the pdf to show all the pdf has all the changes my bad so the state revolving fund passed over our application and uh i guess you know like uh age grants there's a there's a scoring system for every application and we didn't come anywhere close to the threshold i don't know why um yeah some people can go i don't know why so what will happen is it would be put out a little piece of bonds but none of the terms of bonds are done right now um trying to mention uh in different contexts the interest on bonds is three to four three and a half percent but we've been funded over 20 years and we've funded over 30 years theoretically a little bit longer and so you know all the information i was trying to give to the folks in the town about what it would look like on my water bills is just not the limit you can't tell anything right now um i still think so so there are a couple of other opportunities something may break we might know something before the water i think unlikely we've got 30 more days or so before town meeting and failing that they're still asking the authority to the article itself actually asked the authority to issue bonds and do whatever else we can to commence this and it still says that the debt service will be covered by uh water rates that hasn't changed either so that's what we have so that's different but not only one of you have the opportunity to think about it yeah while people are thinking about that i did find an example from 2023 the finance committee recommends against approval and i sent that to you in an email sorry i didn't hear what you said um the example i found from the warrant in 2023 says the finance committee recommends against approval and it's 051. the example okay we had something similar yes oh yeah 20 23 so the finance oh i see i'm sorry you're talking about i was still on the wall i should go back to the warrants to find an example so i guess so i guess there's a couple questions about this one i think you cut out the increase that's already slated to go into effect is that do we have to take that out um i try not to have to i talked to um to georgia babies the uh the chair of the board of public works yeah and he said that although those um those those projects are planned they might roll some of that into these bond firms um so again we don't know the length of time we get like i just feel like there's a big difference between like your water rates might go up and your water rates will likely double you know yeah personally i rather not but you know yeah so the articles moving forward they're the backup option is to issue bonds the bonds will come with an increased cost because the interest rate will go from this zero percent interest rate which is baked into all these estimations to uh what minimum four percent like you know who knows yeah three and a half three you know four you know five times i was thinking um you're not necessarily stuck with a 20-year term right it could be longer but that would lower i mean you pay more right right so it's like you're angry and it's improving less right how would the annual payment to be lower we had a zero percent bottom no that he's just saying the 30 30 year term might have a oh i see i see i see what you're saying yeah yeah amortized over 30 years but look payment might actually be lower okay all right um i mean i think it makes sense to talk about the rate increase in general terms i i'm a little concerned we don't want people voting i'm going to vote against because i don't want to see my rates go up i mean you know so we have to be careful that they aren't voting on whether they want their rates to grow up they're voting on whether they're going to have water you know and meet the state regulations so i think you should are right to bring it up but i i think we want to be pretty general and vague that you know this will cause a significant increase in rates uh but yeah and you do say in the argument suppose that it will significantly increase the town's water rates already i'll be honest i i would find that very tough because i agree that can't do without water right like we gotta we gotta fix the water problem but i would personally struggle with the probability of like you can't tell me how much um you you can't prepare the public for what's actually going to happen and that is tough but we don't have the option of putting this off for a year no i understood understood i i'm just explaining that it puts us in a really tough and it's something that'll have to be explained and defended at town meeting i'm sure there'll be a long discussion about it i guess i assume there are some options right i don't know i guess i don't know i don't know that there's an option for them to resubmit that they ask there is and they are okay okay all right so there's something i don't know whether it's a an appeal or you know reconsideration for whether by the same group i don't know that they're not you know continuing to work it what's the vote on this is it two-thirds or majority
majority according to this which it's not always yeah maybe speak out 100 correct so so two-thirds might be tough but yeah i think i think it is majority yeah i'm fine with what is i don't know if you want to re-vote it or whether you just want to have discussion but i think especially since there's i'm not sure all of the same opinion i think a re-vote is is the right thing to do are we still eligible for this fee waiver yes okay because i think you struck that out from the pro only because it was it was repetitive um it wasn't it's not really an argument to do it now as opposed to later that is the fee waiver not time limited that's right it's the fee waiver not time limited no i think it is um i guess it will cost seven million dollars more later if we don't do it now is a to me a good argument to do this now well okay i mean i could certainly put that back if you'd like um i mean i don't know it's it's already been there once it's in the description in the comments in the body right that's why i was i had noticed it was in the body you taking it out of the pros but i don't know
i think i would i think i would keep that in there especially as you're talking about the whole cost thing it's like yeah there isn't it has to waiting for it yeah i mean my own and your arguments opposed the last two paragraphs really discuss whether we want to take the you know pay for this out of increased water rates or uh or taxation which is not part of the article and that reopens up a whole discussion which is not i mean it's an interesting discussion and i think the select board made their decision and we may or may not agree with it but the article isn't talking about whether or not you know we're paying for it one way or the other i i agree with you and i put that in there for two reasons one of which is people are talking about that issue and i wanted to hit it squarely and the second reason which i don't think is as good is that we're supposed to have a balanced number you know even number of pros and cons and given that we have to have clean water i had a hard time coming for the better i'm going against you know you could even phrase it i'm just you know brainstorming you know you know even though this article doesn't deal with how you know the rate versus taxation issue there are some voters who will vote against it because of that issue so if you caveat it to say look the article doesn't really you know isn't a vote about this but there still might be some people who are against it because of that uh you know that that sort of covers both bases anyway but it's a new saying it's like an argument it's okay go ahead i thought your second argument against that says that some residents may believe that if higher water rates lead to reductions in demand well those reductions it may become more difficult to service the desolate and then relying on increased water rates rather than taxation yeah it's really the third yeah i think bill's talking about that third one we get the same language some residents they believe but not believe that's it's it's clear it's it's not a belief it's a fact um maybe i don't want to i don't want to use voted yet i don't think you ought to train that way but i think it all makes sense carl i think it's just uh a disappointing development and makes the you know certainly again i think that as a voter i think it just i look for i guess a little bit more certainty in the projections which you cannot provide this is not at all a comment on you let me just say that i'm just like mentally thinking through this for myself of like it it you do need clean water but i yeah it's tough it's tough not to give people sort of a heads up for exactly i mean you have the large amount but the impact directly on those individuals is not clearly called out and i think that's a little unfortunate i'm just trying to avoid the pro-con you know where the people in the con says you know i don't you know i i agree with the water we should fund this i don't agree that it's coming uh out of my rates but but that's not what the article is understood but that is but that so if this fails because of that reason town voters have a right to express that that they could amend they could amend the right they have a right to say that's the point the point is that like absolutely that's why it goes to a vote because if there's enough of a quorum of people who say this is not the way we want to pay for this they have that right
for you it's just a matter of do you agree with it i mean it's almost like it's amendment but it's also introducing really another article and this is you know how do we how do we uh you know spread these costs i mean it's a it's a legitimate article it's just not this one anyway that's i don't know i think you in that last argument opposed i think you could just add to that i mean you use it for the relying on water rates rather than taxation to service the devil eliminates taxpayers option to option to deduct their payments for federal income tax purposes i think it's even more than that and puts the onus on the water users right it just puts the full onus on the water users which most i mean because it's fully on the water users like honestly for whatever reason i don't have town water town water so if it were on the taxpayers it would be shared on amongst maybe more people for themselves it's the same it's just right water so i think it's an argument against funding funding it by water rights argument against necessarily doing it right which which is kind of i mean i think people's concerns that they already have i i think you could actually if if you still wanted i'm not recommending this but if you still wanted that argument that pam just brought up you could add a pro and an against for it right in that we heard the select board talk a lot about extensively about the fact that all water users pay which means our not-for-profits in town and businesses right whereas you know if you put it into a real estate tax there are there are groups in town that don't pay falling into the same trap this has nothing to do with the article but um i mean i think it's it's related topic it's an argument on source on why people would not support why people would oppose this article as it's presented i think funding sources are a valid reason to vote for or against something well i mean it's i'm sorry to try to think of the it's a similar argument we had with the article uh about whether or not we're going to have a remote temp meeting and you know the article was do we send a letter to the state that passes to pass legislation that would allow us to have that consideration and then we get into a discussion well do we want to do remote town meeting it's like that's not the article you know that will be a later article so that that's that's my point is that we're we're conflating the payment with funding i think those is being different yeah i would i would respectfully disagree because we are here at the moment where we have to pay for this thing and so how we intend to pay for it right if you're if you're in a restaurant you're about to pull out your wallet how you choose to pay for it does the article have a sentence that says it's coming out of uh uh uh uh what are we sorry the article itself says no no no and i think that i agree with bill is that we're just asking for approval to move forward to fund this project isn't that what all the ask is do we have to determine how it's funded in this that it's just more of an explanation of
it's being funded and what is that the what the s is right and not break down how it's going to be funded that's exactly my point so it's so you would take out the fundings that all references to the water rates i like for that you can say it may increase it may increase you know this will will be paid for either through water rates or through taxation is it that's that was a combination of the two i think carl that's why is it part of the art that's exactly what i was asking before is like this is such a generic article it's just saying we want to spend 38.6 million dollars right but the article description should be saying the why and i feel as though that's what you need it's we're more getting into the how it's going to be paid for but is that our role because they're not it's talking we're we're presenting this plan that that they haven't even articulated the article articulated right that's my point yeah yeah sorry i didn't mean it it's fair right i mean because the last time though just to be fair rob you're totally right you did bring it up but the last time the startup was presented we had a fairly concrete go forth plan and i think part of why correct correct correct which but i think all of us or many of us felt significantly more comfortable with all the discussions that had taken place that the go forth plan was relatively concrete um and which is why you have included it in your explanation and in your write-up um you go for it it's still well so now this is an interesting point is it is it that fluid i think it's still about as solid as it was right as i understand now there's a go forward plan that go forward plan is we're going to fund it with bonds and not the srf and otherwise everything else they have the same reconsideration yeah right we're going to appeal but right now the go forward plan is trying to bonds and not the srf and it's still going to come out of water that's the plan but to the point right the town could change that without violating the article right right but that's true of all almost all the articles so almost all the articles leave a lot to the interpretation of the town many articles specify the funding source many of them specify the funding that would be the option the wording of the artist one example to do that right right right i'm not recommending that but that's in the response when you've asked uh i thought primarily carol martin about it and the answer seems to be that that um we and you have more history here than i do but that we frequently go to ask for the ability to borrow money without specifying in the article in the text of the article how what what the funding source will be i i i get that for for for smaller sums of money when it gives you when it gets you know multiple and it usually lists multiple funding sources or um if they're unwilling to change the wording in the article then i think it's really hard for us to be talking about how it's going to be funded and that that would be a reason for not voting for the article because it's not included in the art i guess we're just repeating the same stuff yeah i hear you i hear you and i hear it in a different way now that we've had this discussion i going back to sort of being the voter sitting there at town meeting if you put forth an article asking for almost 40 million dollars and now not only have you not included how you intend to pay for it but it's not even there in the write-up explaining to me that you have a plan like well i understand the suggestion was that we need to maybe i misunderstood i understood your suggestion uh bill being like to remove some of the content that carl has put in there about funding source because you find that it could be um misleading because in fact the funding source is not perhaps as con concrete as we are having this conversation about and in fact could be various different funding sources and if that's the case then i would agree with you like right that makes sense hey you don't put something in here that could potentially be erroneous or misleading but also then what are we left with as an article in a write-up it just seems like it's a lot i mean these are fincom comments it just seems a lot to to put on fincom that we're presenting that this is how it's going to be done when it's not in the article itself i mean i think for such a large amount that's going to affect people one way or another but they should know how and that i guess to me i think that when you think about the idea pardon me rob i apologize but what do you think about the idea of saying obtaining that sense to saying that that um if true i gotta check on this that the select board has has voted to have this paid for through water rates i think we should yeah i think that should be i think that's okay i mean that i mean yeah i think that's the first simple declaration statement right yes basically put it back on that but then are you going to also add a note after that that says that's subject to change yeah i don't know why this for me right i would i would be in towards phrasing it says you know the current plan is or the current plan for select board vote is and i will consider a calm that does say like that might change i like that i agree but i also feel as though your first sentence down the wrong direction i i think i would state i i think i i don't even know if i do the hypothetical afterwards but i would state that the select board has voted that to have the debt be supported by water three water rates and whatever the you know whatever their specific vote was on the when you start the passage of this article authorized i would personally take that full part out move it somewhere else and start with this project is critical to town's long-term ability i'm going to beg you not to make a struggle i'm just wondering because i feel as though you're talking about the how it's going to be funded right away where i think the project itself and like the long-term ability to continue is the more important part of all of that but if you start with that then it's look we're not talking about how it's funded we're trying to try to help you right up front this is what the article does and this is what it's going to cost and that i think that's more important than why it's critical i interpret it his way you know i think it just kind of like a basic introductory this is what it is i think it's fine i hear you i hear you that they could potentially be adjusted but but i don't i don't take this to be super funding focused okay that's just yeah the biggest risk here is that people will say we don't know what this means for our water rates right right the biggest risk is that the the um the funding source may theoretically be different and therefore we don't know we don't know that or how it will affect our taxes but we're not going to fix that all we can do is decide how much of a warning we want to give and that to me is a legitimate argument opposed so we don't have clarity on how much it's going to affect our rates and somebody might say hey then i'll vote for it next year or or later on once you get that clarity i think that's a legitimate you know within the article we don't have enough information on it we know i almost wonder to like it i agree and it's to have something in there on the order of magnitude i mean significantly it could be 15 or you know 80 and it's it's closer to the left it's probably closer to the left but um they don't know what it is or they know what it is they're not telling us yeah i don't know what to do but you know i understand i just it's it's i think it's it's just it's hard i think it's going to be hard for people to see well what does that what does significantly mean i mean i that that would be my question nothing we can do about that but i know people want to know answers yes that's for maybe the answer is at least 74 percent so you know i i guess i guess we're left with leaving it there we're presenting what we can and then when it comes up on the floor it's significant you can say something like likely increased water is significantly likely more than i don't know that i don't know that and i think we can we can make it honestly i i i am withdrawing my comment i i think it would be nice if we had something but there are so many unknowns that it likely will come up on the floor
public works or select board will take that question absolutely and it's not ours you know absolutely hypothetical well and to your point maybe it's worth i don't want to say prompting that debate right but that's significant but it'll come up it'll come up anyway right it's getting bigger bring it up well i just mean like i'm sure we can yeah i moved it i was gonna say i could tweak the wording you know significant but unknown currently unknown amount or something i don't know like unknown is worse i mean but unknown is true unknown is true we can't possibly know it but heaven forbid we call it unknown because i'm a lawyer i take four words to say it um uh because of the duration interest rate and other terms of something okay so i was looking at the argument of folks i'm not writing the text we can't we can't currently quantify the increase and i was looking at the argument of folks right and i would just consider adding it there as well because i do think there are going to be a non-trivial number of voters who scan to those and focus their attention there yeah i think the primary article opposed is there are a lot of uncertainties about which is legitimate hey there's so many uncertainties i don't think i can vote on this right now but i think i wouldn't put in you know the discussion about well anyway i would modify it and sort of soften it to sort of say there are just a lot of uncertainties about you know who's going to pay and how much it's going to be and so forth is there uncertainty but well i guess there is theoretically there's uncertainty about who's going to pay because how much how much just to add that i would just keep that bullet or that argument the way it is and then just the first argument opposed debt service will significantly increase the town's water rates for the foreseeable future you know semi-colon the the you know just copy what you had again the the duration interest rate and term other terms of the debt are not yet known yeah i like that yeah i agree like that gets to your uncertainty and the rates are going to be higher yeah and it gets it gets over higher it's going to be higher and we don't know how much based on because of these things right should there be also a comment i'm just curious some arguments a favor they're going into i can't figure out if you have it in here as waterways and 100 goes into water rates that it would be that spread like that they talked about that they would impact all water users in like there's is there anything in here sorry that we did in complete detail on the like the non-profits yeah yeah i don't know if that's relevant but i think it's also um part of why it should go into water rates to a degree as opposed to taxation that's that's the discussion i want to avoid the taxation versus water rates it's just that there are a lot of uncertainties about how this is going to be paid for and your rates are going to go up significantly but i think they're not voting on which whether it should go out of you know taxation or out of uh water rates so far i believe we seem to be in agreement that we should qualify sorry qualify the statement about the water rate to say that that's our understanding because the select board has voted back without them saying it may change yeah i think that's that just opens it up it may open up anyway but we don't need to and i've got pam's comment on adding to that first argument proposed that the duration term etc will not yet known i think that's pretty clear and then the second two paragraphs would go away like two paragraphs in other words you you you rewrote the first paragraph that we opposed i just added assuming then the second third paragraphs would not be there i guess my only thought on the um in the third bullet opposed i would say and that the onus or the you know the fall brunch of the is being born by the the water users you know you can't imagine i don't know if that's not in the article although it's it's in the right it's part of what i'm okay with that in the write-up at least the way you just described it i'm just trying to cut off the discussion you know you know as much as possible at town meeting that we're going to be arguing not whether we fund this but whether we uh you know fund it through taxation or not yeah it's like both don't even bring it up there yeah they want to go there i mean it may come up yeah we shouldn't be promoting that but doesn't the articles in favor the dual source plan offers the most likely talking about how it's been like the arguments in favor talk specifically about funding because dual source plan offers most cost-effective alternative available to allow to you i don't see anything that doesn't say anything about the funding and i don't see anything in the arguments in favor on how it would be funded yeah i mean i could live it out adding it i mean i think it's i think people won't infer it around well can i can possibly add into that second argument opposed you know make that you know say that if water rates lead to sorry not that the third one relying on increases in water rates um you know to usually put the onus of repayment on the on water users yeah uh and eliminates the yeah option for the to run yeah yeah it's true it's yeah more importantly it's easy i'm not sure you know like again i mean i don't want to if people aren't agreeing with my position i don't think that paragraph should be in there i guess it's as simple as that i mean it is it is factual but the issue is it doesn't relate to the article i mean it's not relevant to this particular article unless unless they were to add the sentence in the article that says it's all going to come out of you know water rates uh and which paragraph are you so no like the elephant in the room i mean by not addressing it yeah but but the the the issue will be we may lose this vote because somebody doesn't think it goes uh it shouldn't it should come out of uh rates should be taxpayer funding so i'm going to vote against this and therefore the town gets stopped with not funding this at all i mean it's up to us either to i mean obviously we want to have clean water and we know this has to be done to get there but it doesn't mean that it wouldn't be discussed anyway and nor that it shouldn't be discussed at town meeting as an option so i kind of feel like if it's out there we should put it in we should address it and just say it's an argument against
i mean i i can't control what people bring up so i think you're right it's a free discussion and people can say how is this going to be paid for and how much of my rates going to go up again i mean i think we can talk about in the oppose there's a lot of uncertainty who's going to pay for how much your rates go up is it any of our taxpayers going to be funding any of it you know we want some answers and until i get those answers i'm opposed but i i think we're getting into the weeds of of you know i just think you're really risked that this will get voted down for a reason that has nothing to do with uh it goes to a vote right like a ballot and so the clicker oh uh yeah
excluded but it wouldn't be excluded debt because it's going on water rates oh oh i see oh i see yes thank you for the reminder but if they change their mind
if they change their mind about the water rates well wait if we did yeah well i'm just trying to figure out thinking on the debt i'm just i guess i i'm trying to figure out what i'm trying to figure out is like special whatever we're trying to do the other things they're really here in the funding source so i'm trying to figure out because even though it's not mentioned in the article can they really just say okay so the excluded debt is from the funding source so if they're going to do the bonds then isn't that going to be excluded debt or is that going to come those are going to be water bonds that are put by the water department and so therefore don't have to go to a vote is that how they're what i think i don't think it the excluded debt is just letting you put debt sort of outside of a levy limit yes it has to go to a vote but i guess what i'm saying is i think this will be debt that is inside the levy limit but since you're no it's on the answer now it's on water rates there's no debt whatsoever like but there's out of the residential debt right because we paid right so it doesn't impact the levy all the debts going into water right it's all going into water rates capital budget right yeah it went yeah that's that's the one that is the other so if it went through is it because the bonds are through the water department but no no vote is needed outside of this article so as long as they don't change the funding source from like water issued bonds
sorry i'm just trying to follow that i agree and and and i don't know if we talked about we talked about like the reasons you would do water versus we talked about water versus residential i don't remember if we talked about sort of the mechanics of what that means for excluded debt or if it were to go through is it if you use if you were to pay for it via taxation could it still be through the water department issue bonds i think it could be i thought it could be through the water department issued bonds
but i don't know okay now some of this was we had confused sorry i i might be confusing folks we can ask this on wednesday you know this will be having cipc we'll be talking all capital and it will be specific to capital and you can ask all of that yeah does it actually i mean it doesn't it's not going to change our view on this article the way it is presented it's just kind of having in the back of your head like if if it were to happen like it is just a reaction to the question about how much is is town meeting the only opportunity for the public to sort of vote on this whereas with excluded debt right like so yeah it's at the ballot for the sewer right like or the septic system like all that there's two opportunities for the public to sort of have a say um and and i was just curious about this unless they change at some point that they want to move it to exceed death right right right
well carl thank you for your efforts i'm sorry that it's i'm sorry that is it was such a so we want to are we ready to re-vote this i hope so yeah with the changes that described earlier yes that the uh select board has voted to that their water rates adding the alignment of the duration and terms not being known to the argument the first argument proposed and adding that the line on water rates rapid taxation puts the onus entirely on water users if those three are acceptable to you all then i would move with the uh revote the article as presented with those changes i second one question on our votes are are we voting on your language or are we voting on whether we're on the article voting on whether we recommend or not and i've been at a saying physics in Washington an hour ago yeah is everybody ready to vote i should have moved oh and i seconded all right carl ira second i have hi interesting april i'm on i feel like i'm on the next day too what is your change here between the last time we took the vote yeah i think all of our conversation for me put into question the whether my own understanding and and previously i understood that there was a plan and perhaps that plan for whatever reason was not clearly explicitly called out in the article language but was called out by you and what i've now understood is we're now basically relying on just facts of what was previously discussed and really whether we explicitly call it out leaving the door open for the fact that that could be subject to change and therefore i personally am not comfortable with recommending approval like i appreciate we need clean water so i guess i don't see an alternative which is why i abstained and didn't vote against it but i i would hope that the select board would really reconsider their writing of the article to consider options to just like more clearly lay out how they're intending to to fund it or what the options for the funding are so that has nothing to do with you carl what the options are to go to the bond market or to they're already going to go to the bond market right and then we pay for that those bonds through water rates is our understanding that's my understanding but what else do you want to say here but i guess what we all just spent a long time discussing is that isn't actually laid out anywhere and they could choose not to do that they could have changed their mind and do real estate taxes and i i i i think i just pointed there's not it's not that there are more things you should be saying right voting against the way you have written what you could do with this i have no qualms of what you've written carl there is why why the change in view from the first right that's why because yeah because before i felt like i understood that the select board had a clear plan you communicated that plan and then it feels like in the conversation we've had that plan is perhaps not as solid and it's also not as good right like fundamentally we're going to pay like 20 out a million dollars more for this than we were because we aren't getting a zero percent loan for it that's right okay is it i don't know i just plugged in that we amortize if we need if we take out loans for 38.6 million dollars over 30 years of three and a quarter percent interest it says the total life of the loans like the total cost over the life of the loans like 62 million or something 62 that was only for 20 right no but as i'm saying we were going to pay 38 million dollar 39 million dollars right over 20 years and now we're we're financially going to pay 62 million dollars over 30 years right like i'm not saying there's a better solution i still voted for it but like it is a less good thing for the town than it was when we thought we were going to get the money at zero percent for sure for sure um but it could be 35 years it could be 25 years that's what i mean yeah for sure but i guess i'm saying like we're going to spend tens of millions of dollars more for this than we were when we thought it was going to come out of srf right which doesn't mean we shouldn't do it it just means that's fair you know um and purely hypothetically you know this shouldn't even happens no it's not i'm not saying we have i'm not asking to change your mind what i'm saying is if the hypothetically if the slip changed the article to say that it would be paid for out of water rates so that was fixed with the article would that change your positions it would change my position yes it would because it would be very clear that they have a plan for the funding source and i totally appreciate that rob's correct the total funding amount might change but at least the funding source is clearly put in ink what do you think i i wrote the notes of basically yeah similar to what the first track was looking at paying zero percent within 20 years but since that was my business uncertainty on final costs i mean i do think that we need to do this we understand that we need this but i think the understanding of the final cost and the type of debt service i think is should be clear but we're not going to get that we don't we can't know that right now we might know in six weeks i don't know that we will um so it's one question i actually had that i didn't ask and sorry to interrupt um is the srf looks like an annual thing right there's a world that we could reapply for that next year is that a real thing um i think it is i think it works on an elder annual calendar um but i i my understanding is we've got to get started on this now maybe maybe and i have no idea what that was we can refinance a bond debt yeah srf debt i just don't know no no i don't know i was just again like just from like a mac perspective there's a world where zero percent interest is worth waiting a year for right that assumes that we can actually get zero percent in person that we can wait a year and neither of those are things that i know to be true but yeah i wasn't paying attention what was our final vote on that uh zero to two zero two okay so we had two extensions okay so i apologize people i didn't follow what you said sorry i changed i look at this whole water project as i know it's a need it's 15 of our needs and i know that but it's such a huge number and if it continues to escalate it just feels like uncontrollable and that's the part that i think i'm i'm most um uncomfortable i understand regardless whether they were to commit to water rates just the magnitude of it just too big or too i know um i think it's more of like the funding source right like so if we were going for the whole project was was predicated on getting a zero percent interest loan for 20 years and it was 38.6 and i got approval and then now it's like okay well we got that loan denied and now it could be a lot more which means the total amount goes up again it's 15 of our needs so it's like it just makes me wonder it's like well what about the other water treatment plants how much would that investment be if we had done that is it going to get done like the um updating the water treatment plants because they said the other two wells like it was too costly to do the treatment plants or update them to meet the needs of removing the pipas and everything else that was needed in the project well i actually think that ship sailed but that it wasn't a matter of cost it was that they were in flood plains or there's not enough land available or i don't think it's purely cost now that doesn't mean you have to like it or vote for it but you know um i i would love to be able to tell the select board you'll get you know you get a better vote from us a more palatable book if you make this change but if that's not going to sway you then you know it's up that's fine so i just like that's why i want to clarify okay thank you all it's not an easy one it's a big number it's a big number it's a third of our budget isn't it i think all of the all of the discussion we've had tonight is exactly what will be happening on the floor of town yes yeah so this is a good practice it could warm up thankfully we don't have to answer right right right but you know there'll be a long discussion on this article with all the issues we just raised long it's like Cinco de Mayo right is it may fish is our town meeting date don't give me a chance
i don't have any others anybody else i was just going to give an update on the ones that um sherman's bridge road um select board was discussing them tonight i know that carol's asked for additional commentary but on some of some of them that we put non-financial like one of the ones two of the ones i have are um redoing the 1971 agreement i personally feel as though it's a legal matter and i don't feel like fincom should take a position there because it's legal is this 1971 agreement legit i don't know right so that's one of the ones that i'm a little bit skeptical on of having a fincom and that's why i'm waiting for and i told doug that i would like to see what town council has to write up and i'm happy to put that in my comments but that's where i would refer to and why because there's a lot in there that makes me unsure one of the other ones is the weight limit we didn't say that this was going to be we're going to have weight limit i think they're going to two separate proposals so i have one that's weight limit um and in discussing it you don't own the full bridge right so how can you do weight limit on one and so i'm like again waiting for legal because i don't know that fincom should have a say in that too because i don't know legally if that's allowed to have a one work a weight limit on one side of the bridge going assuming legally it's just logistically and be a nightmare but is that a financial responsibility right like i don't know that's it's not it's not so that's another one they're finishing applications for it right like are there in the building of it like the big one is on the walkway that he asked for so that's where that would have financial it's a weight limit like i don't know the weight limit i think it's not it's not the engineering weight limit it's like a the neighborhood wants doesn't want the neighbors don't want buses okay but they would build it the way they're going to build it i think they're building it the way they're building it regardless this would just be to reduce it further it's like sundry would have to vote that too in order for you to get on both sides that's because otherwise there's a sign in the middle that says if you're a heavy truck you know stop and back up right which is logistically legally allowed logistically not the best plan so that's where i stand on um those articles and then the town officers we're just waiting for final write-up from kelsey and um town to submit those but that one's all done so it's all sherman's bridge road that i'm waiting for and think uh select board was supposed to discuss those oh and one other one route 20. all those were supposed to be discussed tonight so i'm waiting to see what the notes were on those i am behind on my articles but the sherman's bridge doug the select board is discussing it tonight and then catch doug holiday road one i will follow the phil whitney again i think this select board knows that was sort of insufficiently baked and is furiously trying to bake it more uh especially with the school committee because the school committee does own that it does have care and custody of that land and the select board is trying to reach a new version of the article that reflects cooperation with the school committee you know kind of first all the reasonable question of like why on earth would we vote for this people who have care invested then i don't want to do it um so that's kind of stalled and then there are two on the alcohol licensing that i just need to get to i need some information from the town um for some of these articles i sent around the article tracker today um for the chapter 19 section three ones if if we voted that um and if you haven't send me sent me sent me your article please do because i need to just submit those as finals because they're the final set column and column b 19 section three or like no financial impact no financial impact sorry it's still been a little wobbly on the like feel like ever changing back and forth of what we're doing with those so if it's not alone oh yeah yeah i am i think especially if it's if it's a standard or i think if we've voted that the last i remember was we had agreed we were going to do 150 word write up on each of them it was going to include the disclaimer of you know i don't think you have to even write up anything i think you can just add that little blur that says the finance committee and consultation but it's not like that but then we talked about it and i thought it didn't change but we're back to just the blurb no i think what we had said is if you have the 150 petitioner's comments like you can add that in some of us had it so i did it so sorry that's petitioner's comments don't worry about it send it so if if right if no petitioner right it's like for some of mine i did not have the petitioners comments yet and so i sent it along because we had already voted on and i had already included all the languages so there's two from bill just so you know bill that pam doesn't have yet ee the planning board appeals and refirms remote participation um i think i have both of them in because those you probably just want to select foreign when you did them because that was where it needed to go and pam just needs it as well to make sure that it gets personalized because those were the non-mongolgable right no the the double e has no financial impact right so so that's done so you just need to send it to pam you you sent i think billy you've sent me yours yeah he's a friend de planning abort planning board appeals that's that's the uh petitioner is the select board same thing with pp but i still need it i don't have i don't have to do anything you don't have to do anything you can just either put the blurb in or i'll put it in for you i just don't have i don't have that article i have the write-up i can find it in your it should have been sent to you like at the very beginning right but they may have changed it or something i don't know but i can say they should i got they should change it because you should they would have sent you would have sent again anyone yeah so if you just whatever you have you can p2 right pam because you don't have that one listed as final sent and i know he did this from remote part of the session i thought that's a lot in some double e and there's another one that i'm getting up and p which one is p
that i'm sure i sent you but anyway i'll send it again i'll find it i couldn't find that if you to double double e and p i can reset okay motion to adjourn ready and then let's transfer no i apologize that got pulled so i that wasn't listed here as pulled so i just want to make x double and double a got pulled as well as the uh uh double a got pulled yeah okay i didn't have that one transfer funds to the oh it's fiscal 26 fire payroll budget new one did but i couldn't remember which one it was okay thank you okay i got emotional who did that i did motion to adjourn second rob seconded thanks for the reminder if there's other reminders that i think you know just let me know i'll all in favor hi