September 14, 2026 – Finance Committee – Video & Transcript

September 14, 2026 - Finance Committee

Autoscroll:

I'll call to order, so I'm going to go ahead and read our public statement. This meeting is being recorded and will be made available to the public on WACAM as soon as possible after the meeting and pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Acts of 2025. This meeting will be conducted in person and via remote access in accordance with applicable law. One may watch or participate remotely with the meeting link that can be found on the Board Committee Zoom links tab on the Town's homepage. If required by law or allowed by the chair, persons wishing to provide public comment or otherwise participate in the meeting may do so at the meeting location, in-person or remote access, and public comment should be limited to two minutes per person. So I will just briefly go through the agenda and then we will see if there's anyone from the public who wishes to provide public comment. So tonight's agenda is going to be a continuation of last week's meeting. We will hopefully vote to approve the minutes of last week. We will also continue our discussion of the multi-year budget model for next year and how that also then impacts 2029 and 2030. We can discuss any additional thoughts there. After that, we will continue our discussion of the possibility of a Proposition 2.5 override. I believe there were a couple additional updates that have happened in the last week regarding some feedback from the school committee. And so if there's anything to provide there, hopefully we can discuss it. We will wrap with two additional items, a discussion of the fiscal year 28 capital budget and the five-year capital plan process. So Brian will walk us through that, help everyone understand what the SIPC does and sort of what their process is like. It's an opportunity for us to really begin to dive into that capital plan, ask any questions, and start to provide feedback if we have it. And then we will wrap up with reviewing any feedback or discussion on the FinComp's annual report for fiscal year 26. If we're prepared for a vote, we may do that. If there's substantial feedback, we'll hold off. However, we do need to provide a vote on that by the end of the month. Then last but not least, we'll just discuss what next week's topics and meeting time look like and hopefully adjourn around 9 o'clock.
Any announcements and are there any participants? All right. Then seeing that there's no one, let's move on to the minutes of September 8th. So did everyone have a chance to review the minutes? Was there any feedback? Yes, I did. Looks good to me. I did not join the meeting, so I'm going to ask Steve. That's fine.
I'm just going to do one more cursory check.
We're at the meeting. I assume you did a double check of the motion language that I put into the minutes. I had supplied that to Carl after a meeting, and he seemed to think it reflected his notes. Since I was the one that made the motion, I assume I was happy with it. Yeah, and Carl has a similar thing in his report. So they should, I was looking at if they match after the wordings are different, but. I have one small change. Sure. On page 5 of 6, after the motion, or the motion that's on that page, you say A box is seconded. Like right in the middle, right before the in bold preliminary discussion of the fiscal year 2020 capital budget, right before that. Do you want me to show you? Page 4. I got it. Yeah. Sorry about that. No, it's quite all right. It's your sister.
So whoever makes the motion will say as revised. Any other feedback?
All right. Then motion to approve the minutes of 9-8-26 as revised. Seconded. All in favor? Aye. Aye. You could abstain if you would like. Oh, yes. You can also vote. You can also vote. It's up to you. It's okay to abstain. I have to abstain. Okay. I just wanted to let you know that it is okay to abstain. Number 01. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you all. All right. Moving on to our next item here. It's the discussion of the budget model and anything that we want to discuss related to fiscal year 2020 operating model and the projected year-over-year tax increase. Any change from last week? No. So you all should have gotten version 7 that I distributed after the meeting.
Apologize to Iris separate. She had asked for a rolling average of the year-to-year tax increases. I had added something for fiscal 27 and 8 to give an average to smooth over the impact of the deferred debt. And I, in my rush to get that out to you all, I didn't put that in. So I'll include that in the next version, if that's okay. What I want to make sure that one of the things that I think, if anyone's been doing the post, right, came up. And I want to make sure that I appreciate the mechanics and thinking about this more long-term. Because I know that the question we put forth will be a three-year question. But the conversations we've had suggest that the pressure around the budget is not going to be alleviated in three years. Asking for funding for three years alleviates the pressure for that three-year term. But the subsequent three-year term will have, frankly, not just equal, but greater pressure, right? This pressure continues actually to compound in, I would say, severity or impact until we get to 2037. And the reason why I bring that up is because I think there was a comment around how, if we don't ask for an override in fiscal year 28, then an override starting in 29 could be an ask for a greater override amount. Which I can appreciate why the amount would be greater, right? Because subsequently, even if the budget is found in some way to come down to the number, right? That we need to hit for fiscal year 28 in 29, because the growth, right? 29, 30, 31. If you package those all up together compared to 28, 29, 30, the number in absolute terms is larger, right? Yes. But I think the mechanical issues, if you look at the model right now, our model tracks the finance director's model. And his model at the moment assumes that there's an $800,000 override, then it gets built into the levy. And so if you need that to support absent cutting expenses or whatever. So if you don't get that increase now, that increase plus 2.5% is going to roll as a need into the next year in his model. So, you know, to get a sense what those numbers would look like, you know, we could certainly, or you can do it yourselves. You can just zero out in the appropriate place the override that he has inserted.
And again, there's a deficit at the moment. So you have to do a couple of things. You'd have to eliminate $800,000 of expenses and eliminate the override. Now, if it's done through eliminating expenses, that too, kind of has felt going forward. So the answer is, you know, there's likely to be some further increase than what's currently short model. But the point that I wanted to make, Brian, go ahead, please finish. And the point I wanted to make is, even if the dollar amount, real dollars is greater, the impact, and I think this is where I want to make sure that I'm really thinking about this very clearly. The net benefit to the taxpayer of waiting a year is still that that $800,000 doesn't roll over and therefore compound. And between now and 2037, the total net increase to the taxpayer is still reduced, even if in fiscal year 29, we ask for more money than we otherwise would have asked in 28, right? And I think that, to me, is an important part of the story to tell, right, from a strategic standpoint of we're not just holding off because we don't want to ask for it this year. We're holding off because at the end of this train, there's a benefit. Yeah, I don't know. The answer is yes, mathematically. I don't know that that's particularly material. Just for argument's sake, let's say the full $800,000, some of a thousand increases what we have to ask for in fiscal 29.
You've gained by not having a 2.5% increase potentially along the way on $800,000, which isn't that material compared to you add up nine years of those overrides escalating into the high $10,000,000. And so I think, you know, you brought up last week, we really, to understand your question, to understand the fact that using a rudimentary model that simply escalates everything at an assumed rate isn't reality. I mean, we're going to have to pick apart, you know, and I think I mentioned last week, I think it's fiscal 29 that the school bucks contract is up for renewal, which is likely going to be, you know, 20, 30%, you know, increase. There are likely other items like that, that, you know, we're literally going to have to get a little bit more granular as time goes on. But, but, but I think for scoping the direction of things, yeah, I mean, and how it's balanced will, will be material, right? So if there are, if it balanced through some cuts, then, you know, it, it won't necessarily carry forward, but if it's some financial engineering, then it will keep carry forward. Yeah. I think I'm just, the idea that later on we could ask for a larger number is a reason why we need to ask for money now, to me, it's not a good enough reason, because the reality is we're going to ask for more money and we're going to ask for it later on. And it's a guarantee that we're going to do that because there's no, there's no release valve on, on the budget until 2037. And I think that that is, I wouldn't use the term guarantee. I mean, I think every year, I think the numbers seem to change a little bit. I mean, when I was sitting here a year ago, we had the same discussion and said, well, we're definitely going to have it fly in 28. We'll definitely do. So, you know, yeah, I don't, I wouldn't assume because I mean, it certainly looks like what's coming, whether it's this year, next year, the year after. Yeah, as a thing stands now, but as we said, if, if the committee is appointed to study and, you know, make some recommendations and proposals, which may include some cuts, who knows, right? I have a point, like to, to your point around school, the bus contract organization, you know, the school budget is like 60 to 70%, right? And probably there will be 10 contract negotiations, like school bus or maybe some software. And then is anybody looking into it? Like, we don't have any visibility into it. Can we recommend school committee to start looking into this? Yeah, I think the answer is the visibility in that level of detail won't be available to us as a committee until January, maybe. When the superintendent delivers his budget to the school committee, they tend to put together a very detailed budget and set of information for the school committee. And at that point, it's successful to the public, should have been delivered to your committee, finance committee last year. And typically what we did when I was on the finance committee before is that we'd go through that detail over a meeting or two, we develop a list of questions. We'd send those questions on to the finance director, and she accumulated questions, she put together a document of Q&As, and ultimately that would get sent back to us, but it'd also be posted on the school website. And I think, unfortunately, last year, you probably ran out of time, and you probably weren't in a position to get as deeply into that. I don't know if you did it last year, Iris. You know, when I was on the FinCom, we typically would, on whatever night the superintendent was presenting his budget, the whole finance committee would go sit in the room and listen to that presentation and would be given an opportunity to ask a couple initial questions. But for those that have been on the finance committee for at least a couple years, you tend to start to know, you know, where the areas are going to be. They'll typically highlight them, but. And it's not to say that we can't, based on collective knowledge of budget drivers on the school side, let's say we can't talk about that this fall, and in anticipation, begin to develop, either take the list of questions from, they still are on the website. So, you know, we could go back and pull down the list of questions for the last couple of budget cycles and just. I think my other question is like, is, or, you know, we are really over it, as well, we're not most important. Is it the same level of importance to the school committee that you can get? Is it as important to them? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, at their August 24th meeting, they, I don't think they voted, but their intention was to go to the joint meeting with the select board on August 31st and ask the board to put an override question on the ballot for three years. So the answer is, yeah, at least as of August 24th, it was very important. It's important from the question perspective was cutting the budget or cutting, like looking for optimizing the budget, like renegotiating, you know, that I don't see that sort of a discussion anywhere.
I mean, do others have a sense of how much of that you've seen occur? I mean, we generally don't, you don't get that level of visibility. You know, most of the anecdotal information about cuts that I've heard so far relates to what they did a couple of years ago. But depending on what information you have, Iris, I can, I can share what little I know about what occurred at the budget working group meeting last week. My experience a little bit from last year was that, you know, you get a budget when they're done, and then the superintendent comes in and basically defends it. And I think it's more helpful to get involved a little bit earlier. I mean, I don't want him just defending his budget. I want him to sort of brainstorm with us. So I'm sort of hoping that we have a couple of meetings with him before he produces the final budget, because then it's really hard for anybody that he's pretty locked in, you know, nothing much has been to change once he's sort of finalized it. The school is represented at the budget working group. Yes. Yes. And I'm not asking anything differently for landscape, which is, you know, by 10%, we go get a couple of calls and then talk to them, right? As simple as that, school committee should do the same thing. Again, I think they rely on the, as the town does, relies on the finance director, Brian Keveney. The schools rely on Kirsteen Patterson, who's a director of finance and operations. And she works closely with the superintendent and the school committee in turn, at least of late. If you go back five or six years ago, my sense as a resident was that there was a bit more rigorous process, a bit more transparent process. The schools, going back even just two years ago, had a budget subcommittee made up of two school committee members who met, you know, fairly frequently with the director of finance and in a public meeting. And so, you know, and they were working through the kind of things you're talking about, maybe not in the absolute detail, but they rely heavily on staff to, you know, when they come to them, say, we've, we've looked, you know, the school committee is supposed to set overall policy. And, and, and they have a view of what level of education they want to support in the town of Whelan, right? And they assume their constituency is most of the families that have kids in the schools. And therefore, they want to, they typically have wanted to maintain what we'll call, which is always questionable what it means, maintain level services. That's what they refer to. Don't go backwards, right? But inevitably, they have new initiatives, whatever they may be, different ways to do reading programs, math or whatever. And inevitably, those new initiatives have price tags associated with them. And so historically, they've themselves have had to look at those new initiatives, look at the level service, trying to figure out, is there a way to pull some of those new initiatives into their budget without busting a budget? So that all happens kind of behind the scenes. But that all said, I think we've said a couple of times now, by state law, we can't, the finance committee and town meeting can't do anything other than approve a single total dollar amount. You know, as happened on the finance committee three years ago when I was on, we thought the increase in year over year tax rate was too high. And so we said to the town and the schools, we need you to find $600,000 of cost savings. But it wasn't our job to go inside the school budget and figure out what that was. All we could say is we're not going to recommend that big number that you've been looking at. We're going to cut it down by three or four hundred thousand. That's the only tool we have to push back on it. And then you, you know, assume that they will do what's forward. And you would, I think you can see the details, right, of last year and all that. Yeah, but that's not to say that the finance committee over the years and going fuller shouldn't be asking questions about what's inside the school budget, because over the years, when when questions have been asked and you get certain answers, you know, at least the finance committee has said, well, wait a minute. And that looks like there's a little bit of extra cushion in that budget line item. So explain to us why you really need that. One of the reasons why, if you look in the budget, the last three years, the energy costs related to the schools is now separately tracked under the unclassified budget that used to be inside the school budget. And it was moved purportedly because the town was now focused on sustainability and it was hiring a sustainability manager. And the notion was it would they would be better able to manage that cost line item by consolidating school and town energy under one person, the facilities department. And having sat there and looked at the budgets each year and asked for detail on the actual spending for energy, inevitably there was they were over budgeting for energy, whether they're doing it consciously or not, I have no idea. And so one of the other side benefits of pulling it out was that became one less opportunity to sort of pad the budget a little bit so that when you get to the next year, you say, well, level service, we have this big number, let's just roll that forward. So it was really partly the finance committee sort of probing in some areas of special education is another area where we spent a whole lot of time and probably will continue to, particularly as it relates to how the state reimbursement works and gets worked into their budget. Because again, much like, you know, much like, you know, much like, you know, Brian Kevany has, has had cushion built into his town side budget. That's about all we could do is try to identify how, how, how, how sure are we that they really need an amount of money. And, and I had a, you know, certainly a question on one of the line items there, the, the override framework you sent on, I think the town of Marblehead. So looking into that, their active employee health insurance, this is although a 527, 28, 29, so I, a year before, and the retiree health insurance. So those are, the assumptions are 7% and 5% annual increases. Why is ours like 12%?
It's, it's a big difference. I don't know. The health insurance? Yeah. So that's on page, page four. What do they have? They have 7% for active employee health insurance and 5% for retiree health insurance. Yeah. I mean, the, the experience that we've had, I think it's shown on the summary tab of the model workbook. Yeah, the 32B, right? And I'm at three years worth of year over year percentage increases. Over the last four years, Brian Kevin has typically started with a 12% placeholder for health insurance. And certainly some of the other larger insurance programs, the state insurance program have experienced double digit year over year increases over the last two or three years. And the West Suburban health group, you know, I think has had a couple of years where we've gotten into the high single digits or low double digit increases. For us, it's 10. For us, it's 10.6, 2.3 and 10%, right? 25, 26, 27. So, yeah, it, you know, the answer is that it, it, it's going to vary based on what insurance program you're in. I mean, I know the town manager has, um, over the last few years thought about whether the town should be exiting West Suburban health group and joining the state program or, uh, there's one other program that is large enough to handle. Uh, and, um, and, um, one of the issues with West Suburban health group is that each member community had to contribute money going in and it sits in a trust fund. And then that trust fund, uh, is intended to be used to smooth over, um, large instances, large variances. And the fact that the year that it was two point something percent was a combination of very favorable experience where West Suburban experience was six or 7% year over year increase. At the same time, the state fund was double digits. And then, uh, the, they had a discussion about how big did they want the trust fund. Yeah. And they decided they took a vote, decided they wanted to manage how big that got. So they took whatever the excess was and they further reduced, um, year over year contributions down to 2%. Um, yeah, because this was just last year. So that's why it caught my eye. Like how are they managing it to be so low? Yeah. And the problem is that if you, the way the process works, if you put in, let's say you felt, uh, we should be at the average, right? Uh, and let's call it 8%. And you put 8% in the actual budget that we ultimately see and have to approve and send a town meeting. Uh, and as we get late in the process, West Suburban actually sets their rate, which is based on experience and other factors. And they come back and tell us, uh, Jesus here, we're sorry. It's 14%. Okay. You've now, you know, got your budget pretty far through the process. And now you have a pretty negative surprise and you've got to hustle to now, again, if you go back for a decade and you look at the town of Wayland budget, it's in the warrant versus what actually got, uh, included in the motion on town meeting. Um, the budgets were approved earlier in the cycle, these kinds of numbers were still not known and inevitably there was just a totally different set of numbers on town meeting, which you can do. Right. But it's a bit more confusing to the residents that are showing up, hopefully prepared to, um, debate the budget. So the current finance director has attempted to be a bit more conservative in the budgeting. If, if, if that leads to positive surprises by the time we're going to print, so be it. And in part to Bill's point, I was too saying the last two years when we were looking at forecasts, we were fully expecting to have to deal with overrides. And, and we ended up with several different kinds of positive surprises and we ended up with some financial engineering that, um, kind of sidestep that. So for me, it's also an argument machine, you know, ad infinitum for me, I like doing probability distribution and that's why I have eight to 14% in my model when I try to see the simulation, you know, some of that. Yeah. And, and, and, and, you know, the one thing that, and, and, and started as a math major, but I don't remember for sure, but they're always the outliers to anything statistical. And so, you know, you have energy in there, for example, with a range, which I want to talk about briefly if I could at some point here, but, um, but at the moment there's, uh, obviously an oil shock going on and the cost of fuel oil anyway, uh, I'm not sure what it's doing to gas, but we're going to find out pretty soon. Cause the towns, uh, you got to pull the trigger at some point to set its, uh, upcoming rate. And the town manager was, uh, said at a joint meeting of the select board, you know, we haven't reset our rate yet. We're holding our breath. We were hopeful that things would steady out. Now they started to escalate again. He goes, we could see a 30% increase in our energy costs. Now, if, if, if you assume it's 30% on the total energy cost line item in the budget, that's a $500,000 increase to what's currently in the forecast. But based on information I got a few years ago, I pulled that number apart and there's electricity and there's gas. Uh, it was roughly 35% gas and 65% electricity. The oil shock doesn't mean electricity rates aren't going up as well, to the extent they are relying on oil. Um, you know, New England, there's basically no oil used for our electricity. Yeah. So, so if electricity goes up, but, but more modestly, that spike that the town manager was suggesting would be limited to gas. So you, you know, you have to be careful not to automatically, you know, get that light on. So I've asked the facilities director who is in charge of the contracts, um, to just give us the breakdown of electricity versus gas and kind of what's his view on what's going on there. I'll bring up, you know, we have an energy meeting tomorrow. So I'll forget that. I can bring up that question, but gas is less, you know, correlated to oil. I mean, it is somewhat, but it's more domestically produced. Uh, so it would go up, but it wouldn't necessarily a one-to-one correlation to what oil is. Yeah. And I looked at the, the forward 12 month rates for natural gas. And obviously they go up in the heating season and go back down, but it didn't, I didn't see the kind of spikes that 30% would. You have forward contracts. So, you know, it's, you're not on the spot market. Right. And it's a local commodity, not international pricing. So, but my point is doing bill statistical analysis wouldn't necessarily, maybe over a period of time, it would capture these aberrations. The snow and ice budget's another one. We busted the budget this year with the $600,000 above the budget. Um, and so, um, uh, but on the, uh, on the energy, I also just want to point out that, um, the rates that get set, you know, whenever you set some, you've got to set them pretty soon here for the upcoming heating cycle, um, the heaviest gas costs are between October and, you know, March. Right. Okay. And that's in fiscal 27. So if there's a shortfall, it's going to likely occur, uh, in fiscal 27 budget and budget enough, and, um, they'll have to deal with that by shifting funds somewhere along the way at town meeting or otherwise to cover it. Now, if that was a, if that sustains itself, or it looks like it's going to sustain itself into fiscal 28, yeah, we'll have to, we'll have to look at that line item and say, Hey, is there, is that got to be increased by some amount? But, you know, the answer is that that's going to be tracked as another variable. And all prices probably will have impact on school buses and. Yes. That's where you'll get more impact. That's true. And then you will, uh, the heat buyer will listen also. Um, but, uh, so I'm just, I'm just suggesting that as we anecdotally hear of these kind of one-off, yeah, but, um, this could go up by 30%. Um, you know, you can also deal in the budget with that type of a situation using, you know, you don't like to have your, we then used to rely on free cash or the general reserve fund to, uh, to, uh, help fund its operating budget as have many communities and a lot of them still do. And Waylon weaned itself off of using free cash to balance the operating budget a number of years ago. But that doesn't mean you still can't use free cash to balance the budget if you have an identifiable, what everybody agrees is kind of a one-off event. Um, you could use free cash, which is basically tax dollars that went unspent that now sit in the reserves. So you've already raised the money and instead of raising more money and building it into your budget so that it, you know, if you have this kind of shock and then you set your new, you know, energy line up here and then you grow that, that's hopefully not reality. I mean, it's shocks and go like this, then this, and then kind of trend, you know, some of the bases. So, um, I just think we have to be a bit nimble, um, um, um, the only other new item I have and, uh, uh, in responding to me on the, um, motion language in the, um, minutes, Carl, uh, in his email noted to me, um, I don't know if he mentioned this to you, Iris, that he went to the working group meeting the day after our meeting. He shared with them our recommendations that we voted on, uh, he said he didn't receive any particular pushback, uh, and apparently the schools had a preliminary computation of their salaries factoring in the new, uh, contract. And, um, um, it sounded like that there's reason for optimism that, um, what's being carried in the school budget in the forecast version seven at the moment and in Brian Keveney's model, uh, may be on the high side. Um, but the schools wanted to go back and triple check, uh, those calculations. And I asked Brian Keveney before I came to the meeting, uh, could he share any specifics with me? And he said, no, we're waiting, uh, to hear back from the schools. They're supposed to report back later this week, but hopefully that whatever Carl thought he heard, um, will hold, which simply supports the proposition that maybe people are coming around to thinking that we can get by fiscal 28 without having to ask for an override. Okay. Um, uh, by the way, you're right about the FY27 for the coming heating season, but the, uh, national, uh, national grid has submitted a request for an increase of eight to 10% over last year. Um, eight to 10, eight to 10, and, uh, for gas, for me, what we would pay for natural gas for a heating cost is coming when that, and that's what they're requesting. Now it's usually a little bit less. Somebody else has a national Google searches, but the national energy assistance directors association said it's going to be 5.8%. So who knows, but it's probably not 30% or it's not equivalent to the oil. Well, the other thing I don't, I've never, I've not seen the town's energy contract. So I don't know if the 30% that the town manager referred to could be off whatever rate the town has been paying, which possibly was a multi-year rate. And therefore there's been. Yeah. It could be like the bus, you know, renegotiating, you know, contracts. Yeah. It's just, you know, and the buses were cost of living for now will be five years. And then, you know, uh, you're going to get the effect of five years worth of not being able to. Uh, yeah, that's next year, right? Bus contract. Yeah, I think so. So anyway, I thought that was positive, um, a positive, uh, tidbit from Carl, but, uh, don't have any specific details, um, to share on that. So talk about energy, school payroll. Does anybody have any other questions on the version seven of the model that I sent out? Uh, I sent it out after our last meeting.
It's, um, September 8th evening when I got home.
I sent it using my personal email account because for some odd reason I was having trouble. Oh, I don't know. But my compliment is in doing those versions because we didn't have that last year and it's, it's so much better to be able to play with the numbers. So thank you. And I think even though we're using it as a forecast, it hopefully is giving everybody, particularly the newer folks here, an opportunity to begin to familiarize yourself with the various budget line items, just the dollars that are associated with them. And, uh, again, ask these kinds of questions that you're asking so that when the actual budget shows up here in late December, preliminary as it may be, to your point of, hopefully we'll be ahead of the game. And then we'll be able to focus on why did that change from kind of what we had in the forecast to, you know, this number. So that's all I had on my list on that topic. Those are your other questions. Is there anything further? Okay. If not, then I'm going to move us on to the next line item. So I think we talked about the multi-year budget. We, as part of that conversation, I think also talked about the discussion of the possibility of a Prop 2 and a half override. Do we want to, I guess, is there anything more that anyone wants to say on that note? In my mind, I think we've gotten the updates around conversations within the working group, sort of what's continuing to happen at the broader level. And I think it sounds to me like Carl was able to communicate sort of this board's current perspective on options for avoiding an override and certainly our thoughts and feelings there. And it sounds like at this moment in time, if I'm interpreting sort of what has happened and some of the conversations that have taken place, there's perhaps a broader sentiment to try to align with that as well. That's what I think I'm interpreting. I had, what, two items and then make sure others don't have questions.
I had a brief exchange with the chair of the select board over the weekend, who was, I copied on the draft minutes and both for the finance committee and SIPC, lucky me. And in both of them, there was a discussion about the potential use of excluded debt. And ultimately, as I think we've heard the point made, ultimately, whether something gets on the ballot is totally up to the select board. And excluded debt, it takes four of the five of them to vote, to put it on the ballot on a operating override. I believe it's a majority of three of five.
SIPC raised, and I think I mentioned this at the last meeting, SIPC raised the same issue that you all discussed last year about the town's recently adopted financial policy that relates to when one needs to use excluded debt, or one can use excluded debt. And the chair of the select board, it sounds like she's intending to go back and relook at that language, given that discussion. And perhaps consult with the state that provided a lot of that boilerplate information to the select board, to determine whether their view was that a four and a half million threshold was intended to be, you know, anything below that shouldn't be using excluded debt, anything above that, you know, must be using excluded debt. That's not been the history of Wayland. It's not typical of most communities. And so I simply made the point where you're going to do whatever you're going to do, but I think you want to just think about not curtailing flexibility by allowing for what we talked about at the last meeting, which is bundling potentially $1 million, $2 million, $3 million levy debt type projects. There are some communities, I did a little investigation, Sirburn, for example, over the last umpteen years, literally almost every capital project that requires debt, they've done with excluded debt. And they've done it with individual votes, so we need a firetruck, there's a vote on the ballot, so there might be six or eight questions. And the state generally has frowned, I mean, I don't know what they can do about it, but they've generally said, from a financial management perspective, that's really not the way to go. You really should do what, in fact, Wayland has done, which is build into your levy, tax levy analysis, some amount of annual levy debt, so that taxpayers, you know, it's sort of a consistent approach. And I think Sirburn's in the process of getting input from the state, so we'll see what happens with that. But in Wayland, I would say we already have done that, we've built in, you know, roughly $4 to $5 million of levy debt as our range, that we try to stay within.
And then it's just, Brian, the thought process there is just to make sure that as part of the levy, like debt service to the equivalent is part of the levy, as like a percentage? Yeah, that the debt service is part of what is built into your operating budget, so that you're not... Constantly going to voters to ask for things. Because it's a risky proposition that every year be going asking for three important capital items, and you can get a no vote on any of them. Whereas if you build it into your operating budget, the debt service, within the levy, it doesn't mean that people can't pick that project out of the list and downtown meeting floor and try to kick it out. So anyway, I'm hopeful that the slug board doesn't viscerally react to not using excluded debt as a potential tool. Because I think, from SIPSE's perspective, there are certain projects on the horizon that won't fit within the $4 to $5 million parameter of levy debt. And so you have to say, well, they don't fit, then you don't do them, but if you don't do them, there's going to be consequences, and excluded debt is there for a reason. So I think everybody should just have to stay tuned to that, and it may be at some point, the finance committee might want to stake out and pass that along. But at the end of the day, the slug board's in charge of the town's financial policies, and also they're the gatekeepers for the ballot. So potentially then there will be like two votes, right? One for override and also for excluded debt? It could be, and there have been in the past.
I'd say sitting here today, it's looking more like no operating override fiscal. The 27 election ballot, and an override for at least the school, $2 million school MSBA feasibility study request. But that's, A, we have to talk about, and that's where SIPSE's heading. The next committee has to discuss that, and ultimately it'll be up to the select board. Is $2 million something they don't want to put on the ballot, kind of like what happened last year? We're going to be talking later tonight about the SIPSE. Yes. The last thing, and this is just because I saw the newspaper sitting on the table here, and I know, Christian, you reacted to the story that I heard a couple weeks ago. And hopefully I didn't come off as pushing back too hard on you. We just have to be careful in our email communications. You left it open that I'm sure everybody else read that story and said, you know, what's this? I can't remember if Carl mentioned at the last meeting, I sent an email to the editor and said, thanks for covering, continuing to cover the town's financial situation. Appreciate it. I said, unfortunately, some of the information you used in your article was somewhat dated because it was like from June. And I said, you're just going to have to, unfortunately, try to stay up with the pace. Same person wrote the article that appeared on Friday. And I thought it was much better. I think it pretty much was up to date, at least through our last meeting. There's a couple of things we talked about last meeting that aren't reflected in that article. But I think the editor got the message that things are moving at a pretty rapid clip. And so they just need to be a little bit careful.
So I did that as a resident, not as a finance committee member. But I've done that from time to time. The other issue that I find is it just bothersome. I understand they have to do it, but they use AI quite a bit to recaps of meetings. And AI isn't perfect for sure in picking off who's saying what. And so inevitably, quotes get attributed or statements get attributed to people who sometimes weren't even at the meeting. So if it's something I said and it's attributed to somebody else, I'll send an email to the editor saying, if you care to correct that, here you go. But I can't spend my whole time. No, I've had that experience. And that was their answer to me was that it's done by AI. In fact, last year, I mean, it was a trivial comment. But either we can do something or we can't do something. And I said, can't. And it didn't pick up the teeth. And it says, you know, Bill Huss can do it. And it's like, wait a minute. That's the opposite. And they said it's an AI thing. So, yeah, they do 100%. AI is much better today than last year. But the good news is at least that paper ends up in everybody's mailbox. Yes, I'm glad they have it. And so if, going forward, if any of you see things that, your comment was more questioning, like, do we really have the right information? I don't know if you're being facetious or not. I think I've seen some of it. But, yeah, that's the worry that, you know, you're trying to educate the public. And they're trying their best. So, but if anybody sees anything, you can always bring it up at a meeting. And, yeah. It's interesting. They don't, I mean, I don't know. This is a broad clip. They don't seem to do interviews. No, they could interview Carl. And they could interview, you know, rather than base it on just, you know, me and me. Yeah, at least perform before printing. I'm going to reroute us back to the topic at hand if you all have fun. Very beautiful. Well, I've related to Proposition 2 1⁄2 that he's covering. I've heard. Thank you for the meeting. I'm just going to bring this guy to the topic at hand. And educating the public. Yep, exactly. Anyway. Exactly. Just before we get a little off track here. I think what I'm hearing is we got the updates related to the possibility of a Prop 2 1⁄2. The thing that stuck out to me, and, again, I sort of say this to perhaps, in my mind, recap my thinking, which has not changed from last week or from the additional version simulations that you did for us, which is there's, based on the updated numbers, an increased likelihood of there being a gap. But the gap amount being relatively small, under half a million dollars. And so, and there still is some probability, albeit, I think I would call 10% a small probability of there being even a surplus. And so, if we look at the distribution, the largest probability is there being a small shortfall, and the question is how to fill that shortfall. And I think that, given that data point, those data points at this point in time, my thinking has not changed, that that would not be enough for me to. Me too. I agree. And, again, the sense I got from Carl's note to me is that if, in fact, the school triple-checking their payroll turns out the way it sounded, that line item for schools may drop back down by some amount that will put a dent in that otherwise small-looking number. That would be great. That would be great. Yeah, absolutely. Is there anything else related to that? If not, I'm going to hand it over to you, Brian, for the SIPC conversation, which I think will probably be the bulk portion of our evening, and where I anticipate you all will have lots of questions, and also moving forward with just discussion on the FinCom annual report as well, which I, again, anticipated would have taken the majority of tonight's meeting. But anything else related to the Prop 2 1⁄2 conversation at this time? Okay. It will be a rolling item continued, so as easy as anything, we can discuss as well next week. All right, Brian, let's move on to our next agenda item, which is the capital budget for fiscal year 28 and then the five-year capital plan process. I think, depending on wherever you want to start, maybe there's an open question, if you all are less familiar. Recently, Wayland has created the SIPC, which is a particular capital improvement planning committee, and really their raison d'etre, if you will, is to ensure that there is a cross-functional collaborative group that comes together to look at all of the capital projects that are being committed by various persons, departments, schools, anyone, anyone and everything, really, and that there's one central intake where they're able to evaluate all elements of the capital request, be that the scope of the project, the cost, the resourcing required to make that happen. So think about it really multifunctionally. Are we, as a town, ready to fund and appropriate funds? What's the cost? But are we ready? And the ready part includes making sure there's clearly defined scope, making sure that there's a clearly defined need, making sure that we understand who the sponsor of the project are. Brian, I don't want to take over, but this is all correct, I hope. Get you on the committee.
And really looking at it from that lens of just making sure there's a real element of ready before something gets slotted, and then this ability to look at the short term, what are we doing this year? What are we asking for? What are we doing in the next five years? What are we doing ideally at some point even longer than that? And the goal there, I think, is to be able to anticipate what's coming down the pipeline. And when you can anticipate sort of over a broader timeframe, also then be able to, I would say the same goal for the budget, like normalize some of the lumpiness of the distribution of projects. So if you think about your house, you need a roof on your house, you're going to know you need a roof on your house every 20 to 30 years. Maybe you shouldn't spend aside money for that, or maybe you end up needing something else, right? Like similar, I think, idea generally just on a larger scale and with, I think, more varied projects and types of requests. Brian, I don't know if you want to add anything to that, but that's how I end up in your role. I think that's perfect. And the only add is that it's taken on another focal point to the looking out over at least the next eight to 10 years, is that to extend a big chunk of that capital budget gets funded with levy debt. It has a direct impact on the debt service on the operating budget, which has the structural deficit. So the two, they've always been linked, but they're even more linked now. And the process, you know, like I said, it's an intake. CIPSI makes their recommendations on what the capital budget looks like. That then goes, as I understand it, Brian, correct me if I'm wrong, to the town manager. They then do kind of, I don't know if I would call it like a last minute check or a validation of sorts, but they then, I believe, also run that list back through their department heads, or certainly they did last year. And then they're the ones, the town itself is who FinCom then receives the capital budget from. So we don't receive it directly from CIPSI. We receive it from the town. And just to give you a little bit like context for why it's important that we do this last year, when we received the capital budget from the town compared to the CIPSI recommendation, there is a relatively substantial delta to the tune of over $5 million between what CIPSI had recommended and what came to the FinCom. And that then generated, as you can imagine, a lot of conversation over why the delta, what were the requests that were coming in for, had those requests been vetted, and what there needed then to be some substantial vetting, I would say, on the part of this committee to look at those requests to understand why the additional funds. And if you imagine the initial CIPSI recommended budget was somewhere eight and a half under nine. And so to add, and then to see a budget proposed to FinCom of over $13 million, that's a substantial delta in terms of an increase. And then fundamentally, the work that this committee did to review that list moved a couple things around in terms of what we felt was perhaps more urgent and also reduced a couple line items to try to bring the total capital budget back down. And we landed somewhere in the neighborhood of around a $10 million capital budget, which is what you saw go before town. It was in what timeline? It was very quick. I think we received the capital budget in February, and I think we turned it around with all of our recommendations before March. It was very, very quick. And we did not have enough time, because I think if you had given us more time, I suspect we possibly would have even gotten closer to the CIPSI recommendation. We really, really did not have a lot of time. I think we did it in the span of three weeks. It was very quick. And so that's where us having the opportunity to, with Brian, to go through what we're looking at to understand the items now, give us the chance to, if we have questions, we can actually meet with department heads. So historically, we have met with department heads to understand their capital budget line items and just ask any questions we might have on the various needs for capital items and understand the impact of any trade-offs that are under consideration. Meet with CIPSI to understand their reasoning, right? Like, this is what, going through this earlier, gives us the chance to actually do that. And that really is, in my mind, the budget work. If you think about it, part of the goal here is to make sure that we feel comfortable with the appropriations and the amount of those appropriations, and that the appropriations are timely, right? So are we actually prepared? I don't know if you disagree, but in my mind, that's part of the scope of the committee, that are the appropriations timely, right? Are we giving money that then is going to be used for these capital projects, and are the projects then prepared and ready to kick off? So those, I think, in my mind, are some of the frame of questions and frame of mind that you could look at this capital budget. And from the document you sent, or it's in the minutes, does it stand at $12.6 million right now? Is that? I'm sure I do. So in the CIPSI minute from the second, I think, there is an Exhibit B, right? So it totals to $12.6 million. Is that the current recommendation? When I hold that question, I'm going to stay with the general first before we get too deep in the weeds. And I'll tell you why I had Irish distribute the minutes in a minute. But so, yes, it's everything Irish just said. So that eliminates me having to say that. The lateness with which the Finance Committee got the capital budget and five-year capital plan from the capital manager was an aberration. Historically, that was the first budget to be delivered, typically late November. And the Finance Committee typically tried to get through it, get all its questions answered, come up with their recommendation by the end of the year, so that the capital budget and five-year capital plan were kind of set aside. In kind of time before everything had to go to the warrant, there might be some special request that came up that caused the Finance Committee to have to reopen or decide if they wanted to reopen their deliberation and ultimately include that request. But what happened last year was just an aberration, and it was largely the fact that SIPSE didn't get started until mid-September, and the bylaw requires it to complete its report by October 15th, which was never going to happen. And so by the time we got through all our work, our initial draft of our report was issued toward the end of January, and we had to do an addendum. That was the fiscal 27 capital budget. And then we issued an addendum by the end of February that covered the five-year capital plan. And the finance director who puts together the town manager's capital budget, five-year capital plan, basically waited until he could see what was going to be delivered from SIPSE. And even though we had been providing copies of our real-time spreadsheets of what we were delivering, and even though the finance director and the town manager are ex-officio members of the SIPSE, with the intention being that there be some collaboration throughout that process, that didn't happen last year. And so they finally, at the end of December, said, we can't wait any longer. The finance director just did the same thing he's always done, which is he looked at the prior five-year plan that appeared in the warrant. He more or less said, anything that was in the first four years, that comes forward. I'm going to look at new requests, of which there were numerous. And if there's a particular case that he felt was justifying getting included in the fiscal 27 budget, he'd put it in, but he either then had to knock something out, which he just made that decision, or he went looking for projects that were still open and trying to get people to close them out and turn the money back so he could use that. So he began that process in late December and ultimately gave to the town manager his recommendation. Pretty sure the town manager just adopted whatever the finance director gave him. And it looked very much like the standard process from the past. And anyway, fast forward to this year, we're on track to get our report done by October 15th. We'll see what happens. Some things haven't gone quite as smoothly as we thought they might in the collaboration area this year, in spite of what occurred last year. The other thing I'll say is last year, we took a, hopefully it's the right term, I think it's a legal term, we took a de novo review. That is, we looked at every capital item in the prior year's capital plan across five years, four years, the last four years in the five-year plan. We took a look at every single one of those items. We looked at the new requests that came in. And we established our own priorities based on input we received from the department of managers. And the other key that's important for you to understand, because it didn't make it into your report in last year's warrant, but if you look at the prior, the 25 annual town meeting warrant, you can just look at it at your leisure. But on page 16, there was a disclosure that talked about annual capital spending guidelines, which were, and I think still are, historic financial guidelines that were put in place by a former town administrator along with the finance director with buy-in from the finance committee. And they set out ranges for how much money is available in each budget cycle. So for free cash, it had a million and a half to $2 million for levy borrowing, three to $5 million. Those are the two big categories. And so what SIPC chose to do last year, and this goes to, in part, addressing the variances that appeared in the document that Carl circulated way back in July, which looked at the variances between the SIPC recommendation for fiscal 28 and what appeared in the town manager's recommendation and in the warrant, is that SIPC said, well, we're going to try to live within those guidelines that historically have been used by the finance committee when they evaluated town manager's budget. And as a result, we said we only have $3 to $5 million of levy debt available to us. So we prioritized all the items afresh. Didn't matter to us where they appeared in the prior five-year plan. That was a big difference philosophically with where the finance director was. He still operates with the notion that it's in the plan. Unless you have a good reason to move it or take it out, that's what's going to come forward. And then we'll bicker over any little changes, quote, little changes. And then you're going to add on the fifth year, right? That's his philosophy. SIPC said last year, we're not operating under that philosophy. We think our charge is to look at this anew, afresh. So anyway, that's what we did. We then said, okay, we've prioritized everything, low, medium, high priorities. We said, maybe next year we'll get to a more numerical ranking, make it a bit more precise, maybe ask for input from department heads, which we actually did this year. And then we said, okay, now how much money do we have in each of those five years to be able to spend on those capital items? And then we could prioritize what was most important and match it up with the funding. And the biggest difference in what we did and what you saw for fiscal 28, if I can just stay focused on that, was the high school septic system. We looked at that and said, you know, that really likely should be handled with excluded, I'm sorry, we put it as levy debt and that used up a chunk of our levy capacity, levy borrowing capacity. And once we did that, a bunch of items that were in the prior year fiscal 28 column that we're relying on using levy debt, we pushed out one year. And once we pushed that out a year, inevitably in that year, then pushed something out another year, another year, until it went off into year six, right? So that one item created a whole series of timing issues that probably explain 90% of the variances that you all saw and I'm sure were aggravating, but that's the reason that happened. Ultimately, you all recommended using excluded debt as did the town manager and the finance director. Select board chose not to do that as we talked about. And as a result, the levy debt exceeded the $3 to $5 million. It ended up at $6 million something for fiscal 28. Now, again, thresholds are intended to be thresholds and if all of you involved in the finance committee at the time said we can live with that and the reason that folks live with it is because the finance director was saying I'm going to use this capital stabilization fund to pay the debt service on the $2 million. So it's really like excluded debt, but it's not. And the same thing on free cash to accept that we were going to drive ourselves over free cash. We just pushed those out. There were a handful of pretty important differences which are going to carry over to this year, but just sticking with Carl's analysis, which you all should have seen whether you've had time to look at it. I basically just took all the variances from the detail I had. Is that just sent out? I think Carl sent this two meetings ago and I don't think it got resent for this meeting, but I'll send it again after this. That would be great. Thank you. And that way I won't have spent a lot of time on it tonight, but there were a couple of large items that were not necessarily timing that actually are going to appear again this year in the SIPSE side of the ledger. There's a potential project brewing at the old landfill on Route 20, which is on the opposite side of the street to the entrance where the current transfer station is. And there's a strip of land plus a capped old landfill. And there was select boards set up a subcommittee to review options for using that site. And there's a bunch of different things they've talked about. That's a priority of the select boards to somehow get that used for some useful purpose. And there had been a half a million dollars included last year this time at a DPW labeled somehow dealing with the cap on the landfill. And when we met with that department head, he said, well, we had a problem because the whole site overgrew with trees and things. The roots started getting into the old landfill and were starting to threaten the cap. DP said, you need to deal with this. And so he put a bunch of money three or four years ago in the budget to address it. And between then and last year, they said, we're just going to mow down all the trees, which hopefully will kill all the roots and that'll stop the problem and we won't have to spend a half million dollars. Right? And so when he came before us last year, he said, well, so it's really not for that purpose. He said, no, I'm leaving that in, even though he didn't change the description, I'm leaving that in as seed money for whatever additional planning has to be done on using that site. And we said, well, that's fine, but we're not going to approve that for inclusion in the plan until we have more visibility in what that project is. So we put it into a separate bucket in our report that said this may be something that the town wants to pursue, probably needs to do it in the form of an article so that you can say to the town, here's our vision, here's the long-term plan. If there's more money to be spent by the town, here's kind of a rough estimate of what that's going to be. And by the way, we need a half million dollars to start down that path. That money appeared again this year under the same description because it was in the town manager's plan. So we said, don't put it in, but it made it in to the plan that you all saw and put in. And will that bring new growth or something? It depends what they put there. And if they put apartments there, for example, maybe, at least the non-affordable units. Some of the other options, probably not much in the way of more recreational use, might be a town cost. So that's, our point was, we're not going to agree to recommending a half million dollars be spent on something in the scope of which we really don't know what its budgetary impact is. We may think it's great, but we need to know what the plan is. So just, that was one of the biggest differences that was other than timing. And it's possible that will turn out to be, again, this year, a difference. I don't know yet. But it's also turning out this year that we're coming up short on the amount of available levy debt. Because this year, let me just see, I think that was the biggest item. The rest were just... That's because it was septic? Yeah. Yeah. So it's not needed for that particular purpose. Everything else was generally timing or there were some errors in what you ended up getting. And we had pointed those errors out to the finance director and the town manager and they just didn't have time to correct them. And so this year as we're going through the departmental request, as expected, certain items that are in the five-year plan and the warrant, department heads have not requested because they told us last year they didn't need the money for that purpose. So we'll attempt to get those cleaned up. But that's kind of where the collaboration... I mean, we thought we were collaborating by pointing these things out, but they just didn't get handled, right? What was the discussion about excluded versus levy debt on this uptake? You said it was switched or at least there were some discussion back and forth? Yeah, so in March when the select board was considering your recommendation to use excluded debt, the finance director gave them several options other than excluded debt, one of which was just use free cash to fund it, which he recommended against. One was to fund the whole thing out of the capital stabilization fund, which he recommended against because it would have used up most of the funds in there. And the third was to basically each year fund the debt service on the $2 million levy debt from the cap stabilization fund so you wouldn't have to raise it as taxation. So it's in levy debt, it's in the debt expense in the budget, same as excluded debt. But for levy calculation purposes, excluded debt then gets reversed out. In this case, in the indirect tab of your model, you'll see a line item for a cap stabilization fund. And the number's wrong, but it's close. It's supposed to match up with the debt service that appears in the debt tab for $2 million septic loan. The problem is mechanically to get the money out of the cap stabilization fund, each year you're going to have to ask town meeting for a vote, which requires two-thirds, to take the money out of the capital stabilization fund to be used for debt service. So that's a risk, right? If you can't get two-thirds any one of those years, 20 years. This decision was made back in March. Isn't something well, yeah, let me say it was visited with the select board and I think that optionality contributed towards the select board choosing basically to do nothing. They didn't vote anything at that time. They didn't vote to do that mechanic. Fast forward to what's in this forecast model, the finance director, having recommended that, has included that in his model at the moment. All things be equal, you're going to see that in the budget that shows up. The finance committee has to still weigh in at some point and say, are we comfortable with that mechanic? There's nothing we can do at the moment about the fact didn't get vote as excluded debt other than if the opportunity presents itself to try again, right? And so we could say, we don't like that mechanic, too much risk, because if you get the timing, you don't get the vote, now you're short, you got to plug the hole, right?
So, but anyway, that, using that item sort of allowed them to stay within the levy debt parameters, technically, financial engineering, I guess. So, when you have time, you can look at last year's variance sheet that was sent around by Carl a couple meetings ago. If anybody has any specific questions, happy to answer them. In May, we looked at every single variance, and in May, sent a list of questions to the town manager saying, and the finance director, please respond, and here we are in September, we still haven't gotten responses. So, we chose to just push on, and to accept there's anything important to ask, we ask the department managers. So, that's, I'm going to close the book on last year, this year process, trying to speed up here, we're taking a slightly different approach. We spent some amount of time revising what they call the CIP submittal form, capital improvement program planning form, and that's where the department heads complete a standardized form describing the project, putting in which year they need the money, or multiple years, justification, et cetera, and we added a bunch more requested information, including a ranking, numerical ranking, based on several criteria, so that as we looked at things, if we were short on funding, we could look to within that departmental request, how to have each of their requests within their own department stack up, and then we also can look across departments if we run into issues. We had hoped to get that out to them by July 1st, again got delayed, unfortunately not on our end, and it didn't get out until like the third week of July, and they were told you got to get this back to us in like two weeks, and they were gracious enough to do their best to get it back to us, and again, this is pretty early in the process for collecting that information, historically that would go out in mid-October, and they'd have until early November to get it back, and so you should be aware that there very well could be revisions and or changes that occur well after October 15th, and CIPSE completes its report, but having looked at everything, we decided that we still were trying to get a sense from the finance director, what should we think about in terms of our government on our financial resource allocation, should we be using what was in the warrant a couple years ago, or should we be using something else? Again, we didn't get any input, so I suggested, and the rest of the members said, okay, we simply said, we're going to take the five-year plan that's in the warrant from this past spring, there's a chart that shows the funding sources in that plan, we're going to tie into the total amounts shown in there, and we're going to use that as a governor as we allocate projects, even though we knew that we got a bunch of new requests that weren't in the plan, and in most of those cases, department heads putting in new requests themselves, reordered some of the requests that were in the five-year plan, they moved them out, and I give you an example, one of the larger examples that you're going to see, I think in fiscal 30, there was a couple hundred thousand dollars to do some upgrades to the fire sensors at the middle school, this fire alarm system, and apparently, somewhat surprisingly, apparently, the facilities group in the last six months, whoever the vendor is on that contract that supports it, said we're not going to support that system anymore, you can't operate a school and have fire suppression system, not have part breaks, you've got to be able to replace it, and so they have a store of some parts and things, and they think they can do, but they said, we've got to move that 200,000 up to fiscal 28, this is unintentional, we didn't know what's going to happen, and by the way, we're going to have to go to a new vendor, so we're going to have to rewire the whole system, et cetera, et cetera, that 200 now is 976,000, okay, so that went from fiscal 30 to fiscal 28, from 200,000 to 976,000, it was not in the five year plan, he said, well, I can only do one fire alarm system in any given summer, because they have to do the schools in the summer, so I think we had either, I think we had local schools slotted in the fiscal 28 plan, $476,000, he recommended pushing that out to fiscal 29, he had Clefitt Hill school in fiscal 29, he recommended pushing that out to fiscal 30, that at least took a little bit of the pressure off of the levy debt issue in fiscal 28, we asked the question, because all those fire alarm things were back-ended in last year's plan, when they met with us, we said, how would you feel if something happens and we didn't deal with that right away, and so we said, go back and think about it and come back and tell us if you're comfortable in both when you do it and how much money you need for it, and they came back and said, we're okay, we're going to move stuff forward, but it all doesn't have to happen at once, we're fine, we're comfortable, everything's working, and then you get this story with the middle school, so we asked the same question this year, are you comfortable moving the low-car fire alarm back one year, Clay Pit back one year, said yes, yes, yes, so those are the kind of things that we focused on, but I'm just giving you one example, the second example we talked about last week, the MSBA feasibility study was slotted in fiscal 30s, and the five-year plan is a million dollars in levy debt,
the SIPSE was well aware of the project, but we did not include it in our recommended five-year plan because we didn't feel we had sufficient information on both the timing of it, the amount of what was needed, and we still hadn't received information on the long-term cost and the scope of the elementary and middle school projects, so in our report there's a little section of table that shows these items we're aware of, we didn't think they were ready for primetime to slot it into the plan, the town manager put the million dollars in the plan, fiscal 30, levy debt, you heard last week, now they want to be able to tell MSBA in the spring next year that the town has approved that funding, by the way, it's now two million, not one million, and so we don't have levy capacity the finance director recommended doing this excluded debt, so that's what you're going to see as our recommendation. So I'm giving you two examples of the pull and pull in this process. We met with all of the department managers, we reviewed, in the past, they pretty much only submitted in their CIP submittal one year to the upcoming budget year, we asked them to put in the CIP for all five years, so again, that was more work than they've had to do in the past, and we asked them questions on all years, obviously it gets a little more fuzzy, but further out you get.
As the meeting with department heads, the finance committee can obviously make whatever request it wants, presumably through the town manager if it's town staff. Part of, as I understand it, part of the reason CIP was put together was to take a little bit of work off of the finance committee who did, in fact, used to meet with department heads to vet some of the things that appeared in the budget that arrived on its table and get directly questions answered, right? Part of the notion was CIPC, by virtue of the fact that they're going to be the first ones meeting with department managers, will do that work and presumably could both in its report and if need be the finance committee's representative to CIPC could show up and help address any further questions, just so the department managers don't have to be pulled into yet another volunteer board. As we found out last year, as Ira said, undoubtedly all those same department heads are going to end up having to go meet with the finance director and the town manager. In a perfect world, the town manager and the finance director would review our report, try to figure out are there questions and maybe those department heads aren't happy with how the CIPC prioritized something, so they go plead their case to or provide more information to the town manager finance director, who may have different priorities.
I'll give you one more advance notice here. There's another project in the five-year plan. It was in at $450,000, which is the second installment on front end planning and design money for the Route 20 corridor where the town, if it does a certain amount of work up front, can attempt to get on a state list that if approved, the project is ultimately approved, the state won't pay for actual construction, which the DPW director estimates the work that they have in is likely going to cost upwards of $8 to $10 million. So by spending $7 to $800,000 on the front end allows you then to be in a position to get on that list and then maybe five or six years later it gets built. That's also a priority of the select board. And that money had been pushed to the back of the five-year plan a couple years ago. The town manager at the behest of the select board at the last minute pushed part of it up $250,000 and the finance committee had to reopen the capital budget to accommodate it and said, well, we don't have any funding sources for you, so we're going to use a bucket called Receipts from Sale Real Estate Reserve Fund, which was used a couple years ago for that purpose. And the same fund was used to fund the Snakebrook Dam, $1,0004,000, if you remember that project which ultimately is getting funded with federal and state grants. That money will end up back in the bucket. Anyway, SIPSE said, we don't think that is a high enough priority to include in our reports if we didn't. It got in the town manager report. Fast forward this year, we have at the moment another phase of the roof to be done on this building. We have the 900 and some of a thousand for the middle school that came in. We moved out part of that. We said we can't fund that item as it's been funded in the five-year plan with levy debt. We're going to have to recommend using some other source or move it out. We're recommending that same real estate reserve fund which was used for the first part payment. Here we are on the verge of draft to report. We met with IT. I'm not going to get into any detail because for those of you that
boss and make sure you got buy-in if you're going to change your request. As of last week, he came back with a revised request. We haven't met with him yet. Probably will do so in a week. He's now gone from zero for certain category of expense. Again, I'm not going to get into great detail. Needless to say, it deals with infrastructure and cybersecurity and those kinds of important things in the network context and protecting data, et cetera. He's gone from zero in his initial request to $700,000.
We're going to talk about that this Wednesday night at our meeting. We now have to both understand what priority that has, which I think we talked about last week on our committee. We think it's pretty high, maybe higher than the roof on this building, certainly higher than Route 20, which will be there forever. You don't want to have a big hole in your network if you can help it. We're trying to get a sense of the town
roof. That's the approach we're trying to use. We haven't gotten a response yet. You may receive something ultimately again from the town manager that has got different prioritization than what SIPSE ultimately thinks. That's fine because we're advisory, as I said to him. I wanted to review a little bit of that because those items are going to be in front of us at some point. I think most of it, though, 90% of what we're recommending is coming right out of last year's five-year plan. Some of the line items have gone up because cost estimates have gone up. Some of the items have gone down. Salt shed was in there at a million dollars. It's gone down to $500,000. There's these movements and we're trying to balance everything out. When we get the capital budget for the town manager, my hope is there'll be six to ten items over a five-year period of time. To your point of what happened last year, the finance committee will have to say, okay, these two different places have different sense of what's important to this committee.
I think it's going to be smoother. What's your sense of timing? What's the next action item for us?
We have to have our final report in and we think we will by October 15th. You got two sets of minutes that I suggest you look at at your leisure because it's got all the nuts and bolts of what we're looking at. You're going to be able to familiarize yourself going forward of what's likely to be in front of us probably in late November from the town manager. Late November is when we have the two in front of us. My only point to Carl was we can have a couple more of these sessions as I further update you closer to October 15th on where we send it up. You'll be able to review the report on your own understanding it's advisory to the town manager. Until we receive as a committee an actual proposed budget and five-year plan, hopefully late November, we'll finally have something we can deliberate. That doesn't mean we can't start collecting questions. The more we do the the more we do from now until the end of November,
the better off we're going to be. Did I run over? Any questions? I'll stop there. Is any of what I just said at all confusing? Are there things from last year that the two of you that were on the committee last year want to raise with me? No. I think if I were new, the things I would be looking at the capital budget and looking at what are the line items? If you have questions about the line items themselves, what they are, what they comprise, why they're necessary, great thing to ask. Then the next thing
are what are we sometimes sometimes it's levy debt, sometimes it's free cash, sometimes it's turnbacks, you'll see turnbacks listed, where is the actual money coming from to fund these projects? I think having an appreciation for the fact that we could also
change, having an appreciation for something might be added, but the funding source might be a turnback. Effectively, the money was already spent and now is basically being moved over to another item, which maybe that particular department has deemed is now more important. It could be something like that, just as an example of do you think that's permissible because really frankly the debt services stayed the same right? There are a lot of questions there, but those things that I would tease out if it were my first pass. What I tend to do in my review is compare the two what you get from the town and what you get from SIPC and any differences and start to make judgments about which group we
But by November, by October, shouldn't it be the same? We have was. That's what I was alluding to, and I think that's why I should be very clear for anyone watching this. I did not bring up the historical context because I have a problem with the difference, but I want you all to appreciate that you might not always receive a budget for the capital plan. And looking at the SIPC report, they may not always be one and the same. They will have variance, and that variance is because you have the numbers come from different people, and there are changes that happen, and recommendations. It's an advisory, so the pound can make adjustments, and they do. Let me give you an example. This goes back three years. I mentioned this real estate reserve fund. So sometimes the town sells property. The last large sale was the site where the apartments are on Route 20. It used to be a septage facility there, and the town sold that land, and Southbury got a little piece of it, and the town of Wayland took a couple million dollars and stuck it in this reserve fund. And that reserve fund can be used for other real estate-related projects. It requires a town meeting vote. And two or three years ago, when we were trying to deal with the escalating year-over-year tax rate, and the community-centered debt had been floated, and it was an $11, $12 million project. And because of the way the debt works, you get a year and a half's worth of interest in the first year, so there's a bump of some substance. And so we were trying to figure out ways to lower the impact on the taxpayer. So a couple of us said, well, here's this real estate fund. It's already funded. It's not going to require raising taxes. It's in the same general area as what we want to use it for, the community center. So we requested input from the finance charter. Can we use that to pay a piece of the debt service, basically the six-month extra of interest, sort of a one-time shot? And that would lower the year-over-year need to raise taxes. And after a few back-and-forths and finally town council weighing in to the debate, said, no, you can use it for that purpose. And by the way, it requires a majority vote of town meeting. And at the time, the select board said, well, no, we're in control of that fund. And we said, it's not in the state statute. It's not in the town bylaws. The finance committee is responsible to produce a budget, which includes funding sources. We make the motion on town meeting floor. Town meeting ultimately has the authority to approve both what gets spent and how it gets funded. So, no, we don't see that as the case. And that went to town meeting and it passed. Fast forward two years, I mentioned those two items earlier. I think it was fiscal 25, Snakebrook Dam, and the 250 for the first part of the Route 20 study. The 250 was the FinCom's direction as to how it was going to get funded. The million four was the finance director's direction and how that would be funded. And, again, I think there was some sentiment that the select board's in charge of that fund. That same fund was proposed to be used, was going to be used to fund the feasibility study of the Orchard Hill property. It was $350,000. And, again, the way they talked about it was like, you know, we control that. We have yet to see any evidence that the select board controls. What they do control is telling the town manager, when you construct your budget, don't use that as a funding source unless we tell you to use it as a funding source. They can do that. And so it's possible that in the case of that Route 20 item that I mentioned, if CIPSE ends up recommending using that fund again for the second piece of that, it's quite possible that that funding source won't appear in the town manager's recommendations. And this goes to Iris' point. It will still be up to the finance committee to say, looking across all the items we have to fund and where it's going to be funded from, we potentially will have two different places to take it from. And I've already had the chair of the select board yet again say, I'm going to have to do some research on that because I think the select board controls that reserve fund. I said fine. But so I think, you know, it's important to understand that this committee, while now not all powerful, when it comes to operating capital budgets, what appears a town meeting sort of emanates out of this committee. A big discussion I remember last year were the baseball fields and the contact to the septic system. And there was a question of, well, if you do the septic system, will you end up tearing up the baseball fields anyway? Are the savings to be had? The baseball fields tended to get wet, you know? And so it ended up that the projects were separated and the septic doesn't really affect the baseball field. But that was one of the differences between, I think, the CIPSE and the town was the inclusion of baseball fields. And again, an example of our process there, I don't think, maybe with one exception of the five members, I don't think anybody was viscerally opposed to the project. It was in the five-year plan, albeit out in fiscal. It was in the plan twice, in error, but it was in fiscal 29 and 30. But with one exception, I don't think anybody was viscerally opposed to the project. But when it was first presented by the DPW director, of all people, the rationale was what you just described. We're going to be hopefully doing this work in the septic baseball fields adjacent. The inference to us was it's going to likely then rip up the outfield for the leaching fields or whatever. And all we said was, please share with us the scope of work and the estimated cost. We just need to understand that. We kept asking and we kept asking from like early November all the way until January. And as we got close to the end, I found online a set of plans dated in October of 2025 that showed the adjacency. But the leaching field didn't encroach on the baseball field. So we said, OK, we still understand that maybe there's some efficiencies of moving dirt over here and moving dirt over there. But you really can't say that you're going to be ripping up one to do the other. And then there was someone else. I don't know if it was on the finance committee. I think it was on the finance committee. Maybe you, Bill, talked about for short money, there's repairs that could be made to the infield to get it playable again. Because the argument was we can't use it, right? And so, you know, we were trying to do our diligence. And then it just appeared in the town manager's recommended budget, right? But it was an example where the finance committee actually made a change and made a difference. You pushed back and said to the town manager, if you don't change your plan, I think you said you're going to go to town meeting with that item excluded. Right. Correct. Is the budget, if you read the bylaws, the budget has to be approved by Finnecom. Yep. So at the end of the day, we have to come to a consensus of our seven, got to get four votes on a budget in order to bring it before the town. And in fact, I think actually, we were, we generally had actually a consensus on making those changes to the capital. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Actually, after talking about it, I think, I think there was, it was a six to one. Like, many of us felt that, that there's changes needed. And the panel was very amenable to making it. Yeah, they were. And they were. And so you should take that as well. That the point, though, is, I think the point you're making is like, we have levers to pull here. And so look closely at it. I know, it's a question. It's not a rubber stamp. And that it's, it's not just a rubber stamp, but it is, there is work to be done to actually make any changes that need to be made. And the other thing I'll say, and I'll always say it again, when we get a little closer to the actual budget, I've been wearing two hats, right? And there's time, there's been times on SIPC where I begin asking questions that really I have my finance committee hat on. And Kelly Lappin says, no, it's not our, that's not our problem. We're staying focused on our mission. When the time comes, I, you know, I'm happy to answer questions of how SIPC and, you know, the report should stand on its own, let me put it that way. And, and the report hopefully will be approved by a majority, if not a unanimous vote of SIPC to submit it. And I will have my views probably on one or more items, but it might not prevent me from, you know, voting to submit it. And, and I might articulate a different position when it comes time for us to debate it. So, but I don't, I don't want, I don't want to be in a position of, of, of lobbying SIPC's view. I'm just advertising this now. I know it's going to be hard probably, but, but I also want to be a resource that you're not spinning your wheels, wondering if I know we had the discussion and I at least can, what you'll more be spinning your wheels on is, well, what were the town manager and finance director thinking about? And that's just a question of having them in when their plan is ready. As typically the finance director would do with the town manager, they would come in and present. There's a report, but they'd come in and take a few preliminary questions. Right. But again, my hope is while there still likely will be some differences, it's going to be a, a, a much smoother and more timely process this year, which was good news. Absolutely. It gives us more time to do that kind of work that you're hearing about. Because everything we've been sharing with you, certainly last year, I think because everything was new and everyone was working through the process happened very, very quickly. Whereas I think we have more time to be thoughtful this year. With that, I'm going to move us along if that's all right with everyone for the FinCom's annual report. And Brian, would you like me to forward to everyone at this point? For those of you who are looking at your outlook, Brian had a version of the annual report with his comments that I just disseminated. You can't distribute something like that to all of you if it's coming from one member. Try to be cautious. We do it at a meeting, just prior to a meeting. So is this, is this what Carl sent or is this? I took, Carl circulated. I, I, I did a, a couple of red lines to it. And I just wanted to tell you what I did and why I did it. And the rest of you can decide whether any or all of what I suggested is worthy of inclusion in Carl's version, which I thought was well done. And there's one discussion item I had at the very end.
So everybody see that word document. It comes from Iris, right? Okay. 847. It just got sent. Yeah. Oh, my God. It's showing up on the tablet, but it's not showing up yet. I got it.
No. That's, you haven't received it yet. Yeah. I, I, I, I got to the, like, the notification. Are you on the FinCom? Yeah. Again, depending on how you have your email box set up, it could get stuck in a, um, yeah, I just saw the pop-up and then it may have, it may have linked itself up with a Carl's prior email. So I, I have my email set up chronologically. Why don't you do a comparing you from. And your red lighting or the yellow highlights. It's yellow. Okay. You know, and I don't see. Yeah. I also, Brian. Any. Okay. Well, I'll just, why don't I just. Why don't you walk us through. I'll just walk you through what I did. So, um, it said, in general, I thought the report was fine. Um, been through a few of these in the past, uh, at the top of the report, I, I didn't have a chance to talk to Carl about, but top of the report, uh, Carl had, um, on the left side, uh, the 20, 27 members of the committee on the right side of the 20, 27 members. And the instructions really are, this report is through the end of the fiscal year, 26, which is June 30, 26. So I really didn't think it was appropriate to have, um, the new members. So what I did was I realized there was some turnover in the committee. So I went and got the dates of appointments and resignations. And we had done this a few years back when a member left, we put resign. So Phil Jadusi was the chair until he resigned. So I put resign May 5th, 26. I'm proposing that would appear. So I basically got rid of the 20, 27 people, shifted to 26 folks over to the left. Um, then we have Carl, who was the vice chair, Iris, Michael Hoyle had been on the committee, resigned in August 25th, 25. Billy started July 1, April was on the committee. I actually got appointed June 25th. So I served a whopping five days on the committee in 26th, took one vote. Um, Rob Quimmy got appointed October 17th, 25. And Pam Roman, um, while she continued to serve, she was actually reappointed on the same day Rob was, and then she resigned the same day Phil did. And what happened was I ended up picking, uh, uh, Pam's slot and Pam took Michael Hoyle's slot. So I think that's both accurate and it limits it to the people that were actually on the committee at some point in 26th. So I was going to suggest that these are suggestions back to Carl. I don't want to, he may have had some other reason he did what he did. Um, then in the second full paragraph, I was going to simply suggest that we insert a number. And, um, um, for the, instead of saying the warrant articles, second line, I was going to suggest we insert a number since you did a lot of article work last year. And as I thought about it, I thought we could put in 41 plus, you know, plus sign. Cause he actually drafted a bunch of articles. I just ended up giving a poll. Yes. Does that make sense? Yes. Um, the next paragraph, I think in the fourth line, he referenced, uh, 2026 and 2025. I think he meant to say 27 and 26 there. I noticed that as well. Yeah. And, um, carrying on in the next sentence, uh, I just added the word of in between number and full time, and then under the outlook, uh, about six line down, I inserted the words that permitted prop two and a half increase in our property tax, which I think is what he was alluding to, and then added a few more words just to make it clear that non-tax revenue and new growth were not controlled by prop two and a half. Uh, but my, my really biggest comment. Um, so you all can decide if any of those make sense, if they all make sense in iris and indicate that to Carl, um, or if. But my biggest comment was the, the recommendation that he put in here. So traditionally, um, and tradition doesn't make, it doesn't matter. Right. But this instructions for this report from town manager's office is, uh, basically get a snapshot of what occurred during the last fiscal year ending June 30, 26. Yeah. And honestly, what Carl has in here under recommendation is almost a great amount of what we just did. Right. But technically it's didn't happen in 2026. Uh, in the past few reports, what appeared under that recommendation section, which isn't in the template, but it has been in the finance committee's report was in the warrant. Typically the finance committee will include a bunch of recommendations at the end of its report. Some of which got pushed up to higher importance and then others are in there. And so typically that has included three or four of those important recommendations. And that occurred in fiscal 26. That made sense. Having said that, I get the sense that Carl felt it was pretty important to include this. So my only thought was, unless people were opposed to, you know, including what he had here and he, I did a work on, he had its wordsmith down to 998 words. They want you to keep it at a thousand if you can, but there's plenty of reports that are somewhat over a thousand. Um, so the only thing I thought was whether, um, just for clarity, um, in the financial accounting and the audit of financial statement world, if you ever look at statements, sometimes you'll see the whole report is focused on the prior year. Right. But for many years, there's been a footnote at the very end of the financial statements that's subsequent events and it's intended to pick up any material item that's deemed material. Now in big companies, you're generally not going to see anything there because typically nothing that big, but you know, I've, I've dealt with statements that inevitably we have a few things in there. So having that in mind, one thought was, um, you know, putting postscripts or putting subsequent event or adding a sentence that says, albeit, you know, something to the fact that, you know, you know, in, in the recommendations contained in last year's FinCon report was X, Y, Z about the override. Um, but given the importance we set forth here, um, you know, the FinCon. Can we just say like, as we look ahead, like, can we say something as simple as that under recommendations, just like add it to the verb. Whatever the words are. I just wanted to, we look at that and taking into consideration, not just what's been done, but what's to come. Right. And then, and then we absolve ourselves of like, look, we are really, we can talk about what we would have recommended as of June 30th, 2020, but like, really, here's where we're at in this moment in time. Because the past is immaterial now. Yeah. But if we, if we are, uh, going to use these recommendations, which is this committee's recommendations, then you will have to include the members up top. Um, I think that's what's his thinking. It could be. And, and, and I just think that, look, we can do whatever we want and we may get pushback from the town managers obviously saying, we want this to be as consistent as we can. And I've never seen that done in all the years of, you know, and I looked at a few recent annual reports to skim them very quickly. Having other than the members that served during the prior fiscal year is what should be there. Yeah. Well, but then it, it, it sort of misleads the recommendations. The report itself is going to be voted on by our current members, not by the old members. So there is still the connection to the new, to the new manager. And the recommendations, which is like. That's what I meant. The recommendations aren't necessarily inconsistent because there is a piece of it that even with, even if you took the recommendations out, there's still like a connection to the current. I mean, you could, you could, without naming those members, you could, in addition to the few words you were suggesting, you could say, given its importance, the current membership of the finance committee, you know, hereby recommends without again, having to change the header and, you know, people, if they really want to know who you are, they can find you. But, but, but I, you know, that, that's what my concern was attributing this to the right. Sure. That's the least amount. Even though not these specific recommendations, but in the FinCon report, the gist of, right, one of their key recommendations was to try to control what happens in fiscal 20s. This is really just a. A follow on to that. Carl will have to cut some words then if you're writing. So, do we want to wait for Carl to get back to make some of those changes or do we want to make a motion and vote on it as amended? How do you guys see it? Does anybody else, did anybody else reading this have any other comments? I mean, I, I'd be happy, um, if someone wanted to move approving Carl's report subject to the revisions we discussed and empower Iris to make the edits and, um, do one of two things. You can offline. I just offline research. Offline talk to Carl. I just don't know what his availability is and when. I don't think he just said Thursday. He has some time to. Yeah. So you. Something if he. Yeah. You could share with him whatever your final red line looks like. Okay. And, um, just as long as he's okay with it, then it's, we're done our job. We voted. Yeah. It could be. Good. I'm fine with that. I'll, I'll second what. I heard a couple of small things beyond. You sent them to me in an email. Yeah. Send them to me in an email and I'll incorporate them. Okay. So Brian, you want to make a motion? Uh, so I move that we approve the finance committee then or report as drafted by Carl Barnes, um, along with the, uh, revisions discussed at the seeking's meeting and authorize Iris Hoxler to, um, discuss with Carl Barnes and submit the final report before the due date. I second it. All those in favor. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? My motion picks up administrative edits. Anybody sees anything in the next day or two that you want to. Send them to me. Yeah. Send them along. Awesome. Thank you. I appreciate it, Carl. If you're watching. All right. Lovely. With one minute to go and my apologies. So I think we're going to run over. Um, I just want to talk about next week's. So in terms of agenda topics, I will remove the FinCom annual report. I think we're hopefully done with that item. I will plan to continue. I will plan to keep the multi-year budget model, prop two and a half over our discussion in case anything changes and the capital budget line items. I will keep those three line items. If for whatever reason we are ready to discuss any drafts, I think I will add a line item for that for next week. If any are ready, I cannot promise that at this time. I'm going to work on this report, I think, between now and then, and just making sure that that gets wrapped up. Um, but if I have any ready, I'll bring them to you all. And then I think, um, are there any other topics for next week? Let me ask this question. I was a big proponent of pushing hard to front end a lot of these meetings, um, in anticipation of the direction of where the overhead was looking. I was headed in early July. Um, but for that, I suspect we wouldn't have been meeting, planning to meet every week. I would agree. Um, I guess my question, are we, are we sort of at a point right at the moment that we may not have enough available to do? I would say yes, primarily just because, so what I was going to ask is Michael could meet with us if we want to talk to him. I will say that Carl shared that because next Monday is a holiday, um, the sun board's not meeting until Tuesday. So in my mind, if there were to be an update that was provided from that meeting, we wouldn't have it anyway until Tuesday. And it might be a reasonable meeting to just say, let's, let's not meet and let's, um, meet on the 28th. If you all are comfortable with that. Yeah. Take a breather. That sounds good. Yeah. All right. So then we'll do that. I will have a nine. Yeah. I, I will plan on submitting an agenda.
I'll talk to Carl and see what he wants to do. Um, and just send him a quick email because sometimes I think making adjustments. So 921 meeting is hereby canceled. Next meeting is 928. And the agenda will be put, pulled together by Carl. Yeah. And, uh, maybe, you know, one of you can reach out to Rob, who I know was hopeful before that meeting that's now canceled, that he might be able to circulate what we looked at on Zoom last week. So maybe that extra time will allow him to get something circulated and then we could put that on the agenda with perhaps, I know you're going to be away, so I don't know if you want to have the warrant discussion while you're away or an article. Yeah. Question. I mean, if people are prepared to have a bombings, please do. Don't wait for me. But I'm away the 28th and the 5th. So, cause I, you know, 28th is what I'm away too. Okay. Well, I will have my computer. So there's a chance I'll have a break and I can, they should still have a quorum. So, all right. Um, do I hear a motion to move? Sure. Second.
Second. Okay. All those in favor. All right. All right. Thank you so much.