September 30, 2026 – Capital Improvement Planning Committee – Video & Transcript
September 30, 2026 - Capital Improvement Planning Committee
Recording in progress.
September 30, 2026, 630 in the Wayland Town Building. This meeting may be recorded, and if it's recorded, it will be made available to the public on WACAM as soon as possible. After the meeting, the public will be excluded from executive sessions.
Pursuant to Chapter 2 of the Act of 2025, this meeting will be conducted in-person and or via remote access in accordance with applicable law. If this meeting has only remote access, no in-person attendance by members of the public will be permitted. If the meeting has remote access, one may watch or participate remotely with the link provided.
When 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. Public comment should be limited to two minutes per person.
I will review the agenda. 630, call the order. Review agenda. 635, public comment and member's response. 640, review and discuss any recently submitted or revised departmental capital requests.
650, review and discuss additional capital closeout responses, if any, from department heads. 7, discuss the revised draft of the CIPC report to the town manager. 815, update on succession planning. 825, review and vote to approve minutes of September 23, if available. 825, set times for next meetings. And 830, adjourn.
830, adjourn. 930, adjourn. 930, adjourn. 730, adjourn. 930, adjourn. • Yes, sir.
THE ATTENDED ITEM OR REVIEW OR DISCUSS ANY RECENTLY SUBMITTED OR REVISED DEPARTMENTAL CAPITAL REQUESTS.
I CAN START AND AT OUR LAST MEETING WE TALKED ABOUT PLAYGROUNDS AND IF THERE WAS ANY OTHER, BECAUSE THERE WEREN'T ANY SUBMITTED.
SO I SEND AN EMAIL TO MIKE FAIL AND CATHERINE PERRENDALE LAST WEEK ON DEPTEMBER 24 ASKING THEM IF THERE WERE ANY OTHERS BECAUSE WE WERE FINALING A REPORT AND I HAD NOT HEARD IT AT ALL.
I DOUBLED YOUR EFFORT, I THINK I COPIED YOU ON WHAT I FOUND THEIR PRECREATION PLAN THAT WE HAD RECEIVED LAST YEAR AND I SENT THAT OUT TO MIKE FAIL AND TO CATHERINE VERONDA, COPIED YOU BASICALLY SAYING THE SAME THING, WE GOT THIS LAST YEAR, HAD NO REQUESTS THIS YEAR, SO, YOU KNOW, PROBABLY SHOULD PUT A SENTENCE IN SAYING, DESPITE OUTREACH, WE RECEIVED NO CAPITAL REQUESTS.
FROM THE RECREATION DEPARTMENT, INCLUDING, YOU KNOW, ESSENTIALLY CPA-FUNDED PLAYGROUNDS.
YEAH, I THINK WE SHOULD PUT SOMETHING IN TO THAT EFFECT AND PERHAPS, AND IT WAS ONE OF MY QUESTIONS, A LIST OF WHAT WAS IN THE PRIOR PLAN FOR THAT FACT.
YOU PUT TOGETHER.
YOU CAN DO IT THAT WAY.
YEAH.
YEAH, I GUESS I WOULD SUGGEST, AND THAT MAKES PERFECT SENSE, AS WE GO THROUGH THE, GO THROUGH THE PLAN, I GUESS WE'RE CREAR, WE'RE THE BEST PLACES TO STICK IT IN.
YEAH.
OTHER THAN RECREATION, WERE THERE ANY OTHERS THAT WE THOUGHT WE WERE WAITING ON?
I DON'T RECALL ANY OTHERS.
I'LL GIVE A QUICK UPDATE TO TOM HOLDER TO ELEVATE HIS REQUEST FOR THE WATER ENTERPRISE FUND AND THE TRANSFER STATION ENTERPRISE FUND UP TO THE BOARD OF PUBLIC WORKS, WHICH HE DID AT THEIR LAST MEETING.
I THINK I SENT YOU AN EMAIL COPYING TOM HOLDER.
THE HUNCHLIGHT OF THAT MEETING WAS THAT THE CHAIR, WITHOUT ANY OBJECTION FROM THE REST OF THE COMMITTEE, DIDN'T SEEM PARTICULARLY INCLINED TO INCLUDE IN THE FISCAL 28 REQUEST THE HALF-MILLION-DOLLAR ASSET MANAGEMENT PLAN.
BASICALLY HIS VIEW WAS WE SHOULD WAIT UNTIL WE GET FURTHER ALONG IN THE LONG-TERM WATER PROJECT, RATHER THAN SPENDING TIME DEVELOPING A PLAN THAT MAY RELATE TO THE OTHER OPERATIONS THAT ARE CURRENTLY IN TOWN THAT ARE GOING TO GET SHUT DOWN.
AND TOM, YOU KNOW, EXPLAINED WHY HE THOUGHT IT WAS BENEFICIAL TO GET THE REQUEST IN NOW BECAUSE IT'S FISCAL 28, SO IT'S GOING TO BE A WHILE.
BUT MY SENSE WAS THAT YOU WOULD BE GETTING A MEMO FROM TOM AND OR THE CHAIR OF THE COURT OF PUBLIC WORKS SUGGESTING THAT THAT ITEM BE REMOVED FROM FISCAL 28'S REQUEST AND UNCLEAR WHETHER THEY WERE GOING TO PUT IT IN FISCAL 29.
SO ABSENT HAVING RECEIVED THAT YET, WE COULD CERTAINLY, BASED ON WHAT I HEARD, WE COULD CERTAINLY TALK ABOUT REMOVING IT FROM FISCAL 28 AND BUMPING IT TO 29, SINCE IT'S SOMETHING THAT I SENSE THAT THE COURT OF PUBLIC WORKS, YOU KNOW, WANTED TO DO.
I THINK THE LAST TIME THEY DID IT WAS 10 YEARS AGO, AND IT'S JUST A QUESTION OF WHEN.
THE TRANSFER STATION, I THINK AS WE EXPECTED, THERE'S AN ONGOING REVIEW OF THE TRANSFER STATION OPERATION, OTHER OPTIONS, TOWNWIDE PICKUP, FOR EXAMPLE.
AND, AGAIN, TOM MADE THE CASE THAT THE ROLL OFF WAS NEEDED, WHETHER OR NOT WE CONTINUED OPERATING THE CURRENT TRANSFER STATION AS BOTH A TRANSFER STATION AND RECYCLING.
THE CHAIR, AGAIN, SPOKE UP AND SAID, YOU KNOW, PROBABLY NOT LIKELY, BUT THEY HAVEN'T TAKEN OFF THE TABLE COMPLETE SHUTDOWN OF THE FACILITY.
BUT THAT WAS SORT OF A LESSER POINT THAT HE MADE.
THE MORE IMPORTANT POINT WAS, WHICH I THINK I HAD MENTIONED, THE BOARD OF PUBLIC WORKS HAS BEEN THINKING ABOUT ASKING THE SELECTMEN TO
ALLOW THEM TO TERMINATE THE ENTERPRISE FUND FOR THE TRANSFER STATION AND PULL IT BACK INTO THE GENERAL FUND.
AND IF THEY PLAN TO DO THAT, THE UPCOMING TOWN MEETING WOULD BE WHEN THEY WOULD DO IT.
AND HE WAS CONCERNED AS EXACTLY HOW, I GUESS, $380,000 FOR THAT ROLOFF VEHICLE, HOW THAT WOULD GET PAID.
HE SAID TRANSFER STATION IS AT BEST BREAK EVEN, ALREADY GETTING A SUBSIDY OF SOME SMALL AMOUNT FROM THE TOWN GENERAL FUND.
AND SO HE WAS INCLINED TO HOLD OFF ON THAT ONE.
BUT TOM PRESSED AGAIN, OTHER MEMBERS SPOKE UP.
AT THE END OF THE DAY, MY SENSE WAS THAT THEY WERE GOING TO GO ALONG WITH TOM ON THAT PARTICULAR REQUEST.
THEY DIDN'T TAKE A VOTE ON ANY OF THAT.
THEY JUST ASKED THEM FOR A SENSE OF THE BOARD.
AND THEY ONLY TALKED ABOUT FISCAL 28.
SO, WHILE THEY COULD SEE THE OTHER FOUR YEARS,
IN THE LATTER TWO YEARS FOR WATER, THERE'S NOT MUCH THERE.
TOM DIDN'T PRESS THEM FOR INPUT ON THOSE YEARS.
SO, LEAVE IT TO THE REST OF YOU AS TO KIND OF HOW YOU WANT TO DEAL WITH THAT.
WE COULD LEAVE IT THERE FOR THE MOMENT.
AND MAYBE IN A WEEK'S TIME, YOU'LL GET A MEMO, BRAD, FROM THEM.
YEAH, I DID SEE YOUR E-MAIL.
FROM THEM.
OR WE COULD, BASED ON THAT INPUT, WE COULD TAKE OUR OWN ACTION AND BUMP IT OUT.
I'M INCLINED TO LEAVE IT ONLY BECAUSE THEY HAVEN'T CHANGED THEIR REQUEST.
CORRECT.
AND SO, AND NOT THAT WE CAN'T MOVE IT IN OUR RECOMMENDATION,
BUT I DON'T, I DON'T FEEL PARTICULARLY INCLINED TO DO THAT.
RIGHT?
BECAUSE THIS ISN'T GOING TO BE THE ONLY THING.
OH, YEAH.
I WAS NOT REFERRING TO CHANGING THE REQUEST.
YEAH.
TO A REVISED REQUEST.
MORE IF WE WANT TO GO AHEAD AND JUST, BECAUSE I THINK WE WERE ALREADY A LITTLE BIT IFY
ABOUT THEM BEING IN THERE GIVEN THE IMPACT ON RATE PAYERS, THE ABILITY TO PAY.
CLEARLY THE TRANSFER STATION, THAT'S WHAT THEY WERE TALKING ABOUT, THE ABILITY TO PAY.
WHEREAS THE WATER WAS MORE, DO WE REALLY HAVE THE BANDWITH AND DOES IT MAKE THE MOST LOGICAL SENSE
TO DO THAT ASSET MANAGER PLAN BEFORE WE GET FURTHER ALONG IN THE LONG-TERM WATER.
SO, YOU KNOW, WE CAN LEAVE IT IN THE REQUEST UNTIL THEY TELL US THEY WANT A REVISED REQUEST
SUBMITTED AND IT'S IN TIME, WE CAN FAKE THOSE CHANGES OR NOT.
YEAH.
WE COULD SAY IT'S TOO LATE AND WE COULD ADD A FOOTNOTE OR SOMETHING THAT SAYS, YOU KNOW,
AT THE END OF OUR PROCESS, WE RECEIVED A REVISED REQUEST FROM THE DPW DIRECTOR,
HOWEVER YOU WANT TO HANDLE IT.
I MEAN, WE CAN'T, WE CAN MAKE CHANGES RIGHT UP UNTIL YOU HIT THE PRINT BUTTON OR NOT.
SO, ANYWAY, NOW WOULD BE THE TIME, I GUESS, TO DECIDE WHAT FOLKS WANT TO DO.
AND SEND NO REAL INSIGHTS.
AND I THINK I REPORTED LAST WEEK, THEY DIDN'T TALK ABOUT IT AT THIS MEETING BECAUSE IT'S A SEPARATE
COMMISSION, BUT I THINK I MENTIONED LAST WEEK, THE OTHER ONE THAT WE HAD OPENED.
ONE THAT WE HAD AN OPEN QUESTION ON WAS WASTEWATER FACILITY, TOWN CENTER, WHICH HAS ITS OWN COMMISSION
MEMBERS.
AND AT THEIR LAST MEETING, TOM HAD BROUGHT UP THE NEED TO REPLACE CONCRETE COVERING IN THE
TANKS.
I GUESS THERE'S THREE OF THEM.
AND, AGAIN, I DON'T BELIEVE THEY TOOK A VOTE.
I WATCHED IT.
I DON'T REMEMBER A VOTE.
AND THE ENTERPRISE FUNDS SECTION, THOSE WERE OPEN ITEMS. YOU KNOW, OPEN IN THE SENSE THAT WE'VE ALREADY INCLUDED THEM IN A RECOMMENDATION, BUT JUST TRYING TO CLOSE THE LOOP ON THAT. SO, ANYWAY, KELLY, YOU DON'T CHANGE OUR RECOMMENDATION UNTIL WE GET MORE INFORMATION. I'M LOOKING BACK AT THEM BECAUSE THESE ARE ALL, RIGHT, WE WERE WORRIED ABOUT HOW, WITHOUT BRIAN KEVENY TO SPEAK TO, LIKE, THE VIABILITY OF THESE FROM, THERE'S NO GUIDELINE AND WE DON'T HAVE ANY ACTUAL INFORMATION FROM BRIAN KEVENY ON THE VIABILITIES. ALTHOUGH WE CAN INFER, RIGHT, THE TRANSFER STATION ENTERPRISE FUND WILL HAVE TROUBLE COVERING THIS COST. AND THE WATER ENTERPRISE FUND, PARTLY, GIVEN THAT THEY HAVE MWRA, RIGHT, COMING ACROSS, THEY ALREADY HAVE A RATE-PAYING, SIGNIFICANT RATE-PAYING IMPACT. SO, I MEAN, I'M OKAY IF WE PULL IT OUT OF THE RECOMMENDATION, THE 500 OUT ON THE BASIS OF WHAT WE HEARD, YOU HEARD AT THE MEETING, THIS IS A RECOMMENDATION TO THE TOWN MANAGER. SO, YEAH. AND THEY'LL GET MORE INFORMATION. THEY'LL GET MORE INFORMATION, THEY CAN PUT IT BACK IN. YEAH. I MEAN, I WOULD, WHEN I SAY PULL IT OUT OF FISFAL 28, I WOULD PROBABLY MOVE IT INTO FISFAL 29. YEAH. AND, YOU KNOW, THE PORT OF PUBLIC WORKS WILL TALK MORE ABOUT IT. IT'S CONCEIVABLE THEY COULD EVEN PUSH IT FURTHER, BUT I SUSPECT TOM WILL, YOU KNOW, RESIST THAT, SO. YEAH. I JUST DON'T KNOW, IF ALL WE'RE GOING TO DO IS PUSH IT, I DON'T KNOW THAT THE PICTURE CHANGES ALL THAT SIGNIFICANTLY. YEAH. THAT'S MY ISSUE. I DON'T THINK THAT REALLY CHANGES A WHOLE LOT. YEAH. AND WE COULD, AS I SAID, GO WITH A FOOTNOTE? I GUESS THE QUESTION I HAVE TO HAVE IS, JUST FOR PROCESS PURPOSESES AND CONSISTENCY PURPOSES, YOU KNOW, WE HAVE THE FORMS THAT THEY FILLED OUT. DO WE, DOES IT MAKE SENSE TO HAVE A REPORT BASED ON THE DOCUMENTS WE'VE RECEIVED AS OPPOSED TO WHERE NOTHING IS NECESSARILY DECIDED? YEAH. WHAT BRIAN WAS SAYING IS, WE'RE NOT CHANGING THE REQUEST. THEY'VE REQUESTED 500. THEY'VE REQUESTED 500. UNLESS THEY SEND US A REVISED. UNLESS THEY'VE SEND US A NEW ONE. RIGHT. THEY'VE REQUESTED 500. THAT'S WHAT WE'LL SHOW. THEY'VE REQUESTED 500. IT'S OUR RECOMMENDATION. IS OUR RECOMMENDATION FOR F-FY-28 GOING TO INCLUDE IT OR NOT? WHICH THAT'S UP TO US, WHETHER OR NOT WE WANT TO INCLUDE IT OR PUSH IT. RIGHT. AND THAT'S JUST A RECOMMENDATION. TOWN MANAGER CAN RECOMMEND OTHERWISE. SPINCOM CAN DECIDE OTHERWISE. BUT, YEAH, I COULD GO EITHER WAY, BUT I GUESS IF WE'RE ONLY PUSHING IT A YEAR, I DON'T THINK IT HAS A SUBSTANTIAL DIFFERENCE IN VIABILITY. IF WE'RE NOT PUSHING SOMETHING ELSE OUT, RIGHT? IF WE'RE NOT CASCADING IT OUT, I DON'T KNOW THAT IT MAKES IT. YEAH. THE WATER ENTERPRISE FUND IS IN A MUCH BETTER AND DIFFERENT POSITION IN TERMS OF PASSING THROUGH ITS COST TO ITS REPAYERS. IT'S NOT SAYING THAT THE REPAYERS AREN'T GOING TO GET A LARGE INCREASE FROM ALL THE A BIG CAPITAL SPEND, BUT ULTIMATELY, YOU GOT TO GET YOUR WATER RIGHT, SO YOU'RE GOING TO PAY WHATEVER YOU HAVE TO PAY. SO, ANYWAY, DO YOU TWO HAVE A PICKLER VIEW OF IF WE CAN EITHER, IT SOUNDS LIKE WE LEAVE IT WHERE IT IS AND JUST MOVE ALONG AND THEN WE GET TOWARD THE END, DECIDE IF WE WANT TO CHANGE IT THEN IF YOU GET SOMETHING? YEAH. I'M KIND OF LEAVE IT AS IS. YEAH. AND I WOULD AGREE, JUST BECAUSE I ALSO THINK IT SETS THE PRECEDENCE FOR WATER SEEMS LIKELY, I AGREE, THAT IT'S GOING TO MOVE THROUGH, BUT WHERE DO YOU DRAW THE LINE FOR OTHER SIMILAR EVENTS? YOU KNOW, DO WE HAVE A CRITERIA FOR WHEN WE'RE GOING TO MAKE THAT DECISION AHEAD OF AN FORMAL DECISION? OR, YOU KNOW, IF WE DO, THEN I JUST THINK THAT MAYBE WE'VE PUT SOME GUIDELINES DOWN ABOUT WHEN AND WHERE TO DO THAT VERSUS. THAT'S JUST FOR THE INITIAL CUTOFF, BECAUSE, AGAIN, IT'S VERY LIKELY THAT YOU'RE GOING TO END UP DOING AN ADDENDUM FOR SOMETHING. RIGHT. YEAH. SOME ARTICLE THAT COMES, GETS FILED AND HAS A CAPITAL REQUEST THAT WASN'T CONSIDERED HERE. SO, ALL RIGHT, SO WHY DON'T WE JUST LEAVE THAT. YOU'RE UPDATED. AND MAYBE IF YOU GET SOMETHING FROM THEM, YOU COULD JUST CIRCULATE IT, SINCE WE TALKED ABOUT IT. YEAH. HE DID SAY HE WAS GOING TO SEND SOMETHING. YEAH. THAT WHOLE DISCUSSION WAS A PUBLIC MEETING. THE OTHER THING, WHEN AGAIN, IT'S REALLY, WE COULD CHANGE IT OURSELVES, BUT AS TOM SAID TO THEM, AND I THINK WE'VE TALKED ABOUT THE DESCRIPTION ON THE HALF A MILLION DOLLAR REQUEST FOR THE ROUTE 20 LANDFILL SOUTH, ROUTE 20 SOUTH LANDFILL CAP, IT'S NOT AN ACCURATE DESCRIPTION ANYMORE. IT REALLY IS MORE UPFRONT, SORT OF PLANNING MONEY FOR AN UNDEFINED, UNSCOPED PROJECT THAT THE SELECT BOARD WANT TO PROCEDE ON, AND SO MY SENSE WAS THAT TOM WAS GOING TO CHANGE THAT DESCRIPTION, AND AT LEAST THAT ONE, I PREFER TO, YOU KNOW, CLARIFY JUST BECAUSE IT'S MISLEADING WITH THE CURRENT DESCRIPTION. YEAH. SO WHETHER WE... I HAVE THAT IN MY NOTES. WHETHER WE WANT TO MAKE UP OUR OWN DESCRIPTION OR WE WANT TO JUST FOOTNOTE THAT AND JUST SAY NO NO LONGER REPRESENTS... WELL, CAN WE CALL IT... BECAUSE I THINK IT'S FAIR TO CHANGE THE NAME BECAUSE IT'S NOT DESCRIPTIVE. CAN WE CALL IT, YOU KNOW, ROUTE 20 LANDFILL REUSE, RIGHT? DESIGN? LIKE, THAT MONEY'S FOR DESIGN. PROBABLY DESIGN, YEAH. PLANNING AND DESIGN. I'M GOING TO GET THAT TO A SOME STANDING MEETING. THAT WAS A PASSING COMMENT AT THE MEETING. THEY WERE WONDERING WHAT THAT WAS. AND HE SAID, OH, THAT'S THE OLD DESCRIPTION. I NEED TO CHANGE IT. I NEED TO TWEAK THAT. I HAVE NO IDEA WHETHER HE'S GOING TO GET TO YOU. I DON'T THINK IT WOULD BE PART OF THAT MEMO. THAT WOULD BE SOMETHING OFF. SO I THINK WE JUST GO AHEAD AND MAKE IT MORE ACCURATE. WHATEVER HE WANTS TO CALL IT AFTER THAT IS FINE. AT LEAST IT WON'T BE MISLEADED. SO WE CALL IT, THOUGH. ROUTE 28, SOUTH LANDFILL REUSE, DESIGN, AND PLANNING. YEAH. SOMETHING LIKE THAT. THIS WAS IN LAST YEAR'S JIPC REPORT, RIGHT? IT WAS IN THE BUCCET, IN THE PURGATORY BUCCET. WE WANT TO JUST MAKE IT AN ASSWER TO SAY CHANGED FROM PREVIOUS NAME OF WHATEVER SO PEOPLE COULD FOLLOW AND WANT TO KNOW WHERE IT WAS IN LAST YEAR'S REPORT. WE COULD HAVE AND SHOULD HAVE MADE THIS CHANGE LAST YEAR, TOO, BUT WE DIDN'T. IT MAY BE IN THAT TABLE THAT SHOWS THE PROJECTS THAT WE WERE NOT, THAT WE PULLED OUT, WAITING FOR SCOPE. MAYBE YOU JUST DO THE OLD FKA ON THE OLD SOUTH LANDFILL. AND IT TAKES UP AN EXTRA LINE. ALL RIGHT. I'M GOING TO RENAME THEM. I WILL DO THE RENAMING. AND I HAVEN'T SEEN, I DON'T KNOW, BRAD, IF YOU SAW ANYTHING, ANYTHING CLARIFYING BACK FROM NICK LOMBARTY, JUST CONFIRMING THAT HIS CIP 1 AND 2, THAT THE TITLE DESCRIPTIONS OF THOSE REQUESTS ARE ACCURATE, BUT THE DETAIL DESCRIPTIONS ARE NOT ACCURATE. JUST BECAUSE WE'RE CONTINUING TO USE THOSE TITLE DESCRIPTIONS AS REPRESENTING WHAT THE MONEY IS TO BE USED FOR. AND I'M PRETTY POSITIVE. AND I THOUGHT HE KIND OF KIND OF KNOTTED HIS HEAD. until we get should really get that revised paperwork from you know I've not heard anything I'm not aware of changes potential changes at this time sure there will be this time goes on okay want to review and discuss additional capital closeout responses from department heads so I asked trying to put this on for a couple reasons one I just wanted to update you all on an issue that I raised which I think I copied was it's it's kind of released open capital capital closeout so for lack of using anything else and understanding that the instructions that went out to department heads was you know please let us know what what projects we can close out using the CIPC's new CIP form which we didn't have any place for them to do that so no one did it right but the instruction was not accurate I think I suggested and we did use the munis report showing the unexpended funds as encumbered yeah that's what that list is what went out and a number of department heads responded to the bulk of it and included in those responses largely put together by Mike Fay and Tom Holder but in the Mike Fay responses included all the school facilities projects Kirsteen cut out those school related requests that appeared that they had you know yeses next to them they could be closed out and it was a little confusing to me looking at the extra columns that were added put in the amount of it could be you know back for you know use and claim for something else compared to the open balance at the end of the report that we sent and it was confusing to the school committee too as they discussed because they she went to the school committee to get a vote to say yes go ahead you can close those out right make it official so they're reviewing the report that Kirsteen prepared which was cutting and pasting out of what tell you would sent out the munis report one of their members said yeah didn't we already approve closing out like this one and that one and this one and so after I watched that you know I went looked at the school line items and I went back and looked at the motion of town meeting for the capital budget where the actual motion on how many floor had to include all of the closed out capital items that were used you know where funds are being generated to be used to pay for fiscal 27 capital items and there were there were about a thousand of those and all 12 of those 12 13 whatever it was are still in the we're still in the munis list and therefore we're showing balances at June 30 which may be right at least based on the way the finance director may deal with the timing of the accounting because as of July it's not till July one that he brings on the fiscal 27 approved capital request which is the point in which he would probably then transfer from those line items over to as a revenue source for the fiscal 27 line items that he had associated which probably is the case but I said I should send him an email which I did I copied was a copy Kirstein I said can you just confirm that and I highlighted all the 12 items whatever they were some of which were substantial and I said he just confirmed that these are here because he hadn't yet closed them out and move them over and instead of responding as usual to that question the response I got was you shouldn't be using a munis report for that purpose and I said okay I said so then I replied to him and I said um oh you did this last year you you gathered the information on what was available to be closed out so you could get these 12 or 13 items can you send me a copy of whatever you sent them to analyze and then reply to you or can you send me whatever they sent you you know whether there's some other template to which I never got a response um and it's not our job to correct the accounting records right that's that's not what we do and I understand we're using that munis report our primary use of it is as I've said before is a proxy for percentage completion it isn't an actual percentage completion as we could see with there's some of the responses we got where they said where percentage-wise they thought they were how much longer to complete but it's the best we had last year it's the best again we had this year um and I'm not uncomfortable using it for that purpose so uh first dean jumped into that email link and said Brian I need this Brian Keveny I need I need this I have to respond to the school committee because they aren't going to take any vote unless they get a good explanation of why these items were in there and so I stepped out of that conversation and said you know I'll let them figure that out uh so that's background question for this group and it comes up um which I'll point out later but in the report it sticks out like a sore thumb in the table that shows the top 10 um uh completed capital and uh one of them is 200 and some odd thousand dollars it's it's one of the dozen items that got closed out um yeah we have we have to amend that yeah so if we're going to do one just because that's totally misleading because it doesn't exist um so the good news is you have all the tables for all the so I know we're talking about doing it for all the items yeah so if we're going to do it for that one I think we should just no we should just make a change for all of them and I'll I'll just make sure I highlighted all of them and I all I need to do to be sure that we're on the same wavelength it basically zero out the balances so that when you yeah hold that munis spreadsheet back in those dozen line items instead of having a balance will go to zero yeah um and that'll affect all the tables you know not materially you know the only one that I viewed as material was the 10 largest yeah but I mean I still want all the tables inside no matter what to show an accurate balance but that's an easy thing to go through yeah so I want but before I sent that off to Liz I wanted to explain to everybody what the issue was make sure everybody was comfortable um as to the accounting records and what gets done when that's not our job um as long as we have something that we feel you know functionally does what we wanted to do um uh so after the meeting I'll you already have a copy of what I'm talking about but I'll I'll send a new one that zeros out those balances that way you can just pull the um yeah I was gonna say you don't even have to I mean if you want to by all means but but you're comfortable to make the updates okay um so anyway um but putting aside the um the uh uh well back to the capital closeout request that we sent out to the department heads um which Kelly you got back I don't know if you got them all back or no some came to Brad but um you know I I put this I asked Brad to put this on the agenda I want to talk about those um I don't feel myself comfortable putting aside this one issue um based on what we got back one if I understood what we got back it didn't seem to me like there's a whole lot of money involved at the moment and in fact if you go back and look at the dozen or so items that were used last year which we've already talked about earlier this year there was a bunch of them that really weren't closeouts they were basically told you're not going to get this item over here for 600,000 unless you basically return money from other capital projects that you have yet to spend it on that's what happened and there's two or three very large items really accounted for paying for that English curriculum item for the school um again that's not our job if the finance director well and we didn't but um just for the record that was not our no that was not our doing that happened after but by the that was part of the town managers yeah yeah no that that's totally within the purview of the finance director and managing the finances and and you know he he as we know he's generally opposed to new requests outside the plan unless they're really important uh obviously didn't do that one as important uh unless the schools were able to help cough up the money um that's not our job here we didn't ask and look for that uh but i'm not comfortable on two two fronts one there's not a lot of money involved at the moment based on the responses and i'm not comfortable using even the amounts that were suggested they could turn back as a funding source and what we're doing um at best i see that we turn over what we got to the finance director and basically say um this is going to be in our improvement list for next year we've got to figure out what is our role and how how do we go about best collecting that information and the finance director has to work with you describing how he's done it in the past he can't just say to us you know they should have given that to you you know okay they didn't um uh so i think the process side you know you guys are going to have to press on um you know my view is we just take what we got and send it off to the finance director and say here you should whatever you do and by the time you put your recommendations with the town manager together go find whatever close out money you think there is we just didn't we didn't it was late in the process we didn't see there was much money there and whatever you find might help you know there's a couple items we didn't include you know through the normal borrowing or free cash maybe it could be used for that purpose um um so again we could maybe put a comment i was thinking in in the open capital section maybe we had a another paragraph that addresses sort of the process we went through try to collect that information and quantify the relatively small amount of money that appears available and then a sentence that says we leave it to the finance director to close the loop on that well we can do that i i think i was never going to be comfortable with using it on two fronts one the amount wasn't that big that we did collect right from folks and two there's still a lot of time between now and town meeting as to what actually gets closed out right what's available for close out or not and so i don't think that we need to opine on that i think it's as simple as this is what we funded there may be capital closeouts available as we approach town meeting based on the status of you know outstanding projects that'll be the finance director and the town manager right that would have to responsible for determining that we think about how to word it but i i don't know that i was ever going to be comfortable since we can't actually close out a project um i don't know that i was ever going to be comfortable saying anything more than it's it appears there may be this much money right now there's not enough money to pay for anything right other than a partial so i don't i was never going to be comfortable with that anyway so fine adding you know a few sentences on on what we did but i mean from a process standpoint do you do you think it's fair that this committee attempt to collect that kind of information in the future um in whatever format the finance director thinks is more appropriate uh just because you know this committee is communicating with them on capital requests right even though it's going to change you know it's fair to ask and we could have we could have easily made it a part of the capital not this cip form but another tab right i think it's very difficult for the department managers to do it blindly without having a list in front of them particularly when some of the department managers have only been here a year or two and there's you know a long list of of stuff many of which i think are done right and have nuisance amounts left on them but so i don't know that it's fair to ask them without giving them a list do i know now that you need to be more specific about exactly which lists we're getting yeah there may be another list or format sure do i think this is something the town should have tightly tracked before this committee ever touches it yeah but it doesn't so um we can we can improve the process next year i still don't think it's necessarily the committee's responsibility to go hunt down capital closeouts um but you know we can certainly do it as a part of the process because we're we're asking them anyway um well just kind of uh get your words out of my mouth because i i don't necessarily see where it's this committee's job to track down capital i mean it seems to me it should it should be nothing more than asking the town can you please provide them with capital closeout information as opposed to what you guys you've got to put tons of hours into doing something that i don't really recognize as being part of our charge well it certainly seems awesome it's the ultimate goal is to be looking at long term i mean this is a lot of sticking and sallying numbers with a thousand percent you know we've got a board of selectmen talent saying why aren't you focusing on the long term and we've got right uh a a town manager and finance director asking us where the capital closeout list is right like i yeah i mean there may be a point of in the past that may have been a point of leverage where when the request went out in mid-october and respond by early november and if the same message was i'd had to go back to look at the prior year but the same message was there basically before you do anything else send us your capital closeout information before you get into asking for more money right so if that's that's been the process all right i get it that now we're on the front end asking for for requests uh but again um the it's just another example of sort of not the best collaboration um uh and and and guidance um and you know again some of these things to your point i think at the last meeting some of things you wouldn't you know we wouldn't be talking about if i didn't have a particular insight from other things i'm doing or have been doing in the last 12 months um it goes back for the 12 months for um but but some of these things and so you know i'm i'm worried for whomever sitting it on this committee uh being able to fulfill your responsibilities if you're not being supported properly but but if we're not if it's not being supported properly that's where you draw the line right and the line is without that support that's not on the agenda if if we ask and it's and the department managers it's an easy ask if the department managers don't give or if it's based on you know faulty information i don't think we can do anything more in our report than say we asked this is what we were told we're not appropriating we're not uh funding any projects with this these funds but when it comes time for and comes recommendation to the town there should be better clarity on what's available right i i consider that all bonus money anyway in terms of if you run out of room or there's a project that desperately needs to be done right that pops up that's where you'd be looking and it's not the bulk of the plan right yeah i mean and you know i worry a little bit carol martin had emailed me uh reading our last set of minutes i mean it was the last set of the one before that word i think there may have been a passing reference to open to the capital closeouts and she said uh something in effect yeah i'm hopeful that you'll get you know the normal six to seven hundred thousand dollars and at that point i had already seen we were at best a hundred thousand plus or minus and so i emailed her back i said well you understand what happened last year um you know brian went after things that weren't really done paid for something that he really didn't think was priority i said from what i've seen so far it's at best a hundred and she i think she's worried because she's seen a couple things we have not included in our plan that are a priority for the select board but we don't have the funding at least we're not seeing the funding available do them and she was hopeful that there'd be that order of magnitude again as it were last year capital closeout so uh you know there's there's different sets of eyes on the capital closeout from a planning perspective um which again i i dutifully got back to where i think i copied you brown on that um so i i agree with kelly's point i think yeah but ultimately it's the three of you that are left plus two new members and after that it's new people over time right um if you can't you know if you can't count on getting the information of support you need it's going to make your job at least as to this blocking tackling and small numbers if not so much the larger the larger planning the longer term planning you probably are going to have a little easier time because you'll be reaching out to other department heads and things i think lessons learned right we know to be careful about the munis report we want to do that anyway from a report standpoint because open capital should be something that we're we're reporting because we say in our charge that we're going to consider resources so if we see a department that's got a ton of open capital that affects recommendations so we're going to do that anyway we can ask if we had asked when we sent out the original cip form i think we would have gotten it would have been able to be a part of our discussions it would have been more productive relatively um easier than what we're doing now so i think we can do that i just don't think the committee right and i won't be here and you won't be around i don't think the committee should get hung up and spend a lot of time you get what you get and you comment on it and move on because i don't think you can be doing the blocking and tackling and ticking and tying on that amount and you're going to issue a report in october you're going to go to town meeting in april or may so you can spend a ton of time on maybe getting a half a million dollars scrape dot right but i can guarantee you there's going to be a a significant percentage difference between what you scrape up in october and what's available when you go to atm and when i look at that against a 10 million dollar on average spend that's not where the time should be spent right so you ask you get what you get and you move on okay um why don't i suggest that you'll you lose will deal with the um updating your file and updating the tables yeah for the 12 items that we talked about yeah yeah it's again i it could be yeah yeah whatever one i highlighted in yeah and i think it was yeah and if you have any questions just email me um and uh i will uh i'll take a stab a a paragraph that can go in the open capital section at the end uh that addresses capital closeouts in some manner um when i think you say just jot it down and the report do you want to put it there do you want to put it for a future well there'll process improvement there'll be of those too but i want to acknowledge that what we did and the limitations of what we did and the relatively small yield that we anticipate at the moment there is it'll be short but um i'm not going to get into all this other stuff um so all right well that's why i wanted that uh item on the other people have anything on with the closeouts um and appreciate the department heads again in short order responding yeah uh to that i think department heads overall yeah i wanted to say that for the record and no part of any frustration that i have expressed in these meetings has um been in any way connected to the department heads i think they've done a fantastic job um responding to us and filling out the form and giving us information so i i i think that didn't wait yeah i agree all of them okay if we're done with uh capital closeouts we can move on to uh with the uh report um i guess i'm not sure of any way to do that other than uh starting on page one i want to give an intro comment and then i'll sit back and listen to the rest of you um you know i i i've had this on my desk for i just sent it and i started it and stopped it and started and stopped it and um i just wasn't inclined to uh redraft um just i didn't have the time and didn't didn't want to redraft it and there's in my view there's a lot of information in there that's still just carried over from last year that's not relevant to what we're doing this past year um i'll i'm in at points where i think that's most relevant and i have a couple of things for liz's section and i have a couple of people related edits in or suggestions i had sent to kelly just because she worked on the tables that we could um at the appropriate times vet but um you know any real drafting i'm going to do other than sending you that paragraph um i was just going to wait one more draft and um just because i was getting frustrated i mean there's nothing personal to anybody about anything it's just it i have a much better appreciation of what you did last year kelly and and uh getting this out the door um because it's beyond just drafting there's a lot of analytics that go along uh you know you have to do the analytics before you can draft the punchline right and um if you're not in a position for having to do those analytics you know there's no way you know obviously you can yeah we we could point out well why don't we go anyway can we just go through it by section and if there's analytics that need to be done great and i know there's some right i'm happy to help with that but like let's step through and talk about because there's a step i agree with you you need no numbers to draft but similar to what the exercise that went here last week there were some things that were in here like it's not we don't want it again this year and it's not worth the effort of going to get it so let's talk about section by section what we want right what we think is important and then that narrows the focus on what to you know i spend time on or you spend time on it so do you want to start brian i know your your comments are around table one so do you want to start there and would you like me to put on screen um what you're thinking well i had one have a high level comment about the executive summary first um with all due respect to our yeoman's work and redrafting the cip form to me that i don't view that as a sort of high enough substantive priority to make its way into the you know executive summary me the executive summary is kind of uh replaying where we ended up last year i mean what we recommended and what what appeared in the warrant and uh the requests that came in and then our recommendation kind of a bing bang boom um the the form is again from my perspective it's part of the process which you have a whole section about much more detail about that and i think that's appropriate because i think it's one of the recommendations made but it just didn't make sense for me there and um uh then there was a get to the table a minute but just below the table there was a a paragraph that was um explaining some numbers in the table under the article line item which you know unfortunately aren't explanations and i'm not even sure why we need to as to the last year plan i'm not sure why we need to miss a highlight what what makes up the 5.4 million and the two and a half million but anyway um the specific table i'm sorry yeah secretary summary in the yeah i have paragraph one i have table one i have paragraph two and then i'm below paragraph two i have the notable projects and unless i've got the wrong version no no no no no the article projects and article line in table one fiscal 28 and then it was a 5.2 that i yeah the 5.4 is the town building and the two and a half is the field it's not it's not all those other items that are referenced in that paragraph um yeah but i wasn't sure i mean we if people think that's um helpful information we could certainly describe what those two items are but um so to me the purpose of putting in this any prior information is simply to say we ended up here so kelly's table that was in this draft um there's um a couple comments one i think um last year's report was drafted before we knew that the uh finance structure was going to actually recommend doing uh what had been proposed to do a couple years in a row which was separate the enterprise fund capital request from the omnibus capital request and it appeared under article 5 in the warrant and so this was fine last year but i think we should restate the table whatever the table ends up being to show the enterprise funds on a separate line item and in the text that follows it uh just break the text up a little bit um uh just so it you know and again and give an example what i would say but just we just need to separate those but anyway my hope was to use this table at least at a very high level to um highlight the variance between uh what we recommended and what appeared in the ward and so um maybe there's a bunch of different ways you can do that but i had said kelly i don't know if you are planning to put that up on the screen or not i have it on a i have it on thumb drive if you want no no i have it open i just need to get okay it'd be easier for you to look at it than me um necessarily explaining it and i see this whole prior year thing being literally just what you have kind of two or three paragraphs it's just uh here's where we ended up and then we move along to the the new year and do it you know do it as efficiently as uh as possible robbie if i go in through the through the town link um can you move me over yeah yeah i'm just giving my opinion so everybody should feel free to say yeah that's great but no um and my my brain operates i can encounter so um remotely on you being on zoom tonight yeah i have uh oh you mean like home on zoom yeah and then you could yeah i know want me to go back though
jeff jeff has joined us yeah jeff has not joined us but no matter how many times i change that and uh are you sharing the version i sent you the one today today okay as soon as i get back to it has two two different components to it although i didn't resend the appendix today that was on the first email so you want to be able to show them the appendix to at the same time um we can't do that or we could get you a laptop you said i have a thumb drive but you still need to get on yeah no i got on i don't know okay so we'll scroll to the top um very good thank you so i did uh i'm suggesting two things one to break the um first line kelly's table apart between operating the omnibus budget and the enterprise fund funds i have and that still totals down to the same numbers that she has and then to get at kind of preparing that's to what we recommended i propose just slotting in a single line item for all those years and then um getting to a variance the last line and the uh the uh cp cipc line comes from table 14 in the addendum from last year's report so people wanted to go see where those numbers came from and um and that would be that i would propose be the table and um you know maybe the text has sets or two below it um that just says you know which we'll see when we look at the appendix um you know uh in total we were 4.3 whatever million dollars less than what was actually included in the planned award um and as noted in appendix whatever albeit there were a lot of individual variances most of them were timing and then call out there's two or three um two or three larger ones particularly in fiscal 28 that were driven in part based on our lack of scope for a project which one of which at least carries over again this year which is the route 20 landfill item uh well i'm sorry the town building was the largest slug i'm sorry and and you'll see that in the appendix do you have the are you able to access the appendix from my first email so anyway this was intended not to get into huge detail but to at least highlight that there was a bunch of differences uh and in dollar amounts and we were generally less in terms of what we were recommending
which is how i think at least the finance committee read our report versus what they received from the town manager and again there are reasons why we ended up where we ended up but brian which which stated what day did you send me uh sent me a lot it would have the same um would have the same same descriptor except probably follow-up without the last one i said is probably follow-up to add those extra follow-ups on there just so they don't get tied to some prior conversation let me see if i saved it um apologize i don't think i put the appendix on my thumb drug if you scroll down to the bottom of the one that i sent you today i think it may go all the way down to the email i sent you original email the email today yeah i wasn't getting it from my email i had saved it down on my heart yeah the email i sent you today with this attachment i think i just tacked on to the prior back and forth we had you mentioned how much i couldn't put down for prior your very phone to stop sharing what i'm sharing now to flip over so do you know that's fine so if everybody just looks at that variance line all right when we pull up the appendix i'll point out where that appears which basically they'll you know there'd be a boatload of detail it might have to enhance the size a little bit because it already get fogged down on this first table to blow it up to them and scroll down to the bottom just so you can see the variance yeah yeah so there's something they said uh no go up it'll scroll up a little yeah i'm sorry yeah so good scroll have grand total that last line showing there we're just going to scroll there right so that the first variance there 4.706 million that's that appeared on the prior version of table one we were just looking at is you keep going across kelly the minus 29 900 was the variance 625 600 negative 324 negative and that's it those four years everything above that then if you just scroll up we're not going to go through any of them but all it is is it it's the detail scroll the left by department the it's town manager which ended up being what was in the warrant town manager uh approved capital request in each of the four years 28 through 31 side by side with cfc's recommendation and then the third column is the variance column okay so the only thing that doesn't get used within each of those departments what were the individual projects that had the variances and you know we have a spreadsheet that that has that we don't need to give that level of detail and um while small i think it still is readable i shrunk it down and cut and pasted it into a word page and i think it it just barely and managed to scrunch the columns together enough that i think it is readable in in report format um so the question for the group having done all this and spent 15 minutes getting this up is uh do people think it's helpful a to show the variances as we did in table one between uh what people saw in the warrant and what our report said and then b the people think it's appropriate to give some level of detail um in this case sort of by department or by articles and uh if you keep if you keep scrolling down a little further kelly i think this is where i pulled out the largest variance um it accounts for the largest chunk of the variance that we were looking at is town building related because the town manager's budget included 5.4 million has excluded debt that's kind of bungling up all the repairs whereas as you know we had an ours basically the phased roof uh amounts and then there was a couple other items um but we've since taken out we've since taken out the phase yeah this is this is though looking at last year yeah oh you mean last year okay yeah yeah yeah we're we're just trying to explain why we were different so but the largest share of the variances between us and what appeared in the warrant was related to town building in the other variance column most of those were timing related and that is we largely ended up pushing projects after we prioritized them because very specifically we did we we funded we recommended funding the high school septic system with two million dollars of levy debt which we then limited ourselves to roughly four four and a half million of levy debt whereas the town manager's recommendation went up to six million and levy debt even though they're using a financial technique to pay for the debt service on the two million um but because we limited ourselves we then had to push projects year to year to year and that that's really most of the variances by the time you get through those four years so i think the text could allude to what i just said in some fashion again i'm happy that if we decide to include the revised table one and include this i'm happy to write that paragraph to explain what people are looking at and um what they'll find in the appendix and and really the the largest contributor and then just make the statement that other than that i'll highlight one or two items the rest was largely just timing um and that's all i think my view that's all we need to accomplish in this first couple of paragraphs relating to the prior year because really what people are coming to this report for is what are we ultimately going to recommend for this year and um i almost thought that under executive summary it might be helpful to use subheaders so you know we could put a subheader that was appropriate for these two paragraphs prior year or current year or something to that effect um so anyway that's my pitch um if you all feel that's not helpful then that's fine um um um i i don't have a problem with it i think it's helpful and i agree letting it up to align with the way the warrants presented makes sense um so i i think it's fine to display it the way that you have it and then to add that appendix to the to the appendices for some whoever wants to go dig into it but i think like you said you only need a sentence or two to summarize what what's the main difference right the main difference is the town building right and and the rest are timing differences so i think that's fine and i i agree with doing a subheading right so your executive summary is like how did we land right how how did our recommendation compare to what was ultimately recommended at town meeting then how does town meeting compare to what the departments have requested this year how's what they've requested compared to what we're ultimately recommending that's sort of your executive summary in three sections right the three subsection the um i hate to put you through the torture is it a pain to go back to the first spreadsheet you were showing and i'm not sure it belongs in the executive section summary probably in the process section and i just may as well talk about it since it was up there um so the the uh spreadsheet i sent you today yeah all right so if you scroll down to the bottom of this one so again i think it's probably in the process section yeah go up a little bit so uh i was trying to figure out how to i think it's important that um this year we went at this rather than using as we did last year the fincom guidelines to put a governor in ourselves as to what we could afford to recommend uh we agreed that we were going to try to limit ourselves to the funding sources that were reflected in the prior year five-year plan for 28 through 31 and so the top section of this is is taken out of the warrant um and um those aren't the amounts and and then i was trying to figure out i didn't want to put a whole lot of detail here and i know there's kelly has a table number 14 that um that reflects our recommended funding sources for this year's five-year plan and so all i did here was i did the math and said okay if i take what's in table 14 or borrowing at fiscal 28 and compare it to what's in the five-year plan and the warrant were we higher or lower than what's quote available and in this case we were higher by 68 000 so if we look at when we get to if we look at table 14 it should you know it should be 4.4 million 280 something 290. um and so you know i did all that calculation and came down and the last line here uh ties out to table 14 total sources and i thought this table would be helpful before or after a paragraph that described that we put a governor this is how we how we chose to go about um developing our our funding source recommendations and i i mean this is the visual way i thought we could do it so you can think about that because it comes later in the memo um but i just since we've had this up before um i just didn't want to go putting all the other real information in there and have a multi-tiered and i didn't do enterprise funds or the articles i thought they could be addressed in the text because there wasn't much difference there and uh really it's the general fund impact particularly on levy debt that's the most relevant to uh you know the operating budget um and so i was going to propose we just do a table for the the general fund component and address uh the others in in the text um which again if people think this is useful information i i could draft the paragraph that appeared above or below this table um so that's fine brian i don't have a problem with that i just want to make sure we're very clear on our wording because it isn't clear in in the sample you have here that it's just general fund yeah i mean i i that i was envisioning in the text that we would highlight why this is being called out yeah i think we can probably make it clear in both places though the table and the text um yeah just put general fund somewhere yeah so i plan to recreate your tables in my workbook okay because that way i'm trying to get the this to a point where if they wanted to be used again but it's all established um in that way the formatting all stays the same too hopefully excellent so um my again so i know what i'm doing will the next version will include the revised table one the subheader prior year for lack of anything else at the moment um and um and i said i'm happy to draft you know something to put in there and uh and then i would drop the third um paragraph i was referencing below before personally drop the cip form paragraph and go right to the next section which is um the uh submission section yeah brian my sense is i mean obviously put a lot of thought into draft the table you know give a much better handle on the numbers especially from last year's as well that i have no problem with you going ahead and doing that unless kelly if it desired that i'm not sure how i mean you're preparing the tables um i'm i'm happy to read and review what randall's um but i don't have time to do the drafting on top of them plus yeah so everybody should and again i you know we can go about this one of two ways to extend i'm i'm off drafting a couple of sections or paragraphs um i can simply send you write and copy everybody else since we've talked about it and um you can then incorporate it into your master draft rather than reading um so people can at least be piecemeal looking at things um um so that work for you Liz john doesn't get a vote because he's not here um yeah i would say the the paragraph on the capital improvement form doesn't belong in the executive summary but it can go when we talk about future improvements we can we can sort of do a recap on hey what did we improve from last year and what's remaining and what are we adding to that list does that make sense as a format so it can go later um not the executive summary but yeah on page five there's a there's a whole there's a cipc current process and um again it references the form so if there's anything in that paragraph brad that you feel wasn't you know incorporated in that first large paragraph under cipc current process you just kind of weave it in there um i think it is appropriate to be in there because it was a significant part of the process and to kelly's point we still i think have talked about the need for some additional improvements um which would then go in the improvement section um you know i don't i like we have the time tonight i i next a lot of my time i spent trying to double check kelly's tables and the numbers and um parent of my files just to make sure i wasn't having some something wrong or whatever um you know i'm i'm still off a couple of uh projects here and there from some of the accounts here and at the end of the day i don't well i'm off a couple tubes so i think i i think i didn't go back and update those yeah after i'd be great if we can tie it all out and maybe by the time we get to the final final version it'll it'll all come together but um there is a definitive number of projects and the definitive dollars associated with it so um and i think we agreed that um with the height the shaded area just above the table i think we agreed we weren't going to really get into talking about revisions in any substantive way just because there weren't that many this year that whole shaded section just come out that was my that was my point in my comment because if this is discussing last year revisions you know i don't think we need uh yeah so the the the sentence those requests total 70.4 million for 152 projects that is our final including revisions we got from it assuming we pinned down the numbers that that yeah i have to just double check the numbers there we're we're not highlighting um and standing for fiscal 28.
yeah so the whole during and after meeting with the department managers right there was changes on absolute value basis i don't think we need anything from there and come out um i didn't really understand in your table too i don't think i passed this comment along to you i didn't i couldn't really figure out where the project numbers and the parentheses next to each line item came from i was waiting for you to ask me some of them i thought i was waiting for you to ask me so i will admit and i'll go back through it again and i can send you this brian um what i did was take all i have the delta right between what we um had in the plan and what the departments requested and for everything that had a delta right i had to pick a category right that it falls in but where i got in trouble was that some have both so i can send you i may give that one more review and then send it to you and have you take a look at that yeah as long as i'm sure you were as long as you're consistent with um i assume that happened because there were obviously there were a couple i knew right away had both additions to dollar and if anybody has a better way to do this i'm all ears because i definitely want to have them at one in the morning so if i take it right so basically and maybe it's worth a sentence here again we're going to assume for the moment 152 projects is the number if i if i add up all those projects in parentheses to whatever that adds up to 12 13 21 26 55 um so you got you're basically saying you have a hundred you have 90 97 projects that were in last year's plan no change to any amount request that sound right that i mean that's a lot yes that's a lot yeah so i think it's worth where we're pulling out that whole section it might be worth just tacking on something in those other senses it just says you know of the 152 project 97 of them were in last year's plan at the same dollar request it's significant right and then um as noted below there were a number of additions and removals and blah blah blah and then the table can speak for itself one thing and then the paragraph right below that table just we need to again make sure we got the right numbers maybe a little redundant we have 28 referenced above and uh where brad do you know the 1.4 million you're showing there all the other numbers except we wanted to include them it's fine the 1.4 million for it infrastructure and cyber compliance where did you get that number from i think i took that from your last uh spreadsheet and just added up the it numbers i think total 1.4 for me in the interest of time i'm happy to read right certain narrative around table two so above and below this table right so you'll check that number right because that number is i think we just do like conceptually what do we want here we want to we talked about narrative right that talks about changes broadly right so we got 97 projects that were requested identical to what was in the previous plan the changes are noted in the table below right what other color commentary do we want on this a little bit of color commentary on what the on the big what the big changes were that's what i would do right so we've got we've got the numbers in the table but do we want to call out right what the things what the big drivers were uh yeah so i would the two million dollar school item i assume is buried in the 3.37 million right yeah um and in the additions you got the you know i don't know where you put the fire sensors that that might be in the 3.37 million as well i moved fire sensors from facilities to schools just fyi oh yeah i saw that um because it's a school project yeah so i'll yeah so if you want to just pick the top you know three or four i mean it is it's effectively what brad was trying to do below right but i'm just going to brush do it from the chart right i have the data and so i'll just pick off what the big ones are which you can see them right you can see them in you know in the move to another year right there's a couple of big numbers here and then i'll just look and make sure there aren't any that are offsetting that are hiding that need to be mentioned yeah i guess in that sense the 1.4 you're talking about with it that that's actually four or five different line that's not a single project which is fine right once i look at exactly what's driving the differences it may be talking about a single project for it i'm not going to get into what the specific projects are i'm going to you know broadly generalize and most of it was cyber yeah and i think it's it's really the new stuff because we're saying 97 projects were in last year's plan there shouldn't be any discussion i mean it's not to say that we or the finance committee can't revisit or town meeting can't revisit something but in terms of explaining what we're doing i think we highlight those larger new items or things that are in those change line items yeah i think that's what you're talking about i'm going to do this in two paragraphs one that's going to focus on f by 28 a little bit more in detail and one that will be broader on the f by 29 to f by 32. that makes sense question is the real punch lines are the last two cents are people comfortable with basically literally just a sentence for each and send them over to the detail you mean the recommendation sentence yes yeah an executive summary yeah yeah i'm i need to put i like that it's up front versus buried in table 14 last year i think we said what we recommended up front we just didn't put didn't we i don't know because this table two is here or maybe not all right maybe not but again it gets back to if anything that might be you better read the one page right but that might be a change here right so we talked about so we're talking about the sections are comparing prior year our our recommendation to what ultimately got recommended to town meeting then what got recommended at town meeting to what the department requested it might be moving up table 14 right the third section because we skip right to we recommend moving up that section on or of some of it on this is what we recommend for the year yeah right so it's sort of table one two and three with narrative on each of them okay does that sound good which which table um um capital plan 14 is capital plan unexpected articles by funding source yeah so i think it's probably table 12 capital plan summary one of those it breaks out by calendar year yeah or fiscal year but i i would say it's 14 because it's consistent with what you wanted to put in your table one comparison by funding source so that would be that information would be out there yeah and then because i think the departmental discussion can be the more detailed discussion
later on if you recall the reason it's in table 14 is because we didn't we did one year and then we addended oh no i think it made sense no no no no i'm not saying like we should move it because that was yeah i wouldn't have put it in that order i don't think if we were doing this all down last year right yeah so i think it's 14 that moves it's just it was dropping a funding source table went at that point just seems too detailed inconsistent with actual projects i would either see it being table 12 or table 13. well so i guess maybe i would say 13. say i don't want to just say what the recommendation is for 28. i think we should say what the recommendation is for all of the years so i think what you were saying the last two sentences right well why can't why can't we okay why can't we do none of those and instead do something that looks sort of like table one when you revised it that's just um that's just omnibus enterprise funds article right the high level yeah that's fine let's actually keep the executive summary high level i don't think there's any plugs left in there sir people understand what keller just yeah so i think people want to just put those exactly the recommended numbers for the next yeah which then the detail would be back in table 12 13 14. that makes sense
so that that that could that could just replace those two sentences i mean you'd have a you'd have an outlet let me unplug my laptop are you okay so unplug it i'm okay we're gonna add a sensor to around that table but we wouldn't then need to separate 28 out because it's it was in right in the column right all right so we got the executive summary under control
yeah well once you have the executive summary then you then then you know three sections have to repeat but in more detail okay thank you robbie okay so just so i'm clear the executive term we found this ryan and kelly you guys gonna put those two pieces together okay yeah i'll do two and three you do one ryan yeah we're down to administrative matters yeah i think the parts that are highlighted um i think we talked about moving those to appendix a yeah i i rethought that i mean i don't find them offensive where they are there's some of it that just i mean i appreciate that by the way i appreciate the comments that you put in there uh but uh some of it i would just take out rather than put it into the appendix but um so what do you want to take out come on look at it yeah make the comment and tell us what you want to take out right i kind of like leaving the members in just because it gives a early advertisement that new members are needed um yeah and you can't take out the part about you guys leaving in our nice comments about you yeah absolutely the background paragraph and i guess the background paragraph i suppose if it could be fit in which maybe is what you envision kelly above the
in whatever appendix that penitenta appendix a is the bylaw yeah so it uh you know if the words would have to change a little bit just because you wouldn't have to be referencing um yeah the reason i didn't i i tried to make sure there's a reference to every appendix in the report itself but you don't have to yeah so um yeah and the last sentence and we don't need um you know but it's not something you would put in the appendix about we're pleased to submit our report um i mean the only reason i i think i put that in and what i draft the only reason i put that in is because we have the um this time it's due to the late formation part so maybe maybe we just take out both they got both senses and just leave the leave the first part in as a lead-in to the actual bylaw um and then so background through by october 15th of each year that goes at the beginning of the appendix a bylaw right where the bylaw is and then you lose the rest of that paragraph you know i might i might move the charter mission that's the first paragraph yep and then i would say you could say under under the bylaw right in appendix a cipc is charged with then you've got a tie out okay so you're talking about going uh background and then charter mission no ditch move the background to the beginning of at the top of the appendix a right then start with charter mission move that paragraph up oh okay and add you know under the capital planning bylaw cipc is charged with right so then then you can do the cross-reference there to appendix a yeah after that then you get all your all your main governance appendix appendices out of the way right away right like what are we doing we're doing this for the bylaw on appendix a using capital planning from appendix b and debt policies from capital c that's those are your governance
keep members in the record proper um would you see them below the debt policies or it's charter mission then you had to get members and then yeah yeah policies that make sense right yeah yeah okay so then are we good with are we good with the capital and planning and debt policies or do we need to add here brian like are we we're covering an executive summary but the fact that we used these are the guidelines but what we're using is the prior year capital plan is sort of our guiding it's both i know do we want to and so i'm fine with that section but do we want to say anything about that right that you know this we have we have a multitude of things here right that we can say in addition in addition to um for the current year that you know the committee used both the finance committee guidelines uh as well as uh i want to say something along the lines because there's no new there there is no more current guideline we relied on yeah that's fine we relied on the last published finance committee approved plan as our guideline right does that make sense brad yeah so we stated it because that's the last published one but because they didn't follow it and they're following that table that's sort of an overarching set of guidelines that we continue to follow maybe after that chart we then say in addition as noted below the committee uh and be whatever the words are to reference the fact that we use the prior year plan funding sources as a governor on our efforts yeah that's what i'm saying but the real discussion that will come in the process section the reference i don't know if it or do we even need to put it here no i don't know if it needs to i was just trying to tie out like if we're saying we've got a capital policy a debt policy and the fincom guidelines but those haven't you know weren't recently updated so we we looked to fincom's recommendation the last published recommendation as a as a governor right and then i don't think you need to say much more on it i can debate where you know the paragraph with the three bullets or the sentence with the three bullets on you know the capital plan should meet the guidelines where that belongs right i've got to do some work to to look at that um but where does that belong it may or may not still belong here like we're we're just talking about what's the policy i'd almost rather those those go somewhere else yeah right so i still think there needs to be something along those lines but in theory that factored into our deliberations really didn't other than we know that it's out there as a yeah i i would still like to if i can find once i finish this i can find time to look at it i would still like to know where it doesn't meet policy and you've heard me harp on it before if we're going to consistently not meet policy the policies should be changed that's not within our purview but and you can say something you know the committee um in deliberating its recommendation the committee um you know attempted to objective was to meet these policy and based on their analysis if it does it doesn't it may for the language that was there last year if if the numbers are available right so that's the administrative policy related stuff so really try to get rid of those and leave the experts in there
yeah well people trust me we'll get rid of them before it's done don't kill yourself yeah i can take care of it
not to jump out of order but i just forgot my charger at home and my battery's kind of getting a little bit low um so let's jump out of order so if if folks are okay with jumping to the uh open capital budgets yeah um i know kelly you had some questions brian you mentioned some cash uh a question or comment um but did want to talk to just how i came up with the buckets because i think otherwise the reports are essentially what they looked at last year so there's not much to talk about there yeah we drew a different line last year as i remember and i i had the all the projects i computed averages in fact i had used a different line initially and kelly i think you moved it yeah i had certain i'd like around like i had a fifty thousand dollar item i think you moved it because it was yeah so that's exactly what i wanted to talk about because i was trying to so i was i looked at what we did last year and for the most part with the reports and and the numbers that we showed i just my first stab at it was just recreate what was done last year just with the updated numbers um my mouse pad it was also going on me so i have to like do my window and then tab and my h key doesn't work i'm really really yeah unless i really jam it down so i was like i can't do it on the narrative here we're gonna have no h's yeah that's why paper doesn't do that you don't think so so when i so there were a couple things that were a little bit outlier so we have two projects so just kind of looking at percentages of the total open budget you have two projects that make up almost half of the total open budget so they're you know north of um a million and a half each so they really just kind of if you throw them into the averages of it just stores things so i thought we should keep those kind of isolated call them out separately because then you know you get a much more accurate rec uh reflection of the remaining funds um otherwise you have like 80 of the budget and 20 of the project so it's just kind of you know it's a bit skewed so um then i went i said okay let's just carve out those two projects and keep everything else current so still looking at things that are an average of 25k or above and that still gives you with kind of a weird distortion of the information so then you're looking at you know if you're talking about percentages of projects three percent of the projects have 47 percent of the budget and then 19 of the projects have 33 78 of the projects make up only 20 of the open budget so again it was one of those things where it was really distorted so i'm like what would this how can we kind of shake this up so that it makes a little bit more sense and that's how i landed on if you do an average of 10 000 you know open projects and that i kind of gave you that range that makes up roughly 61 of the total project so it's you know the point was to say the majority of a lot of small balances yeah exactly the majority of these projects have dwindling smaller balances less than 25k from last year we can add some narrative around that but i didn't want to do that without having a conversation first um and that you know the majority of your budget is sitting on two projects one is the library and the other one is i i forgot what 23 but um that was kind of the idea of slicing and dicing it but thoughts see the only reason i questioned it was because that breakup was different than in the table right so which which would table the table right below the like the 50 the the 50 50 to 100 100 to 250 greater than 250 so if i i think your breakup is probably perfectly logical but why not line the table up with the same breakup so you're saying it's basically you've got two projects that are over a million right then you've got because you've got i think it it lays out nicely then like hey there's a ton of stuff that's super small yeah there's a couple of things that are really big just why not do the the chart below it lined up to it you're talking about one that's like um i think it's easier to read a chart well i didn't want to go and change reports oh that's fine so the first line would be greater greater than half million or yeah greater than a million greater yeah so the next line would be 250 to a million yeah but some of the lower amounts would just have to line up i think you're saying yeah and i so i think i can take a whack at updating that specific report so it's more reflective of how things are shaking out and then put a narrative around like hey what do you need to know what's the takeaway here put it in actual words as opposed to you know hoping they infer it from the numbers yeah i think that the punchline is what you're saying is get these two big things and then we had a whole bunch of projects that have really relatively small balances yep and then there's a little bit of in between 20 is in between right um okay yeah all right i got the action to update that all right good any other comments or questions um i had a minor bit on um page six table so the first pair of open capital it says there are 67 capital projects for 26 and 27 and then the table it adds up to 68. that was the exact same issue last year okay so you just just double check yeah accurate um yeah um and this stands out so if you would jump out at me curiously was fiscal 2020 is one of the years that had one of the big closeout items and so you know you got all these relatively small numbers and it goes to 19 and then it goes back down to single digits and if you look at the school line the 210 604 item most of that is um the so-called fiscal fear 20 dw core network 202 358 which will be coming out yeah yeah so those numbers will then drop down yeah um but that all seemed to make sense to me um you know the same thing will happen you know obviously in the next table um uh just a minor bit on the uh and maybe i had it this way i don't remember ah in the third table you have four i know kelly had a comment about sorting it differently which probably makes sense between uh town and school in one section and maybe do a spacer and then uh water kind of just separate the water just you know the large top ten gosh you have to bring another one in but yeah um just just do town school and then maybe a row and then water just so it's separated which are which report was that one this is taylor uh the top ten september would you do separate subtotals for both of those yeah probably we have nothing else in these tables that give any sort of sense on oh no actually we do maybe i would space town space school space and well we don't separate town and school anywhere else oh right above we we do in the other tables we have town school and enterprise oh true oh you're right okay yeah i would do town space the town the subtotal school and the subtotal water water for the subtotal but then just the top ten yeah yeah so the top ten broken out by those categories you could just um change these to initial cap only in all caps uh yeah okay that's in your data set yeah it's just it's how it pulled from the report so but yeah and the 11 million that's showing there for the coacc you can delete that and then wherever it is in the data set in the description it has 11 million you don't need that in there and if you want to easily do that capitalization change you can use either proper or title as a formula and it'll change it for you yeah if caps is another one that you can do yeah are you going to caps or away from that well i think for the ones that i'm going to take out the caps would be yeah seeing the land proper yeah title so after this last table i guess is where i'll give you um i'll circulate language relative to the closed capital yeah i'll tell that to everybody i did have a question about appendix c because i yeah okay um for the 2027 new ads so we pulled them from last year because we couldn't get an updated um report post 6 30. so the 2027 is missing oh great you're gonna so sorry uh
there's like unique identifiers is what i call them but they're they're not but at the beginning of each descriptor there's a number or a code um for the 2027 items we don't have that information so in appendix e there's like there's a gap essentially and i can show you it's probably easier sorry guys i can't show everybody but let me um tab over uh you do you have my chance you have the full excel file so it should yeah i had exhibit e in it i opened it so it's
you want to just send it to me yeah so maybe i'm assuming we have that information now just i don't know why don't you just send me whatever you're looking at yeah and then just ask me the question and all of them i would say to you whatever exhibit e looked like last year let's make it look like that this year but if i'm also missing that information we had the report from um what was it november november so we had it was already populated but because we didn't have it the 27 the 2027 information in the june 30th 26 it didn't include that yet we're adding those as of july 1. yes so you added so yeah so i would say if you're asking the question should fiscal 27 approve requests be in exhibit is it e not happen is it our option um i would say yeah that should be included should be included it's just it's missing that furthest left column that was in yeah because they haven't assigned them yet which is right okay you just put in a or blank okay okay so then they're off that so brad what i said well i'll still send you an updated file because it will i've got a couple tweaks that we're making tonight okay so get it updated but then we just talk about those things like that being appropriate yeah if you want to since again we talked about it if you want to copy all of us on that that appendix yeah just because i haven't i don't think i've seen that yet so i can well i just look at the brand yeah yeah so i'll look at that and if i see anything else i'll let you know yeah okay we're done all right go to my batteries go home that was great guys got 10 minutes okay now we have to go backwards we actually have four minutes because we need one minute for the minutes we're going backwards yeah we go back to the section on the ipc current process on the page um one of my again i just don't know if you didn't get a roundup the um the uh this this criteria that are in here are the ones we used last year when we did the low medium high those are not the criteria that are in the revised cfp form the department heads filled out i don't know where are we i'm sorry the in the current process section second full paragraph you have bullets oh yes yes i see yep yep yep so we really need to jettison those and pull in the um once from the form that's the lead in text says department managers were required to rank employment but the form does require priorities of one to five yeah but the bullets are the bullets describe they describe different things than what's actually in the oh oh i see what you're saying so you're saying the bullets need to be updated yeah okay to align to align with the criteria we put on the form right yep and um speaking of that kelly can you remind me i i you mentioned at the last meeting i know you have a comment in here you seem to think what at least one of the rankings was um brad's text that he put in seemed to say it's because they're all inverted which i don't think it's no i think i i think it called out the one that was inverted yeah but but were you saying it was the last one enhancement yeah yes and and and i was struggling to i suppose if you were coming at it from the standpoint of um of five you get a five if you're spending less money oh as opposed to adding service but this suggested adding this this is no you might be i might have just read it wrong so i looked at it and said i would give you a priority if if if you need this to maintain so i looked at it as it's higher priority to me to maintain existing service than it is to add new new services yeah but that's different from what the description says is completing the project will provide a benefit to citizens above existing service yeah you're right so no i have i happen to agree with you i i would
i'm not going to actually suggest it but you know if i worded that description differently saying i put more of a preview on not adding new services right but that's not what that's not what it says what we asked them so perhaps we leave it the way it is we don't make and we look at it next year whether that category should be read should have a different description so that addition should be deleted from the changing that it'd be that it was yeah because it well because it it's not what it says right but i i didn't even look at the description brian admittedly i looked at well what would i give a higher score i give a higher score to something that that where we're going to lose a service we already have versus adding a new one yeah and yeah and there could be a year if that's the direction that's given by the town manager that that could be a flip or or you would just word it differently yeah i would probably not call it enhancement i think what we don't have here is um and maybe we already have it in value to residents right in the minimal versus high but i would say um it needed to maintain sure consistent yeah consistency of operations right it's it's not enhancement right um right although some would argue that having an enhancement category like that's like getting getting more services is important i just didn't so i could go either way so i think you should leave it the way it is and discuss it next year okay um thank you for cleaning that out then we go to page eight the discussion of the plan the capital budget recommendation so i'm sorry so it's at the end of um at the end of before you go there brad so it's right above oak and capital projects that's that's kind of where i would propose inserting that table 1b that we looked at earlier and and i'll again draft that if you guys right above the open capital project status well actually before that very last sentence i would insert the table and then i'll add i'll create some text before the last above open capital projects says cpc then developed recommendations anticipated funding sources etc we did that but we previously had agreed to follow the prior year funding source amounts so if you park the table in there right about that sentence and then i'll circulate another paragraph that follows the table that would be helpful 28 capital budget recommendations and some of this language in this section was just again i assume it's just carried over from last year it's just not reflective of kind of this year's situation so just a question of whether you're comfortable brad getting the language more matched up with you know our current situation now that we have tables out and about or that maybe end up being one of those areas where people have to weigh in with specific edits going the numbers and the whole last paragraph you can only deal with if analysis actually got done yeah i don't understand your comment kelly about looking at prior warrants or how to show real estate expense oh that was just a reminder you gave it to me was that the real estate fund yeah that was the words i just needed the word okay i should have deleted that sorry but i'm in that in that the budget page nine the budget table in that description we were just talking about you could take the word the out it's receipts reserved for sale of real estate fund summary table uh you mean in table that's table seven till seven yeah just take the word the out from in front of sale and the same thing back in table 14.
oh i didn't get it right and i didn't know but table seven table 14 right um table eight um the uh first the first box the last line says total funding sources should be total budget
departmental enterprise fund request the first total lines currently says total funding sources that should be total budget for budgets right again the paragraph under table eight again needs to be tweaked again i think it was relevant last year it goes to the fact that we had to re-rank things and move things around but we really didn't you know had a couple of situations where we did that this year
um table nine that is for everybody's benefit so i'm sorry right but so that paragraph that you're talking about are you referring what are we suggesting we do with that paragraph so you would just talk to we we did it very generally last year because we moved a lot um there actually isn't that much that we moved out in in this one so i would just be a discussion of basically it's town building the south landfill one or two other things right those are the only things that we excluded yeah the top building it was the septic tie in the yeah the phase two roof which we eventually moved and the uh the southville south landfill planning and designs required so at the brad they're listed in table 15. it's the new description in table 15 for the first one you're going to change that description table 15. what do you want it to say no the route 20 lamp that we talked about uh yeah design and planning so would we just say the project's not included uh a reference in table 15. um you could call them out you could call out right if you're talking about it by 28 it's just the first three yeah and and what's not in table 15 is the 700 000 phase two roof because that's we moved it to fiscal 29. so you'd have to basically say you know i like the thing that we left out we left out the landfill design and planning money 500 000 the wastewater tie in a town building 500 000 and we moved the 700 000 phase two roof down building roof to fiscal 29. that doesn't appear in 15. well i don't know why i don't have that in 15. well 15 is things that just weren't in the plan five-year plan the roof we end up putting the roof out a year right right but we did leave out the roof and the other there was a three hundred ten thousand dollar roof request for 29 already so we did leave that out in the 2000. table nine um the uh the title for table nine should that be 2020 prior plan versus departmental departmental reconciling that versus your header it's both it's both right because it's departmental requests but it's also kind of right between recommended and not recommended um maybe maybe you don't need the departmental request about that uh anything hopeful though because that's total and we can change the header and then it's just the breakdown of what we recommend what's the idea i think we can add okay i'm just having trouble between the header and the header and then um i maybe i need to i think maybe last year i had better lines in between this so it's separated better but i'm dreaming and then the column recommended runs over and fix that yep and um did you get my uh the um the transfer stage enterprise fund at 380 000 and water enterprise funded 710 should this number should be 390. and i can see that my total doesn't match oh because i must have pulled yeah you pulled from the record for a year that's why uh i know why because i i i put the values in for the 300 the 2 million and the 90. i put in the articles and then i subtracted i subtracted the run column i did not see that no fine i'll end up at 2 million 390. yeah yeah um do you have a problem brian with the fact that i combined underdust an enterprise there you want that broken at the bottom and that in column and in table nine it doesn't matter it's already broken out i just i the columns together but doesn't matter because it's broken out yeah it's fine never mind yeah i think you're fine yeah for any interest of space okay that's how i have a table i do have a go back on the 77 quantity for projects um going back to the open capital 77 check so it's only reflective of through the school year 25 so if you back off 26 and 27 projects you get to the 77 number okay with 77 i was having a problem with 67 in the first paragraph versus 68 which added 77 would be 145 projects
now i'm dropping where your numbers come from let me go and check yeah i think the dollars were right yeah thank you well on table 15 i mentioned this last meeting um and i'm sure whatever the whatever the decision is made to do with this building if it's to say here the numbers will all be different anyway but um you know we're picking up the 5.4 million just because that got into last year's five-year plan right uh and as i pointed out last week that and i think i sent you all after last meeting of reconciliation maybe there are too many numbers there for people to follow but basically trying to point out that double counting yeah yeah so i didn't know if on table 15 whether we could drop a footnote this just references that i think we should do more than drop a footnote i think we should add some text there add some text there but you know while acknowledging that the ultimate cost is going to be dependent on what's whatever the decision is but yeah right now it's just double counting it's two things right it's acknowledging that um there were projects that were components of the 5.4 that were submitted separately right and then acknowledging that the overall project right to rehab the building is expected to be more than 5.4 and that there's a visioning committee we have we have language on that okay i'll uh i'll circulate something okay you mean to add every table yeah yeah okay uh well let's see yeah well because i i yeah i do that i do start talking about that on page 13. yeah try to add ahead ahead of i think there are yeah i'll put it ahead of the table yeah okay i shall do that because i on page 13 i didn't know what number to put in whether to put in that 5.4 if they requested x come out i left that blank because of our discussion last week where is that in the long-term section uh the discussion of long-term planning it's worth noting facilities has requested blank for multiple replacements and various renovations because it sounded like that number was kind of all over the place i wasn't quite sure the number was reserved there 15. i assume we're not going to have a table 16. we didn't we didn't push anything out other than that eight million dollar item we didn't push out we just took it out well we have that in table 15. i'm saying so we don't need table 16. yeah so so maybe is this here you mentioned beginning meeting um maybe creating a another table that includes items that were requested last year like do we want to have a section on things that notable items that have been in prior requests that were not requested this year yeah i think so i think so so those are the transfer station building the cpa funded playgrounds uh uh and other other fields which is that it sent you yeah what we got last year is three million something out and yeah anything else those that those are the ones that come to my mind okay yeah i think that's useful long-term planning and the future process improvements again these seem to be the same ones that were in last year yeah so they just need to be reworked through um yeah we hadn't really talked about what we wanted what those improvements would be so i thought we'd think those need chair committee acting chair yeah um well let's just hear you can do a quick yeah so the first bullet it's continued to continue to you know enhance revisions or you know to the cip form to address uh i don't know if you need to be specific or just maybe maybe there it's it may not be in the form itself but the collection of the uh close capital capital closeout yeah yeah i would say capital closeout i would say on the first sort of combining first and second bullet like let's continue to improve except feedback on the on the new capital form um and uh request from departments pick a date for next year by good date rather than say begin coordination with the partner we did we started earlier this year well i think our goal was to send out the form in june within it and then yeah until late july yeah but there should be no reason it shouldn't go out in june and i also suggest that um you might want it may be a separate bullet that addresses um town support town staff support you're going to need more town staff support next year and that might include someone that's got some level of expertise and dealing with the kinds of the excel workbook macro whatever's that kelly put together because it's one thing to have them that's another thing to you know now that the department heads think they're the greatest thing since sliced bread you know you best be in a position to you know have it work again next year so again i'm not saying liz you don't have that capability or john doesn't have that capability i don't know
but it's that it's that to me those type of functions just because you never know what the membership makeup will be you know finding someone on town staff that has that expertise and if they don't have that expertise you know some sort of commitment from the town manager that they will get that training to be able to maintain it on a consistent basis no matter who's sitting uh in here i think would be
squeeze that into maybe it's just a generic gonna need more town staff support yeah from a process standpoint but yeah i would also yeah because i can talk about yeah but it happened in the finance committee i mean kelly created a bunch of spreadsheets that you know you used over a number of years around the finance committee and then you pass them off and and uh you know another individual did her best to utilize them and understand them but kelly had to get dragged back in uh ad hoc to help out and even then as crunch time came you know there were there were issues and and uh that that's that's the only issue i ever had myself when i would not necessarily using macros but developing models and things you know i i'd always try to develop them so that hopefully someone could pick them up and relatively easily sort of figure their way through um and even i you know not that i'm expert in excel but i can get around i mean it took me a while to be able to sort of identify where the issues were in the incomes spreadsheets that were i knew the results were not making sense so i had to kind of trail backwards so i i just not sure i think that's a great tool i'm just not sure this committee should be counting on somebody being able to staff that but um i would two things one you can find me but two all of that right was done through use of copilot and so if something's not working you can drop it into copilot and say yeah this isn't working tell me why um which is what i did yeah and and i couldn't do that today i mean i i tried doing something simple just to see if i could kind of do what kelly did and i'm sure if i put some extra time into it i'd probably figure my way around it but um anyway if again if it really john seems to be using ai i don't know if you're using you know copilot or whatever to do a lot of the programming and stuff but um again if something goes wrong you all you know all i know is i need to look at the output and say does it make sense yeah well keep in mind brian though and i would hope this doesn't happen the form itself doesn't have a map like the the excel file itself doesn't have a macro so somebody could manually copy sheets and fill them out it's not going to give you an automated total but they can still fill out the sheets right and somebody can you could always manually do it that's what the department is like the most does that roll up yeah like tom tom mentioned that at both the meetings i watched he was i said look it's really so tell me in terms of the process in terms of getting all the comments um i always get nervous and you guys have more experience on this but nervous when there's so many different comments coming in so many different red lines coming in how do you guys typically handle it because i've seen draft things can't even read it because there's so many different comments and red lines i mean normally what would happen and it's just i think what you're hearing is neither kelly or i either have the bandwidth or the brain cells left to be heavily involved in redrafting i think normally what would happen is two people would go at it off the committee which if assuming that's less than a quorum and they would be able to exchange back and forth their own edits and things well guess i guess what i'm saying is how do you i've got some edits you've got it you've got it i mean so you have to process i mean i'll process the edit size but so if you and so just order it's a little bit order of this so we've talked about a whole bunch of edits tonight if you incorporate your edits send out a version right the best easiest way to do it is in sequence so meaning you do your edits i add my edits to yours you decide whether to accept them right everything that we've talked about tonight we can do that with what we can't do is add new thoughts right new new stuff so i would say you have to do it the easiest way is to do it in sequence right right and it doesn't matter which order but like put your edits in and then one of us send it and so i what i would i guess what i would do then is take the current version which is uh the one kelly did and i had a couple edits would accept all those changes add my changes uh that we talked about today in redline and then send that out yeah and where your notes allow you to do it i would put it or put a comment in for placeholders where we've talked about adding different tables yeah kelly's got to work on updating some of the tables who's going to update her tables so at least acknowledge that you know where those are going um you need to move you know we talked about moving some text around you can reread the whole thing yourself and try to update you know some of those areas that we talked about and then i think the next best thing to get in there would be the updated tables um um you know what i'm sending you will be complete paragraphs that you should be able to just i mean i can either yeah you know if if you send out something that we're all now looking at kelly in turn then drops your tables into that sends it back to you you then can send that out because it's all the tables we talked about i could then certainly just go ahead and cut and paste my paragraphs in or i could independently just in advance of that just send out to everybody my paragraphs and tell you where they go and so people can have them right and then you'll have them and then when you're getting around to you know something that kelly sent you can you know just pull them in i'll plan on the comments that we talked about today that i'm working on i'll plan on getting those out tomorrow yeah so it would be better if you did them separately because i'm traveling tomorrow and friday so i won't be able to look at it until friday night yeah and and so um again tomorrow i can give you my updates and then by the time kelly's done with traveling those will already be picked in yeah absolutely yeah right so you would send me yours yeah the rest because it's all yeah it's not really changing other than you know the the balances we're going to zero out right but that's very much outside of you know what we're project or what our recommendations are for next year right yeah i mean if you can do that in time for brad to incorporate that into what his changes are that'd be a good starting point yeah i'll just send my paragraph separately and then um you know if if if i get what you get and i don't see certain placeholders in there for other things we talked about i'll i'll just put comments in and send it back to you so you know that you'd be looking for something um you know from kelly okay and um and um and then again the question is on the appendices um do you you have those in word form from last year i don't have any of the appendices you have do you have the final report unless are they there are they in the report they must i can you can you send you have the final word doc for both the report initial report and i might we can just send that so we all have it and then i can i'd be happy to take the um you know the word actually i might have the word version of the report of the appendices and just start to get the final version i'm not sure yeah yeah we just want to make sure we have the final version and so you know if you have uh you know appendices e list um do you send that to brad too or i did send it to him but i think it needs to be updated for the things we're zeroing out yeah yeah so if you could just circulate the appendices e appendix e to everybody i'll i'll brad i'll take on from kelly's original documents final documents i'll just make sure we have all the appendices in order to take that off your plate and that means i'll pick up some of that language out of the text that we were talking about you could just cut it out of your document i have it in word as in pdf that's that you want it in word yeah yeah i do have the appendices all right well let me let me send the version just in case okay well what we like to do is have all the appendices in word with pictures of the tables yeah that's what that's what you have if you just send the new picture and then send that to me just so i can get them all ordered and then that way we can figure out which order they're actually going to appear and change the yeah titles on them but that's just one so i have the report and all these appendices and the tables are embedded and then if people are still thinking it's fine for a table of contents um yeah we do that at the last minute we'll just update it and um i originally sent you a cover sheet just single i was basically just going to suggest we take the header off the top here and make that a cover sheet oh okay and then the table of contents would be the first page oh i see and then you'd have the report and then you have the appendices you know in the back so um you know you can either do that yourself or if you go back to the original time i sent you the table of contents i had a separate page for that okay yeah i was really going to get you know if i was industrious i was going to put some photos of capital projects and trucks and buildings but i said do i really want to do that well if you make the cover look nice you know they said well it must be a good report that's how the school the superintendent present used to always present his budget he put pictures of the kids with the artwork and then um you know we only have two meetings to finish this so yeah no problem and and at the last meeting um brian keveney and uh michael call we're going to come to that um it's kind of the 15th the 14th yeah and they wanted to have a copy of the report before that and you know let's give them whatever draft is after after we meet next week we will do it with them so my question was um yeah um there's really not much we can be doing on the 14th other than meet with them preview the report when we're done with them clean up and authorize you've had to probably finalize whatever final editing and then ship it off so we really need to finish this for the most part by next meeting so my question was um which is when on october 7th yeah um then my question was uh could we see if we could gather a quorum for seventh as a wednesday right yeah yeah um whether we could gather a quorum uh for um 10 12 a holiday here yes almost did i'm just looking whether we need another i think we should put a hold for another one um even we somehow are miraculously done
next one's that great but i think we should better to shoot for the you know if we if we get this further along at the next meeting and then give people sure there's a long weekend to get through it we can we schedule something on the 13th to i'm a bill sort of pre-finalize the report so i play out the 13th but i'm in west coast time zone so um my day ends three hours later earlier than you guys and we just need to be sure we have three people yeah well i know john's not here but yeah i won't be able to support the 13th through like the 15th and i know the 15th is already after the fact but yeah i know john said you couldn't make the 14th did you get a sense it was that week probably depend on whether kelly can meet that weekend the alternative is to go the prior week and they're on one calendar hold on i gotta get the other you are in the home stretch we're gonna dub you a member
you've sat through all of these meetings
you could be the next town manager
13th as long as we don't start before 6 30. that's a tuesday night tuesday night so brad if you could check even if it's if all we could do is an in-person um coacc but uh preferably if they had a hybrid that way if liz could well on the 13th i'll be in the air oh okay um all right see what they have i'll see if they have 6 30 to 8 30. yep okay okay guys want to look at the 39th or is that like
too close to the heaven i think we need time yeah i was just thinking people if we have edits after the seven you don't want to after one of these sessions work another like three hours i kind of already do that i'm hopeful what comes out of this and the next couple days is going to produce something that's advanced enough that we're starting to get a little closer to more stylistic tweaking and things you know i don't i don't see any major holes other than again you're going to have to make a judgment on all that policy calculation stuff um yeah if it's and that could be you know we're going to take it out i'm going to take it out we're just not going to do it we know it wasn't it wasn't valued last year so by others outside this room so i'm not i put it in the same category as collecting where the committee could hire you as a consultant and you could do an addendum
for zero pending was that all just one big document or dependent as a separate document no no it's all in one big document the only we have two documents i sent you two documents okay initial one the initial which was amended i didn't send you the original january one i sent you the amended okay so that had the full initial report and the addendum stuff correct and all the but did that one have all the appendices it did it was a full that's just added that's the complete and then i sent you the separate one page for the article that was we didn't put in the document um because we're talking about with with appendix a the bylaw we're talking about putting an introductory yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna do is i'm going to take all the i'm going to take all the appendices out of that word document i'm going to create okay a separate appendices set of okay documents got it because we're going to end up probably reordering a couple of them right and then uh just make sure we have all the information we need as to the text we talked about hey you just go ahead and cut it out yeah but if you record i'll i'll get pulling what i need for that appendix okay okay all right um review and vote to approve minutes of september 23 any changes edits i had no edit there i have a motion to uh accept the minutes so moved second second all those in favor all right thank you i think we've dealt with meetings uh and can i have a motion to adjourn so moved second second all those in favor all right nine o'clock
recording stopped
AND THE ENTERPRISE FUNDS SECTION, THOSE WERE OPEN ITEMS. YOU KNOW, OPEN IN THE SENSE THAT WE'VE ALREADY INCLUDED THEM IN A RECOMMENDATION, BUT JUST TRYING TO CLOSE THE LOOP ON THAT. SO, ANYWAY, KELLY, YOU DON'T CHANGE OUR RECOMMENDATION UNTIL WE GET MORE INFORMATION. I'M LOOKING BACK AT THEM BECAUSE THESE ARE ALL, RIGHT, WE WERE WORRIED ABOUT HOW, WITHOUT BRIAN KEVENY TO SPEAK TO, LIKE, THE VIABILITY OF THESE FROM, THERE'S NO GUIDELINE AND WE DON'T HAVE ANY ACTUAL INFORMATION FROM BRIAN KEVENY ON THE VIABILITIES. ALTHOUGH WE CAN INFER, RIGHT, THE TRANSFER STATION ENTERPRISE FUND WILL HAVE TROUBLE COVERING THIS COST. AND THE WATER ENTERPRISE FUND, PARTLY, GIVEN THAT THEY HAVE MWRA, RIGHT, COMING ACROSS, THEY ALREADY HAVE A RATE-PAYING, SIGNIFICANT RATE-PAYING IMPACT. SO, I MEAN, I'M OKAY IF WE PULL IT OUT OF THE RECOMMENDATION, THE 500 OUT ON THE BASIS OF WHAT WE HEARD, YOU HEARD AT THE MEETING, THIS IS A RECOMMENDATION TO THE TOWN MANAGER. SO, YEAH. AND THEY'LL GET MORE INFORMATION. THEY'LL GET MORE INFORMATION, THEY CAN PUT IT BACK IN. YEAH. I MEAN, I WOULD, WHEN I SAY PULL IT OUT OF FISFAL 28, I WOULD PROBABLY MOVE IT INTO FISFAL 29. YEAH. AND, YOU KNOW, THE PORT OF PUBLIC WORKS WILL TALK MORE ABOUT IT. IT'S CONCEIVABLE THEY COULD EVEN PUSH IT FURTHER, BUT I SUSPECT TOM WILL, YOU KNOW, RESIST THAT, SO. YEAH. I JUST DON'T KNOW, IF ALL WE'RE GOING TO DO IS PUSH IT, I DON'T KNOW THAT THE PICTURE CHANGES ALL THAT SIGNIFICANTLY. YEAH. THAT'S MY ISSUE. I DON'T THINK THAT REALLY CHANGES A WHOLE LOT. YEAH. AND WE COULD, AS I SAID, GO WITH A FOOTNOTE? I GUESS THE QUESTION I HAVE TO HAVE IS, JUST FOR PROCESS PURPOSESES AND CONSISTENCY PURPOSES, YOU KNOW, WE HAVE THE FORMS THAT THEY FILLED OUT. DO WE, DOES IT MAKE SENSE TO HAVE A REPORT BASED ON THE DOCUMENTS WE'VE RECEIVED AS OPPOSED TO WHERE NOTHING IS NECESSARILY DECIDED? YEAH. WHAT BRIAN WAS SAYING IS, WE'RE NOT CHANGING THE REQUEST. THEY'VE REQUESTED 500. THEY'VE REQUESTED 500. UNLESS THEY SEND US A REVISED. UNLESS THEY'VE SEND US A NEW ONE. RIGHT. THEY'VE REQUESTED 500. THAT'S WHAT WE'LL SHOW. THEY'VE REQUESTED 500. IT'S OUR RECOMMENDATION. IS OUR RECOMMENDATION FOR F-FY-28 GOING TO INCLUDE IT OR NOT? WHICH THAT'S UP TO US, WHETHER OR NOT WE WANT TO INCLUDE IT OR PUSH IT. RIGHT. AND THAT'S JUST A RECOMMENDATION. TOWN MANAGER CAN RECOMMEND OTHERWISE. SPINCOM CAN DECIDE OTHERWISE. BUT, YEAH, I COULD GO EITHER WAY, BUT I GUESS IF WE'RE ONLY PUSHING IT A YEAR, I DON'T THINK IT HAS A SUBSTANTIAL DIFFERENCE IN VIABILITY. IF WE'RE NOT PUSHING SOMETHING ELSE OUT, RIGHT? IF WE'RE NOT CASCADING IT OUT, I DON'T KNOW THAT IT MAKES IT. YEAH. THE WATER ENTERPRISE FUND IS IN A MUCH BETTER AND DIFFERENT POSITION IN TERMS OF PASSING THROUGH ITS COST TO ITS REPAYERS. IT'S NOT SAYING THAT THE REPAYERS AREN'T GOING TO GET A LARGE INCREASE FROM ALL THE A BIG CAPITAL SPEND, BUT ULTIMATELY, YOU GOT TO GET YOUR WATER RIGHT, SO YOU'RE GOING TO PAY WHATEVER YOU HAVE TO PAY. SO, ANYWAY, DO YOU TWO HAVE A PICKLER VIEW OF IF WE CAN EITHER, IT SOUNDS LIKE WE LEAVE IT WHERE IT IS AND JUST MOVE ALONG AND THEN WE GET TOWARD THE END, DECIDE IF WE WANT TO CHANGE IT THEN IF YOU GET SOMETHING? YEAH. I'M KIND OF LEAVE IT AS IS. YEAH. AND I WOULD AGREE, JUST BECAUSE I ALSO THINK IT SETS THE PRECEDENCE FOR WATER SEEMS LIKELY, I AGREE, THAT IT'S GOING TO MOVE THROUGH, BUT WHERE DO YOU DRAW THE LINE FOR OTHER SIMILAR EVENTS? YOU KNOW, DO WE HAVE A CRITERIA FOR WHEN WE'RE GOING TO MAKE THAT DECISION AHEAD OF AN FORMAL DECISION? OR, YOU KNOW, IF WE DO, THEN I JUST THINK THAT MAYBE WE'VE PUT SOME GUIDELINES DOWN ABOUT WHEN AND WHERE TO DO THAT VERSUS. THAT'S JUST FOR THE INITIAL CUTOFF, BECAUSE, AGAIN, IT'S VERY LIKELY THAT YOU'RE GOING TO END UP DOING AN ADDENDUM FOR SOMETHING. RIGHT. YEAH. SOME ARTICLE THAT COMES, GETS FILED AND HAS A CAPITAL REQUEST THAT WASN'T CONSIDERED HERE. SO, ALL RIGHT, SO WHY DON'T WE JUST LEAVE THAT. YOU'RE UPDATED. AND MAYBE IF YOU GET SOMETHING FROM THEM, YOU COULD JUST CIRCULATE IT, SINCE WE TALKED ABOUT IT. YEAH. HE DID SAY HE WAS GOING TO SEND SOMETHING. YEAH. THAT WHOLE DISCUSSION WAS A PUBLIC MEETING. THE OTHER THING, WHEN AGAIN, IT'S REALLY, WE COULD CHANGE IT OURSELVES, BUT AS TOM SAID TO THEM, AND I THINK WE'VE TALKED ABOUT THE DESCRIPTION ON THE HALF A MILLION DOLLAR REQUEST FOR THE ROUTE 20 LANDFILL SOUTH, ROUTE 20 SOUTH LANDFILL CAP, IT'S NOT AN ACCURATE DESCRIPTION ANYMORE. IT REALLY IS MORE UPFRONT, SORT OF PLANNING MONEY FOR AN UNDEFINED, UNSCOPED PROJECT THAT THE SELECT BOARD WANT TO PROCEDE ON, AND SO MY SENSE WAS THAT TOM WAS GOING TO CHANGE THAT DESCRIPTION, AND AT LEAST THAT ONE, I PREFER TO, YOU KNOW, CLARIFY JUST BECAUSE IT'S MISLEADING WITH THE CURRENT DESCRIPTION. YEAH. SO WHETHER WE... I HAVE THAT IN MY NOTES. WHETHER WE WANT TO MAKE UP OUR OWN DESCRIPTION OR WE WANT TO JUST FOOTNOTE THAT AND JUST SAY NO NO LONGER REPRESENTS... WELL, CAN WE CALL IT... BECAUSE I THINK IT'S FAIR TO CHANGE THE NAME BECAUSE IT'S NOT DESCRIPTIVE. CAN WE CALL IT, YOU KNOW, ROUTE 20 LANDFILL REUSE, RIGHT? DESIGN? LIKE, THAT MONEY'S FOR DESIGN. PROBABLY DESIGN, YEAH. PLANNING AND DESIGN. I'M GOING TO GET THAT TO A SOME STANDING MEETING. THAT WAS A PASSING COMMENT AT THE MEETING. THEY WERE WONDERING WHAT THAT WAS. AND HE SAID, OH, THAT'S THE OLD DESCRIPTION. I NEED TO CHANGE IT. I NEED TO TWEAK THAT. I HAVE NO IDEA WHETHER HE'S GOING TO GET TO YOU. I DON'T THINK IT WOULD BE PART OF THAT MEMO. THAT WOULD BE SOMETHING OFF. SO I THINK WE JUST GO AHEAD AND MAKE IT MORE ACCURATE. WHATEVER HE WANTS TO CALL IT AFTER THAT IS FINE. AT LEAST IT WON'T BE MISLEADED. SO WE CALL IT, THOUGH. ROUTE 28, SOUTH LANDFILL REUSE, DESIGN, AND PLANNING. YEAH. SOMETHING LIKE THAT. THIS WAS IN LAST YEAR'S JIPC REPORT, RIGHT? IT WAS IN THE BUCCET, IN THE PURGATORY BUCCET. WE WANT TO JUST MAKE IT AN ASSWER TO SAY CHANGED FROM PREVIOUS NAME OF WHATEVER SO PEOPLE COULD FOLLOW AND WANT TO KNOW WHERE IT WAS IN LAST YEAR'S REPORT. WE COULD HAVE AND SHOULD HAVE MADE THIS CHANGE LAST YEAR, TOO, BUT WE DIDN'T. IT MAY BE IN THAT TABLE THAT SHOWS THE PROJECTS THAT WE WERE NOT, THAT WE PULLED OUT, WAITING FOR SCOPE. MAYBE YOU JUST DO THE OLD FKA ON THE OLD SOUTH LANDFILL. AND IT TAKES UP AN EXTRA LINE. ALL RIGHT. I'M GOING TO RENAME THEM. I WILL DO THE RENAMING. AND I HAVEN'T SEEN, I DON'T KNOW, BRAD, IF YOU SAW ANYTHING, ANYTHING CLARIFYING BACK FROM NICK LOMBARTY, JUST CONFIRMING THAT HIS CIP 1 AND 2, THAT THE TITLE DESCRIPTIONS OF THOSE REQUESTS ARE ACCURATE, BUT THE DETAIL DESCRIPTIONS ARE NOT ACCURATE. JUST BECAUSE WE'RE CONTINUING TO USE THOSE TITLE DESCRIPTIONS AS REPRESENTING WHAT THE MONEY IS TO BE USED FOR. AND I'M PRETTY POSITIVE. AND I THOUGHT HE KIND OF KIND OF KNOTTED HIS HEAD. until we get should really get that revised paperwork from you know I've not heard anything I'm not aware of changes potential changes at this time sure there will be this time goes on okay want to review and discuss additional capital closeout responses from department heads so I asked trying to put this on for a couple reasons one I just wanted to update you all on an issue that I raised which I think I copied was it's it's kind of released open capital capital closeout so for lack of using anything else and understanding that the instructions that went out to department heads was you know please let us know what what projects we can close out using the CIPC's new CIP form which we didn't have any place for them to do that so no one did it right but the instruction was not accurate I think I suggested and we did use the munis report showing the unexpended funds as encumbered yeah that's what that list is what went out and a number of department heads responded to the bulk of it and included in those responses largely put together by Mike Fay and Tom Holder but in the Mike Fay responses included all the school facilities projects Kirsteen cut out those school related requests that appeared that they had you know yeses next to them they could be closed out and it was a little confusing to me looking at the extra columns that were added put in the amount of it could be you know back for you know use and claim for something else compared to the open balance at the end of the report that we sent and it was confusing to the school committee too as they discussed because they she went to the school committee to get a vote to say yes go ahead you can close those out right make it official so they're reviewing the report that Kirsteen prepared which was cutting and pasting out of what tell you would sent out the munis report one of their members said yeah didn't we already approve closing out like this one and that one and this one and so after I watched that you know I went looked at the school line items and I went back and looked at the motion of town meeting for the capital budget where the actual motion on how many floor had to include all of the closed out capital items that were used you know where funds are being generated to be used to pay for fiscal 27 capital items and there were there were about a thousand of those and all 12 of those 12 13 whatever it was are still in the we're still in the munis list and therefore we're showing balances at June 30 which may be right at least based on the way the finance director may deal with the timing of the accounting because as of July it's not till July one that he brings on the fiscal 27 approved capital request which is the point in which he would probably then transfer from those line items over to as a revenue source for the fiscal 27 line items that he had associated which probably is the case but I said I should send him an email which I did I copied was a copy Kirstein I said can you just confirm that and I highlighted all the 12 items whatever they were some of which were substantial and I said he just confirmed that these are here because he hadn't yet closed them out and move them over and instead of responding as usual to that question the response I got was you shouldn't be using a munis report for that purpose and I said okay I said so then I replied to him and I said um oh you did this last year you you gathered the information on what was available to be closed out so you could get these 12 or 13 items can you send me a copy of whatever you sent them to analyze and then reply to you or can you send me whatever they sent you you know whether there's some other template to which I never got a response um and it's not our job to correct the accounting records right that's that's not what we do and I understand we're using that munis report our primary use of it is as I've said before is a proxy for percentage completion it isn't an actual percentage completion as we could see with there's some of the responses we got where they said where percentage-wise they thought they were how much longer to complete but it's the best we had last year it's the best again we had this year um and I'm not uncomfortable using it for that purpose so uh first dean jumped into that email link and said Brian I need this Brian Keveny I need I need this I have to respond to the school committee because they aren't going to take any vote unless they get a good explanation of why these items were in there and so I stepped out of that conversation and said you know I'll let them figure that out uh so that's background question for this group and it comes up um which I'll point out later but in the report it sticks out like a sore thumb in the table that shows the top 10 um uh completed capital and uh one of them is 200 and some odd thousand dollars it's it's one of the dozen items that got closed out um yeah we have we have to amend that yeah so if we're going to do one just because that's totally misleading because it doesn't exist um so the good news is you have all the tables for all the so I know we're talking about doing it for all the items yeah so if we're going to do it for that one I think we should just no we should just make a change for all of them and I'll I'll just make sure I highlighted all of them and I all I need to do to be sure that we're on the same wavelength it basically zero out the balances so that when you yeah hold that munis spreadsheet back in those dozen line items instead of having a balance will go to zero yeah um and that'll affect all the tables you know not materially you know the only one that I viewed as material was the 10 largest yeah but I mean I still want all the tables inside no matter what to show an accurate balance but that's an easy thing to go through yeah so I want but before I sent that off to Liz I wanted to explain to everybody what the issue was make sure everybody was comfortable um as to the accounting records and what gets done when that's not our job um as long as we have something that we feel you know functionally does what we wanted to do um uh so after the meeting I'll you already have a copy of what I'm talking about but I'll I'll send a new one that zeros out those balances that way you can just pull the um yeah I was gonna say you don't even have to I mean if you want to by all means but but you're comfortable to make the updates okay um so anyway um but putting aside the um the uh uh well back to the capital closeout request that we sent out to the department heads um which Kelly you got back I don't know if you got them all back or no some came to Brad but um you know I I put this I asked Brad to put this on the agenda I want to talk about those um I don't feel myself comfortable putting aside this one issue um based on what we got back one if I understood what we got back it didn't seem to me like there's a whole lot of money involved at the moment and in fact if you go back and look at the dozen or so items that were used last year which we've already talked about earlier this year there was a bunch of them that really weren't closeouts they were basically told you're not going to get this item over here for 600,000 unless you basically return money from other capital projects that you have yet to spend it on that's what happened and there's two or three very large items really accounted for paying for that English curriculum item for the school um again that's not our job if the finance director well and we didn't but um just for the record that was not our no that was not our doing that happened after but by the that was part of the town managers yeah yeah no that that's totally within the purview of the finance director and managing the finances and and you know he he as we know he's generally opposed to new requests outside the plan unless they're really important uh obviously didn't do that one as important uh unless the schools were able to help cough up the money um that's not our job here we didn't ask and look for that uh but i'm not comfortable on two two fronts one there's not a lot of money involved at the moment based on the responses and i'm not comfortable using even the amounts that were suggested they could turn back as a funding source and what we're doing um at best i see that we turn over what we got to the finance director and basically say um this is going to be in our improvement list for next year we've got to figure out what is our role and how how do we go about best collecting that information and the finance director has to work with you describing how he's done it in the past he can't just say to us you know they should have given that to you you know okay they didn't um uh so i think the process side you know you guys are going to have to press on um you know my view is we just take what we got and send it off to the finance director and say here you should whatever you do and by the time you put your recommendations with the town manager together go find whatever close out money you think there is we just didn't we didn't it was late in the process we didn't see there was much money there and whatever you find might help you know there's a couple items we didn't include you know through the normal borrowing or free cash maybe it could be used for that purpose um um so again we could maybe put a comment i was thinking in in the open capital section maybe we had a another paragraph that addresses sort of the process we went through try to collect that information and quantify the relatively small amount of money that appears available and then a sentence that says we leave it to the finance director to close the loop on that well we can do that i i think i was never going to be comfortable with using it on two fronts one the amount wasn't that big that we did collect right from folks and two there's still a lot of time between now and town meeting as to what actually gets closed out right what's available for close out or not and so i don't think that we need to opine on that i think it's as simple as this is what we funded there may be capital closeouts available as we approach town meeting based on the status of you know outstanding projects that'll be the finance director and the town manager right that would have to responsible for determining that we think about how to word it but i i don't know that i was ever going to be comfortable since we can't actually close out a project um i don't know that i was ever going to be comfortable saying anything more than it's it appears there may be this much money right now there's not enough money to pay for anything right other than a partial so i don't i was never going to be comfortable with that anyway so fine adding you know a few sentences on on what we did but i mean from a process standpoint do you do you think it's fair that this committee attempt to collect that kind of information in the future um in whatever format the finance director thinks is more appropriate uh just because you know this committee is communicating with them on capital requests right even though it's going to change you know it's fair to ask and we could have we could have easily made it a part of the capital not this cip form but another tab right i think it's very difficult for the department managers to do it blindly without having a list in front of them particularly when some of the department managers have only been here a year or two and there's you know a long list of of stuff many of which i think are done right and have nuisance amounts left on them but so i don't know that it's fair to ask them without giving them a list do i know now that you need to be more specific about exactly which lists we're getting yeah there may be another list or format sure do i think this is something the town should have tightly tracked before this committee ever touches it yeah but it doesn't so um we can we can improve the process next year i still don't think it's necessarily the committee's responsibility to go hunt down capital closeouts um but you know we can certainly do it as a part of the process because we're we're asking them anyway um well just kind of uh get your words out of my mouth because i i don't necessarily see where it's this committee's job to track down capital i mean it seems to me it should it should be nothing more than asking the town can you please provide them with capital closeout information as opposed to what you guys you've got to put tons of hours into doing something that i don't really recognize as being part of our charge well it certainly seems awesome it's the ultimate goal is to be looking at long term i mean this is a lot of sticking and sallying numbers with a thousand percent you know we've got a board of selectmen talent saying why aren't you focusing on the long term and we've got right uh a a town manager and finance director asking us where the capital closeout list is right like i yeah i mean there may be a point of in the past that may have been a point of leverage where when the request went out in mid-october and respond by early november and if the same message was i'd had to go back to look at the prior year but the same message was there basically before you do anything else send us your capital closeout information before you get into asking for more money right so if that's that's been the process all right i get it that now we're on the front end asking for for requests uh but again um the it's just another example of sort of not the best collaboration um uh and and and guidance um and you know again some of these things to your point i think at the last meeting some of things you wouldn't you know we wouldn't be talking about if i didn't have a particular insight from other things i'm doing or have been doing in the last 12 months um it goes back for the 12 months for um but but some of these things and so you know i'm i'm worried for whomever sitting it on this committee uh being able to fulfill your responsibilities if you're not being supported properly but but if we're not if it's not being supported properly that's where you draw the line right and the line is without that support that's not on the agenda if if we ask and it's and the department managers it's an easy ask if the department managers don't give or if it's based on you know faulty information i don't think we can do anything more in our report than say we asked this is what we were told we're not appropriating we're not uh funding any projects with this these funds but when it comes time for and comes recommendation to the town there should be better clarity on what's available right i i consider that all bonus money anyway in terms of if you run out of room or there's a project that desperately needs to be done right that pops up that's where you'd be looking and it's not the bulk of the plan right yeah i mean and you know i worry a little bit carol martin had emailed me uh reading our last set of minutes i mean it was the last set of the one before that word i think there may have been a passing reference to open to the capital closeouts and she said uh something in effect yeah i'm hopeful that you'll get you know the normal six to seven hundred thousand dollars and at that point i had already seen we were at best a hundred thousand plus or minus and so i emailed her back i said well you understand what happened last year um you know brian went after things that weren't really done paid for something that he really didn't think was priority i said from what i've seen so far it's at best a hundred and she i think she's worried because she's seen a couple things we have not included in our plan that are a priority for the select board but we don't have the funding at least we're not seeing the funding available do them and she was hopeful that there'd be that order of magnitude again as it were last year capital closeout so uh you know there's there's different sets of eyes on the capital closeout from a planning perspective um which again i i dutifully got back to where i think i copied you brown on that um so i i agree with kelly's point i think yeah but ultimately it's the three of you that are left plus two new members and after that it's new people over time right um if you can't you know if you can't count on getting the information of support you need it's going to make your job at least as to this blocking tackling and small numbers if not so much the larger the larger planning the longer term planning you probably are going to have a little easier time because you'll be reaching out to other department heads and things i think lessons learned right we know to be careful about the munis report we want to do that anyway from a report standpoint because open capital should be something that we're we're reporting because we say in our charge that we're going to consider resources so if we see a department that's got a ton of open capital that affects recommendations so we're going to do that anyway we can ask if we had asked when we sent out the original cip form i think we would have gotten it would have been able to be a part of our discussions it would have been more productive relatively um easier than what we're doing now so i think we can do that i just don't think the committee right and i won't be here and you won't be around i don't think the committee should get hung up and spend a lot of time you get what you get and you comment on it and move on because i don't think you can be doing the blocking and tackling and ticking and tying on that amount and you're going to issue a report in october you're going to go to town meeting in april or may so you can spend a ton of time on maybe getting a half a million dollars scrape dot right but i can guarantee you there's going to be a a significant percentage difference between what you scrape up in october and what's available when you go to atm and when i look at that against a 10 million dollar on average spend that's not where the time should be spent right so you ask you get what you get and you move on okay um why don't i suggest that you'll you lose will deal with the um updating your file and updating the tables yeah for the 12 items that we talked about yeah yeah it's again i it could be yeah yeah whatever one i highlighted in yeah and i think it was yeah and if you have any questions just email me um and uh i will uh i'll take a stab a a paragraph that can go in the open capital section at the end uh that addresses capital closeouts in some manner um when i think you say just jot it down and the report do you want to put it there do you want to put it for a future well there'll process improvement there'll be of those too but i want to acknowledge that what we did and the limitations of what we did and the relatively small yield that we anticipate at the moment there is it'll be short but um i'm not going to get into all this other stuff um so all right well that's why i wanted that uh item on the other people have anything on with the closeouts um and appreciate the department heads again in short order responding yeah uh to that i think department heads overall yeah i wanted to say that for the record and no part of any frustration that i have expressed in these meetings has um been in any way connected to the department heads i think they've done a fantastic job um responding to us and filling out the form and giving us information so i i i think that didn't wait yeah i agree all of them okay if we're done with uh capital closeouts we can move on to uh with the uh report um i guess i'm not sure of any way to do that other than uh starting on page one i want to give an intro comment and then i'll sit back and listen to the rest of you um you know i i i've had this on my desk for i just sent it and i started it and stopped it and started and stopped it and um i just wasn't inclined to uh redraft um just i didn't have the time and didn't didn't want to redraft it and there's in my view there's a lot of information in there that's still just carried over from last year that's not relevant to what we're doing this past year um i'll i'm in at points where i think that's most relevant and i have a couple of things for liz's section and i have a couple of people related edits in or suggestions i had sent to kelly just because she worked on the tables that we could um at the appropriate times vet but um you know any real drafting i'm going to do other than sending you that paragraph um i was just going to wait one more draft and um just because i was getting frustrated i mean there's nothing personal to anybody about anything it's just it i have a much better appreciation of what you did last year kelly and and uh getting this out the door um because it's beyond just drafting there's a lot of analytics that go along uh you know you have to do the analytics before you can draft the punchline right and um if you're not in a position for having to do those analytics you know there's no way you know obviously you can yeah we we could point out well why don't we go anyway can we just go through it by section and if there's analytics that need to be done great and i know there's some right i'm happy to help with that but like let's step through and talk about because there's a step i agree with you you need no numbers to draft but similar to what the exercise that went here last week there were some things that were in here like it's not we don't want it again this year and it's not worth the effort of going to get it so let's talk about section by section what we want right what we think is important and then that narrows the focus on what to you know i spend time on or you spend time on it so do you want to start brian i know your your comments are around table one so do you want to start there and would you like me to put on screen um what you're thinking well i had one have a high level comment about the executive summary first um with all due respect to our yeoman's work and redrafting the cip form to me that i don't view that as a sort of high enough substantive priority to make its way into the you know executive summary me the executive summary is kind of uh replaying where we ended up last year i mean what we recommended and what what appeared in the warrant and uh the requests that came in and then our recommendation kind of a bing bang boom um the the form is again from my perspective it's part of the process which you have a whole section about much more detail about that and i think that's appropriate because i think it's one of the recommendations made but it just didn't make sense for me there and um uh then there was a get to the table a minute but just below the table there was a a paragraph that was um explaining some numbers in the table under the article line item which you know unfortunately aren't explanations and i'm not even sure why we need to as to the last year plan i'm not sure why we need to miss a highlight what what makes up the 5.4 million and the two and a half million but anyway um the specific table i'm sorry yeah secretary summary in the yeah i have paragraph one i have table one i have paragraph two and then i'm below paragraph two i have the notable projects and unless i've got the wrong version no no no no no the article projects and article line in table one fiscal 28 and then it was a 5.2 that i yeah the 5.4 is the town building and the two and a half is the field it's not it's not all those other items that are referenced in that paragraph um yeah but i wasn't sure i mean we if people think that's um helpful information we could certainly describe what those two items are but um so to me the purpose of putting in this any prior information is simply to say we ended up here so kelly's table that was in this draft um there's um a couple comments one i think um last year's report was drafted before we knew that the uh finance structure was going to actually recommend doing uh what had been proposed to do a couple years in a row which was separate the enterprise fund capital request from the omnibus capital request and it appeared under article 5 in the warrant and so this was fine last year but i think we should restate the table whatever the table ends up being to show the enterprise funds on a separate line item and in the text that follows it uh just break the text up a little bit um uh just so it you know and again and give an example what i would say but just we just need to separate those but anyway my hope was to use this table at least at a very high level to um highlight the variance between uh what we recommended and what appeared in the ward and so um maybe there's a bunch of different ways you can do that but i had said kelly i don't know if you are planning to put that up on the screen or not i have it on a i have it on thumb drive if you want no no i have it open i just need to get okay it'd be easier for you to look at it than me um necessarily explaining it and i see this whole prior year thing being literally just what you have kind of two or three paragraphs it's just uh here's where we ended up and then we move along to the the new year and do it you know do it as efficiently as uh as possible robbie if i go in through the through the town link um can you move me over yeah yeah i'm just giving my opinion so everybody should feel free to say yeah that's great but no um and my my brain operates i can encounter so um remotely on you being on zoom tonight yeah i have uh oh you mean like home on zoom yeah and then you could yeah i know want me to go back though
jeff jeff has joined us yeah jeff has not joined us but no matter how many times i change that and uh are you sharing the version i sent you the one today today okay as soon as i get back to it has two two different components to it although i didn't resend the appendix today that was on the first email so you want to be able to show them the appendix to at the same time um we can't do that or we could get you a laptop you said i have a thumb drive but you still need to get on yeah no i got on i don't know okay so we'll scroll to the top um very good thank you so i did uh i'm suggesting two things one to break the um first line kelly's table apart between operating the omnibus budget and the enterprise fund funds i have and that still totals down to the same numbers that she has and then to get at kind of preparing that's to what we recommended i propose just slotting in a single line item for all those years and then um getting to a variance the last line and the uh the uh cp cipc line comes from table 14 in the addendum from last year's report so people wanted to go see where those numbers came from and um and that would be that i would propose be the table and um you know maybe the text has sets or two below it um that just says you know which we'll see when we look at the appendix um you know uh in total we were 4.3 whatever million dollars less than what was actually included in the planned award um and as noted in appendix whatever albeit there were a lot of individual variances most of them were timing and then call out there's two or three um two or three larger ones particularly in fiscal 28 that were driven in part based on our lack of scope for a project which one of which at least carries over again this year which is the route 20 landfill item uh well i'm sorry the town building was the largest slug i'm sorry and and you'll see that in the appendix do you have the are you able to access the appendix from my first email so anyway this was intended not to get into huge detail but to at least highlight that there was a bunch of differences uh and in dollar amounts and we were generally less in terms of what we were recommending
which is how i think at least the finance committee read our report versus what they received from the town manager and again there are reasons why we ended up where we ended up but brian which which stated what day did you send me uh sent me a lot it would have the same um would have the same same descriptor except probably follow-up without the last one i said is probably follow-up to add those extra follow-ups on there just so they don't get tied to some prior conversation let me see if i saved it um apologize i don't think i put the appendix on my thumb drug if you scroll down to the bottom of the one that i sent you today i think it may go all the way down to the email i sent you original email the email today yeah i wasn't getting it from my email i had saved it down on my heart yeah the email i sent you today with this attachment i think i just tacked on to the prior back and forth we had you mentioned how much i couldn't put down for prior your very phone to stop sharing what i'm sharing now to flip over so do you know that's fine so if everybody just looks at that variance line all right when we pull up the appendix i'll point out where that appears which basically they'll you know there'd be a boatload of detail it might have to enhance the size a little bit because it already get fogged down on this first table to blow it up to them and scroll down to the bottom just so you can see the variance yeah yeah so there's something they said uh no go up it'll scroll up a little yeah i'm sorry yeah so good scroll have grand total that last line showing there we're just going to scroll there right so that the first variance there 4.706 million that's that appeared on the prior version of table one we were just looking at is you keep going across kelly the minus 29 900 was the variance 625 600 negative 324 negative and that's it those four years everything above that then if you just scroll up we're not going to go through any of them but all it is is it it's the detail scroll the left by department the it's town manager which ended up being what was in the warrant town manager uh approved capital request in each of the four years 28 through 31 side by side with cfc's recommendation and then the third column is the variance column okay so the only thing that doesn't get used within each of those departments what were the individual projects that had the variances and you know we have a spreadsheet that that has that we don't need to give that level of detail and um while small i think it still is readable i shrunk it down and cut and pasted it into a word page and i think it it just barely and managed to scrunch the columns together enough that i think it is readable in in report format um so the question for the group having done all this and spent 15 minutes getting this up is uh do people think it's helpful a to show the variances as we did in table one between uh what people saw in the warrant and what our report said and then b the people think it's appropriate to give some level of detail um in this case sort of by department or by articles and uh if you keep if you keep scrolling down a little further kelly i think this is where i pulled out the largest variance um it accounts for the largest chunk of the variance that we were looking at is town building related because the town manager's budget included 5.4 million has excluded debt that's kind of bungling up all the repairs whereas as you know we had an ours basically the phased roof uh amounts and then there was a couple other items um but we've since taken out we've since taken out the phase yeah this is this is though looking at last year yeah oh you mean last year okay yeah yeah yeah we're we're just trying to explain why we were different so but the largest share of the variances between us and what appeared in the warrant was related to town building in the other variance column most of those were timing related and that is we largely ended up pushing projects after we prioritized them because very specifically we did we we funded we recommended funding the high school septic system with two million dollars of levy debt which we then limited ourselves to roughly four four and a half million of levy debt whereas the town manager's recommendation went up to six million and levy debt even though they're using a financial technique to pay for the debt service on the two million um but because we limited ourselves we then had to push projects year to year to year and that that's really most of the variances by the time you get through those four years so i think the text could allude to what i just said in some fashion again i'm happy that if we decide to include the revised table one and include this i'm happy to write that paragraph to explain what people are looking at and um what they'll find in the appendix and and really the the largest contributor and then just make the statement that other than that i'll highlight one or two items the rest was largely just timing um and that's all i think my view that's all we need to accomplish in this first couple of paragraphs relating to the prior year because really what people are coming to this report for is what are we ultimately going to recommend for this year and um i almost thought that under executive summary it might be helpful to use subheaders so you know we could put a subheader that was appropriate for these two paragraphs prior year or current year or something to that effect um so anyway that's my pitch um if you all feel that's not helpful then that's fine um um um i i don't have a problem with it i think it's helpful and i agree letting it up to align with the way the warrants presented makes sense um so i i think it's fine to display it the way that you have it and then to add that appendix to the to the appendices for some whoever wants to go dig into it but i think like you said you only need a sentence or two to summarize what what's the main difference right the main difference is the town building right and and the rest are timing differences so i think that's fine and i i agree with doing a subheading right so your executive summary is like how did we land right how how did our recommendation compare to what was ultimately recommended at town meeting then how does town meeting compare to what the departments have requested this year how's what they've requested compared to what we're ultimately recommending that's sort of your executive summary in three sections right the three subsection the um i hate to put you through the torture is it a pain to go back to the first spreadsheet you were showing and i'm not sure it belongs in the executive section summary probably in the process section and i just may as well talk about it since it was up there um so the the uh spreadsheet i sent you today yeah all right so if you scroll down to the bottom of this one so again i think it's probably in the process section yeah go up a little bit so uh i was trying to figure out how to i think it's important that um this year we went at this rather than using as we did last year the fincom guidelines to put a governor in ourselves as to what we could afford to recommend uh we agreed that we were going to try to limit ourselves to the funding sources that were reflected in the prior year five-year plan for 28 through 31 and so the top section of this is is taken out of the warrant um and um those aren't the amounts and and then i was trying to figure out i didn't want to put a whole lot of detail here and i know there's kelly has a table number 14 that um that reflects our recommended funding sources for this year's five-year plan and so all i did here was i did the math and said okay if i take what's in table 14 or borrowing at fiscal 28 and compare it to what's in the five-year plan and the warrant were we higher or lower than what's quote available and in this case we were higher by 68 000 so if we look at when we get to if we look at table 14 it should you know it should be 4.4 million 280 something 290. um and so you know i did all that calculation and came down and the last line here uh ties out to table 14 total sources and i thought this table would be helpful before or after a paragraph that described that we put a governor this is how we how we chose to go about um developing our our funding source recommendations and i i mean this is the visual way i thought we could do it so you can think about that because it comes later in the memo um but i just since we've had this up before um i just didn't want to go putting all the other real information in there and have a multi-tiered and i didn't do enterprise funds or the articles i thought they could be addressed in the text because there wasn't much difference there and uh really it's the general fund impact particularly on levy debt that's the most relevant to uh you know the operating budget um and so i was going to propose we just do a table for the the general fund component and address uh the others in in the text um which again if people think this is useful information i i could draft the paragraph that appeared above or below this table um so that's fine brian i don't have a problem with that i just want to make sure we're very clear on our wording because it isn't clear in in the sample you have here that it's just general fund yeah i mean i i that i was envisioning in the text that we would highlight why this is being called out yeah i think we can probably make it clear in both places though the table and the text um yeah just put general fund somewhere yeah so i plan to recreate your tables in my workbook okay because that way i'm trying to get the this to a point where if they wanted to be used again but it's all established um in that way the formatting all stays the same too hopefully excellent so um my again so i know what i'm doing will the next version will include the revised table one the subheader prior year for lack of anything else at the moment um and um and i said i'm happy to draft you know something to put in there and uh and then i would drop the third um paragraph i was referencing below before personally drop the cip form paragraph and go right to the next section which is um the uh submission section yeah brian my sense is i mean obviously put a lot of thought into draft the table you know give a much better handle on the numbers especially from last year's as well that i have no problem with you going ahead and doing that unless kelly if it desired that i'm not sure how i mean you're preparing the tables um i'm i'm happy to read and review what randall's um but i don't have time to do the drafting on top of them plus yeah so everybody should and again i you know we can go about this one of two ways to extend i'm i'm off drafting a couple of sections or paragraphs um i can simply send you write and copy everybody else since we've talked about it and um you can then incorporate it into your master draft rather than reading um so people can at least be piecemeal looking at things um um so that work for you Liz john doesn't get a vote because he's not here um yeah i would say the the paragraph on the capital improvement form doesn't belong in the executive summary but it can go when we talk about future improvements we can we can sort of do a recap on hey what did we improve from last year and what's remaining and what are we adding to that list does that make sense as a format so it can go later um not the executive summary but yeah on page five there's a there's a whole there's a cipc current process and um again it references the form so if there's anything in that paragraph brad that you feel wasn't you know incorporated in that first large paragraph under cipc current process you just kind of weave it in there um i think it is appropriate to be in there because it was a significant part of the process and to kelly's point we still i think have talked about the need for some additional improvements um which would then go in the improvement section um you know i don't i like we have the time tonight i i next a lot of my time i spent trying to double check kelly's tables and the numbers and um parent of my files just to make sure i wasn't having some something wrong or whatever um you know i'm i'm still off a couple of uh projects here and there from some of the accounts here and at the end of the day i don't well i'm off a couple tubes so i think i i think i didn't go back and update those yeah after i'd be great if we can tie it all out and maybe by the time we get to the final final version it'll it'll all come together but um there is a definitive number of projects and the definitive dollars associated with it so um and i think we agreed that um with the height the shaded area just above the table i think we agreed we weren't going to really get into talking about revisions in any substantive way just because there weren't that many this year that whole shaded section just come out that was my that was my point in my comment because if this is discussing last year revisions you know i don't think we need uh yeah so the the the sentence those requests total 70.4 million for 152 projects that is our final including revisions we got from it assuming we pinned down the numbers that that yeah i have to just double check the numbers there we're we're not highlighting um and standing for fiscal 28.
yeah so the whole during and after meeting with the department managers right there was changes on absolute value basis i don't think we need anything from there and come out um i didn't really understand in your table too i don't think i passed this comment along to you i didn't i couldn't really figure out where the project numbers and the parentheses next to each line item came from i was waiting for you to ask me some of them i thought i was waiting for you to ask me so i will admit and i'll go back through it again and i can send you this brian um what i did was take all i have the delta right between what we um had in the plan and what the departments requested and for everything that had a delta right i had to pick a category right that it falls in but where i got in trouble was that some have both so i can send you i may give that one more review and then send it to you and have you take a look at that yeah as long as i'm sure you were as long as you're consistent with um i assume that happened because there were obviously there were a couple i knew right away had both additions to dollar and if anybody has a better way to do this i'm all ears because i definitely want to have them at one in the morning so if i take it right so basically and maybe it's worth a sentence here again we're going to assume for the moment 152 projects is the number if i if i add up all those projects in parentheses to whatever that adds up to 12 13 21 26 55 um so you got you're basically saying you have a hundred you have 90 97 projects that were in last year's plan no change to any amount request that sound right that i mean that's a lot yes that's a lot yeah so i think it's worth where we're pulling out that whole section it might be worth just tacking on something in those other senses it just says you know of the 152 project 97 of them were in last year's plan at the same dollar request it's significant right and then um as noted below there were a number of additions and removals and blah blah blah and then the table can speak for itself one thing and then the paragraph right below that table just we need to again make sure we got the right numbers maybe a little redundant we have 28 referenced above and uh where brad do you know the 1.4 million you're showing there all the other numbers except we wanted to include them it's fine the 1.4 million for it infrastructure and cyber compliance where did you get that number from i think i took that from your last uh spreadsheet and just added up the it numbers i think total 1.4 for me in the interest of time i'm happy to read right certain narrative around table two so above and below this table right so you'll check that number right because that number is i think we just do like conceptually what do we want here we want to we talked about narrative right that talks about changes broadly right so we got 97 projects that were requested identical to what was in the previous plan the changes are noted in the table below right what other color commentary do we want on this a little bit of color commentary on what the on the big what the big changes were that's what i would do right so we've got we've got the numbers in the table but do we want to call out right what the things what the big drivers were uh yeah so i would the two million dollar school item i assume is buried in the 3.37 million right yeah um and in the additions you got the you know i don't know where you put the fire sensors that that might be in the 3.37 million as well i moved fire sensors from facilities to schools just fyi oh yeah i saw that um because it's a school project yeah so i'll yeah so if you want to just pick the top you know three or four i mean it is it's effectively what brad was trying to do below right but i'm just going to brush do it from the chart right i have the data and so i'll just pick off what the big ones are which you can see them right you can see them in you know in the move to another year right there's a couple of big numbers here and then i'll just look and make sure there aren't any that are offsetting that are hiding that need to be mentioned yeah i guess in that sense the 1.4 you're talking about with it that that's actually four or five different line that's not a single project which is fine right once i look at exactly what's driving the differences it may be talking about a single project for it i'm not going to get into what the specific projects are i'm going to you know broadly generalize and most of it was cyber yeah and i think it's it's really the new stuff because we're saying 97 projects were in last year's plan there shouldn't be any discussion i mean it's not to say that we or the finance committee can't revisit or town meeting can't revisit something but in terms of explaining what we're doing i think we highlight those larger new items or things that are in those change line items yeah i think that's what you're talking about i'm going to do this in two paragraphs one that's going to focus on f by 28 a little bit more in detail and one that will be broader on the f by 29 to f by 32. that makes sense question is the real punch lines are the last two cents are people comfortable with basically literally just a sentence for each and send them over to the detail you mean the recommendation sentence yes yeah an executive summary yeah yeah i'm i need to put i like that it's up front versus buried in table 14 last year i think we said what we recommended up front we just didn't put didn't we i don't know because this table two is here or maybe not all right maybe not but again it gets back to if anything that might be you better read the one page right but that might be a change here right so we talked about so we're talking about the sections are comparing prior year our our recommendation to what ultimately got recommended to town meeting then what got recommended at town meeting to what the department requested it might be moving up table 14 right the third section because we skip right to we recommend moving up that section on or of some of it on this is what we recommend for the year yeah right so it's sort of table one two and three with narrative on each of them okay does that sound good which which table um um capital plan 14 is capital plan unexpected articles by funding source yeah so i think it's probably table 12 capital plan summary one of those it breaks out by calendar year yeah or fiscal year but i i would say it's 14 because it's consistent with what you wanted to put in your table one comparison by funding source so that would be that information would be out there yeah and then because i think the departmental discussion can be the more detailed discussion
later on if you recall the reason it's in table 14 is because we didn't we did one year and then we addended oh no i think it made sense no no no no i'm not saying like we should move it because that was yeah i wouldn't have put it in that order i don't think if we were doing this all down last year right yeah so i think it's 14 that moves it's just it was dropping a funding source table went at that point just seems too detailed inconsistent with actual projects i would either see it being table 12 or table 13. well so i guess maybe i would say 13. say i don't want to just say what the recommendation is for 28. i think we should say what the recommendation is for all of the years so i think what you were saying the last two sentences right well why can't why can't we okay why can't we do none of those and instead do something that looks sort of like table one when you revised it that's just um that's just omnibus enterprise funds article right the high level yeah that's fine let's actually keep the executive summary high level i don't think there's any plugs left in there sir people understand what keller just yeah so i think people want to just put those exactly the recommended numbers for the next yeah which then the detail would be back in table 12 13 14. that makes sense
so that that that could that could just replace those two sentences i mean you'd have a you'd have an outlet let me unplug my laptop are you okay so unplug it i'm okay we're gonna add a sensor to around that table but we wouldn't then need to separate 28 out because it's it was in right in the column right all right so we got the executive summary under control
yeah well once you have the executive summary then you then then you know three sections have to repeat but in more detail okay thank you robbie okay so just so i'm clear the executive term we found this ryan and kelly you guys gonna put those two pieces together okay yeah i'll do two and three you do one ryan yeah we're down to administrative matters yeah i think the parts that are highlighted um i think we talked about moving those to appendix a yeah i i rethought that i mean i don't find them offensive where they are there's some of it that just i mean i appreciate that by the way i appreciate the comments that you put in there uh but uh some of it i would just take out rather than put it into the appendix but um so what do you want to take out come on look at it yeah make the comment and tell us what you want to take out right i kind of like leaving the members in just because it gives a early advertisement that new members are needed um yeah and you can't take out the part about you guys leaving in our nice comments about you yeah absolutely the background paragraph and i guess the background paragraph i suppose if it could be fit in which maybe is what you envision kelly above the
in whatever appendix that penitenta appendix a is the bylaw yeah so it uh you know if the words would have to change a little bit just because you wouldn't have to be referencing um yeah the reason i didn't i i tried to make sure there's a reference to every appendix in the report itself but you don't have to yeah so um yeah and the last sentence and we don't need um you know but it's not something you would put in the appendix about we're pleased to submit our report um i mean the only reason i i think i put that in and what i draft the only reason i put that in is because we have the um this time it's due to the late formation part so maybe maybe we just take out both they got both senses and just leave the leave the first part in as a lead-in to the actual bylaw um and then so background through by october 15th of each year that goes at the beginning of the appendix a bylaw right where the bylaw is and then you lose the rest of that paragraph you know i might i might move the charter mission that's the first paragraph yep and then i would say you could say under under the bylaw right in appendix a cipc is charged with then you've got a tie out okay so you're talking about going uh background and then charter mission no ditch move the background to the beginning of at the top of the appendix a right then start with charter mission move that paragraph up oh okay and add you know under the capital planning bylaw cipc is charged with right so then then you can do the cross-reference there to appendix a yeah after that then you get all your all your main governance appendix appendices out of the way right away right like what are we doing we're doing this for the bylaw on appendix a using capital planning from appendix b and debt policies from capital c that's those are your governance
keep members in the record proper um would you see them below the debt policies or it's charter mission then you had to get members and then yeah yeah policies that make sense right yeah yeah okay so then are we good with are we good with the capital and planning and debt policies or do we need to add here brian like are we we're covering an executive summary but the fact that we used these are the guidelines but what we're using is the prior year capital plan is sort of our guiding it's both i know do we want to and so i'm fine with that section but do we want to say anything about that right that you know this we have we have a multitude of things here right that we can say in addition in addition to um for the current year that you know the committee used both the finance committee guidelines uh as well as uh i want to say something along the lines because there's no new there there is no more current guideline we relied on yeah that's fine we relied on the last published finance committee approved plan as our guideline right does that make sense brad yeah so we stated it because that's the last published one but because they didn't follow it and they're following that table that's sort of an overarching set of guidelines that we continue to follow maybe after that chart we then say in addition as noted below the committee uh and be whatever the words are to reference the fact that we use the prior year plan funding sources as a governor on our efforts yeah that's what i'm saying but the real discussion that will come in the process section the reference i don't know if it or do we even need to put it here no i don't know if it needs to i was just trying to tie out like if we're saying we've got a capital policy a debt policy and the fincom guidelines but those haven't you know weren't recently updated so we we looked to fincom's recommendation the last published recommendation as a as a governor right and then i don't think you need to say much more on it i can debate where you know the paragraph with the three bullets or the sentence with the three bullets on you know the capital plan should meet the guidelines where that belongs right i've got to do some work to to look at that um but where does that belong it may or may not still belong here like we're we're just talking about what's the policy i'd almost rather those those go somewhere else yeah right so i still think there needs to be something along those lines but in theory that factored into our deliberations really didn't other than we know that it's out there as a yeah i i would still like to if i can find once i finish this i can find time to look at it i would still like to know where it doesn't meet policy and you've heard me harp on it before if we're going to consistently not meet policy the policies should be changed that's not within our purview but and you can say something you know the committee um in deliberating its recommendation the committee um you know attempted to objective was to meet these policy and based on their analysis if it does it doesn't it may for the language that was there last year if if the numbers are available right so that's the administrative policy related stuff so really try to get rid of those and leave the experts in there
yeah well people trust me we'll get rid of them before it's done don't kill yourself yeah i can take care of it
not to jump out of order but i just forgot my charger at home and my battery's kind of getting a little bit low um so let's jump out of order so if if folks are okay with jumping to the uh open capital budgets yeah um i know kelly you had some questions brian you mentioned some cash uh a question or comment um but did want to talk to just how i came up with the buckets because i think otherwise the reports are essentially what they looked at last year so there's not much to talk about there yeah we drew a different line last year as i remember and i i had the all the projects i computed averages in fact i had used a different line initially and kelly i think you moved it yeah i had certain i'd like around like i had a fifty thousand dollar item i think you moved it because it was yeah so that's exactly what i wanted to talk about because i was trying to so i was i looked at what we did last year and for the most part with the reports and and the numbers that we showed i just my first stab at it was just recreate what was done last year just with the updated numbers um my mouse pad it was also going on me so i have to like do my window and then tab and my h key doesn't work i'm really really yeah unless i really jam it down so i was like i can't do it on the narrative here we're gonna have no h's yeah that's why paper doesn't do that you don't think so so when i so there were a couple things that were a little bit outlier so we have two projects so just kind of looking at percentages of the total open budget you have two projects that make up almost half of the total open budget so they're you know north of um a million and a half each so they really just kind of if you throw them into the averages of it just stores things so i thought we should keep those kind of isolated call them out separately because then you know you get a much more accurate rec uh reflection of the remaining funds um otherwise you have like 80 of the budget and 20 of the project so it's just kind of you know it's a bit skewed so um then i went i said okay let's just carve out those two projects and keep everything else current so still looking at things that are an average of 25k or above and that still gives you with kind of a weird distortion of the information so then you're looking at you know if you're talking about percentages of projects three percent of the projects have 47 percent of the budget and then 19 of the projects have 33 78 of the projects make up only 20 of the open budget so again it was one of those things where it was really distorted so i'm like what would this how can we kind of shake this up so that it makes a little bit more sense and that's how i landed on if you do an average of 10 000 you know open projects and that i kind of gave you that range that makes up roughly 61 of the total project so it's you know the point was to say the majority of a lot of small balances yeah exactly the majority of these projects have dwindling smaller balances less than 25k from last year we can add some narrative around that but i didn't want to do that without having a conversation first um and that you know the majority of your budget is sitting on two projects one is the library and the other one is i i forgot what 23 but um that was kind of the idea of slicing and dicing it but thoughts see the only reason i questioned it was because that breakup was different than in the table right so which which would table the table right below the like the 50 the the 50 50 to 100 100 to 250 greater than 250 so if i i think your breakup is probably perfectly logical but why not line the table up with the same breakup so you're saying it's basically you've got two projects that are over a million right then you've got because you've got i think it it lays out nicely then like hey there's a ton of stuff that's super small yeah there's a couple of things that are really big just why not do the the chart below it lined up to it you're talking about one that's like um i think it's easier to read a chart well i didn't want to go and change reports oh that's fine so the first line would be greater greater than half million or yeah greater than a million greater yeah so the next line would be 250 to a million yeah but some of the lower amounts would just have to line up i think you're saying yeah and i so i think i can take a whack at updating that specific report so it's more reflective of how things are shaking out and then put a narrative around like hey what do you need to know what's the takeaway here put it in actual words as opposed to you know hoping they infer it from the numbers yeah i think that the punchline is what you're saying is get these two big things and then we had a whole bunch of projects that have really relatively small balances yep and then there's a little bit of in between 20 is in between right um okay yeah all right i got the action to update that all right good any other comments or questions um i had a minor bit on um page six table so the first pair of open capital it says there are 67 capital projects for 26 and 27 and then the table it adds up to 68. that was the exact same issue last year okay so you just just double check yeah accurate um yeah um and this stands out so if you would jump out at me curiously was fiscal 2020 is one of the years that had one of the big closeout items and so you know you got all these relatively small numbers and it goes to 19 and then it goes back down to single digits and if you look at the school line the 210 604 item most of that is um the so-called fiscal fear 20 dw core network 202 358 which will be coming out yeah yeah so those numbers will then drop down yeah um but that all seemed to make sense to me um you know the same thing will happen you know obviously in the next table um uh just a minor bit on the uh and maybe i had it this way i don't remember ah in the third table you have four i know kelly had a comment about sorting it differently which probably makes sense between uh town and school in one section and maybe do a spacer and then uh water kind of just separate the water just you know the large top ten gosh you have to bring another one in but yeah um just just do town school and then maybe a row and then water just so it's separated which are which report was that one this is taylor uh the top ten september would you do separate subtotals for both of those yeah probably we have nothing else in these tables that give any sort of sense on oh no actually we do maybe i would space town space school space and well we don't separate town and school anywhere else oh right above we we do in the other tables we have town school and enterprise oh true oh you're right okay yeah i would do town space the town the subtotal school and the subtotal water water for the subtotal but then just the top ten yeah yeah so the top ten broken out by those categories you could just um change these to initial cap only in all caps uh yeah okay that's in your data set yeah it's just it's how it pulled from the report so but yeah and the 11 million that's showing there for the coacc you can delete that and then wherever it is in the data set in the description it has 11 million you don't need that in there and if you want to easily do that capitalization change you can use either proper or title as a formula and it'll change it for you yeah if caps is another one that you can do yeah are you going to caps or away from that well i think for the ones that i'm going to take out the caps would be yeah seeing the land proper yeah title so after this last table i guess is where i'll give you um i'll circulate language relative to the closed capital yeah i'll tell that to everybody i did have a question about appendix c because i yeah okay um for the 2027 new ads so we pulled them from last year because we couldn't get an updated um report post 6 30. so the 2027 is missing oh great you're gonna so sorry uh
there's like unique identifiers is what i call them but they're they're not but at the beginning of each descriptor there's a number or a code um for the 2027 items we don't have that information so in appendix e there's like there's a gap essentially and i can show you it's probably easier sorry guys i can't show everybody but let me um tab over uh you do you have my chance you have the full excel file so it should yeah i had exhibit e in it i opened it so it's
you want to just send it to me yeah so maybe i'm assuming we have that information now just i don't know why don't you just send me whatever you're looking at yeah and then just ask me the question and all of them i would say to you whatever exhibit e looked like last year let's make it look like that this year but if i'm also missing that information we had the report from um what was it november november so we had it was already populated but because we didn't have it the 27 the 2027 information in the june 30th 26 it didn't include that yet we're adding those as of july 1. yes so you added so yeah so i would say if you're asking the question should fiscal 27 approve requests be in exhibit is it e not happen is it our option um i would say yeah that should be included should be included it's just it's missing that furthest left column that was in yeah because they haven't assigned them yet which is right okay you just put in a or blank okay okay so then they're off that so brad what i said well i'll still send you an updated file because it will i've got a couple tweaks that we're making tonight okay so get it updated but then we just talk about those things like that being appropriate yeah if you want to since again we talked about it if you want to copy all of us on that that appendix yeah just because i haven't i don't think i've seen that yet so i can well i just look at the brand yeah yeah so i'll look at that and if i see anything else i'll let you know yeah okay we're done all right go to my batteries go home that was great guys got 10 minutes okay now we have to go backwards we actually have four minutes because we need one minute for the minutes we're going backwards yeah we go back to the section on the ipc current process on the page um one of my again i just don't know if you didn't get a roundup the um the uh this this criteria that are in here are the ones we used last year when we did the low medium high those are not the criteria that are in the revised cfp form the department heads filled out i don't know where are we i'm sorry the in the current process section second full paragraph you have bullets oh yes yes i see yep yep yep so we really need to jettison those and pull in the um once from the form that's the lead in text says department managers were required to rank employment but the form does require priorities of one to five yeah but the bullets are the bullets describe they describe different things than what's actually in the oh oh i see what you're saying so you're saying the bullets need to be updated yeah okay to align to align with the criteria we put on the form right yep and um speaking of that kelly can you remind me i i you mentioned at the last meeting i know you have a comment in here you seem to think what at least one of the rankings was um brad's text that he put in seemed to say it's because they're all inverted which i don't think it's no i think i i think it called out the one that was inverted yeah but but were you saying it was the last one enhancement yeah yes and and and i was struggling to i suppose if you were coming at it from the standpoint of um of five you get a five if you're spending less money oh as opposed to adding service but this suggested adding this this is no you might be i might have just read it wrong so i looked at it and said i would give you a priority if if if you need this to maintain so i looked at it as it's higher priority to me to maintain existing service than it is to add new new services yeah but that's different from what the description says is completing the project will provide a benefit to citizens above existing service yeah you're right so no i have i happen to agree with you i i would
i'm not going to actually suggest it but you know if i worded that description differently saying i put more of a preview on not adding new services right but that's not what that's not what it says what we asked them so perhaps we leave it the way it is we don't make and we look at it next year whether that category should be read should have a different description so that addition should be deleted from the changing that it'd be that it was yeah because it well because it it's not what it says right but i i didn't even look at the description brian admittedly i looked at well what would i give a higher score i give a higher score to something that that where we're going to lose a service we already have versus adding a new one yeah and yeah and there could be a year if that's the direction that's given by the town manager that that could be a flip or or you would just word it differently yeah i would probably not call it enhancement i think what we don't have here is um and maybe we already have it in value to residents right in the minimal versus high but i would say um it needed to maintain sure consistent yeah consistency of operations right it's it's not enhancement right um right although some would argue that having an enhancement category like that's like getting getting more services is important i just didn't so i could go either way so i think you should leave it the way it is and discuss it next year okay um thank you for cleaning that out then we go to page eight the discussion of the plan the capital budget recommendation so i'm sorry so it's at the end of um at the end of before you go there brad so it's right above oak and capital projects that's that's kind of where i would propose inserting that table 1b that we looked at earlier and and i'll again draft that if you guys right above the open capital project status well actually before that very last sentence i would insert the table and then i'll add i'll create some text before the last above open capital projects says cpc then developed recommendations anticipated funding sources etc we did that but we previously had agreed to follow the prior year funding source amounts so if you park the table in there right about that sentence and then i'll circulate another paragraph that follows the table that would be helpful 28 capital budget recommendations and some of this language in this section was just again i assume it's just carried over from last year it's just not reflective of kind of this year's situation so just a question of whether you're comfortable brad getting the language more matched up with you know our current situation now that we have tables out and about or that maybe end up being one of those areas where people have to weigh in with specific edits going the numbers and the whole last paragraph you can only deal with if analysis actually got done yeah i don't understand your comment kelly about looking at prior warrants or how to show real estate expense oh that was just a reminder you gave it to me was that the real estate fund yeah that was the words i just needed the word okay i should have deleted that sorry but i'm in that in that the budget page nine the budget table in that description we were just talking about you could take the word the out it's receipts reserved for sale of real estate fund summary table uh you mean in table that's table seven till seven yeah just take the word the out from in front of sale and the same thing back in table 14.
oh i didn't get it right and i didn't know but table seven table 14 right um table eight um the uh first the first box the last line says total funding sources should be total budget
departmental enterprise fund request the first total lines currently says total funding sources that should be total budget for budgets right again the paragraph under table eight again needs to be tweaked again i think it was relevant last year it goes to the fact that we had to re-rank things and move things around but we really didn't you know had a couple of situations where we did that this year
um table nine that is for everybody's benefit so i'm sorry right but so that paragraph that you're talking about are you referring what are we suggesting we do with that paragraph so you would just talk to we we did it very generally last year because we moved a lot um there actually isn't that much that we moved out in in this one so i would just be a discussion of basically it's town building the south landfill one or two other things right those are the only things that we excluded yeah the top building it was the septic tie in the yeah the phase two roof which we eventually moved and the uh the southville south landfill planning and designs required so at the brad they're listed in table 15. it's the new description in table 15 for the first one you're going to change that description table 15. what do you want it to say no the route 20 lamp that we talked about uh yeah design and planning so would we just say the project's not included uh a reference in table 15. um you could call them out you could call out right if you're talking about it by 28 it's just the first three yeah and and what's not in table 15 is the 700 000 phase two roof because that's we moved it to fiscal 29. so you'd have to basically say you know i like the thing that we left out we left out the landfill design and planning money 500 000 the wastewater tie in a town building 500 000 and we moved the 700 000 phase two roof down building roof to fiscal 29. that doesn't appear in 15. well i don't know why i don't have that in 15. well 15 is things that just weren't in the plan five-year plan the roof we end up putting the roof out a year right right but we did leave out the roof and the other there was a three hundred ten thousand dollar roof request for 29 already so we did leave that out in the 2000. table nine um the uh the title for table nine should that be 2020 prior plan versus departmental departmental reconciling that versus your header it's both it's both right because it's departmental requests but it's also kind of right between recommended and not recommended um maybe maybe you don't need the departmental request about that uh anything hopeful though because that's total and we can change the header and then it's just the breakdown of what we recommend what's the idea i think we can add okay i'm just having trouble between the header and the header and then um i maybe i need to i think maybe last year i had better lines in between this so it's separated better but i'm dreaming and then the column recommended runs over and fix that yep and um did you get my uh the um the transfer stage enterprise fund at 380 000 and water enterprise funded 710 should this number should be 390. and i can see that my total doesn't match oh because i must have pulled yeah you pulled from the record for a year that's why uh i know why because i i i put the values in for the 300 the 2 million and the 90. i put in the articles and then i subtracted i subtracted the run column i did not see that no fine i'll end up at 2 million 390. yeah yeah um do you have a problem brian with the fact that i combined underdust an enterprise there you want that broken at the bottom and that in column and in table nine it doesn't matter it's already broken out i just i the columns together but doesn't matter because it's broken out yeah it's fine never mind yeah i think you're fine yeah for any interest of space okay that's how i have a table i do have a go back on the 77 quantity for projects um going back to the open capital 77 check so it's only reflective of through the school year 25 so if you back off 26 and 27 projects you get to the 77 number okay with 77 i was having a problem with 67 in the first paragraph versus 68 which added 77 would be 145 projects
now i'm dropping where your numbers come from let me go and check yeah i think the dollars were right yeah thank you well on table 15 i mentioned this last meeting um and i'm sure whatever the whatever the decision is made to do with this building if it's to say here the numbers will all be different anyway but um you know we're picking up the 5.4 million just because that got into last year's five-year plan right uh and as i pointed out last week that and i think i sent you all after last meeting of reconciliation maybe there are too many numbers there for people to follow but basically trying to point out that double counting yeah yeah so i didn't know if on table 15 whether we could drop a footnote this just references that i think we should do more than drop a footnote i think we should add some text there add some text there but you know while acknowledging that the ultimate cost is going to be dependent on what's whatever the decision is but yeah right now it's just double counting it's two things right it's acknowledging that um there were projects that were components of the 5.4 that were submitted separately right and then acknowledging that the overall project right to rehab the building is expected to be more than 5.4 and that there's a visioning committee we have we have language on that okay i'll uh i'll circulate something okay you mean to add every table yeah yeah okay uh well let's see yeah well because i i yeah i do that i do start talking about that on page 13. yeah try to add ahead ahead of i think there are yeah i'll put it ahead of the table yeah okay i shall do that because i on page 13 i didn't know what number to put in whether to put in that 5.4 if they requested x come out i left that blank because of our discussion last week where is that in the long-term section uh the discussion of long-term planning it's worth noting facilities has requested blank for multiple replacements and various renovations because it sounded like that number was kind of all over the place i wasn't quite sure the number was reserved there 15. i assume we're not going to have a table 16. we didn't we didn't push anything out other than that eight million dollar item we didn't push out we just took it out well we have that in table 15. i'm saying so we don't need table 16. yeah so so maybe is this here you mentioned beginning meeting um maybe creating a another table that includes items that were requested last year like do we want to have a section on things that notable items that have been in prior requests that were not requested this year yeah i think so i think so so those are the transfer station building the cpa funded playgrounds uh uh and other other fields which is that it sent you yeah what we got last year is three million something out and yeah anything else those that those are the ones that come to my mind okay yeah i think that's useful long-term planning and the future process improvements again these seem to be the same ones that were in last year yeah so they just need to be reworked through um yeah we hadn't really talked about what we wanted what those improvements would be so i thought we'd think those need chair committee acting chair yeah um well let's just hear you can do a quick yeah so the first bullet it's continued to continue to you know enhance revisions or you know to the cip form to address uh i don't know if you need to be specific or just maybe maybe there it's it may not be in the form itself but the collection of the uh close capital capital closeout yeah yeah i would say capital closeout i would say on the first sort of combining first and second bullet like let's continue to improve except feedback on the on the new capital form um and uh request from departments pick a date for next year by good date rather than say begin coordination with the partner we did we started earlier this year well i think our goal was to send out the form in june within it and then yeah until late july yeah but there should be no reason it shouldn't go out in june and i also suggest that um you might want it may be a separate bullet that addresses um town support town staff support you're going to need more town staff support next year and that might include someone that's got some level of expertise and dealing with the kinds of the excel workbook macro whatever's that kelly put together because it's one thing to have them that's another thing to you know now that the department heads think they're the greatest thing since sliced bread you know you best be in a position to you know have it work again next year so again i'm not saying liz you don't have that capability or john doesn't have that capability i don't know
but it's that it's that to me those type of functions just because you never know what the membership makeup will be you know finding someone on town staff that has that expertise and if they don't have that expertise you know some sort of commitment from the town manager that they will get that training to be able to maintain it on a consistent basis no matter who's sitting uh in here i think would be
squeeze that into maybe it's just a generic gonna need more town staff support yeah from a process standpoint but yeah i would also yeah because i can talk about yeah but it happened in the finance committee i mean kelly created a bunch of spreadsheets that you know you used over a number of years around the finance committee and then you pass them off and and uh you know another individual did her best to utilize them and understand them but kelly had to get dragged back in uh ad hoc to help out and even then as crunch time came you know there were there were issues and and uh that that's that's the only issue i ever had myself when i would not necessarily using macros but developing models and things you know i i'd always try to develop them so that hopefully someone could pick them up and relatively easily sort of figure their way through um and even i you know not that i'm expert in excel but i can get around i mean it took me a while to be able to sort of identify where the issues were in the incomes spreadsheets that were i knew the results were not making sense so i had to kind of trail backwards so i i just not sure i think that's a great tool i'm just not sure this committee should be counting on somebody being able to staff that but um i would two things one you can find me but two all of that right was done through use of copilot and so if something's not working you can drop it into copilot and say yeah this isn't working tell me why um which is what i did yeah and and i couldn't do that today i mean i i tried doing something simple just to see if i could kind of do what kelly did and i'm sure if i put some extra time into it i'd probably figure my way around it but um anyway if again if it really john seems to be using ai i don't know if you're using you know copilot or whatever to do a lot of the programming and stuff but um again if something goes wrong you all you know all i know is i need to look at the output and say does it make sense yeah well keep in mind brian though and i would hope this doesn't happen the form itself doesn't have a map like the the excel file itself doesn't have a macro so somebody could manually copy sheets and fill them out it's not going to give you an automated total but they can still fill out the sheets right and somebody can you could always manually do it that's what the department is like the most does that roll up yeah like tom tom mentioned that at both the meetings i watched he was i said look it's really so tell me in terms of the process in terms of getting all the comments um i always get nervous and you guys have more experience on this but nervous when there's so many different comments coming in so many different red lines coming in how do you guys typically handle it because i've seen draft things can't even read it because there's so many different comments and red lines i mean normally what would happen and it's just i think what you're hearing is neither kelly or i either have the bandwidth or the brain cells left to be heavily involved in redrafting i think normally what would happen is two people would go at it off the committee which if assuming that's less than a quorum and they would be able to exchange back and forth their own edits and things well guess i guess what i'm saying is how do you i've got some edits you've got it you've got it i mean so you have to process i mean i'll process the edit size but so if you and so just order it's a little bit order of this so we've talked about a whole bunch of edits tonight if you incorporate your edits send out a version right the best easiest way to do it is in sequence so meaning you do your edits i add my edits to yours you decide whether to accept them right everything that we've talked about tonight we can do that with what we can't do is add new thoughts right new new stuff so i would say you have to do it the easiest way is to do it in sequence right right and it doesn't matter which order but like put your edits in and then one of us send it and so i what i would i guess what i would do then is take the current version which is uh the one kelly did and i had a couple edits would accept all those changes add my changes uh that we talked about today in redline and then send that out yeah and where your notes allow you to do it i would put it or put a comment in for placeholders where we've talked about adding different tables yeah kelly's got to work on updating some of the tables who's going to update her tables so at least acknowledge that you know where those are going um you need to move you know we talked about moving some text around you can reread the whole thing yourself and try to update you know some of those areas that we talked about and then i think the next best thing to get in there would be the updated tables um um you know what i'm sending you will be complete paragraphs that you should be able to just i mean i can either yeah you know if if you send out something that we're all now looking at kelly in turn then drops your tables into that sends it back to you you then can send that out because it's all the tables we talked about i could then certainly just go ahead and cut and paste my paragraphs in or i could independently just in advance of that just send out to everybody my paragraphs and tell you where they go and so people can have them right and then you'll have them and then when you're getting around to you know something that kelly sent you can you know just pull them in i'll plan on the comments that we talked about today that i'm working on i'll plan on getting those out tomorrow yeah so it would be better if you did them separately because i'm traveling tomorrow and friday so i won't be able to look at it until friday night yeah and and so um again tomorrow i can give you my updates and then by the time kelly's done with traveling those will already be picked in yeah absolutely yeah right so you would send me yours yeah the rest because it's all yeah it's not really changing other than you know the the balances we're going to zero out right but that's very much outside of you know what we're project or what our recommendations are for next year right yeah i mean if you can do that in time for brad to incorporate that into what his changes are that'd be a good starting point yeah i'll just send my paragraph separately and then um you know if if if i get what you get and i don't see certain placeholders in there for other things we talked about i'll i'll just put comments in and send it back to you so you know that you'd be looking for something um you know from kelly okay and um and um and then again the question is on the appendices um do you you have those in word form from last year i don't have any of the appendices you have do you have the final report unless are they there are they in the report they must i can you can you send you have the final word doc for both the report initial report and i might we can just send that so we all have it and then i can i'd be happy to take the um you know the word actually i might have the word version of the report of the appendices and just start to get the final version i'm not sure yeah yeah we just want to make sure we have the final version and so you know if you have uh you know appendices e list um do you send that to brad too or i did send it to him but i think it needs to be updated for the things we're zeroing out yeah yeah so if you could just circulate the appendices e appendix e to everybody i'll i'll brad i'll take on from kelly's original documents final documents i'll just make sure we have all the appendices in order to take that off your plate and that means i'll pick up some of that language out of the text that we were talking about you could just cut it out of your document i have it in word as in pdf that's that you want it in word yeah yeah i do have the appendices all right well let me let me send the version just in case okay well what we like to do is have all the appendices in word with pictures of the tables yeah that's what that's what you have if you just send the new picture and then send that to me just so i can get them all ordered and then that way we can figure out which order they're actually going to appear and change the yeah titles on them but that's just one so i have the report and all these appendices and the tables are embedded and then if people are still thinking it's fine for a table of contents um yeah we do that at the last minute we'll just update it and um i originally sent you a cover sheet just single i was basically just going to suggest we take the header off the top here and make that a cover sheet oh okay and then the table of contents would be the first page oh i see and then you'd have the report and then you have the appendices you know in the back so um you know you can either do that yourself or if you go back to the original time i sent you the table of contents i had a separate page for that okay yeah i was really going to get you know if i was industrious i was going to put some photos of capital projects and trucks and buildings but i said do i really want to do that well if you make the cover look nice you know they said well it must be a good report that's how the school the superintendent present used to always present his budget he put pictures of the kids with the artwork and then um you know we only have two meetings to finish this so yeah no problem and and at the last meeting um brian keveney and uh michael call we're going to come to that um it's kind of the 15th the 14th yeah and they wanted to have a copy of the report before that and you know let's give them whatever draft is after after we meet next week we will do it with them so my question was um yeah um there's really not much we can be doing on the 14th other than meet with them preview the report when we're done with them clean up and authorize you've had to probably finalize whatever final editing and then ship it off so we really need to finish this for the most part by next meeting so my question was um which is when on october 7th yeah um then my question was uh could we see if we could gather a quorum for seventh as a wednesday right yeah yeah um whether we could gather a quorum uh for um 10 12 a holiday here yes almost did i'm just looking whether we need another i think we should put a hold for another one um even we somehow are miraculously done
next one's that great but i think we should better to shoot for the you know if we if we get this further along at the next meeting and then give people sure there's a long weekend to get through it we can we schedule something on the 13th to i'm a bill sort of pre-finalize the report so i play out the 13th but i'm in west coast time zone so um my day ends three hours later earlier than you guys and we just need to be sure we have three people yeah well i know john's not here but yeah i won't be able to support the 13th through like the 15th and i know the 15th is already after the fact but yeah i know john said you couldn't make the 14th did you get a sense it was that week probably depend on whether kelly can meet that weekend the alternative is to go the prior week and they're on one calendar hold on i gotta get the other you are in the home stretch we're gonna dub you a member
you've sat through all of these meetings
you could be the next town manager
13th as long as we don't start before 6 30. that's a tuesday night tuesday night so brad if you could check even if it's if all we could do is an in-person um coacc but uh preferably if they had a hybrid that way if liz could well on the 13th i'll be in the air oh okay um all right see what they have i'll see if they have 6 30 to 8 30. yep okay okay guys want to look at the 39th or is that like
too close to the heaven i think we need time yeah i was just thinking people if we have edits after the seven you don't want to after one of these sessions work another like three hours i kind of already do that i'm hopeful what comes out of this and the next couple days is going to produce something that's advanced enough that we're starting to get a little closer to more stylistic tweaking and things you know i don't i don't see any major holes other than again you're going to have to make a judgment on all that policy calculation stuff um yeah if it's and that could be you know we're going to take it out i'm going to take it out we're just not going to do it we know it wasn't it wasn't valued last year so by others outside this room so i'm not i put it in the same category as collecting where the committee could hire you as a consultant and you could do an addendum
for zero pending was that all just one big document or dependent as a separate document no no it's all in one big document the only we have two documents i sent you two documents okay initial one the initial which was amended i didn't send you the original january one i sent you the amended okay so that had the full initial report and the addendum stuff correct and all the but did that one have all the appendices it did it was a full that's just added that's the complete and then i sent you the separate one page for the article that was we didn't put in the document um because we're talking about with with appendix a the bylaw we're talking about putting an introductory yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna do is i'm going to take all the i'm going to take all the appendices out of that word document i'm going to create okay a separate appendices set of okay documents got it because we're going to end up probably reordering a couple of them right and then uh just make sure we have all the information we need as to the text we talked about hey you just go ahead and cut it out yeah but if you record i'll i'll get pulling what i need for that appendix okay okay all right um review and vote to approve minutes of september 23 any changes edits i had no edit there i have a motion to uh accept the minutes so moved second second all those in favor all right thank you i think we've dealt with meetings uh and can i have a motion to adjourn so moved second second all those in favor all right nine o'clock
recording stopped