 This program is brought to you by Cable Franchise V's and generous donations from viewers like you. Okay, then I thank you very much. I'm calling the Finance Committee of October 6, 2020 to order. I was posted for 2pm. It is now 2.06pm. And I think that most members are present. This pursuant to Governor Baker's March 12, 2020, you order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law, General Law 30A Section 18. This meeting of the Finance Committee is being conducted by a remote participation. So I am going to, in a moment, I go through and check each of the members to make sure that they can hear me. And they can be heard. The agenda for the meeting is on the screen as we go through this process. This is for the purpose of the open meeting law to make sure that we have a sufficient connection to satisfy the requirements of the open meeting law. So I'll ask the person to acknowledge their presence and start with Lynn Guzmer. Present. And Pat D'Angeles. Present. Kathy Shane. Present. And Dorothy Pam. Present. And Bernie Kubiak. Present. Bob Hagner. Present. Sharon Povinelli, I believe is not currently on the call. We'll keep an eye out for her. The agenda is momentarily on the screen. We're going to take it down in a second so they can see each other and documents. Other documents will be shared as we go through the discussion, but I am going to proceed in the order of the agenda and try and keep us moving so that we can do a lot of working a two hour period. So are there any questions about the agenda? I think no questions then. Why don't we take that down and, Sean, were you going to put up the fourth quarter in your end budget report or just have that. Is Sonia going to, Sonia, are you going to summarize? Yeah. I'm going to summarize quickly. So this is the fourth quarter report, which shows our year and where we ended up with fiscal year 20. And it's posted on the, in the packets and it's also posted on the accounting webpage. If it's not right now, it is happening right at the moment. It's up there shortly. And it has three parts to this. It's got it has the written explanations and then it has revenues and expenditures in detail by department, the expenditures by department and revenues by category. And then it has your budget reports, which I'll tie in to all the numbers that are on here. So we ended up this year has been a really challenging year. We ended up with a revenue deficit, which we were expecting to about a half a million dollars, but we ended up at 458 with the revenue revenue deficit and then we had a surplus appropriation of $2.25 million, which is due to we had a lot of things that we didn't do this year because of COVID, our regular operations that we didn't do when we charged everything we could to CARES Act and FEMA. So this helped us to end up with an increase to our fund balance of almost $1.8 million. So I had my notes all signed up here and then I just messed them all up and now I can't figure out where we're going. So the 1.7 1.8 million dollars is pretty much in line and what we, what our undecided fund balance grows every year. But just in previous years, it's been mostly coming from excess revenue from what we've budgeted this year happens to be the appropriations because of COVID-19. So we're in a really, really good place, considering everything that's been happening. I can go through the things that came in a little bit over our projections for revenues were the cemetery, say cemetery lot sales, investment income that was already locked in at the time so that came in better than expected. Our licenses and permits are already out there. That's mostly through the beginning of the year. We have our strategic partnership agreements with UMass and Amherst College and everything in that came in. Our, actually our hotel and motel taxes are in here as above the 5% projection, but this is a little misleading because this is all grouped up with cannabis taxes as well and that's not budgeted. So whatever we lacked in meals and hotel cannabis helped us make that up because it's not budgeted penalties and interest came in a little higher. The rentals came in better than we expected. The ones that were affected were mostly our economic revenues, which are fines and forfeit, licenses and permits, Medicaid reimbursements, motor vehicle access was down a bit, and I put meals tax down here because that one was down, worked up top, the cannabis kind of set that off a little. So on the expenditure side, turnbacks in general government ended up being about $966,000. And this includes 712,000 employee benefits back. This is actually the final year of our increase for health insurance. We increased way high before we went to private insurance and it take the budget takes a while for it to catch up. So that was good for this year that helped us out. And the other is just where departments were salary reserves, they'll think and allocated out to other departments because their most departments were turning money back as it was because of COVID, we didn't fill vacancies. So there was no need to allocate any of those out to cover any deficits. The departments that turned back the most were, well, public safety was mainly police, they had some, they had positions that have not been filled. Public Works is pretty much right on target. Community services that is a senior center leisure services, a lot of those programs got shut down so there was money returned there. The new schools returned almost $400,000 to the schools closing down our operations. And I believe that was mostly from transportation savings. And our assessments came in lower than anticipated for charter and choice and I think Sean could probably explain that better than I could. And then the enterprise funds we had deficits. Where do we hold on the enterprise funds. I was thinking about that I should have said at the beginning might be helpful to stop and let people ask questions about the general fund and then hit the enterprise funds after if that's okay. Yeah, that's fine. I'm sorry I didn't number the pages in this full document with the attack on the attachments but if you look at the year to date budget reports that are attached there's revenues and expenditures you can actually see the the excess and the deficits by department. So if you have any specific questions about that. I will tell you that there's a lot of retirements that have been pending and there's a lot we've been doing a lot with transitional staff. So if you see deficits. It's not really that we overspent it's we were anticipating we're anticipating people that are retiring this year. Okay, because there's so much savings in this year, we were able to carry over funds in order to pay the payouts for the people. So it doesn't affect the fiscal 21 budget. And that's a legal thing to do. Just so you know. Well, thank you. So let me, Sharon, you weren't here when we took when we confirmed connections before so everybody else good here and be heard you're you're with us now. Yes, you can hear me. Yes. Okay. Great. So what I'm going to do is, we'll go through the see if there are questions on the general fund portion of the budget I'm going to save questions that that I have for the end and then, because if they're asked by others I'll just not ask them. So, I'm going to go in order I think Lin was first to raise hands so Lynn, you have question. Yes, I had done mute sorry. So, I just want to go back to on the revenue side and ask under miscellaneous non recurring. The Amherst College 125 and the UMass 120. I didn't realize we got 25,000 from Amherst College is that not annual however, based on based on ambulance calls. So it fluctuates spend from anywhere from 80 to 135. And is the 120 for UMass also ambulance. But that's the last year our strategic partnership and right agreement that we had and right now that's, that's not needed for the upcoming years. But that it does that include the money that the schools got here now. Okay. All right. And then my only other budget revenue. Okay, my only other other question under revenue is the penalties on fees. I thought when we allowed deferment we weren't taking interest but this suggests we were. This is for the, for most of the most of the beginning of the year. I see. So it doesn't include from middle of March on. Right. Right. Okay, thank you. Those are my only questions on revenues I have some others on. We can go with expenses. I just didn't want to get into the enterprise funds separately. So then, I guess I would like an explanation on the elementary and the assessments on the choice and charter tuition came in lower than anticipated. Sean. Yeah, I can speak a little bit. Yeah, those. So the, the schools that typically one of the big things I think was, there's typically a lot of additional work that goes on throughout the year time cards type and especially year and around professional development. Just a lot of that didn't happen the same way it's happened in the past because of COVID and some of the professional development they did was related to remote learning, and that could be covered by cares act so that didn't have to come out of the budget. The other big was the transportation contracts. So the transportation company didn't provide transportation the same way they always do throughout the entire year. So school districts had to sort of renegotiate with their transportation companies about what would be sort of a fair payment for the year. And so, so the cost for transportation came in quite a bit under because we didn't they didn't pay them for the full year of transportation. So on the assessments, these are essentially how much, you know, it's based on our charter school enrollment and our number of students that choice out. And I believe when we looked at it Sonya on the chart enrollment I'll confirm this but I believe when we looked at the charter enrollment was the big one. And the enrollment was down a handful of students from what we projected on the budget side. So the way these numbers are budgeted is their budgeted based on cherry sheets which are often very conservative estimates of how many students will attend charter schools. And then the actual is based on the actual enrollment so there's there's often quite a bit of variance between what the cherry sheet projects for charter tuition and what the actual is and that could be up or down based on a particular year but there's usually quite a bit of variance. Yeah, it's usually down so that's why it seems little strange, but not that wasn't related to co vid per se. Um, you know, I don't know if families made any choices about you know what schools they were attending, you know during the second half of the year. So I don't think it was related to Kobe but I don't know for sure. Under revenues you said they're below projections do you have a total dollar amount for that area below projections. Yeah. Yeah, if you look at the subsequent pages. Yeah, okay. So if you look at the budget versus actual state statement it'll actually show you what was budgeting and what actually came in. Yeah, different things. So, which one of you look the totals on for each category are on here, what's over so which one are you looking at particular the total fun. I'll just go back and look at those I don't know the revenue deficit we have for the general funds 458,730. Okay, sounds gonna laugh about this but if you remember a few months back I said we're going to be about $500,000 short. I've always been very, very amazed at your ability to project. And will we see cares act money actual expenditures later on and the thing. We've been in this report, but we can talk about that with Paul, how we want to share that information. We are starting to do our reporting to the through the state of actual so we've only done through June so far, and we'll be working on the second cycle soon. And just learn real quick to give you more specifics on the charter enrollment I pulled up the reports. The state had projected 95 students from Amherst Elementary going to charter schools, and we ended up with 87 for so we were about seven students under what they projected. Okay, those are my questions on the first two pages on the first three pages actually. And since you mentioned cares act funding I'm actually going to interject only because it just fits right in. One of the things that I had cut it had was a request from another member of the council, who looked at the report and then sent me one question and I don't think that there's anybody to answer it now and I think you've already partially done it, but I just wanted to let you know it said what this counselor said as I assume, you will be asking your finance committee for an accounting of how we have spent cares act funds so far, and what's in process and what's left. And this should be public information. It's not available, but I don't want staff and I'm reading I don't want to have staff to have to do extra work. So if there's a way to mostly rely on reports were sent to the state with a little explanation that might be fine to suffice the questioners curiosity. So, so we can again I'll connect with Paul about how we how we want to kind of share that info, just as a general overview. You know we did spend and particularly in the end of FY 20. We spent a lot of the cares act funds is mainly on ppne cleaning materials supplies disinfectant sanitizer, you know all the stuff you could imagine, and additional first responder costs and there were some other things some other costs mixed in shelter costs and things of that nature. The hard part right now with giving exact amounts of money spent from cares is that there are most of the cares categories. We also have to submit to FEMA for it's a requirement of using the cares act money is that we submit to FEMA, and FEMA will cover 20 female cover 75% of the cost they deem eligible, and then cares will cover just the 25% in those cases. So a lot of our costs are female eligible we think we submitted our first application and we're working on our second application. We still have to hear back to see if they are going to reject or accept all of the costs. And until we hear back from them we won't know exactly how much FEMA is going to cover and how much cares is going to cover. But you know the people, there's, there was quite a bit of money given out in cares act money and that doesn't include all the money that we potentially might get from FEMA reimbursements as well. Thank you. See what I can include in the draft report and then run that by you how I word that but thank you. I'll go back to the other questioners because we're trying to get questions on the general fund portion of the report and then we'll come back and do enterprise funds, Dorothy Pam, you had your hand up. I have a question about projections, and we came in under a lot of projections which looks really great. My question is when were these projections made. I mean I know I should know this but I don't. When were they made, and were they made with COVID in mind so that they were lowered. Are these projections the usual projections or have they been adjusted for the situation we're in now. I'll take that one. Well, we didn't, we didn't really. We just projected what COVID, the effects of COVID on our revenues. Back I'm creeps was at March towards the end of March. We just figured with a shutdown on all this we just tried to figure out what revenues that we haven't collected yet that are realistic so we just went through there and it was just like an internal projection. I'm going to date so I can find all that and send it to you. So my question really is, because it just came in looking too good, but it's good because you made reasonable projections, and you, and you came in on it, but if you had the projections from before COVID, these numbers would be quite different. This is projections before COVID what happened is they came in, they came in less I would I projected was how much less. Come in right. Yeah, so I think Dorothy just to add to what Sonya said, the budgets were pre COVID so we when when these budgets were developed we didn't that was back in the spring of 2019. We didn't have any idea about COVID back then so that's why things are coming in better, in particular on the expenditure side because we didn't know about COVID when the expenditure budgets were developed. And then Sonya was projecting revenue deficits throughout the whole, you know, she kind of always updating that projection throughout the year. Because to me it looked like some of the revenue, the revenue, the revenue must be down a lot from like a year ago, two years ago, but since you're projected a decline in the revenue because of COVID. It doesn't look as bad as it really is is what I'm really trying to get at. So we really didn't project a decline in revenue for FY 20, in terms of the budget because we didn't know about COVID at that time, really where you'll see the projection in decline in revenue is for FY 21. FY 21, you'll see that the revenues were decreased significantly and that's because because of COVID. Okay, so budget is based on COVID and slow recovery. Okay. Thank you. Kathy. Yeah, I want to go up a little bit. I'm in expenditures. And now the amount the benefits came in, in terms of a saving Sonya, you said this was mainly from over projecting them earlier in the switch over is that I took that then we can't expect this to happen again. I thought we also got some money back because our use as in the rest of the country even Medicare was way down under COVID and some insurance companies were giving premiums back because they realized none of us were going to the doctor at the hospital. So how much of that 712. That's in this fiscal year. Yeah, we're going to have a half a month of premium holiday, but that was for this fiscal year and not. Okay, so none of that was for this other is that so we'll get something this year, but not at this level. Right. Okay. Then on public safety. You said it's mainly during the staff turnover. I was wondering whether we had budgeted for overtime, particularly in fire. And the fire EMT and the engine fire EMT engines weren't running over to the hospital same thing. Did we come in under what we had budgeted for amount. I know our revenues were down in the pre ambulance but I'm just wondering if we came down in hours worked hours built, however we build in the amount of time that that's potentially overtime. You know, there wasn't any say there wasn't really any savings in fire department. They actually overspent their budget. Okay, repairs to vehicles that were done. Okay, so most of the savings and public safety came from the police department and the facility police facility is also under public safety, and a chiller went last year early on I don't know if everybody remembers and we fix that chiller and we need to see if there was going to be enough savings and public safety as a whole to cover what that chiller cost and there was but it does reduce the amount of money coming back. It was mostly positions not filled with fire. We were able to hire with COVID the last three months with COVID extra firefighters, but there. There was a lot of things going on at the fire department so there really wasn't a lot of savings in the first three months of the last three months of fiscal year 20. Okay, can I just ask you just mentioned the chiller went and you could use some of the savings so when we're in a situation where the operating budget is coming in well below what we expected can we move money over to something like a chiller. What happened at the very beginning of the year and normally back in the back in the day when we had town meeting we would also have that reserve fund transfer appropriation of $100,000 for emergencies like this. So now, because it's not just a two twice a year town meeting with a chiller like that as long as we get permission from the state to emergency spend. And then we cover it after the fact. So we didn't have to go and ask for supplemental appropriation for this so we just covered it with savings. Okay, it gets it gets complicated. Okay, and then my other question is building on to lens talking about the assessments and charter. We're always. So if we were, and you are now in the projections for the next fiscal year. Do you use the actual rates of charter enrollment that we just experienced or do you go back to whatever the state says, and I'm just wondering how much we can fine tune our choice so that. And it's of course great to get 420 back when you've over budgeted something and you wouldn't like it to flip the other way, but I don't have flexibility with that that's a state number that gets booked in that number. Okay, that answer so you just have to book the state number in and then you could be lower high if their number is lower high. Okay. Okay, thank you very much. Andy, can I jump in real quick and just let Bob know that if he wants to raise his hand he can press star nine he's joined on his phone. I didn't notice that. So Bob. Yeah, I can hear everyone. People off and on my my internet connection is wobbly. Okay, well, if you want to raise your hand do so. Sharon. I have a question also about projections. The cannabis, which was not budgeted for FY 20, is there a projection for next year and is that going to be budgeted in. We did not budget for 21 cannabis for 21. We didn't put it use it as part of the revenues. We did not budget for 20. Normally, we don't put start a budget on things until we've had at least two or three years of trend. Yeah, that I guess that was my question. So, Do you see a trend in that I know that that was shut down for a while. We only have really the one year for trend, and we just opened up another another one of the facilities just opened up so and I think there's another one coming. So it's going to be a while before we get any really kind of steady trend on that. Okay, I was thinking it was at least two years. I guess I must be ahead of myself. Must be thinking of Northampton. Great. Thank you. Actually, that was the other question that I had. So, I'll just finish out the comment that I had thought about. I think it would be very helpful if we, and I know that there's at least one counselor who's not on the committee who's raised this question and other contexts of wanting to have more information available about what's coming in in revenue, both the fees that come in as a result of the host community agreements and excise taxes. And if we could get some breakdown is to what's what's coming in so and so that we can project into the future and have a sense of what it really means for the community. What everybody is anxious know is when we're going to be able to actually have numbers so we can start budgeting against and what we're choosing to budget against for it. I know that there was a lot of community concern at the time that we were originally setting up the host community agreements about things like assuring community public health and education work with the schools, things like that. So, I think it's a mechanism to continue those conversations. So I'll just say that I don't know that there's any response right now but the request is out there for more than one person. So I will, I will let him that information is on the quarterly reports every quarter so if you look at the revenues on the quarter it is broken out cannabis tax. And there's fees. Does that include any payments that are other than the tax that are provided by the host community agreements. That's the tax that comes in through the state. The additional fees. That's under fees. And I haven't broken that out yet because the only fee that we have so far is cannabis is host agreement fees. So you'll see there's $206,000. That's the host agreements. And that's, and that's, I think there might be $600 for short term rental in there, but that's it. So it's 206,000 for the house community agreement and then the exercise tax is separately listed. So that's that information is included in these quarterly reports. I'll take a further look and then get back if there's additional questions. The meantime Bernie to be back. Do you have a question. I think I've unmuted myself. Yeah, the marijuana questions got answered but I've got one that sort of concerns it's cares. I know that folks have been really rigorous about trying to build against the cares act. I also know that the Department of Revenue just released new guidance. And so the question is really is that new guidance going to alter the way we've been able to use the cares fund is that going to be favorable to us or unfavorable. So it's affected some hasn't really changed anything that I can think of in terms of what we've already used cares act funds for. I think that's out that change recently that might FEMA. Mima, which is the Massachusetts emergency management group emailed us about changes that FEMA is making in terms of what they will reimburse for, particularly around ppne. And so they've encouraged us to get another FEMA application in for all of our expenses prior to September 15 because FEMA is changing how they consider some stuff after September 15. So that may mean that we get less reimbursement from FEMA and then would would rely more on our cares money. One of the things in the new cares that guidance weren't so much changes is more clarifications of what is going to be considered eligible and what's not going to be considered eligible. The main things really haven't changed in terms of we still has to be unbudgeted so it's going to be necessary due to cobit, and we have to incur the, the expense prior to December 30. And we have to get a little more specificity around certain requests and, you know, like, can we buy vehicles or can we build new buildings, you know, they kind of clarified the answer to those types of things. But there wasn't actually a ton that change with the new guidance is more clarification I would say. Okay. Yeah, because I know from newspaper reports that she was basically going to wipe out the reimbursement for PBA. Yeah, that's more on the that was, I believe that's more on the FEMA side. FEMA was saying that, you know, if you're not buying Ppne for first responders while they're actually on a call for COVID, then they're not going to reimburse for it. Whereas before, you know, Ppne for teachers and Ppne for other municipal staff working with the public that we were was considered to be eligible. They've sort of brought that in to be very specific Ppne for for COVID specific calls for emergency workers. And that again that's part of the after September 15 piece. Thanks. And anything else on the general fund. I think the one thing that I was less than I was going to ask was the on the page that's on the screen now where it says like, licenses and permits, actual receipts were 142.5% year to date. And that does not include liquor license and that kind of fees. Now under. Yes, it would include that. 20s. Yeah, I think that I this is additional. It's really not a part of this report, but I just want to throw it out there is that. I think the finance committee might like to know if there's going to be a renegotiation of liquor license fee charges for the next round. What that amount might come to and how that's going to affect future budgets but that's not in something needs response now, just so that you know that there's an interest in it. So the town manager has started talking to us about that. Yeah, I know and he mentioned it very briefly last night, and it seemed to be a work in progress and the future question not a past question. So is there anything else on the general fund part of the budget if not have Sonya to take us through the enterprise funds and then get questions on the enterprise funds. I think that's where we are in the process. So the enterprise funds are the ones that got hit pretty hard on the share water and sewer rose combination it was co good. And consumption numbers were a bit were high. So it's been half the trend started to go down with consumption and it takes a while for budgets to get adjusted because we do these so far ahead of time. So our sewer. Our sewer fun ended up with a $753,000 revenue deficit, and we returned 104,000 and expenditures, which gave us a net of 648 525. And so maybe after you read these I'll just I'll give the ending fund balance because that information was requested is that okay. Well I was just going to say, you're going to say it perfect good go ahead. This week I filed for our free cash and retained earnings certification, and I have certified numbers yet but the estimate for fund balance and sewer is about 1.69 million. So that's what around where we're going to be. And then on the water. Is that what you're going to say Sean. Yeah, perfect. Thank you. And then I know. The water fund. Our revenue ended up with a 500 and almost $44,000 revenue deficit, and we returned 45444 leaving 400, almost $500,000 deficit in our water retained earnings. So we're hoping we'll come in at 1.78 million. I didn't want to put these documents out so their public record until they're actually certified from the state. So you cannot just ask you and Sean is that about what we were seeing when we were looking at the budget for this year that you had expected that kind of drawn on the reserves. Yeah, it was in the ballpark. I think we did losses. So I think, you know, we, I can, I'll pull that out to see where we were, but I believe we were pretty close for water and sewer terms of what we were projecting for a deficit. Yeah, we were pretty on top of those. They came in and a solid waste, usually the problem child and still is but that actually came in with a little bit of a growth here. The revenues came in at almost $6,000 more in our expenditure to turn back as $102. So that gave us a growth in the fund balance of 6068, which left us with an 86.586 thousand 500. Fund balance. Now that's a little lower because no, yes, that's a little lower because we took some money for a match for a roll off truck, if you remember. Yep. So that's already subtracted from all this. And the last one is transportation. We stopped writing tickets, which hurt. Our transportation fund, we had a revenue deficit of $303,000. And what we did is we altered. We altered our retained earnings by 200 and was it 244,838 dollars so that we wouldn't have a revenue, I mean, expense deficit as well. We made that a net zero this year so that we wouldn't have to put a deficit on the tax rate. And that's pretty much it. I'll say that we're at the end of September now so probably in a week or two once all the revenues are are posted, we could do the first quarter report and kind of give everybody an idea where we are with all the revenues for the first three months of this fiscal year. Just to see if they're on with our lower projections that we did for fiscal year 21. I think we should put some of that information as part of the financial indicators report we're still pulling up together but we assume people will be interested in that so that might be a couple slides on that as well. So, good questions and comments people have regarding the enterprise funds loan. Could you just go back to that enterprise one page please. I just want to make sure so, either by raising the money for sewer, the amount people pay for sewer and water, or in the transportation fund situation by absorbing the debt elsewhere. We're going to go back into FY 21 without carrying forward these deficits. Is that true. They all they all net out in the in the fund balance revenues and expenditures. The general fund actually took the hit for the transportation fund because we have our indirect costs. We lowered the indirect costs. The fund continued to take a hit for FY 21, a little bit lowered it for FY 21, and, and for FY 20, but okay I just wanted to make sure I understood that we're not going into FY 21, carrying any of this deficit. No, no, and we did adjust revenue projections for FY 21 to factor some of this in. So, you know, the magnitude of the impact of COVID on these things will be, you know, we're, that's what we're monitoring very closely. You know we assumed one semester, potentially gone with the colleges and the impact that has on consumption for water sewer and transportation. But we still don't know what the second semester looks like. And just the overall, you know, decrease in the population on in town. Thank you. Dorothy. Yes, I have a question about solid waste. So we know that we lost revenue from UMass. We're reading in general things about United States that a lot of towns found that their sewer use had increased, because people weren't going out to business or going to another town they were all staying home. So I'm wondering how that is reflected in these numbers. Well sewer revenues are based on water consumption. So it's like 85% of water consumption is what gets built up for sewer is what comes in goes out normally. So we're not seeing big drops. I mean the last time I looked at it at least we're not seeing a big reduction in the water and sewer usage of sort of the normal town accounts the residential accounts. Really where we're seeing the big drop is in our college accounts college university accounts where there's just fewer people. So we have the so usage of private residents if everybody's home and they're using more water and they're using more sewer, their fees to the town have will be going up. Is that not correct. It is if they're using more. Yeah, we can look at the numbers closer I don't know if I saw that they were using more on the residential side but we have to look at it again. I know that's what happened in some towns so just curious to know if that was kind of balancing things out a little bit that's all. Anything else or not all says Kathy. Hi, I'm shown where we've got three full months of water and sewer use. And you said we're going to wait and get a full six months. We, we did not know when we initially looked at rates in June, I think we did not know that UMass was not going to come back. At the extent, you know they they were still planning on a lot more people on campus and then, you know I know the students didn't know until the end of August just before they were due to come back. So you have a first three months and then the best guess for six months on how much off we are going to be I know we lowered our revenue, but are we going to be off a lot for the current fiscal year on revenues compared to what we thought we were going to get, even though we had already lowered those. So that's what we're looking at now with DPW and and the water folks over there. We're looking at how much our production, you know what we estimated and how we came to those numbers versus what we're seeing. And we'll conclude information in the financial indicators report on enterprise funds because that that along with some of our local receipts are probably the two most concerning areas of our budget just not at the present time like there's something jumping out at us but just as we go forward into the year, those are the areas where I see the most risk if we don't see a rebound from where we were in the spring that are not the revenue numbers could come in lower than what we budgeted. So we do have an idea it is lower but we have to project out what we're waiting to see is sort of September and October now the college students are back to some extent. What those numbers look like because during the summer it was well below, you know what it normally was. And the reason I'm pushing on it. As everyone here knows we did a big hike and water rates and sewer rates, and then going out. We're starting this year next year we're starting to take on the debt service and the water fund both for the study and then we start taking it on for Centennial and that was already built into a rate increase. But my understanding of the way we were moderating those increases was to draw down on reserves. And we're, we're, we just drew down on reserves for the fiscal year that's over, if we're going to start drawing down on them, again, in the, in this fiscal year, it, I think my math says the rates are going to have to go up more than we had said. So, if we could have a mid-year like January, you know, does it look like that's going to happen or not. You know, I know it's still going to be estimates and best estimates but early warnings on some of this because people were surprised by the increase. And people who asked me, I also said that's not just this current year but it's going to keep going up, you know, because we had the projection so just trying to get it ahead of that so that we don't have a may surprise for people, you know, absolutely. I don't, Sonya correct me if I'm wrong, I don't believe that we were relying on reserves to fund any of the debt. You know, in the future I don't think the reserves were kind of keeping the rates down, but maybe I missed that but I don't believe so. We weren't. So, so none of it came out of reserves because I thought Guilford said part of the study costs we're going to come out of reserves. Yeah, I mean there may have been specific like capital projects there's always some capital projects we do each year. So potentially maybe a specific capital project was earmarked from reserves but I don't think there was ever a plan to sort of use ongoing reserves to support any of the those large projects or keep the rate down, but we'll double check and and get back to you. Okay, so yeah, I hear you guys, I hear. Again, it's one of the highest priorities for us is monitoring the water and sewer consumption so we'll keep you informed as we go on. Okay, thank you. I know we have some members of the public president I just want to remind everybody who's watching meeting now or watching it later on. If you are interested in the documents that you see on the screen or in the other documents that were provided to the committee. If you go into the town website under council and then committees finance committee, and then packet for today's meeting you will find all of these documents are available to you. So back to the committee sharing you had a question. Just a quick question again maybe you said more about this but I just heard you say about the solid waste fund it was a blip that they actually had a surplus is that. Is that just a one time thing or you know, or is that perhaps ongoing or just, you could say something about that. I think it's just our revenues came in a little better than we projected. That's all I don't think are we raised our rates like many year last year so I think this is just showing that. And I think we benefited sort of what Dorothy was talking about before with people being home a lot, you know we definitely heard a lot about people cleaning out their garages and doing yard work and, and more of that type of thing so you know we speculate that that may have a revenue increase that we saw. Anything else. I guess the one thing I'll just see if you have any comment on this and I'm always anxious about the transportation fund because these very under circumstances such as we're in, but PVTA expenses, I assume remain constant. And I assume that all of that is fact that is essentially part of what was being absorbed by adjusting the amount that's being reimbursed to the general fund. So PVTA was covered. So, so that's still part of a fee coming into the general fund. So transportation is still covering the PVTA. And I did talk to Doug slaughter about that because he still has a role. He's, he's, you know, very well versed in the PVTA. And when I've spoken to him, it did seem like there was a, there is some flexibility to reduce costs a little bit they have sort of their summer runs. And, and that cuts back a little bit on bus routes. And he, he wasn't sure if that how long those summer runs would continue with with fewer students at UMass and if that would impact how many total bus routes there were to potentially have lower costs. So we'll, we'll get more information on that. So, if I, if I can go back to answer the water and sewer retained earnings use for future years, there was no retained earnings use for the future years to offset any of the debt. The only use of retained earnings was in the sewer fund for fiscal year 21, because it's so unknown. Anything else on the fourth quarter year end report. We've covered both. Now, both parts of it the general fund and the enterprise funds. So, Kathy use your of your hand, but did you have a final question. I had just a final a future looking question for Sean at an earlier meeting, Sean, you said you were looking at parking fees permit fees, fee setting policies. Do you have a sense, and it's partly because I've got a half written memo I was going to send you. Do you have a sense of how far along you will be when because, you know, the stickers that people get so they have a resident parking permit. If we wanted to look at some of those not just the meter fees. If we could be saying, there's a source of revenue here that we could adjust should we want to. Yeah, we. So, we, we, in terms of parking, I think we did pretty good in terms of looking at comps and getting being able to pull comp rates from a couple other communities. We did look at all fees and other areas were a little more difficult to find comps, because sometimes fees very pretty significantly just in terms of what the fee is for to so it's hard to compare apples to Apple sometimes for certain ones. But in terms of parking, I think we actually did a pretty good job so we have some of that information already. Okay. Thank you. So if there's any nothing else on the year and fourth quarter report we can get on to the next agenda item which is the FY 22 budget process. And good separate calendar on that and now on the screen. So if you want to give any review, I had a question under comment and then but I'll see what else the committee has first. Okay, so we sort of two of these I'll just do a really brief overview. There's sort of one big one looking at the whole year. And then there's two can kind of get a sense of where different pieces kick in and then there's this sort of couple months looking forward at what's coming up. So this is the full year one. I'll make it a little bigger. And there's no specific dates in here it's more about sort of relationships between different entities so we've got the town manager. We've got other committees like the elementary school committee the region school committee in the library. And then there's the funding group, the finance committee and the town council. And this is all under sort of the regular budget process. So just doing a quick overview of sort of the order of things and there's a lot of staff and other things that happen in between that I've sort of carved out to try to focus it on the major, the major tasks that we have for the budget for FY 22. Additionally, the town manager, we do this financial indicators report in November, which I believe is scheduled for November 9 that sort of kicks off the budget process and a lot of ways. The next piece, it comes down to the finance committee. The next piece of that is the actual budget forum that the town council will hold. Andy, is that a town council budget forum or is it a finance committee? Councils required to hold the forum the hearing that happens later as is a committee hearing. Great. So then there'll be a budget forum and I think that's the week after the financial indicators report. The finance committee, I believe typically has a deliberation after all of that and it talks about, you know, the different components of the budget and that will happen sometime. It might take longer this year, given all the things going on, but that'll happen in November. And then ultimately down here at the end of November, the council would issue some sort of budget guidelines. And again, some of these things, these are just rough dates. Some of these might get extended or change because of COVID and all the uncertainty. Once the budget guidelines are issued, then there's sort of a break in time for us to really work on developing the budget. And that's where a lot of the staff activity happens meeting with department heads doing all of our projections, get all of our inputs. And then BCG, I believe is required to meet once a year. So that's, I think last year happened in February. And sometimes there could be more meetings of BCG, depending on the year this might be a year where there needs to be more meetings of the budget coordinating group, because they're, again, there could be some uncertainty and require some coordination between different different budgets between the schools, the library and the town. The next piece that comes up is we need the school committee and the Jones library I believe approved budgets by the end of March. And so the town manager has those budgets ready for his overall budget that's presented to the council. Then we go down here to town council there's some presentations of the regional school information, because the regional school is taken out of out of the regular timeline, at least in the past has been taken out of the regular schedule of considering the budget. And that's because of the other member towns when they hold their town meeting so the council has typically worked on the regional school a little sooner. Same thing the finance committee will have a hearing on the regional school and a recommendation, and I'll skip over a little bit more so there's lots more discussions presentations that go on with the finance committee. The committee will vote a recommendation, and then it'll go to the town council for approval. So, sort of a general overview. All these dates and will change a little bit. But there's obviously a lot of, a lot of weaving in and out from different committees and, and staff. Sorry, go ahead and maybe just make a general comment and then to finish up and get on to questions from other members of the committee. Assumption we're making right now is that we're adhering to the dates that are incorporated in the charter that we're not even if the governor's emergency is continuing that we're going to assume a budget on the normal schedule and not to what we did this last year. So that's, that's our assumption at the, at the current time is that we're going to try to get back to doing the full year budget based on the dates in the, in the charter. You know, we were close to being able to do that last year. We decided to go for the one month to see if we got any more information. But yeah, for this calendar that we're looking for at this point, it's based on the charter. And we add one little piece to that is that we will find this out if we have four town meetings this year, and either zoom format or otherwise. But the reason that we take the hour budget for the regional schools out of order is to try and coincide with town meetings of other towns. And if we find the town meetings of other towns are not on the traditional end of the April beginning of May dates, then we might reevaluate that. Yeah, that's a good point. And one other page I just didn't show you but just so this committee is aware of sort of the other timelines. Capital, a lot of the dates for finance committee in the council in terms of reviewing and discussing sort of the same but the joint capital planning committees work really takes place over the months of February and March. So they'll have, you know, several meetings throughout those those two months and we don't know what capital look like next year this is based on sort of a typical capital allocation but again that obviously could change. In the CPA we did make a change to the timing of CPA this year so I think the committee should be aware of. I think last year the CPA sort of took place in the late winter early spring along with everything else. This year we decided to move it to the fall so that it kind of have its own time slot and maybe be focused on on its own so it wasn't intermingled with everything else. It also helps because we'll know by the end of the CPA process what projects have been recommended, and that will help JCPC and capital because in the past or sometimes been projects that are being considered by both CPA and JCPC. And it was, and they weren't quite sure, you know, was was it going to be approved by either body. At this point, with the way this calendar set up we'll know before JCPC starts what projects CPA is recommending. That's the that's the overview. And then in terms of specific dates. So some of the stuff we've done we've just as a reminder to the finance committee we are trying to do an update of the full budget document it's not we're not looking to kind of make it, you know, 100% different, you know, people are used to certain types of formats and the way certain types of format. But we are trying to provide more information and streamline the information a little bit on the back end, and maybe make it a little easier to go through. So we were still taking feedback, so people have have reviewed the budget document and and think there's certain pieces that could be changed or improved you can you can send that over to us. We talked about reviewing the water rate structure which we'll talk about later on. We have already started projection for next year with limited information. We have all the CPA dates in here. And we've begun working on the financial indicators report here on the ninth that's when the print that's sort of the next big budget date that's coming up for the financial indicators report, followed by on the 16th of the Council's budget forum. We have a few more community preservation committee meetings, and some of these dates will, you know, it depends how many present how many proposals we get we want to stick to this calendar as best we can, but we ultimately need to see how many proposals come in for CPA. We've got a tentative date for finance committee to discuss an initial recommendation on budget guidelines. And again a tentative date for town council to adopt those budget guidelines. We have a final report date for committee preservation committee the BCG date and a kickoff date for for JCPC. Any questions on some of the things that are coming up. Let me just say one thing and then I'm gonna ask Lynn. And that is that I will want to circle back and talk about the dates for the budget guidelines from the council from the council both the finance committee recommendation of the council and the council discussion. I think that might be a more complex process than it has been in prior years and I'm not sure those dates will work but I'll see if we get comments on it Lynn. One of the ones I'll comment on. So first of all, November 9 is correct. That is when we are having the financial indicators previously known as the four boards now only three boards. And I want to make sure that all of the finance committee resident members are aware of that date. That meeting will be at 530 that night and we'll make sure you were invited. The meeting that is in fact going to be the hearing not the hearing the public budget forum is actually on Thursday, November 19. And it's separate from a council meeting we only have two council meetings in November because of the election and Thanksgiving. And so we're having a separate night that we're doing the budget forum. That will be the 19th at 630. And then I also just want to point out and this is consistent with where Andy will need to go on the budget guidelines and that is that we do not even have a council meeting scheduled for November 30 at this time. And the reason to schedule it right now are meetings in December or December 7, which is when we're going to do state of the town but also have a regular meeting as well, and then also December 21. But I would agree with Andy that the budget guidelines might take a little more time to develop. And then one other thing and that is it turns out that the way the charter is written BCG budget coordinating group is essentially equal to the group that assembles for the financial indicators. And because you need to have quote representation from the town council the school committee and the Jones library. And the reality is, we call that meeting for the financial indicators as the BCG meeting, the BCG meeting that you've project here in February, God forbid that we have to have it. We only had it this year because we had to completely relook at the guidelines once COVID hit. I'm not clear that there would be another BCG meeting until we get a sense of just how difficult it will be to project guidelines early on, and then have to change them or augment them the way we did. Andy, I'm the rest is is all that you want to say about all of that too. Well, as far as the BCG is concerned, I think that the reason that it gets placed logically where Sean has it right now is just a hold for nothing else is that in traditional years when the governor releases his proposed budget at the end of January, it's the first indication that we have that there may be a variation in a significant budget item, which is state aid. And this is going to be a precarious year for what we can are going to receive for the state I think we have to recognize the uncertainty. And for that reason, it is probably worth, worth holding a date for BCG, because if there is something that is very different from the financial indicators meeting and the first projections. We have to have room to talk about it. So that's why I think it is worth having a BCG meeting. And it might be certainly in February is who we can think is reasonable to have it but it's good to have it as a hold on to the schedule. I just wanted to explain that in previous period, the year before when things were quote normal. We never had a second BCG meeting we just had the financial indicators. I think that's right now, Sean or Sonia can comment on this or anybody else who wants to but really depends upon how we're looking on that particular indicator and whether that's going to require further discussion that needs to involve schools and library. In addition, and that's why I think that we hold that. Right. Anything else one. Nope. Kathy you had your hand up. Yeah, I'm Lynn already hit on one of them on November 9, I guess the suggestions also its financial indicators reports last BCG meeting just so people understand it's got schools and library there too. My question is on when you get down to the capital side. And you're doing your projections. You had said during JC, the joint capital planning committee meeting in September, Sean, that you were, you might be trying a way of saying well at we're at 5% this year for capital, because we had to cut way back on capital. Maybe we can go to six or 7% you know you were you were going to have a few different markers. So, if we come out, I don't know how you're going to handle that when you come out to guideline when the budget guidelines and then how that's going to feed into JC, but JC PC, it feels like somewhere in the guidelines since that's our flexibility if we are short on revenues that we don't want to slash operating budgets. If we have to do that again, you might want to have in an unusual way, a couple different capital scenarios coming out of guidelines. And then have JC PC, maybe by February that will be settled down enough that we have more certainty. But the same thing is that people should understand with the revenue projections being far less certain than they've been in the past. And that's our place that were, I shouldn't use the word flexible but that's where we were flexible this past year. So just trying to think of a couple scenarios right from the beginning, both so all residents understand that we're trying to do that but we also have JC PC starting the meeting understanding that we're not going to start with one number and have it completely change a month later, which is what happened last year, but potentially we're we're starting with two targets. So, I think some of it, I think those are good points. Some of it just depends on what guidelines are issued by by the town council, and sort of where, like you said where revenues are at when we get around when we get to the point of developing the capital improvement program, because when we present the capital improvement program to JC PC to consider. We can either include a couple options if there's still a lot of unknown at that point, or we can go with what we think is the best, you know, the most accurate estimate of what will be available for capital, it'll, I think it'll depend when we get to the spring and and we see what we know about revenues with the state's budget looks like, but no, that may be an option for the for the capital improvement program. But when when the council as a whole or when finance is first looking at guidelines and then it goes to the council for discussion of the forum, the more people understand that we may not be out of that uncertainty yet the better. And that this is where this is where, if we have to we can be flexible, so whether we peg it at our best guess and say but it is our best guess and, you know, they at the national level sometimes the congressional budget office does a best guess, a low and a high. You know, like, you know, sort of it could come in five, you know, or something so people are, it's always just one number. It's not like people work with two numbers more than once but just, it feels like this is going to be that kind of year. And, you know, maybe the spring springs with sunshine again and and without virus, you know, sort of a series of without, but otherwise we're going to continue in this world where we don't know what local receipts are we don't know how well the state can continue to draw in its rainy day fund so it doesn't hit localities. So I just think we've got a shifting sand underneath. Yeah, we're still in the same place we are, you know, in the spring that we were last year. Last year we did best, you know, we did best case a worst case scenario projections as well. You know, I remember one of the first meetings I attended, we were looking at sort of a best and worst case scenario so no yeah, that's a good point where we're, that's definitely something we'll be considering based on what the, what the outlook looks like and at the time. Thank you. Anything else, Kathy? Two parts. The first one is, although it's hard for me to read this on my computer, the color coding is really a good idea. It's very helpful. And also, I don't know how to print an Excel chart because it comes out just one page. But I think that this set of documents right here should be on the town website, but maybe not in the place you would normally put it or at least in an additional place. Some place that's very easy for somebody who does not go, I mean the general public, who's not used to going into SharePoint or other points. And some kind of like the budget year or some such thing because I think a lot of people who don't really get into the nitty-gritty too much might want to have some idea of the process and how the different boards come in. And there are a lot of people involved in the town who are on all these boards too. So that's point one, because I think this is a very helpful document. And then my second one, building on what Kathy said, but maybe making it, stating it more specifically. Last night at Town Council, a date was given, which I don't remember what it was, as to when we the town would be asked, are we in a position to accept the library money for the new building? And I wanted to know where we would be in our budget process when we have to, about time we'd have to make that decision. And then coupled with that is the school thing is not yet happening. I mean, is there a time or a date when we might have to make a similar statement about going forward with the school proposal? I'm trying to go after either of those, Andy. Yes. As far as your suggestion about the budget calendar and posting, we have actually, SharePoint is for counselors only, but there's a budget page under when you go to the website under government, there's budget and having the calendar on the budget page in the fairly, makes it a fairly prominent place that comes up there fairly quickly. So, Sean can work with us on that. Yeah, we'll set up the FY 22 budget page after this meeting and get the calendar up. So it will be there. So back to the library question, I'll turn it over to Lynn. So, let me backtrack and just say that when as we, as we approached June, et cetera, of this past year of FY 20, in other words, just this year, several of the library statewide that were coming up on the list, including we're very straightforward with the Mass Board of Library commissioners and said we're not sure that this would be the year for us to be able to get the funding for a new addition. And so, with all of that, and not just Amherst, but going down the Mass Board of Library commissioners decided to do was in fact use the $20 million that they got this year to back fund, if not back fund, but to provide funding to those library projects that had already voted and gotten started using their town money. Right. I believe four of them. And so that's what they use their money for, which took the pressure off this past year. However, sometime around April, May or so, we'll start hearing what the pin is for the coming year. And that will indicate whether or not, because we are number two in the queue, but with the idea that we would actually be coming up, possibly as early as July 21 will be coming will is it's whether or not whether or not they're going to go forward, the way they originally were planning to do at that point, the town will not know officially quote officially being the budget until July one, and we have a certain chance in which we have to either accept the grant and then sign on the data line or not accept the grant. In addition to that, there are both state and federal efforts going on to identify additional library Monday money in fact, at the level, another 115 million has already been identified quote in a bond bill now bond bills can sit there for years and get funded. So I just be clear that that doesn't mean a damn thing. But the idea is that if the bond bill did get funded, then the goal would be to go back to mass for the library commissioners and have them fund 75% of the eligible money needed for the library renovation and addition. It's, it gets extremely complicated and convoluted but the bottom line is because they decided not to fund Amherst for FY 21. The earliest it would happen would be FY 22. And again, that would be capital money, and it would be over a period of years, not in the general revenue budget but capital. Right. But would we know what our financial health was at that time so that this is the goal actually by trying to have it put off a year would be Yes, the goal would be that we would know much more about our financial health. Then the schools actually it's almost two year process to get to the point that you have to do the next decision point on the schools. And that's the decision point at which you say yes we're going to go ahead and we have completed our curriculum plan and Kathy you're on that. It's getting ready to meet are going to as met for its first meeting. And it takes a while to do the curriculum plan and to get ready to go to the next phase so that's not that's off for almost another year or so. The town would make a commitment. If they do make a commitment to the library before we have the chance to make a commitment to the school. Is that right. That is correct, although the hope would be would you would have an estimate of school begin to be able to estimate what the school is. Out there in the float of all of that is still the issue of DPW and fire. And the idea would be that we would get back to and this really goes back to Sean. The note I've had on my in from my conversations with Paul and that is getting back to the model that we were looking at before. We're trying what we're also trying to do is come in with, you know, kind of the air there is a possibility that at some point. Finance committee and the council, you know, working with the manager and the financial people are just going to say, this is how much you have versus the skies the limit. Which other towns by the way have done. Right. Thank you. Okay. Anything else. Kathy, did you have something else your hands. Yeah, I just wanted to build on what Lynn said, and Dorothy asked. We'll have a best guess date for the school as well as a range of estimates for the school. At the point we're having to look at the library because that decision has to come first. So I think we have to look at them jointly. We probably will not have enough internal funds, and this is one Sean is going to be able to tell us to do both out of just our cash flow so even though we're making a decision on one, it has a direct implication for the other. So it's, it's, it's, we're going to have to have a context as we look at that, and it is a year off from now and when I asked Sean on best guess on when, you know, I'm trying to which fiscal year, FY 24, FY 25, it's in that world so it's not going to happen in FY 22 or 23, but maybe, you know, and our first meeting hasn't happened yet we're about to have the first one at the end of October at the call, you know, so it's, but it's in the same, you know, it's not 20 years from now. You know it's in, if we're talking about in a, in a five year span they're probably both drawing on what we're able to do plus the savings fund we've built up in reserves and that interplay. So, I don't think there's going to be any way around trying to think of them together and as Lynn says then put two more in the pot. But those two more may not have to be in that five year period it may, but it may be some big expenses for them, we don't know yet on those. But at least those two are kind of tied together because of the number of years that will have, we have to make a decision and an up or down to draw on resources. I think that's a reasonable and important point and I appreciate you bringing it up. I'm going to just make my some concluding observations about sort of the fall part of the process and then look if they know further questions. What I'm going to do is see if there's anyone from the public who wants to do public comment, then move to the capital funding needs and plan. Not, not the capital funding needs and plan the question of the capital inventory. Brief discussion of water sewer rates I don't think that we're really going to get much into capital funding needs and plan with the time that's a lot of today and I don't I was put on as a placeholder. But if there's any member of the public who would like to make public comment on anything that has come up so far. They certainly should raise their hand and I'd be glad to recognize them. We do have a policy that any matters that are within the jurisdiction of the committee can come as public comment at this point I didn't see anybody raising their hand. I've lost my discipline list for the moment. There is no one who has so I think that we can can go on and what what I was just doing the generally comment about the end of the calendar processes. The financial indicators meeting. I hope that there's going to be some time that's going to be built in from discussion amongst the three boards that are present, because there's a lot of issues that are going to be proposed. Possibly, certainly, we're going to have information that we're going to have to digest about them. And there are a couple of key questions one that Kathy's already alluded to and that and that is the question of capital, and what assumption that we're going to make about the percentage for capital is as we define it in the current policy. And that, you know, this year we cut our capital back by half and postponed it if we're going to have a reasonable five year plan that's just going to take care of ongoing capital needs. We'll start knowing what we're doing moving forward and recognizing the consequence of any such decision again, and the other is question of use of reserves to supplement either immediate capital needs or supporting budget operating budgets. And that discussion is going to be informed by what we hear at the financial indicators meeting and is going to then come forward further through the public through the forum and get back to this committee. But I hope that we have discussion amongst the boards that night that will begin that discussion that can then follow through that process. By the time it gets back to this committee to develop a recommendation to the council for budget guidelines. There's going to be a lot of information on the table and I don't know that we can do it in one meeting I think it's going to take at least several meetings to to provide to produce that agreement on that recommendation we're making to the council. And we're going to have it and I think that the council is going to need to have time to digest the issues at that point and some a little bit anxious about the schedule it's been put forward for those dates for the reasons it's described. So, I will leave it at that and see if there's anything else that people want to talk about regarding the schedule right now and, if not, we can go to the, at least the two remaining items that we wanted to talk about. And I think that I was going to do the capital funding needs because it sort of fits in in some ways the inventory question with a process that we're underway. So that probably makes the most sense to do that first and then I want to have a few minutes at the end to have Kathy and Bernie explain any answer questions about what they're thinking was on the water rate structure. Sean, did you want to start us off on what you thought about with this. Sure. Andy, did I hear you correctly that you sort of you want to combine those two agenda items the capital inventory with sort of the capital planning one. I think so, because I don't think we're going to get into a real deep discussion about the second part, the capital planning. I'll go through the inventory first I did have a couple comments related to the capital funding plan and looking forward that I do want to put in there before we're done but I said, I'll just briefly go through this because you all have it. I wanted to give you a brief memo about what type of information we currently have on buildings vehicles and equipment. And there was an attachment that also gave you sort of what we have at this point has actual list of, of buildings vehicles and equipment and that we're updating I did we were originally having department heads update update that information, but I asked them to hold off once it was determined that we were going to get additional feedback from the finance committee about specific items. I asked them to hold until we until we know exactly what type of information we're going to have to, we're going to pull together for for you all. And then the only piece that I just wanted to highlight are some of the things that you may want to consider as you have your discussion looking forward as to you know if we do a sort of a basic inventory for FY 22 but a more robust inventory beyond that. And so some of those things are just again thinking going back to the usefulness of whatever is asked for and how that specific criteria or piece of data would be used to inform capital planning in the future. What is available is the data is it something that we can readily get by, you know, going to read a mileage or, you know, looking up, you know what type of fuel something burns or is the data more, more difficult to obtain. If it is more difficult to obtain. Is there any cost to collecting that data I can imagine some types of inventory categories where the information might be really useful but we may not have the expertise to actually compile that information. And so we'd want to know if there's a cost to gather that information. Typically we would want something that's easy to replicate year after year so we can have consistent inventory as we move forward and have a set date where we updated every year and we don't have issues doing that. And then independence of data and is the what's the category that's being considered is it free of potential bias. I think about that I'm thinking sometimes things around useful life, you know the useful life that the manufacturer may suggest for a particular item may or may not be free of potential bias that they want you to replace that every so many years. So, there's there's other things along those lines but those are just a few thoughts I had on the longer term discussion around inventory. And then I think this is the lists, which again you have this is the inventory list, or the building and infrastructure list this list was compiled from a facilities report that was done four or five years ago. And so we're looking to update this. So some of the building conditions will certainly change. So that's why I just want to be clear that this was this data is going back several years. But it does have some useful information around square footage. The priority that was set on that type of building and how important that building is to the town's operations. When the last renovation is, and obviously the current condition of the building. So those, those are all things we can do currently that that are hopefully useful to you all. So on the vehicle side, the department that the vehicle belongs to the year was purchased, the making model, where it's stored, the mileage and I talked to Kathy would, I agree it would be great to have multiple years of mileage is in here. We may not be able to do that the first year, because we want it to be sort of a consistent maybe one year span, but after this first year we may just keep, you know, keep multiple years of mileage is in here so you can see how much a particular vehicle is used over the course of the fiscal year, the condition of the vehicle and then the purchase price of that vehicle. And so some of these have been updated or up to date, as of July, but we still have some gaps and information that we're waiting for. And that is it. Okay. So one comment that I'm going to turn to because there's a long list of people who are asking to questions, I'll save everything else. It's my understanding on the mileage issue that DPW is a registered inspection station for state inspections so the town on vehicles can be inspected by our own staff. Since the inspection program itself records mileage each year when inspections and done, it might be worth at least checking with DPW as to whether they maintain records that year for year through the inspection process. Yeah, that would be helpful. It wouldn't be the same point in time. I don't think so we wouldn't. We have a bunch of different times. The inspections on an annual basis probably when the stickers are due. Yeah, I know but I'm saying that every vehicle stickers going to be do a little bit differently. Timing so the all if we did that I don't know if that would work for all the vehicles or it would just, we want to have one point in time where we could grab the mileage, it would be different times throughout the year based on when they needed the inspection. That would be one, one year usage. Let me turn on the other members of the committee that going again in order Dorothy. Just a simple note on the schedule of meetings where you're not sure if you might have to have an additional meeting. I appreciate having a meeting date with a question mark in my calendar, so that whether you have the meeting or not, I haven't given that time away. So I, it's clear that both you and Lynn are not sure exactly how many meetings you might need for something. So I'm just suggesting or hoping that you'll put in the tentative or possible meetings if needed. Thank you. You were next anyway. Let's go back to the list and the memo. I think it would also be useful to have a column that says major repairs. And so let me just give you an example. And that would be for instance the police station getting a new roof is a major repair, and also whether or not at any point we put solar on top of something and I realize that's a down the road. So I would like to make sure we see, you know, we provide that option. Those are my two on the buildings. The second, however, on the vehicles. I like Andy's suggestion. It just, so in other words, we have an annual mileage. It just doesn't always key to July 1. If the purpose of the vehicle is not obvious from its name, like, for example, plow. And then you also behind the model and the make in the model also put a parentheses or whatever the purpose is. And then another one is if there is any energy efficiency, what is the type of vehicle. I mean, is it for example, electric hybrid diesel. And then that last column, I would call that purchase price not value because we know that no vehicle retains its purchase price value so purchase price would be what we bought it for when we bought it. Those were my suggestions on the actual inventory. That's it. Thank you. I was wondering if we would be possible to add into the vehicles and equipment fuel consumption. Particularly if we end up getting any kind of hybrid vehicles, it would be, I think a reasonable comparison to make between that and a standard vehicle. Can you clarify when you say fuel consumption, do you mean miles per gallon. Yeah, so like what the what the sort of list miles per gallon is for that vehicle. Yeah, and yeah, and over and over time whether that changes I mean your vehicle can be listed as getting 40 miles a gallon. But what does it actually get. Right. Yeah, I was thinking, I think we track Phillips by Sonya you may know the answer to this. You know, there are some vehicles that fill up at a pump in town and we track by department. I don't know if it tracks. I don't know if we have every single vehicle though that attracts sort of consumption by vehicle. What Sonya. I don't believe we track by vehicle just by department. Okay, I think we track by some vehicles but not for all the vehicles in town I think like school buses attracts. They're not the big, big ones but okay but no, that's noted. There's something to think about. Yeah. Thank you. Anything else Pat, if not the Kathy. Just on Pat's, you know, I actually think to the extent there was a dealer MPG. If we had that, and it was easy, you know, your thing easy to get and the source, it wouldn't be a bad because we'd hope over time, we'd see that the vehicles were getting or get are at least supposed to be getting more as we're buying new ones. I was going to ask, can you go to the just the page that shows the actual buildings the old building inventory because I had a suggestion. Yeah, that's one. So Lynn, as I understood Lynn, it was to add, you know, a column that would say, you know, major repairs or potential. I, if it's major repair or something else but things like the Hitchcock Center which is closed and as far as I know, we have no plans to use it. So I would like for some kind of comment column that would say building empty plan to sell don't know what we're going to do with it. Decision soon, you know, so it could be a free form column, and it would only, there aren't that many, I don't think the East Street School we moved over to be in the housing trust now, but I think we had one other. So it's it's singling signaling that we have an empty building sitting on a piece of land. You know, and so that was my only comment so it's whether the town has a potential plan for it just, you know, what we would do with it but I think seeing some of that would be useful. So I would like to go ahead and talk about if we ever moved the pre K out of Crocker, where could we put it. And if we already own a piece of land with the building is the building in such bad condition you want to knock it down to rebuild it, or could it be renovated. And so that was my comment on condition so this old school up here that's rented out. That's the town property right by up here I'm pointing out my window because I live in North Amherst. It's a pretty corner for me which has the Amherst Family Center the WIC program in it that used to be survival center it's being rented out right now. So that that I think it's a useful piece of information but only for a few buildings so maybe, rather than adding a column to this really long list. There's another sheet. It's slated for alternative use potential disposition it's just like a separate one so that I'm not making an ever wider set of columns as a way of, and then you can put a star next to the places that see, you know, see spreadsheet to or something on it. I really don't know how many of those we have, because every once in a while when I look at this let's say I didn't know we had that. You know, and at that address on. Yeah. It's also the school building that I think is now vacant. That's across from the Munson library. Right exactly. Yeah, I was going to say that one but I can't remember what the name is so I was looking at this tiny print to try to find it but it's the same thing we've got a value on it. Who knows whether that value is anywhere real other than you could at least sell the piece of land for that amount of money. Happy street school. Yeah, thank you. Okay, anything else if not Bob Hegner. Can you hear me. Okay, great. Yeah, so I agree with the comments to this so far under the building. I the questions are the information I would like to have would be, do we really need to keep this or is it really surplus. Which is kind of what Kathy was getting to and also the uses what can we use it for what what are the appropriate uses for this facility, or for this building. And some of them are going to be obvious if it's like a tool shed or something, but for, you know, things like the school buildings, could they be used for offices, could they be used for, you know, other other things. So I think that should be part of that narrative column with vehicles and equipment. I think, again, I think we should have some information on whether do we really need to replace this once it's, you know, once it's lifespan is over, are we going to need to replace it or not. I mean, some things we may need some things we may not need in the future. Also, while the purchase price is, you know, it's informative, what really matters is, how long does it last and what's it going to cost to replace it. The purchase price is something that occurred in the past. And what we this should be forward looking. So if we can get something on that where we had something like a, you know, the expected lifespan, and at the end of that lifespan, if we paid $50,000 for it, we estimate it will be $75,000 to replace it, something like that. It doesn't have to be precise, but it would just be helpful, I think, to inform things. The other thing on the, not so much the vehicles, but the equipment is, and I didn't look at this list really carefully, but there should be some sort of de minimis amount value that we want to track. In other words, we don't want to track every single shovel and rake that we have. But, you know, if there are things that, you know, and it looks like we probably have something like that in this, but it would just be important to kind of lay out some sort of de minimis value. So we're not spending a lot of time and energy tracking things that really aren't worth very much. Those are my comments. Thanks. I'm not sure if you have any comments. So at least for now, you know, our de minimis is, is it worth ensuring or not. Because this list is compiled based on our insurance list. That's sort of the clean right now the easiest way to get a full comprehensive list of all of our vehicles with updated information. You know, that sort of holds true for buildings as well. Okay, that's fine. I'm just going to go back. Go ahead. Okay. If that's the de minimis value, whether it's worth ensuring that works for me. Okay. So I was looking, I went back and looked at the section of the charter that started this whole thing off about the capital inventory. And the key sentence that we're back to which started off this discussion in the referral to the committee from the council was a sentence the town council shall establish the requirements. For such as age condition maintenance and repair history, remaining useful life and other features the town council may deem appropriate. I think that Paul's suggestion when I talked with him about it was we should start with the things that are specifically listed in the charter. In other words, and other features as a council may deem appropriate to make sure we have those covered and then add to the list from there. And so, going back again, age condition maintenance and repair history and remaining useful life, I think are very important terms they are built into the charter itself. I think that what it is all about is informing the five year capital plan, which is actually if you're looking at the charter itself in the very next section that follows that sentence. And I'm not sure that the terms of maintenance repair history and remaining useful life. In condition are really set out for buildings which are the key feet. I think the most expensive part of this. So, without getting into a bunch of specifics, what I would be looking for is ways that inform the finance committee and JCPC about those issues as listed in the charter. And we may need the help of Jeremiah LaPlante to help us to do that. But otherwise, how do we know what we need to set aside for capital budget expenditures in coming years. So I think that was my comment on it. Dorothy of your hand up. So I'm looking at the list of cars and I know Kathy has brought this up in the past. Once you mentioned that they were insured. I began to feel differently about some of the old ones. And some people just can't bear to get rid of an old car truck because it has always come in handy and useful and they kind of love it. And I'm just wondering if a really serious culling of this list needs to be done with some help. Because it's a very long list. There's a lot of vehicles here, even before 2000 and most are more than 10 years old, at least a high percentage. Sean, am I right? This list was last updated in 2015. The vehicle list is more current. The vehicle list is more current. And to Dorothy's comments, not all of them, you know, depending on the age, you know, the insurance, you know, whether we have collision and things like that, you know, varies. When we meet with department heads to review capital, we can certainly go through their vehicle list with them this year and, you know, pick their brain on the number of vehicles, how they're used, do they have any, you know, I'm sure, you know, I know for the schools, for example, there are spares. Like for buses, for example, but they're usually for good reason like this past year when we had to get a new bus, the spares were being used pretty often. So, but we can ask those questions when we do our meetings with department heads. Okay, great. Thank you. Yeah, I want to go back to Andy's statement about useful life and just say that. Not me use two examples of buildings in town. Until town hall was renovated over 20 years ago, we probably would have said it had passed its useful life. But as a renovated building, it's actually serving us extremely well. On the other hand, Central Fire Station has long past its useful life. And yet we don't have an alternative at this point. So I think the issue of useful life. I actually regret that it stated that way in the charter because there, it seems to me that some buildings are actually through renovation may have some very serious extension on their life. Other buildings and now you're going to hear my bias like to school buildings that we have. I wish they would disappear somehow. So there's just it's an exist. It's it's a admit in my mind, useful life is almost subjective. Yeah, I just quickly I agree with Lynn that's one of the reasons why I put that criteria at the end of the memo about, you know, sort of free of bias. You know, the useful life, depending on what you're talking about, and you're asking could be very different. So I think as long as you're rating the condition of the building, that gives you some sense of its capabilities and useful life. I, you know, there's three buildings right now that the town doesn't even use except for storage one and Kathy mentioned them earlier. Are they, do they really have a useful life. It's not clear. I will, I will mention Kathy that southeast school has been discussed as a way as a building that could be used for swing base to get to the point that we're renovating deep, we're tearing down DPW and building a fire station. And yet we would have to do improvements to the building to even use it as swing space as humans could be in. That's why I thought this was a comment column on a few buildings now on every single one of them. And I guess on useful life. I'm not, I too when you said that and I thought, Oh, I don't want to try to do that and even maintenance and repair history seems to me like an incredible amount of work to put into an easy to read but lens column that says it doesn't need any major repairs and list what the major repairs are is informative. If we've stuck $900,000 into something or $800,000 of repairs, I don't know what that means, other than we spent it so someone had to write the charter sentence when they wrote it. But they didn't use Sean's screen of easy to get unbiased, easy to update. So I do think those were good. If we want to maintain this, we have to be able to use the information, especially if it's hard, harder to get. If it's easy to get it's just another column so the question is more in not past but the future piece and that is remaining useful life because it's really about if we're going to continue to use the building is that a reasonable plan and what do we need to invest to do it. Thank you. That's probably been the more useful way to say it instead of focusing on repair history. But anyway, Sean, just on the repair and maintenance. So right now we don't keep that data by vehicle. I mean there's, there's individual records and invoices that we could pull but there's not sort of a single source that has all that information available. That could easily be pulled together so what I was thinking for that was every department has a vehicle maintenance budget. So we're going to kind of give you that information about, you know, it's already been used in the past on buildings and building maintenance costs. We were going to create something in a similar format for vehicle maintenance expense and costs by department. So that at least you would have some sense by department of how much, you know, how much has been spent on fire, fire vehicles in total on vehicle maintenance and how much has been spent on school vehicle maintenance. And Sean, I think that's useful for vehicles. I was talking about repairs for buildings and I was talking about in the future. I was talking about major repairs we've done and I gave the example of the police station roof. Yeah, in my mind is a major repair. So how are we going to proceed? Sean, do you have something you can work with to Yeah, why don't I try to summarize what I heard and send it to you and see if, if that, you know, if I wrote down most of what I think I heard from people's suggestions and, and I'll summarize that send it to you and we can talk about is that what we're, you know, what we're thinking for next year or is this what we're thinking for the longer term. And I know you're we still need. I don't know if we receive feedback yet from the the acronym that's escaping me on sustainability that other committee. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. If we receive feedback from them on what they wanted to see in a future inventory or not. Yeah. I think when we get ECAC's comments assuming we get ECAC's comments that we probably ought to see what fits into the question of the capital inventory and what's really an ECAC request and whether they should be separated. Okay, yeah, so I'll send you a summary of all of the different things that I heard. It seemed, you know, reasonable. I didn't hear anything that was sort of made me gasp. So it's just a matter of how quickly we can get that information for existing vehicles and, and what might take a little more work to get it catch up on things. Andy, can I speak a little bit to the other capital piece that we talked about. Yes, I was just about to ask that perfect timing. Yeah, so I'll stop sharing my screen. Okay, one of the things we are planning to do with the capital improvement program this year is fold in the four major building projects and include that payment costs as part of that capital improvement program. So that we would circuit a more realistic view of what money we have available for these capital projects what money we would be left over for other capital projects, how we might use reserves to supplement. I know that was one of the discussions and it's a very weighty conversation. We are planning to include all that in the capital improvement program this year and going forward to have it really think about all the capital in town. In the past we've sort of ignored that for a little while because there was so much uncertainty, but we think this year is a year we should start including that and that might help some of the discussions move forward a little bit. So that's one thing we're going to include those and will include the most up to date information. You know the library project has changed a little bit in terms of its timing. So we'll update it based on whatever the most accurate information is at the time. So that's on the capital improvement program. And the other piece was just an update for for this group. We had an ambulance. This is more of sort of a general capital update that I think could fit under this category on the agenda. We had an ambulance breakdown. And so we've been working with the fire department to talk about how to replace that ambulance. It was one of the capital items that was noted earlier in the year we talked about what type of projects could pop up this year and so it has popped up. And so just an FYI we're working with the fire department and Sonia and we'll be bringing more information to you in the future about plans to replace that ambulance. And that's it. Yeah, I just want to clarify something that we spent a lot of time on in the very first year of the council and that is that the major capital projects remain the, if you will, they remain. They remain with the council, but they absolutely remain within the finance committee. The other capital improvements are to JCPC. So even though you're meshing the two which I think is very wise. I want to make sure you keep in our minds that division. Yeah, I agree. Pat, you have your hand up. We're talking about four major capital projects, etc. But the centennial plant is a major capital project. I know that. You know that it's what how what effect enterprise and funds have on that but we need quite a bit of what is it $11 million. I never hear it talked about as part of what we're planning. And I would like to make sure that we find a way to address it included and not pretend that it isn't there. Thank you. Go ahead and dance. And because ambulance funds are often used to when we have better revenues are often used to buy new ambulances. So, I mean, it's, it's a very, even though it's in a different category of how it's going to get paid for, it's still a capital expenditure. I think it's a very good point Pat. Say a couple things to close it out and then we can actually move to quickly to Bernie and Kathy for a minute because we're getting real close with that segue of me mentioning the Centennial plant gets us there. Those comment or report given to us about ambulance needs and one of the things that we did not talk about when we were talking about the budget was the status of the ambulance fund. And I'm assuming that resources for the ambulance fund are declining because of the reports that we've had about ambulance runs for the past months, being actually decreased. And the fact that heavily is no longer part of our ambulance service which which was number of runs. So I think that we had, we're in a position where we might not even be able to replace equipment with within the fund. But I think that is a subject that we need to know more about as an ongoing basis. Yeah, so so we are looking at that fund now for the replacement but we'll again we'll bring more information when we review that a little more closely. We did for FY 21 as you noted because of the receipts coming in lower we did that is adjusted in the FY 21 budget we reduced how much support there is from the ambulance fund by quite a bit so I didn't recall that. And as far as the Centennial plan comment and this gets us to our transition point. That's really out of the enterprise fund not out of the operating fund and so that the borrowing will, which I think has authorized but not taken place. We then a charge on the enterprise fund and have to be paid back through enterprise fund revenues. And it's not a general fund question, which therefore I can use as my subway to see if either Kathy or Bernie would like to say say something about what they presented to us. Bernie, do you want me to lead off. He, he said sure silently with his body as well as his mouth. We, you will have a memo in front of you and Andy given the late time of the day when we said it was just going to be a two hour meeting. I might want to just introduce this and then say, next time we can have a fuller discussion or we'll see whether it's only a few minutes. So, Bernie and I talked about one possible change in the way we do water rates now, and asking DPW and I think it's really important to come up with what ifs we did something like this to give us a sense of what, what impact it would not making a decision whether or not to do it. And the one we flagged was including right now, if as everyone probably remembers, we have a very simple water rate structure. That varies by the amount of water you use. And it doesn't matter whether you're a big user or a little user, there's a rate. So if you use thousands of cubic feet you pay for thousands of cubic feet if you never take a shower, you don't pay very much. So you can, in addition to that rate, do a quarterly charge that's not related to use. And one of the goals of that one of the reasons one might do that is it helps stabilize the rates that are charged you would still have a rate charge for the amount you use. But with higher or lower use or the example would be UMass leaves town really early and water use goes down. You don't have to increase water rates on everyone else to cover fixed costs so you can stabilize rates by having this. You can, depending on how you set it cover part of your fixed costs. They don't vary with how much you use. So it takes some of the burden off the variable rate. Most towns that have this have a lower rate for water use than we do because the fixed costs takes on some of it. You can again this is you can you don't have to set that rate in a way that a small percentage every year goes into reserves. So that knowing that you're going to have big, big replacement costs or repair costs at some point you can build up your reserves deliberately through a fix. And then the last and it's not last but least is if you set this by the meter size of the water, it will charge a very large user. It will mean they pay more. It's the fixed rate might be the same, but it's by meter size. So they'll pay more. So they're covering more of the fixed costs then. And part of the reason we have as much water supply as we have is it's supplying very large users. So that's a rationale for it. So we thought, look at that one change. So leave still have a variable rate. Pick a couple different levels and Guilford would guide what those would be and come back to us and say what does that do what does that do to the small business owner and the homeowner in terms of their rates and how much, you know, the if it varies by meter size and a homeowner would have a smaller, much smaller fixed charge than would a very large user because we have small meters. So that's the concept that we put out and depending on what the analysis showed, we could decide to do that but we wouldn't be deciding for next year. It might be for the year after so you any change we would make would be far in so people knew it was coming and you would, if we wanted to do it, we'd go out. I assume the town would go out was for the official, you know, the official consultant kind of structuring of the rate so wouldn't be DPW putting together a rough estimate for us. So we brought this memo to you because I was really intrigued when I saw Hadley and a few other towns had done that, and that their variable cost, the one the homeowner saw is quite a bit low within Amherst, because the fixed charge is picking up a piece of the cost. So I'll just stop there that's it's it I'm kind of repeating what was in the memo. Yeah, it's a pretty it's actually the tiered a tiered fixed rate tied to meter sizes pretty pretty standard approach. And I think it's been fairly effective in the towns and in the towns that use it, in my experience, it's, it does smooth out the revenue. You're going to you're going to collect a portion of your or you may be able to occur all of your fixed costs but you'll collect a good portion of your fixed costs and this is something Guilford would have to tell us. And it's the same time you could drop that that that rate for the per gallon rate for the water. So I should just let folks know that because I said a question to Kathy and Bernie that I did not send to the rest of the committee so I want to put it out there in the record. The one question I had is whether large apartment complexes which have a lot of low income residents might be affected by this. If ultimate utility costs as a whole increases for those complexes and the rents that are charged to have incorporate portion of the water use that are increasing the water use for a large user which is an apartment complex with a lot of low income residents. Will it have a negative effect on the people who live in those complexes and go into the whole political question that falls behind that concern but I think it's fairly obvious but that was the one thing that I raised. One of our responses is in the end this kind of what if looking at it. You could say this building tell me what it's going to do to this building so this apartment complex because because it lowers the rate. It may not increase the use rate, but the individual units, it may not increase the cost of water in in that unit so if there were 100 apartments, it might well not because the fixed rate is covering part of it and the variable rate. And it doesn't have to be passed down but we could we could ask Guilford to tell us for this building. What does it do to the total cost of water in a typical year. So we could, you know, earmark, you know, a building for to understand that impact. Yeah, I mean there's so many variable factors in here and I don't think we can or need to get into it all today because whether people are metered separately. And then pay separately. Well I would probably mean that they're on a small meter and that would take care of it but if it's done building wide and then divided up that it's built into the rent. Then it's makes the collection of small users a big user. And I said, I think we could it's that is something that is, we could collect that information and know an answer to it. I think you're going to want to look at that. As I said back to my response back to Andy, I'm really reluctant to get into like means testing for a town service a gallon of water. You don't know what the water usage presents itself as a percentage of the overall operating budget of the apartment. And the size of the apartment means that any increase is going to get, you know, when I first permanent I first place I lived here in town we had four four apartments. The next place I lived here in town we have a 250. And so you really don't know I think the best thing to do would be to model it. Landlords will have different approaches might actually encourage landlords to make some improvements in their property to drop their. You make them more efficient in the way water gets used. I don't know until you model it. Well, it's going to be it's going to depend on so much on who's operating building and what percentage of their operating costs are reflected in water use. So I'm going to drop my part of this and go back to the last couple of people hands up and get to scheduling future meetings so that we can conclude. Dorothy. I think that I really do like the plan very much fixed rate for fixed costs which really helps even out our budget, but usage is still in there which is very important. And what Bernie was saying about landlords when they tightened up metering in New York City and the environs water use really did go down a lot of landlords had just been, you know, not paying attention to it. If they want them more money, they took care of it and reduce their use and reduce their bills. So I really do like the plan. I agree that Andy that's a concern but you know we could make what adjustments are needed. But I think it's a great plan. Yeah, I think this is a good direction directional piece for Guilford to look at. I still think he might need some more information to really dive into different models. If he was here I don't speak for him but he might say, again, what are the, what's the goal of the models he's trying to simulate is it to keep overall revenues the same but shift more the cost to heavy users. Is it to decrease consumption, or, you know, I don't, you know, it may not be intuitive but I would think if the, if the rate per water consumed was lower. It would be to discourage conservation of water, as opposed to the way we have it now where they pay more for every, you know, all their consumption they pay a higher rate. If we make the rate for consumption lower and have a higher fixed fee. Does that actually help conserve again I don't know the answer to that it just to me if you had a lower unit rate, I would think you'd be less likely to conserve and unless you were going to try to get your meter reduced to be a smaller meter than maybe you would. I think he might still need and this could happen offline, but I think he still might need some direction on sort of what are the goals that he's trying to produce with his models. Easy easy way to do this would be to. Keep it revenue neutral. Let's, you know what what would be the the tiered rate for meter connections for fixed costs. And then what impact would that have on the water rate and produce the same revenue that we were anticipating now. That's a good start. And then you can, you can play with that. The next point to this is in little number of communities done must. Well, I was the manager there. We came up with two sets of we came up with tiered rates as well as the meter rates, which really put the squeeze on the big users. At the time. Home Depot decided they were going to drill well, rather than tie in the town water because of the cost and Haley's goal was to conserve water. We need to know what what the goal is here as well. I mean, we approach this the idea that there's going to be another way to raise revenue. And help stabilize the funding of the waters and sewer system because those meter rates are going to collect a considerable amount of money up front more money up front. And also help the homeowner by tearing the rate to the meter. So if Gilbert could do something to revenue neutral. It says, okay, this is what I'm expecting for revenue under this current system. And here's what it would look like under some variations of a tied to a meters that would be helpful as a start. What we thought we might do if, you know, this is presuming the committee likes this enough is that you could tell Bernie and I are just Bernie meet with Gilford, you know, work, work out, you know, what's possible again with the data he's got already, we're not trying to send create a giant work project or consulting project here. And have him ask those questions and we would just make a series of decisions along the way to this way or that way to then get something back on a schedule that made sense to him, you know, so we didn't have a have to have it in a week or a month but to start a conversation on a take a look at this and have him have control of what he simulated and as Bernie said we thought revenue neutral and not do it with the most recent year because we didn't have the revenue we thought we had so it would probably be the last full year of, of, of water flow that we had to say what would it have looked like in that world. And then raise the caveats that you just raised Sean, you know, if we lower lower the use rate, does it incur does it stop people from conserving, you know, putting in a better toilet in their house or worrying about leaks. So, show one place with this will have an impact and I don't know, does the town if you have a sprinkler system. Does the town require you to have a separate meter or sprinklers. No. Yeah, I'll be real quick with that is only God, so we can move along. See, Pat has anything that she wanted to ask because her hands been up. The, we did try a separate metering system for agricultural perfect users, but it required that they actually have two separate meters and is, I think that the last time I asked kill for that. He said that none of the agricultural users had installed two separate meters so that there was a question, but it wasn't about usage. It was about getting them off of the sewer building piece. Pat, did you have anything that you wanted to add. I kept putting my hand up and down because I don't like wasting people's time, but Andy made an important point that got dismissed. When I was first involved with the folks who established the mobile market I went there, initially to discuss community gardens at South Point and I discovered that every unit is monitored for water usage, and that a lot of decisions were being made already in conservation. But I also learned that any cost any increases in the cost of water will directly impact the tenants rent. So to say no that's not really going to happen is, is kind of naive. We don't have multiple big users like Home Depot. Now I'm not even I'm on and I'm interested in this idea so I'm not dismissing it out of hand. But I think you need to come up with some better. A better strategy than telling me that Home Depot pays more than a homeowner. We don't have very many Home Depots so I'm not going to. We have Amherst College. Yeah, but they're not as big as Home Depot and then Lowe's and Hadley's in a very different situation than we are. That's right. And in the case of South Point. Folks have individual meters. Then, and we're able to shift some of the costs to larger users than their overall cost for water would likely go down. The owners are tracking the unit usage. It is not the tenant who's tracking it. And it doesn't change. They don't pay for the water. The owner does. Well, maybe we'll use one of those if we're going to do a model of building. Well, yeah, you got to prove to me. You got to be a little bit more specific. You know I'll fight with you and I'll learn from you and that'll be a good thing. Okay. What I was saying is take set. We should take South Point and ask you to just tell us what South Point looks like. I mean we can be very specific, not a imagine something. I think we can stop right now. I think about where we're at is that was my understanding that Paul sent or was going to send your memo to Guilford and probably did already. And maybe think to do is to have either Sean or Sonya is the two of them determine is the best person. Find out where Guilford is in his ability to meet with the two of you, and then they can signal it. It's time to set up a meeting with Guilford. Does that make sense. Yes. Is that based on. Yeah. So, let me just come to the last point. I had sent you in one of my most recent memos, sort of a compilation of what I had heard from people who chose to respond. Like Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for the best time for setting up future meetings. And since there was also strong feeling expressed in our last meeting to not do the two as we are today Tuesday after council meetings in case the council meetings go beyond 10 o'clock which did not last night. Thank you, Lynn. The, that was the request that come in so I had put in that it seemed like the best date if we want to have time to produce a report would be the Thursday following a council meeting. And the second best would probably be the next Tuesday prior. So, but that was then posing. Tuesday of the week that is in between. So, let me just ask the first question. How would people feel about Thursday of council meeting weeks as opposed to Tuesday. Thursday at the moment TSO meets in the evening, everything meets generally there's like a big pile up of meetings on Thursday nights. So, because I know that I'm missing meetings I want to see so we're actually going to be looking to maybe change the TSO so that we can get to some of the meetings and hearings and stuff. But I'm tied up teaching in the morning. So what time were you thinking two o'clock maybe or two. Yeah, I mean, you would because of your schedule. I had that's why I said afternoons. Right. So, I mean, I could do it. I probably prefer Tuesday but it's possible. It's possible. I actually prefer Tuesday, but, and I don't mind having it right after council. I prefer Tuesday as well. I think Andy, I believe that CRC is moving to the non council Tuesdays. Right. I think they are. So we stick with where we are. Council meetings. I also don't mind starting it too. Yeah, that was good. Okay. So that said anything else that needs to be raised anything on the anticipated business that wasn't on the agenda. The next meeting date, or are we just 20th. Yes, I think so. We're going to be told that and then we'll see if we have an agenda at this point on these items. So our real heavy schedule is going to come after starting coming after the indicators meeting. So October 20th. But right now, yeah, let's hold October 20th. At two o'clock. At two o'clock. Anything else, if not, I will declare the meeting adjourned. Thank you. Bye everybody.