 I'm Paul Backelman, town manager, and we, this is a special meeting of the budget coordinating group, budget coordinating group is composed of members of the town council, the school committee and from the board of library trustees plus staff to those three bodies. We have a time limit of an hour, so we're trying to get through the substance part of the presentation and the first hour and the committee wants the group wants to continue talking we're here for that. So the first thing I'd like to do is just go around and sort of acknowledge who's here so I'll just start if I'll say your name and if you're here just unmute and say you're here and then unmute back up again so Lynn Griezmer. Here. Okay, Andy Steinberg. Here. Man to Joe Hannity. Here. Kathy Shane. Here. Alison McDonald. Here. Carrie Spitzer. Here. Bob Pam. Here. Chris Hoffman. I do not see him. Not here. Superintendent of Schools, Mike Morris. Here. School finance director Doug Slaughter. Here. Library director Sharon Sherry. Here you are. Oh, we don't hear you guys. I see you. In term finance director Sonia Aldridge. Here. And Angela Mills, who is going to be our minute ticker for today. So. So this, this is a presentation that Sonya and I have been working on. It's about our finances, obviously under these circumstances. We've, Sonya has been working on various. Groups of numbers and how we're going to get through this for quite some time now. We just to sort of phrase this, the presentation was present was prepared by a team. We're a really good team. So Sonya is brings the numbers. I bring the words and Brianna Sunred who brings the pictures. So we do a, it's a real team effort. So the next slide. So today we're, there are four items that we want to address. I want to alert everybody that we will not be talking about specific numbers, specific percentages, how, how big cuts or additions would have to be things like that's not the purpose of this meeting. That's the purpose of the next meeting, which we will get to. This is not because we don't know what those numbers are. We're, we've, we've done a number of different scenarios, but we really believe that once you put a number out there, it sort of sticks. And we want to make sure that we follow the process and go through all of our committees and make sure everybody sort of understanding what they are before we just throw out a number. We want to make go about this methodically. We want to make decisions when we need to with it, when we have as much information as we absolutely can get. That's, we have the, there's, we don't have to be rushing through a lot of these things. I think that if we look at it in a really sustained, reasonable way, we're going to get through this. We're in a good shape financially. We have a really good team. We have terrific people working together. We have a lot of great people working together. We have a lot of great people working together. We have a lot of great people working together. The things that elected officials can bring in the public is patience, because we are all going to be really anxious to find out what the answer is. And sometimes the answer is that we don't know the answer. We need to wait. And so I think, I think we have enough experience on all of our elected boards to recognize that that's where we're going to be. The message that I want today is that we'll get through this. There will be pain. We'll have dashed hopes. We'll have hope that we're going to do. Are not going to be done earlier this year. I sort of get put out to our department heads that we wanted a bias for action that this was a year to take action. The council was prepared. Everybody was ready for an exciting year. That's all changed dramatically. It doesn't mean we don't have the bias for action because we still have the bias for action. It's just going to be funneled in a different way. So, and I think the important thing for us is that we have a really good. It will have a renewed sense of collaboration. I can't tell you how great it is to work with a library and school. With Doug slaughter at the school. He's got finance committee experience and a lot of experience on the select board. He knows the town side and he brings that to the school. You all know that we have. Appointed Sean McGonough is the finance director for the town. He has the school things that he brings to the town. He's got a lot of experience. He's got a lot of experience. He knows it will be cross fertilization there. It's going to be, I think we were right, a really good position staff wise to manage through this. We have people who have years of experience. Sony has been here for a lot of years. I won't say the number. But has been through these ups and downs as has Andy Steinberg and other members of the council. And so people have seen what it feels like. And I think it's a good opportunity to weigh in a little bit on that as well. So I think that we're in a good shape to move forward. So the next step, next slide. So this body doesn't work. By vote. We don't take votes. This body works by consensus. It actually was put into the charter because it had worked so well previously. It was not many communities have a body like this. But we do have a body. That's really important to me. I think that's the first one. And this is the first, especially one that's written into the, the charter. So I really appreciate everybody putting the time into it. What we want to walk away today. These are the takeaways is that we want to talk about a one month budget. We want there to be consensus that we will then look at a FY 21 budget. And we want to look at a schedule. So that's the framework that we are looking at for today's meeting. that we look at, that's going to change. We're going to look at it today, and then I'm sure it will change over time. So next slide. So the first thing was the budget coordinating group. Historically, the chair of the finance committee and the chair of the select board were the co-chairs of the budget coordinating group. And I would like to, without objection, ask that to continue in a sense for this group so that I would ask Andy Steinberg as the chair of finance and Lynn Griezmer as the chair of the council to basically co-chair this group and then turn it over to Lynn to sort of take over running the meeting and Andy to weigh in on terms of how he sees BCG looks, you know, looks like and what its function is so everybody understands their role. There's many people on this cap call who've never been part of BCG before. So if there's no objection to that, I'll just ask Lynn to take the reins. Is that okay? I see no objections. That's fine, except maybe I thought it was the other way, but that's okay. So let me just ask Andy and Mandy Joe to review the charter section 5.2 so that we get a sense of both history and the intent of the charter group as they coded this into our government act. So Andy? Next slide. I was waiting for the next slide. So the budget coordinating group, I'm going to give a little bit of history and then Mandy might weigh in as to why the charter commission decided to continue it. The history piece is that there was a point in time when I was early on in the finance committee, the old finance committee, that there was a lot of tension that would develop at some town meetings because various boards and committees had taken different positions on how the budget development should be and we're not communicating during the development of the budget and we were looking for a way to try and keep that from happening again. This goes back to when John Miesanti was the finance director and was staffing the finance committee and Larry Schaffer was the town manager and John and three of us from the old finance committee were talking about this after one of the finance committee meetings and we came up with the idea of having a budget coordinating group and so you can blame us, but we're here and it has worked very effectively when it's needed. My observation having been involved in this for quite a number of years is it is this type of period when we're really in a critical situation where the group is most active and most important, years when we've had sort of routine budget and things flowed smoothly like last year, BCG really didn't need to meet at all and frequently we would have only one in most two meetings a year, but this harkens back to 2008, 2009 period when we had a lot of uncertainty going through the process. The major points that we try and do is to have a group that could meet, talk about the process, talk about the coordination of the calendar and try and reach consensus on points and if one budget was in particular stress for some reason to be able to have a mechanism to talk about that within the group of boards and senior staff who were involved in the process to see if there was a way to resolve that. So that's basically Mandy, I don't know if you have anything to say about what the charter commission's thoughts were. I'll be brief, we had heard when we were writing this section or the whole finance section that the way finances worked in town under the previous government were fairly successful and so people had sought for us to try and mimic that in a way as much as possible and one of the things they spoke positively of was the BCG and so we thought we should write something like that in to keep the success of our coordination going. Let me just mention one other piece of history that goes here. We actually did meet on November 7th, 2019. At that point, it was the full school committee, the full library board and the full town council for what we called the financial indicators meeting or the three boards meeting. Well, we were just so sure that everything was going to be just fine that we also designated that as the BCG meeting and so this group has met but in a different format once before. So that brings us today and I'm gonna turn it back to Paul. Okay, can we go to the next slide? Thank you for that historical lesson, history lesson, Andy. So for today, I mentioned three things. So we wanna talk about a one month budget and FY21 budget and the reason we're talking about a one month budget is also called a one 12th budget is because we just don't have enough information to make an informed decision on a FY21 budget. So at this point in time, we'll be asking the town council for the ability to do a one month budget which is permitted in the state law and then move forward from there and have a schedule for doing the rest of the year. The longer you wait to do an entire budget, especially if you're looking at changes to the budget that might be level funding or reductions in budget, it's harder to implement so that you have less time to implement. So we don't wanna go beyond one month if we don't have to. So go to the next slide. So we just wanna talk in general terms and Sonya can weigh in here about what we see in terms of where we are. Now I'll start and Sonya can jump in on some of these things. Again, we're not gonna really talk about the actual dollars, but we can tell you what the soft parts are. So do you wanna just talk about third quarter revenues Sonya? Trying to figure out how to unmute this thing. Third quarter revenues are really in line with most of historical third quarter revenues. We're gonna see the real impact in the fourth quarter. What we're gonna see is mostly in local receipts. Those are all economically driven receipts. Definitely meals and hotel tax. Definitely parking revenue. Parking revenue, ambulance revenue. Our calls have been weighed down since all the colleges closed it. Investment income in the fourth quarter will definitely go down. And we're still waiting for some money for some of the colleges. But other than that for the third quarter, I think it looks good. It looks like we'll have a deficit, but it won't be so huge that savings in the operating budget won't be able to cover it. So I think for this fiscal year, we will be okay. So that's a good news story that FY20, we think that we'll be okay in terms of where our budgets are. We do have increased expenditures, but we have reduced income, but I think it's gonna, Sonya's estimation when she projects out is that we should be okay throughout the FY20, right? Okay, so that's on the general fund side. When you get to enterprise funds, not having, we were already having some issues with our enterprise funds because water consumption was way down. So we've been readjusting our estimates for that. This is just another big explosion in water sewer and transportation revenue as well for parking. So those, we're starting to look at now, we should have more information on that by the end of next week, but we're gonna have deficits in those accounts as well. At the end of next week, we'll have April numbers in and we can start to look at that. That'll help us. Yeah, so the big, the things where we're seeing is parking and ticket switches are transportation fund, hotel and motel and meals, taxes, fine down, ambulance fees, just calls have dropped off dramatically. Building permit fees have pretty much dried up and then our water and sewer revenue, you know, UMass and Amherst College are our two largest users of water and sewer. They both have depopulated their campuses so they're using a lot less and they don't have the workers coming to work as much anymore. So all that usage is now gone and that's a significant impact. We've had some expenses for PPE. We've added staff at the fire department for this temporary piece. We've had to purchase a lot of new technologies. I know the school has done the same and then we have some other public health expenses that we've incurred. But again, with all that and I think we're still within range of where we need to be. So if you wanna go to the next slide. So the big question for us is about, a major question for us is about state revenue and what's going to happen to us on state aid. State aid makes up almost 20% of our budget. So what happens if the state matters a lot to us? So and one of the things I think what I've been hearing is that FY20 and Mike may have some, or Sharon may have some other input on this, but FY20 seems like I think the state's gonna stay stable with what they're giving us and all that stuff. So I think we'll be okay on that. FY21 is a big, big question mark. Did you wanna add something to it? No, I was just agreeing with you. Well, that's a first. I forgot. No kidding. We can go to the next slide. Okay. So this is information that was developed by the Mass Municipal Association. I'm sort of truncated it down a little bit and there's a few slides here I wanna talk about. So what we've just said, there's no clear answers really for FY20 or 21. It's a significant recession. It's unlike other recessions we haven't had. And as Lynn noted yesterday, and she's been on some of these Zoom calls too, and this is a long-term recession and we don't really know how it impacts Massachusetts because of where an education medical facility driven economy, Eds and Meds as she called it. And so I think that that, we don't know how we will come out of this as quickly. When this happens, state and local revenues will fall because of this economic standstill. The capital gains are collapsing, income taxes will fall because of unemployment, sales tax, obviously people aren't buying things and if they're buying things or they're buying them online, gaming, lottery taxes, lottery revenue is down. Lottery revenue is a major source of income to the towns, cities and towns. We're not too worried about cash flow problems, but that might be an issue for the state. Obviously hotel and motel meals tax, 20% loss and FY20 would be $80 million out of the state budget. And if they're projecting another six months into FY21, that's like $200 million out of the state budget. And then one of the things is the federal government said you can't use any of the money that they're giving us to fill lost revenue pots. So these are things that we're going to have to just recognize that those things exist for this year and for as we project forward for FY21. Next slide. So after a week delay, the legislature had the budget writers get together from the secretary of administration of finance, the chair of the house and it said it weighs means committees and they listened to a lot of different economic experts talk about what's the economic forecast for the state and the kind of consensus figure was around a 14%, 15% decline in revenues. So what does that mean? It means about a $4 to $5 billion out of a $31 billion budget. And so that's a significant decline in the state's revenue. The legislature isn't moving as quickly on this and I don't really see them, there's even a question whether they will come up with a agreed upon revenue figure, a lot of interest to play, a lot of people's livelihoods at stake. This is going to be played out over a significant amount of time. And again, they don't even have a mechanism for meeting at this point in time. So it's really happening at the chair level of the ways of means committees and the Senate and state in the house leadership. The good news is that the state does have a significant rainy day fund, $3.5 billion. Sounds like a lot of money. It won't go as far as the way we think about our rainy day fund. And then that there was money that came in from the Federal Cares Act to help pay for some things. There'll be some FEMA reimbursement. My concern with the FEMA reimbursement is that you've got, this is a 50 state emergency. Everybody's pouring in the FEMA expecting to get 75% reimbursement. It would not surprise me if the federal government said, we can only go 50% or something because it's such a widespread. It's not like a hurricane hit one section of the country. It's everybody. So the next slide. So I'm gonna, Andy may want to weigh in on this too. Doug may want to. So several of us have been in and been in local government for a while. And remember the Great Recession of 2008, which lingered into 2009 and 2010. And this is where tax revenues dropped by 10%. Unrestricted aid, UGA, UGGA, that was given to cities and towns was cut by 20%. Education aid was held harmless in some ways. Where it was actually once it was not cut as deeply because there was federal help that helped offset some of the cuts that were due in education. The legislature helped by introducing local option meals taxes and lodging taxes. But that's sort of off the table this time. So there is a lot of call for federal help. But the problem at the federal level is, I'm not sure if I saw it, but yesterday you had Mitch McConnell, the president of the Senate basically say he'd like to see cities and states who've been profligate with their pensions go bankrupt and declare bankruptcy so they could abrogate some of those agreements. I think that's not, the House Speaker Pelosi had said that this helping cities and towns and localities and state governments was a high priority for the Democrats. How that plays out in the federal legislature, I don't know, but it was kind of disturbing to hear that the Senate president makes such, or the majority leader makes such clear and contemptible in my way, my view, comments about local government and state governments and seeing that basically saying you have to learn a lesson with this economic catastrophe. Go to the next slide. So there's four things we wanna talk about in terms of the calendar. So I'm gonna shift from that's the sort of general words description of where we are. Again, we're not throwing numbers out there. We will do that at our next one because we wanna show you really what the parameters are because that will inform the kinds of decisions that the council and the school committee and the library trustees will have to make ultimately. So this new, the schedule which Andy put together and he put it together. Roy, thank him for the work you've put into this. You've been doing a lot of very deep thinking on this. Covers our one month budget, our FY 21 budget, the regional school budget, although we don't really have anything in there that's just in there as a placeholder because we know that that exists. And then we also recognize that we, at the same time, we have to be talking about our capital improvement plan. So next slide. So, well, think back, these were the good old days. This is where we were. This was our schedule going into this fiscal year. We were so young and innocent then. It was a wonderful time. We were on track, schools, library. Everybody had built their budget. We were ahead of schedule on the town side with our budget. Sonia and her team had done so much work with department heads reviewing budgets. We had taken a different approach. It was really working out really well. We built this great sand castle and we're getting ready to start to present it to the council and the finance committee. And then this tidal wave came in and just washed it all away. All that work is just gone. So it was kind of demoralizing, but I think we all sort of have gotten beyond that and recognize that this is a new challenge that we get to take on. And that's gonna be something different this year. So we can go to the next slide. So the next two slides are a scheduled, modified that Andy put together. And I think, again, thank him for that. And he has a color coded, which I didn't know until we talked yesterday because I'm color blind. And so it's helpful to know that is color coded. And I'm not sure if you want to talk about this, Andy, if you want me to walk it through, see the one assigned by me. I'll just say a couple of things and then let you get back to it. What I tried to do with this was to mirror the process that you saw in the last slide, but to make it work within the timeframe that we have going forward so that we can get to an end result both for the one month budget for the first month of July and for a full year budget. And so I thought if we were going to try and mirror that prior slide as much as possible, that we would need to take today's initial discussion and get a real estimate of the revenues that we see going forward. Because if you think back to that meeting that we had that started the process that was referred to as the first BCG meeting of all of the boards and committees, that it was principally to kind of take a look at the financial health of the town and then to make projections for revenues for the next year and make some additional suggestions from the town manager about priorities and division of money, then it went to the finance committee of the council to develop some guidelines and send them along to the council, the council to agree to it so that there was unity of the executive and legislative branches going into the budget development process, setting timelines for getting, which is actually charter provision to have date certain for getting elementary school and library budgets back. And which then would enable the town manager to propose a budget in accordance with state statute, which I think is chapter 44 section 32 or something like that. But many event that that would generally be the process. And then of course, then the next thing that comes up is how do we set dates into that? And I did do some thinking about dates. In the final version that you have, we pulled some of those dates out so that we don't show them now because that makes it, but we do show some dates. I would say that most of them are really what the discussion today is about because a major role of the budget coordinating group is to talk about calendar. And so we want to be realistic about calendar. The original, the color scheme that was referred to is that the red dates are not really town dates, the regional school dates, but I tried to make them fit in. And there's therefore suggestions to the regional school committee and the superintendent, but they're not something that is a termination that the time of hours can make. The blue was intended to give us some guidance of things that would have to do with one month budgets and the black was intended to be the full year budget process. So that was what the color coding was. So that as we go through this, the major discussion that we really need to have is whether the dates look realistic and fit in with the steps. But if you have questions about the steps that should be brought forward too. But at least we need to start with a framework and that's what this is. Thanks, Andy. So conceptualizing this was really important. So if you look at the slide, the first thing is where we are today. BCG is talking about the budget challenges and their revised budget schedule. The finance committee meets this afternoon and they will look at some of these same things for the town council finance committee. On Monday, I will present in the device video helpful will support the extension of the deadlines for the school and library budget submissions to the manager and revise deadline for the manager to submit the operating and capital budgets to the council. May 11th is the date that we're targeting. Now is the date we had previously had secured for the library trustees and the council to meet. So I felt confident that the or Lynn felt confident that the trustees would be available and we hope that members of the school committee can attend or watch set at a different time. And that's the time when Sonia and I will be talking more specifically about where we what the scope of the issue that we're talking about in terms of where we are financially on the entire situation. The next day, the finance committee will meet and talk about what does this imply for the existing budget guidelines. The existing budget guidelines the council has adopted are pretty much irrelevant at this point in time because they call for things expecting a normal budget income and that's not the case anymore. Andy was able to identify the sort of things that and Mike can speak to these things at another time a little bit later if he wants to about the regional school budget. And I know he has a lot more information about that. And I haven't really reviewed this schedule at all with Sharon or Mike. So they may have, they may blow this out of the water and that's fine too. And then we have May 18th has slotted in for when the council would look at the revised budget guidelines. And then we would say if we agree to a one month budget then that would be expected from the school and the library on May 20th. If we can go to the next slide, Sean. Then we would, we're looking for a June 1st and I think this is overly optimistic but we're gonna put it on the calendar for when the school and library FY 21 budgets would be submitted. We'd be looking for JCPC to have a bare bones capital plan ready by June 1st as well. I don't think there'll be hardly anything on a capital plan at this point in time. Then I would submit on June 1st, the one month budgets to the council, which under the council rules is an automatic referral to the finance committee. Finance committee would consider that and then three weeks later would make a recommendation to the council on the one month budgets. Then basically what it, I'm not gonna go through every one of these things but it just basically pushes everything out a month. And with the goal of having a council approved budgets for all three entities by July 20th. So actually I'd like to open up the mic and see if he has any idea or thoughts on where the, especially about the regional school district or Doug, if you have thoughts as well on any of these counters, if these are reasonable or not. Yeah, so from my perspective, I'll start talking about the region. So Doug and I were both on a conference call with the state, perhaps last week they're all blending together a little bit for everybody. And the one thing they were very, though with their regional school folks at the Department of Education, they were very clear on three things. One was that they expect no regional school district to have a past budget on July 1st. A couple of reasons for that, the uncertainty that the town manager spoke about but also every, I think, I believe every regional school district has at least one, if not multiple towns that use a town meeting format for passing a budget. And it's very unclear whether any town will actually be able to safely hold their town meeting or how they will safely hold their town meeting this spring. So between those two factors, Desi is not, I mean, they said their guiding assumption is that they will have no past budget from a regional district by July 1st. And they were emphatic about that point. The second thing they shared with us is that because of that, they are actively preparing for that eventuality in supporting regional school districts with what one 12th budgets might look like. They're not waiting until July 1st. And then sort of managing it, they're actually looking and going down each regional school district and seeing where they are and not communicating directly with us, but they feel like they will be prepared to support what a one 12th budget looks like in each regional district. And the third thing that perhaps is a particular note to this body is that as many of you know, in the past, the way one 12th budgets work is for regional school districts is they default to the statutory method, which is not a method we've been on for many, many, many, many, you know, not in recent years anyway. And on the conference call, there was a number of superintendents who were weighing in on that point. And to Desi's credit, a couple of us got an email response from the person running the meeting saying, that's under normal circumstances. These are not normal circumstances. And they do not plan to hold districts to the statutory method for a one 12th budget under these circumstances. And, you know, they're talking to the legal department whether there needs to be legislative review on that, but they felt the email indicated strong confidence that each district will be looked at uniquely. And it won't be a blanket rule of statutory method for all. And in our situation, you know, that was very reassuring for me and my role because I know that would create a number of issues, both in the town of Amherst, but for the region more generally. I think the other point, I certainly don't wanna speak for Kerry or Allison, but from my vantage point, the June 1st state feels reasonable with the guidance that we're receiving for the town of Amherst, for the Amherst public school budget. I think it gives the school committee and myself enough time to review to gather feedback. Certainly I'm not at all speaking for the elected officials in charge of that. But from my perspective, we've been working on budget the last two weeks furiously to, with all of our principals, all of our district directors, that process is in motion. It'll become more public in coming weeks. We have an Amherst School Committee meeting tonight. We'll start talking about it at FY21, but re-talking, I guess, about the FY21 budget that was previously passed. But certainly, as you said, Paul is not really where we're headed now. We have a regional meeting next Tuesday where we'll start that conversation with that body. So, you know, from a district administrator perspective, we feel like we can do some pretty heavy lifting in the short order because we know the timeliness of this really matters. It matters for our staff. It matters for, as you noted, as the town manager noted, it matters for our planning. We need to know how many sections there's gonna be so we can place kids in classes and set up service delivery for all those types of reasons. We feel urgency to get this done as soon as possible in a reasonable way that fits with where we are today. So, again, that's just my perspective. I wanna be really cautious today that we have not had that conversation at school committee. We'll start that conversation tonight. But from my vantage point, the timeline sound reasonable with the exception perhaps of the region. My recommendation would be pushing that back because I don't think the June 1st thing I find unlikely and given the guidance from the state, they're essentially telling us to slow down our processes at region because, you know, it's unlikely that they'll play out with any reasonable timeframe and whether the other three towns in the region are able to have their town meetings this spring is really an open question. Mike, at some point you and I should talk. I have had conversations with the finance committee chairs in Pellum and Shootsbury. They are pretty firmly set in their belief that they can go forward with June town meetings and have specific dates in mind. I have not had that conversation with Leverett yet. And I'm not sure that we don't need to do something to create a conversation that involves all of the towns. Yeah, so we could definitely follow up offline and I don't necessarily disagree with that point. I think that the timeliness of that, I think is perhaps what we can talk about offline with certainly involving Doug and perhaps the regional chair as well. Thank you, Andy. Thanks for that work. Doug or Carrier Allison, do you have anything you want to add? No, I would agree. I think a lot of the heavy lifting in the work is being done from the district and it's a matter of getting the meetings together and those committee members to weigh in and review. So I think the timing is totally doable from our perspective. I'd agree. And Sharon or Bob, anything from the library's perspective? Yeah, so from the library's point of view, this calendar that you all have put forth is reasonable. We can do this. So, okay, thanks Bob. The next slide. So this is the calendar at this moment in time that the finance committee will be reviewing. So we also went to identify just that there are some town charter requirements that we also have to factor into this and that hasn't been overlaid on any of these calendars at this point in time. So these are the things I've identified. Mandy Jo may recognize others that I missed. I think the dates on all these things, there are some provisions for exception to time requirements that the council can do. I think one of the challenges for this entire process is gonna be adequate public involvement because I think there's gonna be, we're gonna need public engagement. It's really hard to do it over these formats and how we are able to do that effectively is gonna be a big challenge for us. Typically we hold a meeting, people show up. It's hard to manage it in these types of things, but we're gonna have to have some kind of focused way to engage the public as we make these critical decisions. So, and in terms of their, if we have, we're gonna be voting on one month budgets, we're gonna be voting on capital improvement program, we're gonna be voting on FY 21 budget and each of these oftentimes will require a separate public forum and all these other things. So that is gonna be something to counsel the president and vice president will be grappling with I'm sure and providing guidance to the council and they can make some decisions on this. I'm not sure if Lynn or Mandy Jo wanna weigh in on any of this. Mandy Jo, I'm not gonna ask you on the spot whether we've gotten all of the charter requirements but I am gonna ask that you take a review of the charter and make sure that we do and add whatever is needed in this list. And then that will allow us to see how we fit that into the calendar as well because we do wanna publicize those public forums. Any comment on that, Mandy Jo? Briefly, it looks like most of what we've got there's something in five, seven the capital improvement plan requires either a forum or a hearing some sort of something that's not on this list. But beyond that, the list looks fairly comprehensive but we will have to figure out the biggest question I have as it relates to the charter requirements is what does a one 12th budget fall under? Does it fall under five, five for operating budgets or five, six for supplementary budgets? And that's something we might have to go to the town attorney on to figure out which one it falls under. So which public hearing or public notice requirements we have to follow for that portion of this budget. But I will go through again and try and overlay stuff onto the timeline that was set forth. Thanks. I also, Paul, when we get to the end of the slides I wanna make sure that we have an opportunity for some questions, but also for me to just quickly make a couple of summary observations. Okay, thank you. The other thing that I wanted to point out here while we're on this slide is that I think that the last action that the council took at the request of the town manager was to extend the date for submission of the library and elementary school budgets to May 1st. And obviously what we're proposing today and it seems to be consensus to do that is to change it to June 1st. So that a motion needs to be crafted through the finance committee to the town council and the council adopting hopefully on Monday that would shift those dates to coincide with the consensus agreement today. Yes, I agree. And I'll have a memo to the finance committee before your meeting this afternoon. Requesting that. And I think Lynn and Mandy Jo had anticipated that for Monday's meeting, so we should be okay. So the next slide, I have two more slides Lynn and then we can open up for a few minutes of questions. So next slide. So I didn't wanna lose track of other processes that we have in place. It's Community Preservation Act Committee. That's a committee that provides its advice to the town council. It has a separate funding source. CDBG advisory committee makes a recommendation to the town manager again, separate budget source. And then JCPC, which makes a recommendation to the town manager who then makes a, presents a capital improvement plan to the town council. And so that committee will be active, will be drawing from the same pot of money. So I didn't wanna really talk detail about these but just identify that we know that they exist and they're there. And then the last slide. Next slide, Sean. And so this is where, I said at the beginning and Andy had emphasized this, that this is a group that works by consensus. And the three areas of consensus, I believe that we hope to do is that we will move forward as a town with all three entities developing one month budgets that all three entities will be preparing an FY21 budget based on guidelines that the council ultimately develops and that we have a schedule above that we've looked at reviewed, that those are the three areas of consensus and that the next major meeting will be on Monday, May 11th at 6.30, which is a not a regular town council meeting night. It's a special town council meeting. So this would be the only topic on the agenda unless the president decides to put something else on. So that's our presentation. So I'll turn it over to Lynn and she can manage any questions and answers if that's okay. All right, so Sean, I'd like you to take the slides down so that we can see each other and also now open the floor for questions from people who are here. Kathy. Yes, Paul, thank you very much for both the schedule and the heads up on what we're facing and Andy schedule. So I have a couple of questions on the schedule on the date you have of May 18th for the council with revised budget count line with school giving the one month on the revised budget count line on the May 18th, would that be just the one month or FY 21 also? That's my first question. And then my second question is you quickly went through the capital budget and said we probably won't have much of one. And when I looked at the projected capital, we have, I mean, Sonya knows these numbers cold but we have about a million 400 and dead obligations. So we would at a minimum have to be paying those. So I think what you were, did I understand you correctly that we most likely won't have anything more than that? It was a part of a question. And would we go to a one month consideration or will we just go to full year on capital? Those are my two questions. Well, first was scheduling, second was on capital. Thank you, Paul. So I think what I would hope is that based on the information that we provide on May 11th, the finance committee, then the council can agree on budget guidelines for FY 21. We may not have enough information for that to actually happen, but that's a goal at this point in time in terms of the capital. Yes, there are certain things that we have to do. There may be other things that we really feel are important to do, but it doesn't mean that this is the last shot at JCPC, we can bring back additional items through the capital budget later in the year. I just think that this is sort of a, what do we absolutely have to do on July 1 and what money do we have to have in place for that? Are there other questions? All I see is 12 very sober faces. No surprise there. Mandy Jo. Yeah, my question was on the submission of the full year FY 21 budgets. We've got in this calendar when Paul will submit them to the council June 29, but I'm not seeing when the library and schools would submit their FY 21 budgets to Paul. And so I know we talked about the one month timing of May 20 and June one feeling okay, but when would they need to submit their FY 21s to Paul for Paul to be able to do a June 29 date and whatever that date is, how do Sharon and Mike feel about, and then the school committee and library trustees think that they can fit that full year into that. Okay. Let me start with Andy, who may actually be able to answer that question or at least we'll note that we have to figure that out. Andy? Yes, the library and schools, if you look at that second of the schedule slides for FY 21, the top line says library schools submit FY 21 school and library budgets to manager June 1st. So that was factored into the schedule. Okay, but Andy, you had your hand up otherwise. Yeah, the other thing that I wanted to just point out is that as we, and this is really not gonna happen is a real discussion until May 11 when Paul would make his presentation through the council and to the library trustees and the school committee at that special meeting that we were talking about. There are a couple of issues that we're gonna have to be dealing with all the way through, one of which was the subject that Kathy just brought up, which is the percent for capital, because if you go back to the history of how that percentage came up, it arose out of the old finance committee because we had, at that point, we're under investing in capital and the finance committee said as a goal we should try and get it to 10% but we were really below 5% at the time and it was set, it's a percentage of the tax revenue since the tax revenue is governed by two and a half, it's not a movable thing. It's a number that is not changing but it's all of our other revenue that's going down. It is a consequence. It may be in order to protect operating budgets that Paul may make a recommendation to us to reduce that percentage and the council may agree that that's the proper thing to do and it's gonna start with the presentation from the town manager. The other subject that is gonna be, that we're gonna have to be thinking about through this entire process is our reserves to combination of free cash and a stabilization fund. And over the last few years, we had built that up with the intent that we would be able to use that to try and help with our major building projects but historically those reserves have been used also in the way that state uses rainy day funds and that falls into two classifications. One is to have funds available for the kind of year that we're facing for the FY21 budget development and to be able to tap into reserves at the time and you build up reserves for that purpose. The other is to protect cash flow and so that there's those competing needs for the reserves that we've built up and we would need to have that conversation, we'll need to have that conversation and I expected to start with the recommendation from the manager at the May 11th meeting. I wanna make sure that Carrie, I know you have to jump off. Is there a question or a comment you'd like to make at this time? No, I just wanna thank everybody for the hard work they're putting in on this and I think the clear explanation. So thank you. Okay. Are there questions from other people who are not on the council? Cause I know Kathy, you have your hand. We also have a finance committee meeting later today that we can also address some of these very questions, but as we're coming right up on nine o'clock. I have one clarification and one comment, I guess. We're talking about a single one month budget. Is it possible? I'm not saying it should be to do two of them. And that's the question. And the second one is we have depended entirely on these kinds of conference calls as our means of getting public comment. It may be that we should think about using the Amherst Gazette, the Hampshire Gazette, publishing something that we do, letting them publish it on their website as a way of expanding the number of people who actually see what we're doing. Okay. Paul? Yeah, I think that's a really great idea to get as many avenues as possible to educate the public because this is a limited number of people. I mean, I think a lot of these can already broadcast on Amherst media, so people can have access that way and from our websites, obviously. There is a provision in state law that allows for additional one 12th budgets, basically. I think we're proposing just one at this point with the hope that we will be able to achieve all of our goals for FY 21 after one month. And Mike has some comments on that too. Yeah, so the limitation, oh, I'm sorry, I apologize. So the limitation the schools have on that front is we have contractual guidelines of when we have to notify staff. So the longer we go and just, it's no surprise here that this fiscal situation could potentially involve reductions of staffing as well as non-staffing financial items. And so the longer we go, the longer we're paying potentially uninsurance for unemployment insurance for folks that we may or may not bring back. And so the longer we go without clarity, actually that increases our cost and it's not an insignificant increase. So, and only speaking from the school's perspective, the sooner we can sort out however unfortunate the fiscal circumstances are, the better off we are because if we're incurring costs in summer months because we haven't sorted out our budget, it actually makes a situation much harder for everybody involved. So one of the reasons I was eager to say that from my perspective, the school should be able to meet that timeline is because we want to both for ethical moral reasons, let our staff know where we're sitting but also for financial reasons, it's an everyone's best interest. The sooner we, even in the situation can have a plan moving forward, even if it has to adapt a bit, the better off we are, not just fiscally. I mean, there's all the other pieces about ethically and morally for us, but in this conversation fiscally, there's a real cost to waiting. Okay. Andy, do you have another final comment? Yeah, and a couple of things real quick. One is that there is no limit to the number of one month budgets that a city can have and we do operate as a city now under chapter 44 and so we have ultimate flexibility. Chapter 40 for that section that refers to the budget process that includes this refers to a one month budget, not a one 12th budget. And that's very important to understand because there are expenses that may be greater in the first month just because of the way that bills come due. And so that there is flexibility under the state statute that applies to Amherst now that allows us to have a July budget that's actually more than one 12th or less than one 12th. And again, that's something that we'll need to move forward through the process that we've previously described. And the last thing is for people who are watching now and would like to make public comment, we did not build public comment into this meeting. The finance committee will be looking at the same slide deck this afternoon when we meet and there is a public comment section in that meeting that was built into the agenda. All right, thank you. So since we made a conclusion that we would only hold this for an hour, we're going to just quickly summarize using Paul's points of consensus. First of all, that we will be working toward a plan for a one month budget, noting again that that's not a one 12th budget. We'll be working towards an FY21 budget, which would be for the remaining 11 months. We have a schedule which we know will probably change based on whatever might happen. There is a desire, and I think this is reflecting Mike, that we actually move as swiftly as we recently can because of the problems of incurring expenses that delaying costs. And finally that we figure out the best way to our best ways, if you can, to get as much public input into this process as possible. With that, I'm going to adjourn the meeting, okay? Thank you. Thank you all.