 I'm going to welcome everybody to the virtual cup of Joe. This is May 14th in the conversation today is going to be focused primarily around the FY 22 budget, but feel free to ask other questions or make other comments and certain suggestions. So good morning, I'm Brianna Sunard communications manager joined by your town manager, Paul balkamit finance director Sean mangano and comptroller Sonya Aldrich. Good morning everybody. So before we get started. Usually we give Paul a little chance to, to give a quick update. I'd love to hear from our special guests as well and then we can kind of launch into questions. Thanks Brianna so happy that everybody was able to be here this morning. We're in the thick of it with the budget. This is heavy duty budget month but we meet once or twice a week with the finance committee for multiple hours and we look over every department budget department line by line pretty much by the finance committee, as many times the full town council is there because there's a lot of interest in different aspects of budget so that's what we're really in the middle of as we move forward. Yeah, I'll just build on what the town manager said which is we have a budget hearing on Monday night. So that's a good time to come and share your thoughts with the full. It's a finance committee meeting but I'm sure the full council will be at that well. And then the next day we have haven't asked me anything which is sort of a, a initiative where for a certain block of time people can submit questions. We have a lot of hours right Sean. 23, 22. 2am Sean's going to answer your question. But, but for a block of time we're going to answer questions on a forum. And so you can kind of submit any question you want and we're going to try to get back to you in a timely fashion. We also have the engage Amherst page which is sort of like a running version of that so you can kind of do that whenever. And I can maybe can give us more information about a little bit. So next week's a big week for engagement on the budget. Thank you Sean, so anything to add about the fight 22 budget before we take questions. No I think pretty much everything has been said. I'm here as backup and support. Well, thanks for joining us. I know it's early. I want to do a quick reminder to those who are joining us live both via zoom and via Facebook. So if you're in zoom, please feel free to raise your hand at any point, or pop your question into the q amp a. And for those viewers that I see on Facebook, you can add a comment, and I will ask your question. So we wait for that. There are some questions that haven't been getting asked on our engagement page which Sean mentioned, you can navigate there from our homepage was a big panel that says joy and engage Amherst, and where you can see projects and initiatives on the town. And we have a big budget tile that you can go there, view the actual budget, view our companion piece story that we did this year, and see what questions are being asked look the FAQ so that's a great place to start if you wanted to start digging into the budget. So one question that we have here is how have federal funds related to coven affected this budget. Sean, Sean said guru on the our local federal funds. Yeah, I can start with that one. So sort of two ways. So we have two buckets of federal money that will primarily affect the town operations and then there's a third bucket of federal money that will affect the school operations. So we have two pairs, which was really the first big federal pot of money. That has allowed the town to not have to worry about any additional budget for things related to coven that's been able to cover any of our necessary costs that have exceeded our budgets anywhere so that program runs through the end of 2021 so at least the first half of FY 22 will still have access to cares money for any additional costs related to coven. The new pot of money that will be getting some time in May or June is the American Rescue Plan Act. And that program is more focused on economic recovery it can still help with cares related car or coven related costs but a lot of the eligible uses are around economic recovery and sort of fixing the damage that was done by by coven. And so for that group of money we've had we have some ideas that we put in the budget document about ways to spend it, but we're going to be getting together as a group and form formulate in a process for how that money gets allocated. And then sort of related to both of those pots of money but it just flows through through a different avenue, our SR funds that go to the schools. And so I think there was some cares money that went through and became SR funds and there's some of this new American Rescue Plan money that's flowing through and will become SR funds, and those funds go directly to the schools, and can be used for a variety of different purposes, mostly similar to us they have to be related to coven. But the schools are coming up with a plan for how to use those funds. Great, thank you Sean. So, if anybody has a question about that in the crowd, please pop it into the Q amp a or raise your hand I do see that we have Council President grease more on the call today so I will invite her at any point she wants to come in and ask a question or make a statement just raise your hand and we'll invite you in. So, open invite there. Another question we had here is relating to the four building projects. Something that's, you know, been in conversation in town for quite some time so is the plan to address the four building projects reflected in this FY 22 budget. It's reflected in a couple different places so the capital improvement program that plan is within the five year plan. If you pull that document up you'll see that in the out years. We are projecting increases in our debt service payments for the four building projects the fire station the DPW the library and the schools. And that because we want to, you know, we're constantly looking out five years to make sure that we're on the right track that we're not going to hit any surprises along the way, and that the analysis we've done so far is still on track, which it seems to be in the public health there's also a five year projection of the actual budget the full budget, and the key part there is that when we project out five years we're projecting how much funding is going to go to capital. And so to do the four building projects the way that we previously presented, we need to get to a certain level of funding for capital, which is about 10 and a half percent of our tax levy. And so that assumption has been built into that five year plan around the overall budget. And again we're looking at the bottom line to make sure there's no surprises that there's not any huge deficits that we can continue to invest in our operating budgets, and things of that nature so. So we've been graded in a couple of different ways and those are the things we kind of update every year to make sure we don't see any surprises coming up. Yeah, I just like to add you know just to take a step back is how people can access the budget. It can be pretty intimidating to look at a municipal budget but if you go to our upcoming budget page all the documents are in one site and you can go through the engage page which is sort of the most user friendly, but there are two basic documents one is the operating budget which is the funds that we use to pay salaries and all that. That's a pretty large document 200 almost 300 pages long, but the first 1517 pages or gives you a nice little summary of what's in that. The other document is the capital plan which is the, the capital not the ongoing budget items that we have. And that's a relatively small document, you know, 2030 pages something like that, but it lists, not only all the things that we intend to buy with a little paragraph on each thing that we intend to buy this year, but also a five year capital plan and an inventory of everything we own so we're building that document up over time as well so if you looking at those two things you can look at how we're allocating funds by department and by activity. Can you guys talk a little bit more about how what new things you've done with the budget in terms of presentation this year I know we touched a little bit on some of those things but why, why did you decide to kind of take some new tactics here and it's crazy. We had it down we did down like a science and then was like, but we can make it better. Yeah, there's sort of a there's sort of a couple things we we try to do one. One is there was a lot of behind the scenes work with the previous budget. There was a lot of different documents it took a lot of sort of not analytical work but sort of just time consuming work to stitch it all together and whenever there was a change had to be done again. And so one reason we changed it up a little bit was to kind of streamline it and get it all in one place so that it was easier to make these updates. One of the things we wanted to make sure that our budget aligned with sort of the best practices that are put forward by the governmental finance officers association. They have a rubric of these different sections that every budget should have or what they view sort of best practices for every budget. And so we took that checklist and we sort of went through what we had which we had a very strong budget and so before it was not like there was major things lacking it was very good. There was areas that we could add to that. And, and then we tried to also incorporate some, some pictures some things to make the budget a little bit more engaging. And so that's sort of how we got to where we are as we try added a few things to make it fully aligned with best practices, and then we added some more engaging photos and charts and things like that but, and a lot of ways it's the core of it is the same as it's always been. So go ahead. No, just, I mean for all for the staff for the finance staff know Sean and Sonia and Holly who put a lot of work into it, doing something new for the first time is really challenging and getting a lot of new pieces in place I know Brianna you contributed a lot to making this document the way it is now. It will over, you know in the future will be a lot easier for us to manage through and put together. But this first year I think we learned a lot and so I just kudos to everybody who's put so much time into making this and getting it to the to the deadline which, which we did. And then the other the other piece of the other piece of the new stuff this year was around the engagement. And so we did two new things this year with a lot of help from Brianna. And then the second piece is the sort of story map of the budget for those who watch the budget presentation. That's one area where we want to, we can probably refine and think about how much time we have and because there's a lot of information that we're going to be able to find out where we're going to be in the process, which is the engage amers page, which we talked about a little bit, which is a nice central hub where you can ask questions and link to the documents and find out about the budget for those who watch the budget presentation. That's one area where we want to, we can probably refine and think about how much time we have and because there's a lot of information in there, but it's a really nice, it's a really nice document for people who want to go through the budget on their own and have more time than we had when we presented to kind of go through the different themes of the budget, what's being done in the budget, what's happened related to COVID. It's a very easy to navigate clickable document where you can get a lot of information. And you don't have to go through the 300 pages of the budget document, you can kind of get it condensed in a short amount of time. So those are the two new things we did, which I thought were pretty good. And again, we've learned a little bit this year of ways we can even make it better going forward. And one of the things about the story map and Brianna, you can weigh in on this one of the things that I found interesting about it is that a lot of people are accessing things through their phone or through their tablet. And it's just you just scroll through it, it's not like a PowerPoint where you have to click to the next thing you just scroll and scroll and you can hear that it says you can read the whole story of the budget by just going through your phone and so we're finding more people and Brianna knows these numbers more than I about who are accessing the website and the budget through their, their mobile devices. And so that was one of the initiatives is to say well let's get to where people actually are versus making them go through our normal website. That's the logic right Brianna. Yeah, absolutely. I think really what we need to do is not just have one new way is kind of maintain the way that it's working for some people and kind of add on and I think that's what the budget story was a little bit of a companion piece because it's mobile responsive and more than half of the people who access our website are using a smartphone. We really decided that that might be a nice journey for them rather than kind of looking through a PDF on their phone is not as, is not as good of an experience so I want to remind the folks in the room we, this is intended to be, you know, community chat we do want to hear from you. I do see a handful of you in our zoom room as well as some live on Facebook so please feel free to raise your hand or put a question into the Q&A. We'd love to hear from you. It's early I know. Here we go. I am going to invite Ken to introduce. Good morning, and thank you on Ken Rosenthal I live on Sunset Avenue. And I want to say first, we are very fortunate to have you, Paul and Sean, and your team in town hall, worrying about our finances in this very very difficult couple of years. We've worked terrific on normal times and to be able to respond to the unpredictable stuff that's been imposed upon all of us individually in the town through the pandemic and the consequences, you've just been great and you're making it easy. One of the consequences of making it easy to understand this is you're going to make it easy for us to comment, and to get comments from would be critics like me who have things to say. And that my question is nothing to do with the budget but it has to do with the plans for redoing the North Common in town and only with one area that concerns me and that is the seven parking spaces that are back in parking spaces off a main street are they still in the, in the plan, Paul. So the town council is going to be having a public hearing on that as well on the actual parking part of it they pretty much decided how they want the North Common to look and now they're looking at the parking options. And they, they, right now is designed to have back in parking, which is sort of the new standard coming forward. And I know that that's in the logic and why it's back in parking. Because it makes it safer for motorists and bicyclists when you pull out you're pulling out not you're not backing into traffic you're pulling into traffic. And so those, those are still there because that almost doubles the number of spaces that we can fit into that space and we're trying to have as many parking spaces as we can to replace the ones that are being removed. And I would just like to say this, I am very worried about safety with back in parking for this reason. When the light changes and people come from amity and go down Main Street, or when they make the right turn from South Pleasant on to main they're accelerating, and they're, they will encounter the people who are suddenly deciding to slow down and back up. I only. I don't know the solution to this but I offer one possible way to investigate it. I wonder if you could. I'm going to go to Gilbert mooring on some weekend when the school parking lots the biggest school parking lot, you know, is, is totally empty, mark out the spaces and practice, having some cars come down what is the equivalent of a main street and while others are trying to back in. I think it's an accident waiting to happen because not everybody is going to be as good a driver as we wish you got old people like me, who suddenly decide they want to park back up and backing up into parking spaces is always hard so you back up you missed the line you pull out again and try to back up a second time. You watch this happen on on the spring street area where where there aren't a lot of fast cars and you still see problems. So I just raise that as as a worrisome thing and I hope you look at it very hard and absolutely. And I think that's a really good concerns can. And I think you're right I mean people are less comfortable backing into parking spaces and they are to pulling in and then, you know, you know I think there are some examples but North Hampton has pull in parking like you are recommending that you're still. But there are other places have done the back in parking but that's a. It's a conversation and in terms of the orientation is just a matter of which way the parking spaces are angled it really doesn't make a difference in the number of parking spaces by that decision. Well one more comment and then I'll shut up and give another chance. I'm worried about even pulling parking spaces there because then to exit the parking you're backing up into traffic again. It's seven spaces. I know that there are some people in town who value the loss of a single space, but, and it would be great to be able to have parking right close to the middle of town. And to lose seven is a problem for some stores, but I think the safety comes first and just to avoid one accident over a few years. I think it's it's worth thinking about again and thank you again for listening and thank you for what you're doing with the budget to make it understandable to people like me really appreciate it. Thank you. Those are those are valuable comments. Okay, so thank you. Thank you Ken and that public hearing is from now in case you wanted to tune into that Monday the 24th. We also have a project page on engage Amherst for the North Common Revitalization project that kind of outlines the different concepts design concepts and invites some some engagement as well so feel free to check that out. So I do see a hand on with. There's not a name but it's 1364. So I'm going to go ahead and ask you to unmute and introduce yourself. It's Phyllis Lara from South Amherst I always follow Ken so I have to keep up the pattern. This is sort of a corollary to his again with the decrease in parking and the changes in all these how much revenue are we losing from all this and it's a modest amount obviously but how is the parking revenue going. Parking revenue and this is Sony Sony why don't you time chime in on our parking revenue it is a problem Phyllis you've identified an important piece. Yeah, we're about 50, not even up to 50% collected at this point in time in the physical. So we've taken a big hit with parking through coven. And that's because of parking revenue and tickets, not sales. Because So to follow up on that are we making more money on the tickets that we issue to the late night party people with all their noise etc etc is that making us more money. I'm not sure if there's more of that I'm just really consistent level of that. Yeah, that's actually been an interesting development is that there have been very few large parties very few tickets. I mean we read about the tickets when they're issued you read about it in the bulletin, but they're having you know they haven't been those big parties and part of it is, I mean just coven and people are a higher understanding of the dangers of coven among university primarily, but also the weather's been pretty crappy on weekends so there haven't been these big gatherings on weekends during most of the year. We still have, you know, so there haven't been as many tickets as in previous years actually for those those events. Okay, thank you appreciate all that you're doing keep up the good work. Thank you Phyllis always good to hear from you. Okay, so some other questions that we kind of had in the in the hopper here. We talked a little you talked a little bit about what's next and some upcoming dates. Can you kind of walk people through what the timeline is from where we are now so what the final kind of end result will be and how they can be involved in that process. Yes. So, the way as I said before we have the budget hearing on the 17th, which is a great opportunity to get involved and come submit your comments. We have the ask me anything on the 18th, which will be a push out of how to submit a question on that as well. And then we have the engage Amherst page which is ongoing that you can visit and submit a question at any time and the nice thing about the engage Amherst pages if you submit a question, it go and send an email directly to the people that are listed on that page which right now are and and then we can respond to it and we respond to it will post the response on that page and keep a running list of all those questions and answers, but it will also send an email to the person who who asked the question right Brianna and it'll and it'll give that answer directly to them so it's a really user friendly tool. We have a number of finance committee meetings still to come we have. I think it's the on the 18th and the 20th we have finance committee meetings, where we will be talking about enterprise funds on the DPW on the 18th. And then on the 20th we will be talking about general government which are all the different departments here at town hall. We have another finance committee meeting on the 27th, where we will be talking about conservation and development and we will also be talking about the community responder program and more detail at that meeting. And then the following week I think I don't have a calendar in front of me I think it's the first and the third is when the finance committee is going to start working on their recommendation based on everything they've heard. And hopefully we'll have a recommendation by the third that they'll get to council. And then once the recommendation it will go to the council for consideration and the council will vote on it. Our calendars posted on the our upcoming budget page so that's that'll have the June 21 right at the date that it's on there for a vote. Yeah. So it's on there for June 21 assuming there's no hiccups or any issues to be voted. And once it's voted then then the, you know the budget will go into effect on July 1. So really at any of those meetings, you can give public comment you can email your counselor. You can email the town manager there's email myself there's lots of ways to submit your feedback and input on the budget. And that stuff really matters we when we read that stuff. We, you know we think about how we can address that in the budget or factor it in the next time around. It is really important to submit your comments on it. I see council president Lynn grease Mercedes hand so I'd love to invite Lynn in to the room if you could unmute. Hi Lynn good morning. Good morning. I wanted to add to show calendar, and that is actually on the evening of the 27th at 530 is when we're going to be focusing on the community safety working group. It's a proposal for the community responder program that is in this year's budget as a starting point. Thank you Lynn. I think that I think Lynn did a wise thing because is and we're because there's a lot of attention on this piece of the budget and a lot of people interested in it. The finance committee meets in the afternoon that's been what the practice has been, but she ended finance committee chair Andy Steinberg felt this was important enough topic that it's all important but this one would be better suits for the public to have it later in the day or an early in the evening so people more people can access that the opportunity to engage with that meeting. Anything else you wanted to add Lynn to the to the budget conversation. All we have you mosquitoes. Can you still hear me. Yes, we can hear you. I just want to say I really appreciate the budget format. It's actually made paper useless. Because it's so much more user friendly when you're using it online. And it's very, very well together so thank you all. Hey Lynn. Do you want to talk about mosquitoes. Yes. No, but yes. So, we actually are moving forward. The board of health met yesterday. They have recommended to the town council five zero as their vote that we joined the pioneer mosquito. I'm not sure if I have the full name, but it's a group of other communities in our area, who only who have a developed plan already that does not use spray. In general, but only if there is an agency, and so that will come before the council on Monday we will have public comment during that time, specific to mosquito spray. And we'll have a full description of the plan that this collaborative of municipalities use. So, I think toward a resolution. Yeah, so the reason that's an interesting topic is that there's a new state law that said, if you don't want us to the state saying if you don't want us to have the option of spraying in your town you have to opt out by May 15. It just sort of snuck up on towns cities towns and everybody was going crazy every community and so the state came back and because of the sort of low back they received they said well now you have until May 28. And there are certain rules you have to follow you have to get the advice of your, your board of health and then the council or makes that decision. And so this gives us the time to make it actually informed they have the council make an informed decision based on advice from the board of health. I think the council received a lot of feedback from folks saying we don't want aerial spraying here. And I think that's that was some of the comments that the board of health heard as well but they also understand that there is a role in the public health world for trying to control the spread of mosquitoes because there are a lot of mosquito born illnesses that can be really that are deadly, a triple E virus for instance we don't have much of that in this section of the state. There was one incident of aerial spraying last year in the state and that was in Plymouth County. But you know, the fact that they could cost a lot of people concerns so that's why the council is responding in this way and considering this proposal by the board of health. That's great. A lot of, a lot of comments, right. Absolutely. And we wanted to, it actually, I just want to be very, very understanding of how this caught so many communities off guard. So many of those communities, this information would come through the board of health and through the director of health. They've been a little busy making sure people. And so I, you know, the fact that they didn't jump on this, we are not alone in this all and we want to thank Senator Cumberford and Mindy Dom for helping to get the extension that we were all given. Yes, absolutely. Great. Thank you for that update Lynn. Okay, so again I'm going to do another call for folks who are in the room to feel free to raise your hand or put your question into the Q&A. I have another question here that was pre submitted. What are some of the major investments in this budget proposal. Yeah, I can start with that. So I think one thing to start with is that this was a good budget in a lot of ways that we're projecting our revenues to bounce back a little bit. But there really wasn't a lot added in this budget. We are really just getting back to where we were pre pandemic. There's a little bit of a disconnect because it feels good because our revenues are going up and then we feel like we're starting to come out of it, but we're still we're still feeling the impacts of COVID and so the first thing is that there really wasn't a lot added in the budget. We were able to maintain a lot of what we had, and we were able to restore a little bit of what was what was reduced in the in the prior years budget. But it was really about getting back to where we are. So I think one of the major investments was we're getting back on track with capital spending. We had cut capital spending from 10% of the tax levy down to about half of that for FY 21. And so for FY 22, we're getting back up to eight and a half percent. And our goal is 10% or even a little bit higher. And so that's really important for the town we get a lot of comments about the condition of the various buildings that are projected to be replaced or even other buildings that just need to be maintained. And so that number that we put towards capital directly relates to how well we can do those things. In the budget, as we talked about a little bit, we reallocated some funding from the police department down to social services to help start this community responder program. So that's one of the one of the new things that we'll be working on in the coming year. We have taken an existing position that's within the within our budget already, and we are proposing to combine that with some of the American rescue plan funds to add a diversity equity and inclusion coordinator to focus on a number of initiatives one, you know, helping recruit more diverse staff or town hall, you know review and our policies and procedures to try to eliminate bias as much as possible. So that's another initiative we're working on. So a lot of it was around restoring things that were cut. We were a lot of reductions in the recreation department and FY 21 because we weren't sure what type of activities the recreation department could do. So two areas that were were reduced in FY 21 were Cherry Hill staffing, temporary staffing and pool part time help. And so those are two areas that the pool part time help we restored that all the way. So in our budget for FY 21 or FY 22, and the Cherry Hill temporary staffing we're proposing to use American rescue plan money to bring that back up to where it was before. And that's another one that will phase into our general or operating budget in the coming years. Again the American rescue plan funds are really about part of it is about, you know, helping address the impacts of revenues that you've lost because of the pandemic and so that's one of the areas that was impacted. I think there's anything else. I mean, I think the big, the big ticket item and you're talking was the capital. We had really pulled back on capital last year to help with the budget. And we didn't purchase hardly anything and so now there is a backlog of need. So we're getting closer to where we should have been a year ago where is going to take us a few years to get that totally back up and running. So there are a lot of things that need to be addressed and that's where the bulk of the new money. It's going to go to is capital. For instance, we didn't buy any vehicles last year. And that's usually that's very unusual for an operation this size to not buy any cruisers or anything like that. So, yeah, I think one thing I failed to mention that I think we are excited about is a couple things one is within that capital allocation going up to a half percent one of the things we were able to do was dedicate $100,000 for sustainability improvements. And we've we've heard a number of potential projects that that money would go towards. And so, you know, and that's an item that we have imagined will be a recurring investment every year within the capital plan to continue making progress and lowering our energy consumption. Similar, we also added $50,000 for accessibility improvements in town, which we also envision will be an ongoing item going forward. We just had an accessibility study done recently that listed a whole bunch of areas where we could make improvements. And so that money will go to start chipping away at that list and I mean in full way. So on the capital front we are doing some exciting new things that should have benefits throughout town in the coming years. Great. I see some new people have joined so feel free to ask your question via Q&A or raise your hand. We'd love to hear from you. So just a quick reminder on that front. What else do you think that's in this budget that might surprise people that you haven't mentioned or talked about yet? Or is it more kind of business as usual besides some of the things you've highlighted? I think people have to recognize or I hope people will help to understand that the COVID had a significant impact on our budget. We tried to maintain services as best we could. But our revenues, especially the non-tax revenues, meaning water and sewer rates, transportation, all the enterprise funds for the most part really took a hit. Water and sewer, because our biggest users are the university and Amherst College and they had depopulated and so they weren't using much water anymore. And even when they came back, they were at a lower capacity. So though our costs did not go down for water or sewer because we still have to maintain all that infrastructure which is built to service these large populations, but the populations weren't there to purchase the water. So those enterprise funds, they are a business in and of themselves. They have to keep reserves and pay all their expenses and pay for the costs to operate, including their pension liabilities and things like that. They have ongoing expenses that they had to meet and so those were really hurt badly and they will take several years to recover. And there's a plan for that. It's not going to all happen in one year and rates, we're in a fortunate position in that our rates for water and sewer are really low compared to our neighboring communities and below the statewide average. So, you know, we don't like raising rates unless we have to. But in order to sustain our operations and there's the operations are getting more and more complex and demanding in terms of environmental requirements, which are a good thing, but they still require an allocation of funds to meet those needs. Anything else on enterprise funds on you, you think. No, it was basically the rates I took a big hit revenues. The general fund it was mostly licenses and permits. Right. And some of the interphone transfers the indirect costs, because the enterprise funds did so bad we couldn't take some of the indirect costs that they normally pay the general fund, which we ended up with about a $450,000 revenue deficit. But fortunately, we had enough surplus in the operating budget that got returned that offset that. And then some. Alright, I don't see any hands currently in the room or on our Facebook stream. Here we go we've got something that got popped into the Q&A. So this is from Tony we saw in the Gazette today that UMass is going to receive 50 million from the American Rescue Plan. What estimates have you received from money is expected to come to the elementary and regional schools. So, I can answer that a little bit I'm not going to be exact. I think of, you know, one thing we can post out is more information on this because I know it's an area of high interest for some people. I believe in the latest round of money that again there's a bunch of these there's s or one s or two s or three. Those are all the school, those are all the school parts of money right how many that go directly to the schools. I believe in the latest round s or three, both each individually each school is supposed to get each school district is supposed to get somewhere around $2 million in s or three money. But we will put out more specific information I will say that I don't think they have an exact number yet. I think that's still sort of an estimate, and even our number at the town, you know, the town was projected to get over $10 million in American Rescue Plan funds. But I was on a webinar the other day that those numbers still aren't finalized we'll get finalized numbers and the next week or so. And just to clarify that $10 million is a three year number. Yep. Yeah, I don't know what the timeline is for the s or money all these. You know, so this has been a, the last year has been a challenging grant management project because the state is giving plenty of money for or not the state the federal government is pushing out all this money for different purposes, but it's coming in these different buckets and different timelines and slightly different uses and so it's really been a little bit of a balancing act to make sure that we use we want to use the money that expires the earliest first. And so we've had to have a lot of conversations with the schools about when their grants expire when our grants and dates are, and to make sure that we're charging the right grant because we don't you know we want to minimize any money that potentially could go back. And so it's been a balancing act from that standpoint. I almost jump in here because it also people should under all the, the amount of correspondence that goes be back and forth between the state and Sean's office. Is this an eligible expense because we have all kinds of things we'd like to put on this and they will say yes or no, but it's every expense has to be submitted and said, will you pay for this if we submit it and because we don't want to buy something or purchase something and then have the have the cares act or whatever not cover it because then that someone's got to pay for it so there's a lot of, even before we purchase or take it take on an activity there's a lot of back and forth with the state seeking permission to use the funds in a certain way because they're ultimately the ones sending us the check. Yeah, absolutely. And the, and the real bottleneck and all of this has been FEMA. And so it's not for kids in particular, anything that we charge to cares that the state deems potentially FEMA eligible, we have to submit to FEMA first, and all the rules for everything has been changing FEMA's change their rules about what's eligible and what's not eligible several times cares has updated their eligibility guidelines several times. And so it's been a little bit of a moving target, but we submitted a FEMA application back in June 2020. And we have just recently got a little bit more information on what of that application they're going to reimburse and we're almost a year after that. And so the major implication that has is that until we know what FEMA is going to reimburse we don't know how much is going to go on to cares, or how much cares is going to have to pay. And so it is a, it is a challenge that both the town and the schools and all the towns, because I've talked to some of my colleagues have had is this how to maximize all these grant funds. And they have a little sympathy for FEMA because they, they're used to dealing like one county that's had a hurricane or disaster now they have 20,000 communities who are all having a disaster and we're all submitting our claims, all at the same time and they had, they have no capacity to ramp up and they've done a pretty remarkable job under the circumstances. And it's, it just imagine and the Congress is allocating trillions of dollars, and they're trying to manage all that so it's, it's an unusual time, I have to say, could we bring up something else. Yeah, absolutely. So, okay, so we did. We made a presentation to standard and poor's last week about our bond rating that's an important thing is this is a short term rating it's only for the next two years we're not doing substantial borrowing the next couple years but I just want to compliment Sean and Sonya and Jay and general fountain and the entire sort of finance team for putting together a pretty remarkable presentation the standard course under these sort of dire financial conditions we were hoping to hold on to our credit rating so I've not seen the final release yet but so I think that that's that's that's our that was our goal and one of our goals. We were obviously hoping for an upgrade if we could get it but we understood that the situation is such. But, you know, I think we made a very strong case for the our budgetary controls. So they look at different factors, they look at how you run your town, the financial controls you have in place. Are you good at budgeting are you good at planning. Are you good at delivering on what your budget says, then they also look at the broader economic outlook for the town and then they also look at the broader out economic outlet for the state outlook for the state. And then they put all that together and they put a rating on it so that when people are buying bonds they have a level of confidence, and they do this nationwide because they're comparing us to every other city and town in the nation when they when they do these ratings. So it was it was a, in the middle of the entire budget. We decided to go get a bond rating upgrade and so. So it was a good it was, it was a pretty strong presentation we learned a lot from doing the presentation as well. And so yours Sean you want to add anything on that. I think we did. You may not have seen it. I think we did get the final rating, affirming our double A plus score and again that has a real, it's, it's a really positive thing has a real impact on our borrowing costs when we go out to issue bonds or bond rates, that's what lenders look at to determine how safe we are of a of an investment or to lend money to. And so to maintain that rate which is sort of the second from the highest you can have is a really positive thing and you know we have heard, whether all four building projects or not, you know, we will be doing us probably a significant level of borrowing in the coming years and so having that rating is good for keeping our borrowing costs down. I do see Council President Lynn grease Mercedes hands so Lynn, feel free to unmute and come on in. Sean and Paul, I think it would be really useful as Sonia, please, really useful to explain the two factors that basically prevent us from going higher, because there are areas, frankly that we have no control over. And we want to make sure that people understand that for a town that is what as well managed as we are. This is an outstanding rating. But there are two factors that kind of are out there, please. Yeah. So there's the other sort of two buckets. One is the, what they call the it's related to our economy the local economy and they look at the sort of economic buying power per person. And so they look at a town like Amherst and, and they come up with sort of a figure per person. And what keeps Amherst a little bit lower than what we would need to be to be the highest score is we have a lot of college students for one thing that don't have a lot of reported income. And so that sort of drives our number down. And then there's some other factors that just keep our number from being where we need to be. And so this is related directly to sort of the, the personal income of people that live in Amherst. As much by a bigger number. Yeah, so what they like are a rich community like a Western or something, or even the rich but just a community that has a very large, a large number of people with a decent income. And our numbers don't support that just and there's nothing we can do about that because of the large student population who report very little income. And you can make the argument to them that those, you can't look at just the student income but you also look at their family income and trying to argue some strong points on that. But they, you know, the standard course is a very metrics driven organization, they look at the numbers, according to their, their formulas, and they sort of apply those numbers to our situation, and there's not a whole lot we can do about that piece of it. Yeah, I mean they give us they give us extra points for for having a large stabilized institution like the college and the colleges and universities which is really positive for us. They recognize all the sort of economic development that's been going on in town. But in the end of the day, it boils down to some key metrics and if those metrics aren't at a certain place and those are just data that we can't control. It sort of prevents us from getting to where we might want to be from a rating perspective I think I think it's sometimes the rating is maybe not as important as what the town is trying to do. You know, there may be a more important issue that the town is trying to do that. You can't just focus on the rating. And so the other bucket that that we have a metric that we're, we're trying to work on is our open pension and OPEB other post employment benefits cost. They look at that as a percentage of your, your overall budget. And so many communities struggle in this area because other post employment benefits is a is a big number that came on relatively recently in the last 10 or 15 years that really became a high focus, and many communities have a really high liability for that. So, Amherst is doing very well at trying to fund that liability, but, but from an S&P perspective they still view the liability is really large and they want towns and communities to do more than what we're currently doing. And then another on the pension side, where our pension system is projected to be fully funded by around 2033, 2034, which is pretty good that's, you know, that's getting pretty close it's not that far away. So if your S&P doesn't agree with some of the assumptions that Massachusetts pension systems use. They think that they may be using overly optimistic assumptions which I think is a debatable topic. But that's another area where they were kind of were docked a little bit because because of that, the assumptions that are used that I don't know if they think that will be funded by 2033. So there was a couple factors that are really outside the control of what we can do here but on all the things that we can control budgeting planning. We scored really high and so we're proud of that. All right, great question Lynn, thank you. Anybody else in the room, we're wrapping up and are getting close to our hour so last chance to ask a question or comment budget related or not. I don't see any hands. I'm coming in the room so is there anything you guys want to leave people with it didn't get discussed yet. Well we give people a moment or two to ask a last question. You know this is the traditional end of the academic year we have your mass graduation today, you know, yesterday today tomorrow and sort of an extended timeframe for it. Hampshire has their graduation this weekend to I think. Which is Memorial Day weekend. So that's the traditional end of the academic year and then we move into our summer summertime and just, you know, hopefully with the vaccines getting pushed out we're really excited about the number of people we've been able to vaccinate and credit to the Health Department for making that such a success. I think we're, we're starting to emerge and I think everybody's feeling that way. So over the next, you know, two to three months. I think we'll be in a much better place than we have been in the past year. Yeah, and sort of related to that Paul maybe you can give an update. One of the things I think is really exciting it are these three projects the North Amherst library the intersection the common. And some of the timelines for those to be completed because those are all things that are going to kind of give a facelift and make Amherst a better place what is what's the time. So the North Amherst library is that's the one that's been there's been an anonymous donor has been supporting that we're moving into construction documents so we're hoping that that could actually get underway and in the fall with it, and pretty aggressive construction schedule is moving very quickly. Pomeroy village we also have funds in place. The council is is reviewing that as well in terms of in the basic question is do we want to a signalized intersection or do we want a roundabout at that location. And there's been a recommendation made by one of the council committees to the council, once they make that decision will be getting doing more the engineering plans and that takes some time that's that's probably about a nine month engineering process to get all the surveys done to get the traffic counts done we're doing traffic counts up there right now, things like that. And then we hope that that project will get started we have next year, and then the North Common. We're hopeful, we're again looking at additional funds to support some of the work that's going on around the common from Congressman McGovern. The council again has to take one more action on that, and we'll start working on the plans for that so those, those aren't going to be shoveling the ground, typically for like the North Common project we would try to start that probably next May if we can get there, because that's the time when there's less demand on parking in that area. Okay, I don't see any hands in the room or any questions in the Q amp a box so Sean Sonya any any last words. I will say that I started last May, and I feel jipped by these couple of Joe's because I understood that Paul would buy coffee for these things. And that hasn't happened yet so I'm looking forward to the first one that I actually get coffee. I'll get you two cups then. That's right. All right well I want to thank both of you for joining us today, and everybody who joined us live. We will be posting this up on our channel shortly and if you have any questions or want to dig into the budget please. The easiest way is just head to our homepage and click the budget under top pages it'll have the connections to everything we talked about including the engagement page. If you have any questions feel free to email us info at Amherst and may dot gov and we'll get you connected to any resource that you need. Thanks, Brianna. Thank you. Have a good weekend.