 Good evening, and welcome back to Byline. This is a public affairs show here on Amherst Media, and it's cosponsored with the Amherst League of Women Voters. And back for his second appearance on our show is our member at large of the town council and chair of the finance committee, long time town public official having been on the select board in the finance committee and done many things over the years, Andy Steinberg. So welcome back, Andy. Well, thank you. And thank you so much for being willing to come back. I guess it wasn't too painful the last time, huh? So welcome back, and we're focusing tonight on the budget because we're getting deeper and deeper into the budget process. And so I wanted to ask you as chair of the finance committee first to just give us a quick thumbnail of where we are in the process and what's going to come next. Okay. Well, thank you. Appreciate being here. Appreciate being able to inform the viewership about our budget process and the budget going forward. At this point, the town manager is working on developing a budget that he will propose to the council under the new charter. He's required to make that budget proposal by May 1st and he will do so. It will then be immediately referred to the finance committee for our review. So we do not know the details, but I know the broad parameters of what he will be presenting. But the specific line item amounts what you're used to in your prior work with Ways and Means committees. You don't know what the Ways and Means committee proposes until I propose it, but we don't know what the town manager is going to exactly propose. So he's working with his department heads now to form a budget, which will then go to the town council, which will refer it to the finance committee. How is that different than the process when we had a town meeting? Or is it different? It is largely similar, except the deadlines are very different, and then the action of the council and the action of town meeting are different. But this budget process began with the select board giving some priorities and making suggestions. We knew we were, I was speaking now as a former select board member, have to switch roles a couple of times. But when we were on the select board, we knew we were not going to be seeing the process through to the end, but we made recommendations for consideration. In future years, the council would have that role. The manager then looks at the budget as does the superintendent for both of the budgets. He works with the regional school budget and the elementary budget, which is a part of the town budget and the library director. In the prior form of government, we would have received the town manager's budget to the finance committee in January, and then the finance committee would have worked on it in February and March for review, and decided what to propose to town meeting because town meeting needed to get things in April in order to start a town meeting at the very end of April or beginning of May. But the manager now gives it to the council on May 1st, which is a whole extra four months for him to prepare his budget. Correct. And of course, because we're no longer bound to the town meeting rules and town meeting season, we're now operating under a different set of budget rules. So we don't really need to have the council act until the very end of the, just before the beginning of the fiscal year, July 1st. So the council can wait until June to act, which is why the finance committee will be doing its work now in May that the prior finance committee that was a committee of town meeting would have done earlier in the year. So you have a couple of months to work on the budget after the town manager gives it to you. What do you do during that period? What will the committee be doing in the council? Actually we have a much more constrained time for line than the old finance committee had, who are required to report back in 30 days in order to give the council time. And in prior finance committee would have once a week meetings during a two month period, we're going to have twice a week meetings during a month. And we're going to essentially be doing the same sort of thing. We will have posted public meetings, and I'll give an example on the public safety budget. We will have the fire chief and the police chief with their assistive staff who may come with them to talk about what their budget request is about and sort of give the flesh behind the budget, not only this is the amount of money, but this is what we're going to do and this is what our priorities are. And so is that before the town council as a whole or before the finance committee or before the finance committee with all of the town council is invited if they choose to come? Option C. Okay. It's not mandatory for the rest of the council? Correct. Okay. So the meetings are public and we will and have given our schedule to the council that's available to the public. And will the other council be able to participate in asking questions during that, those meetings or only observe? They can ask me questions and will and. And where does the public fit into those meetings? It's open to the public, so the public can be in the audience. Are they able to ask questions or will there be a public comment period attached to those hearings as there are with the council meetings? Actually all of our committees have public comment periods because we believe very strongly in allowing public participation and encouraging public participation and so having a public comment element to the meeting will be important. And the big difference and I should stress this early, I think I even mentioned it last time I was in the show but that's been a while ago, is that in town meeting, town meeting could increase or decrease budgets as recommended under the new form of government and under the charter and we're not unique in this. The town council has the authority to remove or reduce but does not have the authority to add something new. It would have to come back then as a supplemental budget request through the town manager in a different process. So that means there's an awful lot more power in the hands of the town manager as compared to the previous budget process under the old government. Because you can't increase. A little bit in theory, yes and the analogy I'll give by the way is Northampton. This is exactly the process except you substitute the word mayor for the two words town manager. But otherwise the process is exactly the same. I can think of a couple of instances of examples where town meeting added to budgets in the last few years items that were not had proposed either by the superintendent or the town manager. One was an amount for social service funding in last year there was in the other example I'll give for the schools is an amount that would allow for addition of time for library paralegal staff. The budgets once voted by the old town meeting the question of whether it would be spent by the superintendent of the town manager in those two examples was still in within their discretion those political question as to whether you want to go to town meeting. So the big difference in this one is that if there's a strong feeling that something was left out of a budget the council would really need to come back and ask them for a supplemental budget submission it would not be a part of the annual operating budget. So there is a procedure for supplemental budget requests yes and we actually have a head one already that was the station road bridge. And that what does that process look like roughly the same as the annual budgeting process where you go to the town manager the town manager comes to the council or can a supplemental budget be initiated by the council itself? I not 100% sure in the answer that. Okay we'll call the lawyer and figure that out. The station road bridge was a recommendation from the town manager okay and you know if the council resolved to request that the town manager do something then that would be a good way to do that. That would in and of itself would draw strong consideration. The station road bridge had to go through the whole process as to all of our budgets where we need to have it referred to the finance committee the finance committee needs to come back with a recommendation there needs to be a hearing a public hearing on it so that there's a public invited participation and all of that has to precede the action of the council on the budget and we expect that there as well we know that there will be a hearing that the finance committee will have in relation to the major operating budget and the date is at this point been set for May 14th and the only portion that was split off and had a separate hearing has already taken place in April 4th that was for the regional schools because it was wise to deal with regional school portion of the budget separately and in sync with our other members who are dealing with town meeting schedule good now you mentioned earlier you don't know the detail of the line items but you know what the parameters are can you address what the nature of the parameters and to whatever extent you can share those in a way that would be useful for the viewers to hear that would be great. Well I think that is very simple and where it really works out to the stand 80 percent of the budget is the operating budget and the operating budget is what provides police officers to provide public safety firefighters to provide fire safety and provide the ambulance service department DPW staff to come in and plow roads and take care of roads and fill potholes and you know the bulk of it is personnel they're personnel who are working for us now they are providing service and the schools are in the elementary schools are part of the regular budget the regional schools are also within the budget a budgeted amount but it's a different process but it still amounts to the same thing we have a town that does things we provide service for people we provide important service for people and the bulk of the budget ultimately is what do we need to continue those services. So if that's 80 percent of the budget what's 20 percent. Well it's 20 percent of the split in two fashions part of it is capital and you know we can talk about that for a moment but it's anywhere from small to big and the other part is there are certain mandated things that we have to do things that prior legislators have told us we have to do or prior contractual commitments pension give you three real quick pension yeah what's called other post-employment benefits which is we've made promises to retirees to pay their health insurance and we need to pay their health insurance regional transit authority I give you actually a fourth charter school tuition okay very good so and that's basically that plus the capital is the other 20 percent yes so let's talk about capital for a few minutes here so last week when our town council president was on we went through the four major projects and we went through the a little bit about the roads and and sidewalks and interested in your perspective as the chair of the finance committee about how people in town should be thinking about capital because it's an important part of the budget there are important projects out there but maybe the list is longer than could be done at any given time how do we as a community wrestle with that and how do you as a finance committee chair wrestle with that it is a challenge and I'm pleased that the council president outlined four major projects which have been something that the prior select board also had identified as prior projects and was working on as part of the difficulty that we're having right now is that because the school project was delayed the cost to build a school has gone up so we're going to be possibly paying more money to construct a slightly smaller school and it's just a matter and had it been done the first day but we are where we are and so we do have some difficult decisions to make and in order to be able to fund all of these projects are several things that we have to do one is we have to look at how much we can build you know can we build building that we ideally like or do we need to build something a little bit less and I analogize that to somebody's building their house and they're going to decide what they want to put into their house and how big they want to make their house they make tough decisions and is a community we're going to have to make those same kinds of decisions second is when you build something and so the spacing has is a factor in the order in which you are going to order and how much you do because if you borrow a whole lot of money at once it you run into the ability to make those borrowing commitments if you spread it out over a longer period of time then the paying back of the bonds get spread out over a longer period of time so we have to make those decisions and then another set of decisions the council will need to make is at what point do we go to the voters for and ask them to consider a debt exclusion override and that's a fancy term but it's really amounts to what in other communities in the United States they call bond issues it's asking the voters to authorize issuance of bonds to fund a specific building project and understand that their taxes will be increased for the period of time that is necessary to repay those bonds so we are not going to be able to build all of these projects within the existing revenue stream because revenue stream has to also pay back debt right so we have to decide what it is that we're going to be asking our voters and then the voters will have to decide and of course we know that there's some matching state funds for schools and library which are two of the projects on the list and but there aren't for the fire station and DPW improvements that are needed so those those things will no doubt have some influence in the discussion but there is another option here and that is to increase the tax base and you increase the tax base by creating more structures that are then taxed and so in speaking with the town council president Lynn Griesmer in last week's show she said the new community resources committee is likely at some point not so long from now to raise the question of creating some kind of a mechanism either a committee or a task force or something that will take a look at economic development within the community and that's not necessarily in the jurisdiction of the finance committee on the other end the revenue that might be generated by that would be available to the finance committee and of course the town manager and the council to be able to afford to do more of the work that we need to do in town absolutely well stated and I actually asked to be considered and was appointed to the community resources committee because I felt that it was important to have an overlap between the two committees because one side the finance committee is principally dealing with the expense side of budget the other committee is dealing with the revenue side of the budget but they're both the budget and you can't have one without the other absolutely not now we got a little bit sidetracked when we were talking about the parameters and I just want to make sure that you made all the points you wanted to make about that you said that there was 80% of the budget was basically personnel and a bunch of services and then the other 20% reflected contractual responsibilities mandates and capital so for example in the state legislature the only major parameter we have as we build the budget is what is the what is our revenue estimate that we're going to use for the next fiscal year which is which is basically a crystal ball exercise because nobody knows 18 months from now how much revenue will have been collected in the 12 months from the end of the fiscal year to the beginning of the fit going back to the beginning of the fiscal year and you're actually writing the budget six months before that so you're projecting 18 months forward so how do you how do you handle revenue estimates and are there any other parameters that you have to consider or the town manager has to consider when he's building the budget before you get to see all those line items in October of every year for quite a number of years we have had a what we called at that point a four board meeting because it involved the select board finance committee the school committee and the library trustees and the meeting was with the town manager and the finance director or finance department staff and they would present their recommended budget estimates and then the budget estimates would go through a process they suggested a division of the operating budget side as to how much would should go to schools libraries and to municipal functions and the current year were in sort of this transition so the traditional four board meeting did in fact happen on October of 18 and it was so we are working off of those estimates as in prior years the staff looks at the actual numbers as they change the taxation we can project pretty clearly the part that is a little bit more difficult for us is the amount from state aid and so we have to periodically test that against first the governor's recommendation and then the house recommendation and ultimately this what in the house the recommendation is right as ways means then the house action the same thing happens in the Senate so it's an iterative iterative process but which gets readjusted periodically but I imagine that state had to do the same thing yeah except for recessions you can pretty well count on the governor's number being the least and if the house matches that number you know that you're likely to have a number at approximately that and a month later the Senate budget will come out so there was some predictability we even though you didn't get a resolution adopted by the legislature all the time you got some predictability sometimes it was a resolution adopted by the house the governor in the Senate and boom you knew exactly what was going to happen other years they they didn't do a resolution but it as you went through that process it got it got clear and clear what the numbers can be only in recessions do you have the most serious of that of that problem because what if the revenues keep tanking believe me I remember that because I was on the finance committee of the old town meeting back in the days of the last recessions so I've lifted and the number kept changing this year which is what we're only ultimately concerned about the projections that were made knocked over have so far held to be pretty good through the governor's budget and obviously if the House Ways and Means Committee does something radically different from what the governor's number was that will be a number that is known to the town manager before presenting the budget on May 1st and only the Senate number will not only the Senate number will not be known but that is no different than it would have been for operating under town meeting rules now do you expect the for the all-town board meeting that you described in October which was the historic an historic part of the process do you expect that to continue going forward yes I expect that we will still have the same kind of a budget projection meeting going forward and some discussion that will allow us to give guidance to the superintendent and the library director for the development of their budgets that has the recommendation of the manager and the imprimatur of the council because otherwise you can't get a responsible budget developed for schools and libraries and presented back to the town manager to then incorporate into the town budget so those meetings are here's my wish list and then a response by the town saying you may be being a little bit too ambitious this year well it's always a little bit of that possibility but by hit what I what I found in the old process and I don't expect anything different on this one is that after the October meeting and a decision was made and actually the under the old process it was up to the finance committee to make a recommendation because that was a committee of the town meeting and so they would say this is the amount that we think is appropriate for the school budget and then the schools have their wish list but they ultimately understand the need to develop and did follow through developing a budget that fit the number and unfortunately there were back to the same thing all the way through is that if you decide you're gonna want to add something really significantly new it is required to think about what to drop because there isn't enough because there isn't enough and we've always counted on new growth to get back to your other point I was encountered on some new growth but it's just enough to still keep us in pace with where we are it doesn't really allow us to add anything substantially new and different and I think that's where the community resources committee discussion really is going to be the most important and since we've run out of time we can't add anything new and substantial to this conversation so I hope you got a better understanding of how our chair of the finance committee and his colleagues are going to be working with us to form a budget as we move forward with standing up our new form of government so thank you so much for being here Andy and good luck with your work thank you you're welcome