 All right, so tonight we have the town manager and the W town manager, Jim Fee and Alex McGee, who will talk about your budget and answer other questions and talk about a few issues that have come up. Right, so I'll just turn it over to Jim. Sure. Good evening, everyone. As the chair mentioned, I'm Jim Fee. I am the town manager with me tonight is Alex McGee, deputy town manager and finance director. No. Many of you, I know, and a few of you have already met this evening. So, good evening. Pleased to be here. Happy to have the time to walk you through the proposed fiscal year 2025 budget. Tonight, we'll do an overview of the budget process and overview at a high level of the budget itself. We'll speak to some of the, what we'll call the budget highlights, including maintaining the board's override commitments and investments in response to community needs review the long term outlook, the long range plan, as well as the next steps. And before I turn it over to Alex to go into the details. As Christine mentioned, you know, as we circle around to the end of the presentation review, some of the, you know, new news that we've received, but it, you know, it has been a bit of a, you know, what I'll say, a tumultuous budget season already. We just know, you know, this committee voted on prior to the special town meeting in the fall. The issue with the fiscal year 2024 override. So, you know, we were starting in a position where we did not collect that $7 million in fiscal year 2024 instead pushing to fiscal year 2025. We initially received, you know, about a month ago, the news from the group insurance commission, the GIC that we're going to see a significant premium rate increase this year on aggregate estimated between 8% and 10%. Again, they don't hone in on that until early March, needless to say we generally carry a 5% increase there and it's a very large budget so that was, you know, an over $1 million hurdle that we've already dealt with, and as alluded to the governor's budget H2 did not bring the best of news for the town of Arlington. At the highest level we carried for chapter 70 state aid and you're projecting in the previously approved long range plan of 5% growth rate on education aid given what we had seen in recent years. And as a result of the ongoing implementation of the student opportunity act, however, that came in at roughly 1%. So, that result in yet another sort of fiscal year 25 hit on the order of magnitude of about $650,000. It's actually a bigger hit on the education side but we budgeted for 1% growth in unrestricted general government aid and that actually came in at 3% offsetting a bit of that shortfall or deficit so just wanted to point out some of, you know, the hurdles that we know we're facing we certainly don't yet have solutions to all of them but look forward to certainly working with this committee to find our way through it. So turn it through. Turn it to Alex to sort of talk through some of the specifics and we'll be going back and forth. All right. Next slide. Perfect. So, a little bit about our budget processes. A lot of you are very likely aware, but some of you may not be so we're going to run over it. Just a long endeavor takes a large portion of the fiscal year to complete our budget process work. I'd say probably like somewhere between 60 and 75% through the process at this point. So this starts really in earnest in August with our capital planning. We launch by asking our department heads to work with within their departments to figure out what their capital needs are. They do a five-year look out and then they say, right, this is what we want. We hope people bring their needs for five years out. And then as the plan moves forward through the years we're able to meet those needs and fund them appropriately. Inevitably we always have things that become critical and so we have to reshuffle the debt every year and so that involves the work of the capital planning committee. The work in earnest is mostly November, December. And then there's a little bit of a lag. And then we begin sort of report building starting really tomorrow is when that will kick off again. The operating budgets really start their development in earnest in sort of November that October, November, our department heads. We distribute materials to them, explain sort of what the situation will we believe the situation that we've been in the fiscal year to be. And so they plan for any new expense requests they may have. So what we call their ordinary expenses and it's not personnel related. And then we work together with all of our department heads to work on all of our personnel and salary sheets brings us to the January through April timeframe. You all folks are beginning sort of really into the teeth of your work now dissecting all the departmental budgets. The budget was really put together by town manager, myself, Julie Wayman, who's our previous budget director now as a town's treasurer. She's recently promoted and Gail Stitzen is our soon to be departing budget director. We'll talk about that later. But so the budget was delivered, January, and then 12 to the select board and the thin comma chair. And now you all are doing your work. Over the next couple of months, I'll be working in our office to develop the financial plan, which is sort of the bigger budget book that we all love. And then we have a girls town meeting and then hopefully we have a budget that is adopted and appropriated in May and the end of the June, we're turning the clock again for any this week. So that's process serve long winded right next slide please. All right, so budget overview. This is just a snapshot of our budget broken into different categories. This is the revenue side of the page. This usually grows pretty steady increment. As we all know, there is an override that is being applied in FY 25. So we'll see a pretty significant jump in our property tax growth in FY 25. Our other funds. You'll also notice there's a huge decrease there. If you don't can see that I'm not sure, but we don't have the ability to spend ARPA money as a general revenue loss that next year. So we already tapped that to the $210 million, which is the cap so we cannot use ARPA for like a revenue replacement anymore in the future. And so that, you know, our funding really is what allows the time to sort of squeeze a couple really better full year out of the last override a little further. Maybe next slide. So this gives you a sense of revenue categories, just a visual breakdown. The lion's share so 75% comes from property taxes. Local receipts make up about 5% state aid and various forms think of about 13%. And then the remainder, about 7% total is broken up into some other smaller categories, including free cash, which in recent years, we've had record free cash. So that does help to offset our next year's operating budget with a policy where we spend 50% of our previous year certified free cash as a revenue source. Next slide, please. All right, expenditures. So this is sort of the working plan for our budget for next year. Some high level notes. We are growing our municipal departments by. We'll talk more about this in detail, but about 3.22%. This remains sort of under our growth cap. The number looks like it's a little higher, but we have a $250,000 override. It's added into this figure. And that is to help offset our looming self the waste and recycling issue that contract expires the end of fiscal 2025. And so that is something that is ongoing and will become a pretty big challenge in the future in the near future. What else? So schools. The Arlington public school department grew at a pretty high clip this year on a lot of that in FY25 a lot of it comes in the form of override commitments. The override was really built around funding the schools at more appropriate levels. And so the, the growth there was a totaled out at 8%. Again, that was held to 3.5% per the commitments for general ed 6.5% for special ed growth. And then a 3.1 million dollar increase over the top of that. What else? Warrant articles. Looks like we have a high, a large percentage jump there, but it's really not a huge dollar figure. Those flex up and down annually based on what sorts of warrant articles are coming before the town. We're looking, we're exploring ways to further offset that there may be some opportunity to offset some of that with park funding. For some of the warrant articles, we're looking a little deeper into that. So, all in, we're looking at about a 6% increase over FY24. Next slide please. Again, this is our expenditure breakdown. Just a visual representation. You'll see that the orange and the gray slivers or slices of the pie. Those make up our education. And all the gray being minute man orange being the Arlington school department school department. So together, they make up about 48% of our budget pot right the darker blue looking wedge of the pie, which is about 20%. Those are sort of the town municipal operations. Yellow on the left side, that is your sort of we look at that as overhead. It's not tied to department. So this is healthcare pensions that sort of thing. The second largest blue wedge on the top left, that's capital. And that, that is a fairly significant piece of the pie and then the remainder we have a 1% income reserve fund warrant articles at 1% and then overlay reserve, which we reserve. In anticipation of not fully collecting all property taxes and allowing for abatements taxes. Now, turn it back to Jim for some highlights. Right. Next slide. So, I know I believe your folks were distributed what I understand the finance team calls the budget explainer, but sort of the roadmap of what is new this year. But I would touch upon some of what we'll call the highlights. As Alex noted, total expenditure growth was at 6.3%. But if you control for some of the override commitments, which I wanted to illustrate here just to further demonstrate that the spending commitments were met. Absent the override commitments, you'd see town growth of $1,332,000 for approximately 3.22%. Again, there's a 3.25% cap. We don't necessarily view that as the target. We view that as the cap of which you would go up to, but we, you know, some capacity remains there. And then across, you know, school growth was at 4.56%. If you remove the FY 25. Override commitment of $3.1 million. Again, that is sort of a blended rate because that includes both general education, which is allowed to grow at 3.5% in conjunction with special ed, which now grows at a rate of 6.5%. So Alex alluded to, you know, much like you are beginning to dissect the town budgets, we spend a significant amount of time dissecting the departmental budget requests. We get sheets with new requests this year. The department head submitted 38 requests total for a value of $830,000 in new expenses. Obviously, as we work through our process meeting with department heads. We whittled that down to funding 20 new requests, many of which were at a level probably significantly below the requested figure. So, the town expense increases totals $270,000, 717. What made up the bulk of this increase was the MTP pay and classification plan, which was introducing a ninth step to that plan. And that is for sort of middle, what I call middle management folks within the organization, they are non union, they are in a collective bargaining unit. But they would generally follow the ATP group, which is a collectively bargaining group, you know, whatever agreement they had reached. Unfortunately, we're not able to fund that ninth step last year that would have been committed. So we're following through on that commitment within the FY 25 budget to meet that earlier commitment. You know, a big jump in electricity. So, noting utility costs here, we're adding $55,000 to the facilities department's budget. We'll know. You know, we do competitively procure in bulk our supply. That contract does expire each December that we're locked in from multiple years. So we just saw in December of 2023. So for our January meter reads, our supply rate has gone up 46%. You couple that with a 10% increase on the distribution and transmission side for winter rates on ever source. It results across the board in a pretty big spike in electricity costs. Also a bump in the facilities department for maintenance contract increases. Again, those are things we procure in three year intervals via the competitive process. And with each year of that agreement, oftentimes the chosen vendor has built in some sort of escalator. You know, the largest contract usually is the custodial contract for the overnight nighttime cleaning that takes place. We also have contracts for elevator service and maintenance. We have roof maintenance. We have an electrical contract, a plumbing contract, an HVAC contract, and all of those hourly rates go up each year. So it's sort of a contractual increase being funded there. There are also some additions in the information technology budget that are new this year. So one is a dedicated internet service provider. So a new data line, in fact, for this building to support the upcoming body worn camera programs for the Allen's police department. The sheer amount in size of those video files that needs to be handled and processed on a daily basis. The best practice is to, in fact, have it have its own internet line instead of, you know, adding on to the to the existing fiber in the building. We're also pursuing, seemingly for the first time, but in response to sort of a growing threat to our networks is deploying some, you know, actual investments in cybersecurity. As you may have read my budget message, it seems that in a few reds and news about Lowell and some other water utilities that, in fact, municipal entities are no longer, you know, sort of forgotten about right like, you know, as it may be with respect to cybersecurity and, you know, effectively fished a few times in recent memory. You know, if you guys have town emails you may have seen some things come through that are seemingly bogus that that does happen is a growing threat so we're trying to introduce $5,000 a year to implement a penetration testing program so we can work with a third party vendor to sort of probe our network and identify weaknesses but also, you know, use those funds as each year moves to, you know, identify and develop in revised disaster recovery plans. You know, perform different exercises that we need to as well as an element I am by no means tech guru and I think we have some in the room but what's described as an endpoint detection and response protocol. You know, I know that I sort of the industry leader crowd strike. So we would be looking to engage with a vendor like that that sort of provides a software package that is both that is adaptable and is being maintained to sort of respond to these growing and evolving threats that is happening quite rapidly that lives in your network at, you know, at each end point so that the devices that are there with end users and find things that, you know, get buried when someone was in there and is often the case that, you know, what was left during the phishing attempt that, you know, sort of malware or ransomware will live there for some period of time, long before it becomes active. So this is the software that's constantly crawling our network and our devices to work for those potential threats but also has a response mechanism for sort of isolating them in a way. And as well as upgrading or what we'll call a GIS platform modernization. So many of you may be familiar with the software package we've used for a number of years called people GIS that is becoming a bit of an outdated platform. It no longer has the support that it used to. In fact, it was once a local company when we, you know, based in Ireland and then it has since been sold and bought out. It serves a number of different departments for various different purposes. It no longer frankly meets our needs, but it no longer seems to meet the public needs as well. We make all those data layers publicly accessible on a website separate from the town and people do a lot of modeling and spatial analysis and figure out how zoning changes might impact the town or different development. So we're looking to switch over to what I know to be the industry standard that is the Esri Arc GIS platform that is far more robust has a number of different tools allows for different analytics. And frankly, many of those things are built in you, you get to benefit from how robust, you know, the Microsoft platform is, but also get to the advantage of tools that other people have sort of developed and it becomes part of the pool. So that assists us with asset management, work order, see, you know, anything you've been envisioned with a GIS platform. It's something I could envision using to help document overnight parking requests and overnight play anything that you can envision spatially. This is something that will benefit, you know, sort of the community at large, but also a number of town departments. In terms of personnel on the general fund side, the only proposed increase this year is for one part time circulation librarian. For roughly $18,000 and the desired intent there and this is based on. A lot of things that I have heard over my years working here, but. You know, a desire to restore library hours and service levels to where they were back in 2003 when we cut a number of staff leading up to that and we started closing the library on Thursday mornings. So this one strategic investment would allow us to restore Thursday morning hours at the Robbins library. We estimate that that'll serve about 200 people every Thursday that are looking to get those library services. And, you know, it's strategically placed on the circulation side of things in the past four years in aggregate we've seen at least a 25% increase in circulation at our library. So, not only that we also introduced a sort of pretty robust library of things that involves anything from metal detectors to selling machines and other complex items that frankly require a lot more. Handling inspection and training on the circulation side of things. So, this would sort of provide the additional staffing, but also through the week, the additional support we need in circulation. So, a fairly small investment for actually a robust return on that investment in terms of increasing service delivery. And then, you know, a couple other highlights I think listed here a street light repairs and replacements. So folks may recall, you know, a little over 10 years ago, we converted all our street lights to LEDs as part of the green communities program. So, and up until this point, when they fail, they had a 10 year warranty. We're able to call and get them replaced. So, didn't carry with it much of a cost for the town. We are now outside of our warranty window. So, you will have to pay for the repairs in place replacements moving forward. So, unless and until I know we've discussed this via the capital plan about finding the right time to actually revamp all of the fixtures because even the technology has come along, especially with dimming and lighting levels. So, for now we are expecting in order to be able to keep up with those replacements that we need to do that are no longer covered under warranty to see increased costs there. And then finally, field maintenance, that is another one of those things that we bid out competitively procure for three year intervals. And again, those costs tend to increase with each year. So, many of you may know, like, we have a parks division that does a lot of the mowing and striping. But this is with respect to our turf treatment and protocol, like fertilization, aeration, overseeding, slice eating, grub treatments, you know, any number of sort of treatments that we put on all of our acres of turf across the town. So get the next slide. So that the next slide here and I know this lived in the budget explainer we don't have to go through, you know, each and every line but these are in fact all of the increases, but all of, or at least some of the decreases as well. So, we did reduce the town's posted budget by $20,000. We did reduce the budget by $7,000 and that's noticed in a telephone expense line. And that is, in fact, because there were some hard lines, I believe, related to the high school and some other buildings. So some copper that was no longer necessary. We were able to cancel that service and not shown here is another approximately $3,000 software decrease as we begin to phase away from informants are old software for ICS prior water meter platform. We're sort of working on that transition. We have less of a commitment necessary to that program. So we're able to reduce that line. I think it was about $2,600. So, in then, in addition to this, you know, the $270,000 in sort of new expenses. The remaining portion of sort of the town ask where the town budget increases with set aside for the salary reserve. And that is because fiscal year 24 was the year of expiration for each and every one of our collective bargaining agreements so fiscal 2526 and 27 is a new contract cycle for all of our unions. So as was customary in the past, we set aside money in advance of future settlement of those collective bargaining agreements. And what I'd say there is we tried to be as aggressive as possible in trying to set aside as much money as possible. And though it's not yet public, we are, you know, sort of finalizing our benchmark salary survey against the town manager 12 communities. I would remind you our color pattern for the last 3 years was probably 1 and a half to 2 or the last 3 years. So, like, how are you about 1.75 1.8% and needless to say, I think we're finding as a result of that salary survey, given what has happened in other municipalities, but what has happened more generally with the high inflationary pressure over the past 3 years that we have in fact lost ground in certain areas of the market and with respect to certain positions. So, you know, we're happy to set aside as much as we reasonably could have in hopes of potentially providing stronger call a pattern moving forward, if we can. So, with that, I'm going to turn it over to Alex to speak to some of the select board. All right. Before we do that, let's ask some questions. What you've covered so far. That's okay. I'll start with 2 questions have this office agreed to wear body cameras. It's the body worn camera policy itself that is yet to be agreed to and is set for arbitration. What's the difference. So, there's agreement in principle to a body worn camera program this it's already been bargained in terms of a percent of salary has been agreed to for the bump it's the policy itself that governs their. Deployment in how they'll be used when they'll be used in those things. There's some language in there that there's, you know, some issues to be resolved with and we're set to hopefully resolve those this spring. And field maintenance has there been any thought to increase user fees to offset the increased costs in the maintenance. So, without getting into dollars and cents. Yes. What we're finding is that it wasn't just field maintenance that is gone up. In fact, the, our quarter party contract has gone up significantly as well. So the recreation department is reviewing exactly how much the user fees can go up. But in large part, if they were to go up, it would be dedicated to funding. You know, the quarter parties at all of the fields as well. Let's jump in real quick. One thing that we, we've sort of done over the last couple of months is ask all of our department needs to review all of the fees that they charge at the department level for all kinds of different services that are offered. We've been, have not been updated in quite a long time. And so we're just taking a holistic review townwide at all of our fees and we will be making some recommendations soon on the changes. And so we're in the middle of that process right now. But that is something that we're working on as an FYI. Any other questions? So I have two questions. The first one is your electricity costs. Is it our use of electricity that's going up? Or is it the cost of being a lot of our costs? Is the per kilowatt hour cost. So, you know, just send them here, maybe 8 cents and now we're at 12 cents. And then distribution has gone up as well. So, more than 1.5%, 1.3%. And then contracted services. Similarly, the, have we had any of the rental of a bunch of them developed every year. What does average is the increase that we get asked for. It is oftentimes above 2%, saying a lot of times it's around 5%. So, not within 2.5%. Just checking. Thank you. I had a question about the drop in spending that you mentioned that went from about 5 million to about half a million. I mean, I, are in terms of the health and human services budget. So I know who do still have off sets. Are those 450,000 that is in there. Yes. Okay. So the drop was the $5 million in general fund revenue offset that was permitted by treasury. And that's the steep cliff, but the staffing remains except for 1, our position in HHS, which was no longer needed. That was a health compliance office position, which is the one difference between 24 and 25. Perfect. Thank you very much. Just so you know that that $450,000 is not tied to our profits right there. That is an overlay reserve surplus that we're budgeting to be used as a revenue source, which is sort of standard. It's an annual thing. This does not showcase all of our ARCA funding and where it's sort of like is found throughout the organization. Charlie then John. Thank you. Thank you. I have two questions. One year, a couple of years ago, one body camera first raised as any possibility in the orange police department. There was considerable discussion at the finance committee and later a town meeting about the policies. Not to do with the use of the cameras by the police, but how the data that was produced would be protected. And. You know, the example is it was given by 1 of our members was that. That can be all sorts of private scenes recorded on these cameras that are not necessarily crime related or whatever. And that needs some privacy controls. Is there any policy about that just been built. I don't have a good answer to that question for you this evening. Can we take a look at that? I mean, I don't need a response tomorrow, but I think it's an important question. Yeah, I think so. And it is often the case with much of what's handled here at the police department is. There's a desire to segregate that information and have it be managed by a very particular third party vendor that we do. For much of what's collected here to limit sort of access to the outside world. And not just the outside world, even within the organization and having it sort of live on a separate network. So that is fairly customary for what gets handled here. And I imagine the same is true. But I want to be able to speak more intelligently to exactly what the plan is to make sure that that's secure. Thank you. The second question is that you mentioned that we were finally getting rid of the informants software, which is great. It's only taken about 20 years. Not getting rid of it entirely, but almost working towards it. Yeah. So we had a big investment in new reader readers. Remote reader readers and seemed like my recollection from prior years discussion was that it could not be implemented because of this informant system. Have we gotten over that hump or is that still a problem? But I think the hump that we're still getting over is finishing the deployment of all of the new meters and readers. So we're still in the midst of that program. I think we still have maybe six or 700 meters that we're still trying to get into households. And, you know, we experienced a pretty significant delay in that project with supply chain issues. We just we're not able to get as much of the products as we needed to. But that is underway. We're sort of sending second notices, final notices, but until we've completely redeployed the new product, we can't fully turn off the old product. It's the availability of the meter readers that's keeping informants as opposed to informants preventing the meter readers from coming in. Yeah, that's my understanding. We have to get all of the new meters and meter readers installed before we can. This is a program that we started at least five years ago. It's not long as I recall. I mean, I was on the Capital Planning Committee when we acquired or at least allegedly funded the new meters. So that in, you know, I'm noticing some bit of discrepancy because a good portion of this project we are funding with ARPA dollars, which didn't come until after five years ago. So, and I'd have to look at exactly what what may have been contemplated five years ago. And I know we had a multi hundred thousand dollar project to find and budgeted some time ago. Sure. And then even it would be nice to be back there. And at the time we were looking at the possibilities labor savings as a result of this. What's the complicated outcome now on that. That's your labor savings with respect to we used to have people going around, you know, going down to the basements and reading meters, you know, and then we had meters outside so they come in now. I understand the new program is remote reader reader reading truck drives around picks up the signal and cores it. So that means a lot fewer people climbing up steps or going behind buildings, etc. What's going to happen with that personnel player. We've been doing remote reads like this now for a number of years. So that that wouldn't be a new and upcoming change. The way it is now that the meters go to a transmitter that lives on the side of your house. And then that transmitter signal to what's known as a collector device, which we have a handful of around town at sort of high points. So it's actually been some time now that we've been able to read most meters from afar so I don't see there being a significant shift once this phase of deployment. Then what what's holding up. What's keeping informants. The fact that we still have some old technology out there. It's a much smaller step but we're essentially still running two systems. Thank you. John. Yeah, sure. My question relates to the over override stabilization fun. It looks like it's it's pretty high at the end of FY 24, 7016 million, which is, you know, solve like 10 million higher than. And we saw at least on the version I'm looking at last year. So that came in a lot higher than expected at the end of FY 24. Which, which version are you looking at? So I'm looking at a verdict from last year. I think it's the final line. But it looks like here it says we're going to finish up the override stabilization fun with 7.9 million. And it seems like that turned into 1716 million, which sounds like great news. Is that true? My generally accurate here. I don't know what it says for 24, but I will tell you right now that that is in fact. A live number 17.6 million. Indeed. Yeah. And I guess, you know, and I think I have the final version last year, maybe I know, but it seems like it's good news. It seems like it's higher than expected. And is that, you know, somewhat of a windfall and does that affect the long range plan in a good way? It affected it in a good way in such that we didn't need an override and fiscal year 24. Okay. What I think we're seeing as a relic for that FY 24 budget is that the override stabilization fund figure in that long range plan. Was was likely a sort of like static figure that had not been getting shown the benefit of interest over time. But I'll tell you right now that that particular account pulls in, you know, upwards of $120,000 a month and interest given where rates are right now. And where the principal balance is. So that is a figure as of today. And that is without even having reconciled some of those. You know, we're, you know, usually four to six weeks behind reconciling all the various bank accounts. So that's what lives in what we call units or financial system today, but it continues to grow because we're not yet drawing down from it. So if you go to the top, you know, the override stabilization fund that was utilized in FY 24 seems like a pretty low 795. Okay. So it just seems like, you know, it's good news. And I'm curious, you know, when you get to FY 25 still, you know, basically the budget we're looking at next year. You know, you're almost out of zero and stabilization funds. Is, is, uh, you know, I guess my question is, why is, you know, why is the stabilization fund dominant with all that good news? And I know I'm generalize that good news. Why is the stabilization fund still not 209 K next year. We'll be looking at next year, the FY 25, FY 26 budget yet. Yeah, yeah, there's like a number of ways to sort of explain this because there's so many different movies in here. So the first thing. So our free cash usage is one thing we need to key in here and we use a 10 year trailing average to calculate our usage of free cash in our out years. So, so we use that to forecast going forward, but in the last couple of years, we've had record high levels of free cash. So what we're projecting in our plan, our usage, we know it's going to be so that way 26 we're showing 5.704 million dollars in free cash. We are very likely to have a higher number than that in that category. So anything that we can contribute in that free cash line will drive our usage of override stable addition down. Additionally, we are carrying. Just look at FY 25 and our local receipts line. We're carrying 10.25 million dollars there. We estimate our revenues very conservatively with our local receipts and anticipation of not screwing ourselves over. We don't want to end up upside down on our receipt collection. In last year, we came in at about 15 million dollars in our local receipts. So you'd be an idea like the benchmark again. All of that excess money closes to free cash. So there's a number of things that contribute to this. Additionally, things that build into our free cash number department called turn back. So then you might get is appropriated but remains on since that goes back into our free cash number and then is appropriated into a future year. Right. So with that being said, we're looking at a, you know, a large red number and at point 27. This plan. It compounds your issues over time. And so any sort of a, any sort of an issue is magnified each year, it goes out. So that 17 million dollar, if you're looking in your budget book. The deficit network 27 is likely to be smaller than that based on the benefit of higher free cash numbers and turn backs, etc. Also, we're likely to have marginally better new growth and other sort of like revenue numbers, which is very conservative. So the point being that our, our override stabilization fund, we will likely not drop down as quickly as we're showing on this plan. But we do have to plan for it just in case. Sure. Thank you. So let's have the questions focused on department of budgets. And then we'll talk about the long range plan. We have a couple slides on. Right now. Let's just have the questions as to what we've done so far. Topher and then Sophie. Yeah, so. Back to inform. You had said there was $3,000 reduction. Approximately $2,600 the IT department. Okay. Because the IT budget here shows it budgeted at 7,000. Right. So it's one of those things that's not yet shown, but then, you know, they recently recorded to us is having right size that number. Okay. And then the other thing I noticed in the pie chart is capital budget was 11%. And I had always been on the impression I would assess that 5%. So explain. Sure. Right. There, yep. Is that it? Is it. Excluded. That includes debt. That includes that includes offsets as well. So we, we keep our 5% number. That is a number that we like really won't move off or down work very well here. And. Yeah, so we're at 5%. The. There is a very intricate series of expenditures that we consider. And then there are also like a huge number of offsets that we consider. Which allows us to zero in on a 5% number. And we can. Look at that capital budget more closely or I can send it to you, but it's actually in your. Right. Right. Okay. No, I mean, the general just like. Right. Just the 5%. Yes. Yeah. Just a comment on that. Alex, the 5% is. On the non-exempt budget. The reason that that number is higher is we have a significant exempt. Right. The high school, for example. Yeah. And that's what it is to do. Right. Right. Sophie. Yeah. Question or comment on the user fees that you were mentioning from the direct department that. Because. They use the services a lot of their children. Has the town looked or are you also considering different fees for out of town? Who use the services? I know, for example, on our system, it says. Resident fee non-resident fee. They've been the same. They've made a difference between non-residents. And also whether there's a. I thought of allowing a priority for registration to residents before allowing non-residents to register. I know, for example, tennis programs in the summer. Fill up a lot of time. A lot of times are on waitlist and with many non-residents using this program. So. Something I don't know. Have thought about that at all or. I have not, you know, I do know that we, in terms of the resident, non-resident or private versus sort of like public youth sports group. You know, I know taking like the high school field, for example, when I did. At one point have a hand in managing that. There were a higher rates for outside entities. So I do think that precedent is there, but this isn't necessarily something I have. Discuss with the recreation director. Happy to do so. But my understanding was always that we. Always fully intended to meet sort of our local needs first in terms of one week grant. Field permits and giving priority for time. Before we would start to give. You know, sort of feel time to outside users. So I would, I'd say it's not just feel time. It's also the classes that my program offers. Right. Thank you. Jones. Yeah. Please tell me that includes some training. That's where the real security is. Teaching people not to click that link. Behind the keyboard. Yeah. And 5000 doesn't seem like much. Yeah. And right that. That's, that's 5000 in addition. I don't know what the total. Yeah. That's 5000 to do penetration testing and to do outside activities. We are just awarded yet another grant from the state to do. So internal cybersecurity training. They've set up a new platform that's going to be offered to municipalities. So this is going to be something we'll be rolling out. Okay. To all employees to understand what's. With the newest risks are and how they appear and how they look just like something you'd get from outlook and, you know, the various forms they come in. So that, that is pending and likely to occur before FY 25 starts. That's something that I, I like. I beat every time we have a department meeting. Like our finance department divisions. If you can talk to your people and make sure they're being aware of fishing tax there. They look legitimate. They look like they're coming from people within the organization all the time. If something looks a little out of place, take the phone and call someone to help desk and don't touch any links. I think that like saying consistent is important also for us. And that's something that we do at our department at meeting all the time also. So that's something that we are focusing in on more. I think. Yeah. It's probably, and it's strange just now, at least once a week where I get a text message from someone like, Hey, did you just email me? I get them daily. Right. Like, no, but like that it's coming in as my name. Oh, geez. Yeah. And I was asking for something. There's sufficient investment and training because that's really what's the most effective. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Overrides. Okay. Overwrite. So as part of the recent override the select board. It makes certain commitments to the public before, you know, sponsoring work. Approving of the ballot question. This budget maintains all of those commitments. Which financially they're three and a quarter percent. A growth cap. On the town three and a half percent. Grows for schools and their gen ed budgets and system. That. It maintains the commitments to respond to enrollment pressures on both. Positive and negative. So the school's budget flexes up or down with the. In addition or subtraction of students at the rate of 50% of. That's these per pupil funding number. This, you know, it's pretty significant commitment investments in our school department. Some smaller investments in the town. We've made additional contributions to our open. Liabilities. Additional contributions to our mobility. So sidewalks and. Roadways through capital. And $250,000. In depth and into our sort of head off art. It's going to be a big problem. It's all the way through cycle. So we talked about this next year there. You know, so. This is separate from the budget, but so sort of as a promise was to try to look after our seniors a little more. So. Moving the senior circuit tax breaker into place. Adopting that program. So that will give. So the tax rebates our seniors in town. And. The bottom one is maintaining a 5% financial reserve. We have to know brainer. This is our, my personal top priorities. Keep our AAA bond rating here. It is very important that how we are. How we're able to borrow money. Next slide, please. So we've alluded to a revenue short. So we alluded to a revenue shortfall. This came from the governor's budget. Being funded funding chapter 70. State aid at a lower number than we had projected. The, what is called the student opportunity act increased funding for certain communities over a duration of time. Over the last two years. We have seen some significant increases in our chapter 78. We had projected that the, that that increase would remain high. We thought that a 5%. Revenue was relatively conservative that came in at just under 1%. Creating the $650,000 shortfall that we talked about earlier. So when you compound that over two years, because you lose out on that new growth level. You're going to grow off of in future years. It creates about a little over a million dollars. The deficit and FY. 26, if you go to the next slide. I doubt anyone will be able to see that unless you have a telescope, but you should be able to tell that there's a red number at the bottom. There's a red number at the bottom. Which used to be balanced to zero, right? So this is the whole that we're working to find out of. And so maybe next slide. I'm talking about, these are you Jim. Feel free to run through them is, you know, as Alex is alluding to, I didn't want to call out one thing that I realized we didn't mention, but we did get one bit of good news this year. And that was, you may have noticed that the Minuteman school budget. We're secret. So I want to call out that, you know, there was one bit of good news. I don't want it to be all doom and gloom that that did go down. And so I think that's probably a sort of a building off of that. That is due to their chapter 78 going up. It was also higher than they expected in fiscal year 24. And that left them with a bit of a surplus for member communities. The member community subsequently voted to take that surplus. And tackle the outstanding debt to be financed for the building project. So I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. And then coming due that will not necessarily be bonded. And of course we excluded that debt here in Arlington. So we will not have to put anything else for the Minuteman school building project on the tax rate recap. We won't have to raise it because it's going to be getting funded with that. The surplus chapter 78 from school year 24. So I just want to point out that there was that one shred of good news for not only fiscal year 24, but also fiscal year 24. So this is where we're looking to help time out of our revenue challenge you with chapter 78. So local receipts are ambulance revenue. You guys will likely recall last year there was a change in how our ambulance revenue was collected. We have advanced life support, basic life support. The long story short is that we now collect a lot more money into nearly as much into our ambulance revolving fund. The benefit to that is that in f. 23 collected almost a million dollars. 24 we're tracking to man comfortably over a million dollars. That's like through I think the November number that 522,000 that we collected already in our year to date, like in our f. 25 budget, we're carrying just $500,000 is an inverter. So we feel that we can comfortably grow that a little bit. That's something we're considering our overlay reserve surplus. This is money that has been budgeted into the overlay for over the accumulation of years. Anything that is not granted in abatements or it doesn't go uncollected, then gets close to it doesn't close to the general fund. It remains in the overlay as surplus. That account has grown to about $3.1 million. In order to access that money, the assessors have to do an analysis and verify what they believe their maximum liabilities are. And then they would then take a vote to allow the select board to consider that with their budget. So there's an official process there. We are likely to be able to grab some of that revenue. So just to put that in perspective, in the long range plan, you have it would have been shown was a decreasing or conservative overlay reserve surplus usage on the revenue side of the ledger. So for fiscal year 25, we have projected a $450,000 usage, noting in fiscal year 24 that it's 600,000. Historically, it's been, or at least for the past few years, it's been in that between six and $700,000 range. So as shown currently in fiscal year 25, it's at $450,000. But again, that's something that the board of assessors is working on as Alex alluded to. Great. And then new growth. We do know that we have some new projects coming online in FY 25. We are carrying a projection of $700,000 in new growth to our tax, our tax levy or property tax levy. The last two years, we've been a little over 1.2 million and 23 and then almost 1.3 million in FY 24. We're likely to crest over a million dollars in FY 25, just with what we know is in the pipeline right now. So we may be able to adjust upward a little bit there as well. On the expenditure side of the ledger, there are a number of warrant articles that we are considering how we can creatively fund them with and stick them into a part of a category to fund them. So specifically, we're looking at work on the master plan, the 250th celebration and also some capital projects that we may be able to fund via our boat. So we're looking at everything that we think that we can at this point. We've been consulting peers on what they've been doing, how they have looked at funding things with ARPA. And so we're trying to get creative on how we can reduce the sort of cash expense that we need to do some grants. Okay. More questions? Yes. Wait, chair. Okay. So we think we can increase some of the local receipts on the revenue side. We think we can grab more of the overland reserve than we had budgeted. We're going to go back up a little bit. And we think we're safe on the new growth despite the current slowdown in the real estate, just because what you know is in line. Yeah, part of it's what's already been 50% captured. So we are already guaranteed the other 50%, like the MIRAC project. And so I guess the question I have then is, what's the trend line on those two categories? Do you think we can keep it up going forward? Because obviously we don't have this funding this year, then we don't have a new growth base next year. So are we being appropriately consistent with on our trend projection? Yeah, certainly with ambulance revenues. I guess this is just a function of our new model, right? And, you know, we're, as Alex said, the year to date figure is actually quite a bit of a lag because we don't handle the billing directly. So much of it's getting processed through Armstrong. We don't know, but, you know, we're not, I guess we're not expecting less ambulance rides. We're probably expecting more ambulance rides. So, you know, in terms of those, I don't think we can speak to just the, those items that are sort of more economic, like that follow economic trends a bit more volatile. You know, we've, you know, even with permit revenue, though we're seeing different types of projects, permit revenue is still sort of blowing estimates out of the water again. So we haven't seen, I don't think exactly the slowdown that we thought we might see. So what kind of different projects are we seeing? I think we're not seeing, you know, we haven't seen quite as many single family home demolitions, but I would say is we're still seeing a number of projects. So this is interest rates impacting it. I think that impacts more so certain builders who are going to be facing the short-term impact of those higher interest rates, but homeowners doing large projects, which we call, we categorize those as $200,000 or greater. Seeing the name, same number of those projects, even those projects growing and cost $800,000 renovation, $600,000 renovation, obviously those folks are impacted by those interest rates too, but if it's, if you're building your forever home and you see what's on the horizon, you're likely just to refinance it, you know, after a few years. So I think it's deterred only a certain category of our builders who actually finance projects. We're still, right. We're still seeing a number of that pay cash and they are still, you know, still doing teardowns. We're still seeing some lot splits, you know, single families turning into two families. And we, we get you broke out of those lighter cremations. Thank you. Thank you. So, you mentioned before that. Anticipated insurance rates are two to 3% higher than we have in the plant. And it's a $21 million budget. So that's another $450,000 annual shortfall. You didn't mention that. I didn't hear you mentioned that in the numbers that you just calculating on the changes. That is captured in our budget. That the 8% number, which is over and above is captured within our budget. In the five year plan. Correct. Okay. Thank you. It's, you know, that because it's grouped with pensions and because the insurance budget also has workman's comp and a number of other things. When you look at that line, it's total growth shows us less than 8% because it's blended with those other categories, but it's just the health insurance premiums that are projected to go up by 8% to 10%. And when we found that out, right, there was sort of like a, it was about a million dollar hit to our insurance budget. Now that was one of the times we sat down with the school department and one of the areas we identified to provide some relief was having the after school programming staff and their insurance costs be born within the school department's budget. So, but that million dollar change is in the current budget. Yeah, we knew about that before publishing this plan. Yeah. We won't know, right? The final number until early March, and then we will react accordingly. You know, they'll announce, you know, the GIC in early March will announce the rates for the various plans. And then we have to go through and pair up. What those plans are versus which the plans are that are held by our employees. And some will go up a little bit more than others. And that's when we can finally hone in on what the actual figure is. Josh. Yeah, thank you. I don't know if it's relevant or not. We went to a seminar by the National Municipal Association and they had a seminar on rebuilding their municipal buildings in Lexington. And they said that they actually could sell the projects on dollar terms because they were billed at like, whatever the peak rate that they used per day. And determined their whole rate. And so the banks on batteries, they kind of diminished that load. I don't know if our utility goes done like that on your contract. Is it flush weight based on peak demand? At certain sites. Yes. At large consumption sites. Yes. They would be demand charges. So not at every facility. Right. So in Lexington, they said they could, they were selling kind of. I'm agreeing. Is it actually greatly reduced like 40% maybe reduction in their cost. So I don't know if that's a, we're aware of here. You've been playing like the use of battery storage. Seconds. Battery. So they're rather than the peak demand rather than drawing off the grid. They drop the battery. And thereby lowering their peak demand, which then. Right. Like that little 15 minute increment would raise the price for the whole day. Let's say. Yeah. And so by having that on battery, then they saved a lot of money. Yeah. I know that was something we had contemplated for a portion of the Arlington high school building project, but for whatever reason, it didn't pan out. They're doing all their build, all the building, all the buildings like this, the same model. Yeah. Yeah. Right now, the only thing we've recently started participating in is we do, it's called a load shedding. So we belong to a group that you get. That sort of an urgent notice from the, the is one sort of the grid saying we expect this to be a peak demand day. And if we proactive and engage in load shedding, and it's oftentimes during the summer and our biggest energy users in the school building. So you might. Pre-cool them. The evening before. And then we have to agree to set the air condition to get a much higher temperature in our participation in that project. Is netted us at certain buildings. You know, it's usually around like $10,000 a year for our participation at each site because we do our part to. I guess reduce stress on the grid at those. So the potential brown out or blackout times. John. Yeah. No, I'm going to say my question. I think it's going to be more out on the next slide. You have a question. Great. No more slides. So what's your. Sorry. About a slide on the schools. So my question relates to the override and actually some of the, these, you know, new charges that, that, you know, weren't anticipated versus the insurance. And then you maybe the drop in the state aid. Is there any discussion? Funding the new programs net. Of life versus the. The insurance and net of the decrease to the state funding. In other words, you take the 7 million. Instead of just saying, here's the 7 million. I intended to use it. Is the 7 million less some of these. Unforeseen charges. Because I know that, you know, on the ballot, it was mirror. It was merely, you know, pretty straightforward. 7 million dollars. Operating override. It wasn't, you know, fun, you know, for this funding and for that funding. So just to avoid a future, at least prolong a future override. Is there any discussions about. You know, taking some of it, you know, taking some of these hits to that 7 million dollars. So it says. You know, I don't think we've. Yet had that firm discussion. Given that. This is still fairly new news. And our first reaction was. Okay, let's take a. You know, as close a look as we can at everything that we. Already have within our grasp and see where that gets us. But. You know, we haven't modeled this yet to know exactly how far we've gotten. And that would now we may need to revisit. Both on either the town or the school side. So I think that. You know, I don't think we've. Yet had that firm discussion, given that this is still fairly new news. And our first reaction was. And so I think that. Those discussions before coming. Now you've just sit here and say that we have a. We've ironed out a plan to sort of clar ourselves out, but we didn't. Sort of think about it on that macro level. Quite yet because, you know, we sort of. Also sent everyone's budget numbers to them. And then got the news after the fact, you know, had it happened another way. I think that that probably would have been. An appropriate logic model to apply, but. Yeah, I personally, I just. I don't like the fact that, you know, the $7 million has already spent. You know, I feel like there should be a little bit of flexibility with that $7 million, but. You know, I actually watched the selected meeting when they did approve your ride and they did. Consider the, you know, these new programs. And of course, you know, they did say they liked the programs. But only the, you know, the $7 million operating. Overriders what made it to the ballot. And that's probably, I think what most of the, you know, the voters consider this is an operating override. So in other words, a lot more flexibility with how it's spent. And maybe one other thing I did hear in the discussion. I was like, sit in it. Was like, first down is that, you know, they don't want. Right. So I know that's a macro huge discussion, but. The impression I got was that they do not want overrides every three, three, four years. So. Okay. How do you avoid that? I would think you take another look at that $70. Sure. Yeah. And I wouldn't want to speak for them or pretend to know exactly how they feel about the timing of frequency of the override. So. Respect the John's comments. Number one, I think the. The dealer only allows you to put a number on on back. We can't put any details on. So. That sort of constrain's to select board. Putting up a number. I thought you could, you could actually say we want to be fired. And that's it. That's a dead. That's a different thing. I don't know. Secondly. My understanding is that the DOR has previously moved. If a select board or a municipal council or whatever says that they're going to use certain things with this override money, the community is bound to follow that commitment for the first year. And then after that, it can be adjustments. But the first year that that made to the effect that made to the voters has to be followed. I want to go on because I don't I don't think this is like appropriate money. So what it is, what the DOR said is if the municipal management makes commitments for X, Y, and Z or an override, yeah, those commitments have to be met in the first year, second year beyond is so up for grabs. I might take a look at that myself on because I actually read it is very confusing. I think that might be the situation where there's more detail on the ballot. In other words, when the ballot says we're going to we're going to take the seven million dollars and buy a fire truck, which is what's outside. It's not it over, right? It's not over. What is that? It's a different matter. All right. Thank you. So far, we have a lot of questions. I noticed on my nine this court judgment sends is that the stage on this point? Very much. Yeah, sort of a like a ghost relic lived there. And OK, and then the municipal budget, the miss, miss, miss that the municipal building insurance trust fund, as I understand it, that's you know, insurance on buildings, buildings are down. You have a deductible and this is what that's what that's that's invested in growing right at times. It would provide relief if you need to take immediate action before you would get bills to pay before you basically for the insurance company. Yeah, you mentioned the changes to the ambulance fees. Does the ambulance revolving funds still have a purpose or is it going away? It does have a purpose. It is not as great as it once was because we do still collect some revenue and we still book it into the revolving fund. And so that still does get some treatment on the capital plan as an offset, although it's just not as much as it once was. So we could look at collecting all of our ambulance revenue into the general fund. It's not a very significant amount that's in the revolving fund. Something that we eat a gym myself. We've been kind of thinking about what to do with it because it has changed significantly. I love to simplify stuff. Right. Yeah, for you to notice like the offset has gone down over the last two years at the end of this year. It's OK with the balance left. Is it time to just move on from it? Other questions, but it's how we enter and you won't have other questions. Actually, I don't know that now, then you can go. So what advice is interested? What is the tax that we pay to lexington for great meadows? And I know you don't you're not going to know this off the top of your head, but it's, but we pay a tax for it. Property, but we don't we pay a certain amount of tax to them because they're managing parts of it. Fund and DPW. That sounds entirely foreign to me. OK, so let's look into it. Yeah, yeah. Scoured this budget. I didn't see that expense. So maybe we're getting a bill. I don't know. OK, so maybe there is. Never mind. I was just going to ask if there was any financial benefit to having the governor living in town. Where's the cost? I couldn't wish there was more. I'll let you know after all our grant applications. Yeah. Second, yeah. Grant. Yes, thank you. So. There's a. To determine the offsets in the water to a budget, there's a. And how is applied. There's a study done. A while ago. And so in the past, how managers have committed to having a new study done. But those town managers aren't here. So what do you guys think about having a new study, making it commitment to having a new study done? I would ask for what would be the desired outcome or. What would be the intention of doing that study? And I'm just curious what you think of the outcome. Well, done. About years ago, another town managers have agreed to do it. Perhaps to update it. Maybe it's why it shouldn't be updated. Yeah, I would just care. I didn't know if you're applying that perhaps the offsets were high or low or if simply that we thought that they needed to be sort of ground truth. It's. Verification becomes something that, you know, or maybe not. I mean, if we don't think they need to be done, but it's like, you know, things change. Another town managers have thought they're not that you have to apply by them, but they thought it should be done. Yeah, I mean, I think. First, what I would commit to is, you know, personally understanding them a little bit better myself, but also, you know, as I understand it, I think all the departments that it applies to. Are still perfectly relevant. The way the program was established is still valid. If there may be perhaps. Tweaks, as you know, like things may change over time in terms of like an IT level of effort versus. The treasurer's level of effort, you know, ultimately, I would think it's probably a zero sum game, but that there may be, you know, shifts from sort of 1 department to another. Slightly in terms of the level of effort. I don't understand why there'd be a shift. There's a rate that says it's the amount of hours that they spend working on water. Yeah, on the white shift, they might go down the amount of time might go down and they might go up. I'm legal spends on it. They make a lot. But again, it's up to you. I don't want to take up a lot of time. I just want to put forth and ask you if you want to do a commitment with it all the time. I just thought that might be done, but never followed through. There may be a translation. So, yeah, like, I looked into this a little bit. We spoke a little bit earlier and there are the DLS provides a suite of financial policies that communities can utilize and when I was the finance director in the town of Hamilton, we did a community compact project. Around these financial policies and 1 of them is indirect cost allocation, which is the sort of the same thing as offsets. And so I took a look at that as afternoon a little more closely and the DLS provides for 4 sort of different ways to calculate your water and sewer offsets and the way that we do it here is 1 of those 4 ways. We should always be looking at everything and looking at the level of effort is important. And I think it's worth looking at every year. So, you know, happy to keep looking at that. Related to that, many generations ago, DLS reported with a number of recommendations. I believe 1 of them was to basically take water and sewer offsets out of the individual budget, aggregate them from the town and have 1 big offset, but not allocate them across the department. And therefore, you have an actual department cost without applying offsets to it. I'll see if I can find that report. Do you think that's better, though, in terms of for us to figure out. It's certainly similar. It's simpler, but if we wanted to know how much legal department is really doing. For why and so, we still have that number, but it's just a matter of how you structure the budgets where the money comes in as a lump sum that some that's derived from time sheets or whether it comes in each department. I'll pick up the report and find out that was the DLS recommendation. So maybe it doesn't become a budget issue. It becomes a time sheet issue. Well, right, that might just be another. So it's not one of the methods. It's not one of the methods, but my point is more that. Well, the, for instance, legal department spends of. What, 20% maybe 1 out of every 5 hours working on water and sewer. 12 years ago, that was determined. You were however long ago that was determined. Maybe they spend more time on it. Right. Understood. Yeah, I think it don't we want to know where maybe they spend us. And it doesn't net out. That's what I don't, I don't understand that doesn't net out. If lawyers do less work, it doesn't mean that postage does more. So I don't understand that so much. It doesn't see how it nets out. I think I was thinking about a different circumstances. We talked earlier about. We had run an older outdated software that perhaps required a significant amount of support to run, but then you then you switch software and it requires less support, but then is being managed entirely by someone in the treasurer's office. Like the level of effort sort of was just shifting in a way back. I understand what you're saying that someone could be doing in fact, more or less some 10 years. And it doesn't net out to a hundred. It's a percentage of the budgets. Yeah, of those. So I think it's sort of a transparent thing because, you know, that it goes up every year and so does the, so does the budget. So if they're working less, it's, it just doesn't, it may not be as equitable as if in the study was done. Right. And I think from the transparency perspective, right? If you look at some of the offsets in the budget, if you looked at. CBG are other things, right? It is tied specifically to an individual and you can see exactly what percentage of that individual salary it's funding. So you reach the conclusion that you have that much that person's time, but for water and sewer, as it is currently where like it, it lives at the departmental level. Isn't necessarily tied to particular individuals within that department. So I can see how it doesn't provide the level of clarity that may be observable with other offsets in the budget. So it gets another point. Any other questions for the town manager? And just 1 more, since we're on to generic questions. So when you think about when you're planning for the operational future of the town. Are you thinking in terms of, you know, we, we, as a finance committee tend to be a little paranoid about adding positions. But sometimes it's not about adding, it's about you get some turnover. Can we switch out when we have position here and take this 1 away? Because it's now not modern anymore. So, and so far, are you, do you look over the whole budget to look for those opportunities? Are you looking for places where you know, we need to add a service because it's 2024. And are there things that are in other job descriptions where those descriptions don't need to be doing those functions? Am I making any sense? Yeah, I think so. And I think what I would say is that happens with really every vacancy, you know, I spend time. Reviewing job descriptions really every week and then sort of making modern, you know, modern edits to them so that before we post them, it reflects what we're actually looking for. So I think we take that opportunity every time we have a vacancy, whether it's a union position or not to really look. Part of what it's going to take. And I think there are probably some examples I could use, but I can see in the future as well. You know, oftentimes seeking the opportunity to perhaps combine positions or, you know, I personally am not one. I'm not going to sit here and say like, Perhaps because I've worked here for a really long time. I know that we are not in a position where I can have, you know, sort of grand plans and comes, you know, I need to add sort of, you know, five general fund positions or this or that. Like, so I wouldn't say I'm thinking about it that way, but I think we try to look for every opportunity like, okay, you know, how was the structure working? You know, how was that work chart flowing with, you know, where are we struggling to hire? Where are we not struggling to hire? Okay, what are we doing well there? And what are we not doing well there? Why are, you know, why do we have more vacancies at this level and another level? So I think those are. What can we stop doing in order to be able to start doing something? You can see a lot of that happening in every class each year. Yes. So we see some of that directly. And in my conversations with Karen, it's clear that she's looking at that when the time comes. Sometimes when she's just looking at each department and the HR within the department, and sometimes when people come to her and say, this isn't the job I'm doing, can we change my title is to something that reflects our job. It comes from the employee, but she's also doing that as well. And sometimes it's as simple as a title change to modernize what the position is. So when it's posted, someone's like, oh, I know what that means. I know. What's the text? Yeah, exactly. I'm just like saying, wiping them off. Actively working on it. They like all these different ways of saying like project manager. It's called a project manager. Any other questions anyone has for the town manager. Okay, so your question. No, we just have the town manager's budget to set. The question around. I'll set. I just want any more questions for the town manager or the deputy. And we all set. All right, well, thank you. Thank you for coming and getting, getting us your presentation. Just two minutes before we finish your budgets. And then now we're going to. Rebecca and. And thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Hurry to do this. Later is that. I think I'll be an hour. I'm going to start with a couple of questions. The first one is. Maybe we was that. The budget was that guy. The gap all about that. The last course. Second worst chair. I'll. No. I suppose. I said these are the second. These are the second words. Actually first words. Of course. Oh, yeah. Okay. Little bit of questions. You ever been to the old Huntington theater. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, they're lovely. And are the, are they wide enough? No. Yeah. No, it's. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's. Yeah. No, it's bad when I'm touching. I could do. Stand up. All right. Any. Yeah, I hadn't put the finance committee as a new. Like heading. So. That's in there now. It was underneath scheduling the vote, but now it's its own section. Anything else. Is there a motion to approve? So. Second. Second. All the things. Say aye. Aye. Any approach. Yes. Budget. We're ready to present the manager's button. If you notice. On the longevity column. 51 56. I'm sorry. In the 51 56 longevity. Notice there's an increase. That is because. The new deputy town manager for operations. That was a transfer from another position. In the. Director of health. So her longevity goes with it. How does they travel? Is the same. The description stays the same. Consulting. I don't say travel. Is the same. The description stays the same. Consulting. I'm sorry. Support. There are no. I don't think. One. Did ask on printing of town reports. The actual for 20.3 was great. I compared it with budget for 24 and 25. And. They don't want to increase that. The goal is to just print fewer books and reports. Closets full. Full books. So that they're trying to be better about that. So even though the actual and 20.3 is high. That's not. And the 20. The actual on otherwise unclassified. New desk furniture for the purchasing officer. There was a departure. The long-term employees. And. So. I'd like to make a motion to accept the. The manager's budget. As written. In the book. For one. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. One. I said, no, I didn't. The book for 1 million 049611. Thank you. Any questions? We usually vote the number after the. So. I can't do. We usually vote the number after the offsets, which will be 734671. I'm sorry. I'm doing to have a cataract operation. Okay. Going back. So it will be at 734-671. Second. Any other questions? All in favor say aye. Aye. Aye. Any opposed? That's unanimous. And that concludes our budget. Thank you very much. Good job. Good job. All right, Rebecca and Yannis. You guys have nine questions. Great. So we're going to use libraries. Reckon-Rink, Rebecca's going to read all that says required. Andy, could you speak a little louder? We're going to do the libraries and then Reckon-Rink. Rebecca's lead on the east and I'll go to the west. Megan. So unfortunately, the town manager sold my thunder that we had the old position. So if we start with a library budget, by 9-134, we turn to the salary detail page. You and you look all the way at the bottom, that's currently vacant. They're in a new position of library assistant for 17 and a half hours per week. And as the town manager referenced, this is going to help them open on Thursday mornings. When Annie and I met with the library director Anna Litton, she was very excited about that. She said, there's always people waiting outside on the porch who have forgotten that the library is not open Thursday mornings. Oh, no, not until one, that's right. So they are very excited about that. She said that that was their largest priority. Other things you might notice in the salary details. So of course, we'd always like if a new person joins the position, we'd love to pay them less. And so if you look at branch library and about three quarters of the way down, that's an example where the new person that actually does receive less than the old. However, this is balanced out in some other positions. Unfortunately, you see the opposite. So for example, for that new head of circulation, we asked Anna why the new head of circulation is making so much more money. And she said that in order to fill that position, they're finding in the library that sometimes in order to fill positions, they are having to offer higher salaries. So for example, that person came from Framingham State University and was already receiving a higher salary. So there's both things happening in this budget. I think we need to go getting a little bit more or a little bit less. She said looking to the future, not reflected, of course, in this budget, but since they've added Thursday morning's back, the next thing they really feel that they're short on is staffing for children and youth services. So they're not meeting the expectations of library and library organizations. So in the future, that may be something that they would like to ask the town manager about. Oh yeah, anyone want to talk? So this is a position where they believe they have the demand to need additional youth services and children's library capacity. This is a position that we've heard about three years in a row. Three years in a row, they've been told they can't add distribution. And I would just like to point this out at report of our discussion about holding legacies from Alina. It's not necessarily a one-for-one, but sometimes that's either end of an editorial. Thank you. So back to the main page on library salaries, Tilfer, you had had a question about what the stipends were. Those are just part of the union contract. Some of the union employees just get a $200 stipend that is called training. And that's just part of their negotiated contract. Clothing works exactly the same way. It's just certain employees receive that as part of their project. If you look at all of the other elements, we are not saying any change with the exception of the books and materials. So this reflects this $7,500 increase reflects additional spending for digital services. So right now, two places in the budget you see money that we give to the Minuteman Library Consortium. So that shows up under other contracting services, 5236. That is a subscription service for the Minuteman Prestigious belong to the Minuteman Consortium. But then also within books and materials, that's where we pay for the digital material. So if you want to download a library book to your Kindle, we pay for that through the books and materials. And they're asking for an additional $7,500 to support those digital materials. She did say Ireland is the largest consumer within the Minuteman Group. So you can see about that. The total amount we do spend between the other contracted services and the books and materials, the total payment we make 10-minute a year is $155,000. But again, you want to move to things Annie and I talked about was the digital budget with only $33,500 for maintenance, 5202 maintenance. They're actually more higher. So we were a little concerned about the budget. So she's not worried about that. She said some of that work is being done through the facilities. So she thinks that that will be sufficient. Another thing to note at the bottom is the Fox offsets are listed at $30,000 left from a little resale shop beside the Fox. But not appearing on this, but if you'd like more detail that you could see in the SharePoint for the library section, there is a nice pie chart that tells you the additional money that comes into the libraries. That through the Friends of the Library, the Arlington Library Foundation, State Aid, Fox Shop, essentially the budget you see here of about 2.8 million is 500,000 less than their actual spending. So they get about 500,000 from outside sources, which again, if you want the actual breakdown, it's available on the SharePoint. So of the non-salary spending, half of it comes from the town and half of it comes from the outside. There's about $9 million in their funds, but they're not all, yeah, that does not mean they're available at this time. What else can I tell you? The last thing she mentioned was, again, going forward, non-reflectives on this budget or something to think about is the the library is helping to rebuild the Fox branch. And so in order to raise money for that, the Arlington Library Foundation is hoping to hire a part-time fundraiser that's paid for by donations. So they'll use some of the donations to hire the person who will then lead a fundraising capital campaign, they'll take the money from the capital campaign, it's money from the state, hopefully through the boss in the future. This one's to keep our eye out for. Any other things on libraries? I think those were the highlights. I mean, one of the things that I really appreciated about this budget is that they are doing their best to leverage private outside funds, donations, salem, and so forth. And it is true that those funds can only be used for non-selling expenses. So those funds make a huge difference to the amount of folks in the curious library has to certainly very much support what's available to the public. And then I think, you know, Rebecca and I were equally excited about the restoration of those hours in 2004 when we had one of the worst kinds of cuts we ever had from the state. We reduced library hours by a lot more than that and have slowly kind of worked to the back. And so it's been really great. And then just to remember that we have an obligation to spend a certain amount of our musical budget on the libraries in order to maintain our membership in the Mid-Atman Network. It's like a state law or a private or whatever. And so we can't fall below that. We fall below opening the waiver to continue to maintain our relationships with other libraries. And being able to land back and forth through Mid-Atman Network is an important part of what makes our library attractive to the many people living in the town who lose themselves to other students at local universities so it's kind of an overview of how that kind of fits into our town as a hope for all. Oh, that's a good motion. I do. I would like to move to the library budget in a amount of 2,822,379 dollars. Second. Questions? Brantz, Peggy, Al, Piper, right there. Thank you. Yeah, I think the Mid-Atman, I love libraries anyways. And I think the Mid-Atman Network is fantastic. I mean, that really makes it the fact that you can borrow both from anywhere. It shows up at the library and they delivered it during the pandemic and it was great. When you mentioned there's, I hadn't been aware of this minimum or the threshold. And again, just the curiosity factor. What is that threshold? Is it like we write at it or is it? No, no, we're in good shape right now. I'm probably start for life by the early 2000s when for several years we were below it and we had to get away with it because of severe cuff and neck all over town. It wasn't just libraries, it was everywhere. I was a big, big drop in state aid, which was based on the, there was a perception barrier in 2002. What's the question? Most of their materials from date, we have a, the town has to fund our books and materials line to a certain extent and the overall library budget to a certain extent. The part of why we haven't moved all of the facilities maintenance to front of the library in two facilities because we have this, I don't know what the exact threshold is. I know we're safe at the moment, okay. It's just a thing to keep in mind should we fall upon very hard times, when we're looking at this budget, there's a big risk to making good cuts here. And that's the big risk. I appreciate that. Thank you. Probably more than you wanted to. Yeah, I don't like that. If you don't know, you don't know. That's good. Thank you. Actually, I had the exact same question. So thank you. All right. I'll see what I can find out about it. Oh, it did save me the same answer. Two questions. Friends of the Robbins Library is sort of like the Fox things. Is there, and I know they think, I think they raise a fair amount of money with the bookstore sales and things like that. Why isn't that listing off stuff? So it's, it's off budget. That's right. So it's part of this 500,000 that just doesn't enter the budget at all. So I'll hand you the piece of paper. Okay. Let the friends give them four years for that. Why is the Fox Library offset in there then? What's the difference? Why are they treating it differently? Well, that's not friends. That's just still one, right? Yeah. I don't know why that was. Well, it's one of those stuff. Yeah, that's just a question. I'm just shooting the big ones. I don't know. Okay. So, so, do you know how much the friends? Yeah. So the friends give 42,739 dollars. Great. So those books persist. Second question. The manager mentioned the library of things, which I think is a great idea, but you see what the future is is that a good or a bad thing from the operations library is that the real distraction for staff or, you know, what are any comments on that? Yeah, we did discuss it this year, the first year that I did talk about the library of things. And it is actually kind of really important to, I mean, it's very popular. What's the circulation of the things? I don't know. But I know that it's very popular. I mean, I have to go back in like, it was a time two years ago, I remember it's very popular. And I think that part of the reason where they continue to grow and maintain it is because there is the mirror. So one of the things that's a consistent theme in talking to the library director is that she's concentrating on where the demand is to expand services or materials or whatever. She's paying very much attention to what it is it is not so good. And they shift their investments based on that. Hence more money going into digital than, say, seats, which we don't purchase anymore at all. So it's, in the sense that it's responding to direct demand from the citizens of our country and its users, it's sort of like this perfect government entity, right? It's so direct. There's no question about whether the citizens don't want that service or whatever. They do. And in theory, it's a great thing, but it takes a lot of room and probably a lot of staff time. Yeah. It's reassuring that it's. Yeah. No. And I don't think just over the three years of doing this project, I don't think they would continue to do something that they didn't think was both successful and efficient. Does that make sense? Because that's sort of the theme that runs through our conversations. They're concentrating on where's the demand and how to move it on. Doing something for the second week. Right. Thank you. So for Charlie, would you like to go first? Thank you. I'm sure. So you mentioned Fox Branch and Revolta, right? But are they doing that entirely through a capital campaign? No. Okay. Because I know they're surveying people on what they want to see. And I didn't see anything in the capital budget at least on the libraries or facilities of money parents. Yeah. I don't think they believe they could be the whole thing with a capital campaign. But I think that they do believe that it's not going to happen without some kind of capital campaign. Well, where's the rest of the money coming from? Well, I mean, I don't know what's in the capital plan, but I would assume that they will either be applying to the capital plan, waiting until it can get on it, or that they will be looking for our state funding to work. But they're state funding, similarly to how they're state funding for schools. It doesn't, you know, it doesn't appeal to the school, but it does put it down. I'll probably have to do all of the above. Yeah. Okay. That was my understanding, but I don't know the balance. Yeah. And it's typical for public libraries that they do a capital campaign where they're going to do an expansion. We don't like that. It's not weird. It's not just that. No, it was more just, how much it works. Thank you for telling me the question. Thank you. Yeah. There's a question. Charlie, did you have a hand up? I didn't, I don't care, but I think Annie answered my question. I was concerned about our prior risk of losing accreditation, but I think that's what she was talking about. Oh, I'm done. Yeah. That's exactly it. Calend? So I think one of the things that I was thinking about with the Fox library is building apartments above it, which I'm for. So does that mean the town would own all of that or contract to? We did not discuss that. My understanding from other meetings, it is very complicated and settled. But it did not come up in our conversation because again, it doesn't appear in the budget. They're just thinking about. That was a lot more than just the library department. Right, obviously, yeah. And obviously, this question of public private partnership and just dropping them all out there. Right. Yeah, that's fine. I'm just going to throw it out there. Any other questions on library Soviet? Just that I'm just curious. There was a few years ago, we did away with the late piece, something like that. Is there any follow-up on, is that working and getting books back or is there a lot of, I'm just curious. Is it not, it did not come up. I think that would have come up because it was having a financial impact. Either lost materials or lost revenue. I think that was quite a general fund and not the library. It's possible. That was always my understanding. Easy to go through. Any other questions on library? So, I believe there's a motion that's been sent again. All in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? It's unanimous. White snaps. Okay. Do you have a recreation department? So page 185. Actually, you know what? Why don't we start with Ed Burns Arena? That's all right. I'm 181. Just for the people who are new to the idea of the enterprise fund. Remember that you're going to see a very large amount of spending and a very large amount of revenue in here. So the enterprise funds are different. That's a very good idea. Exactly. Are different from other things that we buy in the budget. All right. So, Annie and I met with Joe Polly. We talked about those rack and the rate. If you save the highlights here. So, when we talked to Joe about how he does the budget for both the rack and the budget. His budgeting strategy. You see a lot more sort of changes both increases and decreases on the right side relative to some of the other budgets in town. And basically the way he likes to do the budget he says it's very conservative about maintaining his funds, his retained earnings funds. But then when he's looking at each line item basically looks at what he's actually spending and he adjusts his budget to what he feels he's actually spending. He thinks more about what he's actually spending than what, you know make it match last year so that it looks like a 0% change, right? So overall some of the changes that you see would be for example the equipment buildings round item 5203 there's increased to 20,000. And we asked him about that. And he said basically that is the 70,000 is more matches more closely what they're actually spending because he had been using some of the rec resources to pay that in the past. But the 70,000 is just a little bit more accurate. We were super impressed by his decrease in natural gas usage. And again, he just said that 32,000 the decrease to 32,000 from 45,000 in the budget was just that their actual natural gas bills are low. So fantastic. The end result of this is they're expecting a budget of spending $688,987 and are matching that with revenues of the same amount 688,787. One of the significant, okay so so when you look at page 183 the last two columns on the right are completely arbitrary. Ignore those two columns entirely and those are somehow got cut and pasted from some previous budget. So the 2024 budget number is correct. The 2025 budget number is correct. But when it tells you dollars changed and percent change those numbers are made up. Ignore those. We've asked the town manager for a corrected version. Hopefully that'll come eventually but you can just eyeball them and see where they're in the change. When there's an increase in his expected revenue for admissions fees, public skating we asked him about that. He says both charging more per ticket for public skate but also that they found that there's a huge demand for public skating sessions especially during school vacations. So he said when it's school vacation week they just open up the rink and they have been making a lot more money. Register. The item we asked about non ice rentals if you run an ice skating rink would you rent in the top ice and it turns out it's things like school dances when the space is not actually functioning as a rink you can pull the dance in there. Oh yeah there was a question about retained earnings. So the retained earnings balance currently for the rink is $82,042. So his strategy on retained earnings is he spends some each year and looks to put in a little bit more. So his retained earnings he's very conservative about it he says and yeah it goes for the rink it has been going up a tiny bit each year. He doesn't pull that money out if he doesn't need it. So he kind of hopes to balance out with better revenue than he budgeted. But he's budgeting $50,000. But he's budgeting $50,000. So I forget how I make a motion for a motion both moments. Okay so I will measure the approval of the Edburns Arena Entry Prize on budget for expenses in the amount of $688,987 and we'll revenue in the amount of $688,787. So the expenses are $688,787? Yeah. Sorry, did I mispeak? Yeah, $688,787, sorry, sorry. Sorry, I'm not. Okay, so there's a motion for a second and any further questions? Thank you. Thank you. Does anybody think it's odd that those numbers match so perfectly? The revenue expenses? Yeah. No, it's not purposeful. Yeah. So I would think. Go get the actual. How can it be the actual? The actuals don't match perfectly. I feel I'm nervous. But when you're budgeting, you balance it out. Otherwise you'd either be budgeting a deficit or a surplus, which just wouldn't be a thing. So it's just that it's a budget as it goes about it. Yep. It sort of has to be a balanced budget. If you notice under the actuals, there is a balance of $9,000, $15,000, which is the difference. Okay. It's funny, they look negative, but they're actually positive. Yeah. Yeah, great. You don't want those numbers to not be a prime disease. I can look at the actual balance. Okay. Okay, that's where he's retained earnings from. Michael and Grant. What's the debt service? Debt service. So there's a complicated ownership arrangement that we discussed last year. I'll look up the details. One of us came up about who owns what. Sorry to ask. Because parts are owned by DCR, but we have to maintain it. And we have a 99 euro piece or something like this. Yes. But the debt is for the DCR owns it. We have a lease, but we had to do the repair. Right. And then that's where the damage is. Yeah. Yes. That was going to be my next question. Is there, you know, is there a reserve or does the money come from somewhere else for the eventual rebuild of the heavy pieces of the infrastructure? I don't have an answer. It looks like Charlie might. Great job. So the infrastructure improvements, whether it's a Zamboni or improving the electrical plant in the arena, all those improvements over the years have been in the capital budget. And then apparently we'll continue to be in the capital budget. And so at least in my memory, there was an agreement between the recreation department and the capital planning committee that the town, we pay a certain portion of the debt service and a certain portion of the debt service will come out of the retained earnings out of the enterprise fund. And that's what you see here. So, you know, the debt, that's debt service. So the actual expenditures might be $500,000 or something like that's being paid over a number of years. Good. Thank you. Grant. Thank you. I just have to say, I like how this person budget, so no, I hate to do the budget, but it's much more realistic and much more, it's, I like how this guy does his budget in terms of facing a war on what happened as opposed to no changes making a flat. So he also has the freedom though to decide how much in charge of people. Right? Yeah. So it gives him that, you know, who knows if he's going to do the budget by changing ticket prices. Joe's stuff runs my part of business than any other part of the town. So it's a very different budget conversation. Over proprietorship. Yes. Right. Exactly. Thank you. Just going back to the debt service. If you look at the capital plan, there are offsets from the Wreck and Rink that match what's in the enterprise fund. So the enterprise fund says an expenditure of $56,000 for the debt service. It comes back to the capital plan as an offset. So it's all in your town. Yeah. Well, I mean, the capital plan is where the money's borrowed and the debt service is transferred to the capital plan and the Rink. But it's certainly an offset. Yeah. But if you look at the capital plan, you'll see lines for Rink and Rink. That's what it was. Do you know when we retire back then? There's always something there because you're replacing the San Bernardin a certain number of years. And I think the last one's for the anniversary for replacement. Yeah. That was a big response. Yeah, you'd have to look at the capital plan literally and see, and then probably Alex was carrying the debt service. Probably in the honor of the ACFR. I think there's a page in the capital plan that has debt service by an item. I mean, in the capital report, it's not necessarily right in the capital plan. I don't know. It's in the budget. It actually is in the debt. That's the plan. In Burns Arena, enterprise fund has been outstanding a year under $375,000. Now it made $55,000 in principal funds during the year. That's what I'm interested in. Thank you. Any other questions? All right, we have a motionist and seconded. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Any other? All opposed? All right, again, let's see if we have another budget. I think to do the recreation of everything which is on 185. This is the same department. And again, Joe Polly with a similar budgeting strategy. He started our meeting by telling us that this year, 2023, he felt went great. And he would be able to add a couple of hundred thousand dollars back to the reserves. So the retained earnings, thousands of retained earnings for the recreation department is $1,342,424. She's going to be hearing more about that in a minute and plan to use some of that. In general, he says the demand for recreation in the private program is very high. The registrations are way up. We expect fiscal year, the actuals for fiscal year 24 to track this item. And yeah, he watches every month and sees the trend of generally the revenue going up to the general project programs. The big change that they're expecting in the recreation department this year is that the kid care programs, which are a preschool program and an after-school program for K to 5 or K to 6, are going to be moving back to the, or moving to the parmitage. So you may recall the parmitage school has been temporarily used to house the public preschool, monotony preschool that's a branch of the Arlington Public Schools. They've been using it during the rebuilds. So it's in decent shape. It's been used as a preschool. But once the, now that the public preschool has been moved into the high school building, the counter is turning over to the recreation department. So he is planning to use a sizable chunk of his reserves. If you look at that, use the retained earnings, the very bottom of age 188. There's a very large use of retained earnings. And a lot of this is towards the upgrade of the parmitage in order to house preschool and after-school there, but also to expand the capacity significantly. So there's a significant demand in town for the kind of preschool program that the REC department runs in very reasonable in price, compared with some of the things in town. So, as I said, it compares favorably to, well, it's comparable to things like the Boys and Girls Club preschool or the Fidelity House preschool of being at least somewhat affordable to many families. And that there's, so he's hoping that once they move into the parmitage and have a year or two of transitional year, they expect to expand their, basically double their preschool in an element, expand their after-school, which is currently running with its jam by 40%, and then be able to use some of the space that will be after-school programming for elementary school children. They'll use that kind of daytime for programming for toddlers. So they'll also move for everything for that. He does expect when they move the preschool and after-school to the new facility, he's gonna have some need for additional staffing to support what he calls a classroom model. So right now in the after-school, they have all the kids in one big gym space, and it's fairly easy to maintain appropriate ratio for licensing purposes. If you just have a certain amount of adults, a whole pile of kids. But once you separate them out into classrooms by age and you have younger kids here, middle-grads, older kids, he's gonna need some increased staffing in order to maintain the ratios. So when you look at these budgets, the no-school things include the fact that they've used to retain earnings as we talked about, it's gonna go way up in order to expand. Another one thing we notice on the salary page, which is 189, one person who had a fairly significant raise was the last employee is the co-director of KidCare. KidCare is the preschool and after-school. Previously they had a model of a director and an assistant director, but they promoted that person to be a co-director and it's their raise. Let's see, what else can I tell you? Oh, yeah, can you say that? One of the things that you will notice if you look at the expenses on the rep side is you'll see a bunch of blank lines and then you'll see lines that say, fall C-R-N-C-O-R-N-T and so on and so forth. He's still in the process of transferring his budget to a model where he's keeping track of the cost and the income from contracted services versus in-house supported services and sort of giving him a finer grain to look at which things make money, which themselves. And I think he also said he was gonna get a little bit of money back on the move to arm and turkey disease and actually paying full rent for that building. He's probably taking on some maintenance expenses and there will probably be some kind of a fee to the town, something great though, but he's getting out of a rented space for the preschool. So I think he really sees that as area of future growth for the RAC department for both earnings and for providing that service to the town at a reasonable cost. And we did ask, you know, Rebecca said, he's comparing himself to other relatively low-cost preschools. He's not trying to run this like a private business. He really is trying to continue to be a public service, which I thought was kind of important. And not being seen as this big profit center and making a ton of money, but it makes it a service for adults. People in town who might not be able to pay for a fancy private program. Just to add to that, the rent on the Mass App store where they are only allowed to use those accounts about $40,000. So they can't do that. They'll be getting that back. Well, those were the highlights. You have a motion. So I would like to move the budget for the Recreation Department Enterprise Fund with expenses in the amount of $2,632,205 and revenues up to $2,632,205. Rebecca? Yeah. Questions? Charlie, Sophie, Grant. Thank you Madam Chair. So Rebecca, did you say what the balance was in the Santa Cruz Fund? Yes, for the Recreation Department, it's $1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. $1,342,424. This was last June. This is, that's a live number when he asked me. So, the landings that he's got about three and a half years that we've been able to use this $430,000 to be paid during. So he does not, the $450,000 is a temporary bump up due to the moon to the preschool. So, eventually this is about the transition, both more so than before the $250,000 every year. So, because he was actually a couple of years ago he was producing 300,000 a year in a retained earnings. That's right. So let's see, do you have a number for last year what that balance was? 300,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 more. I don't think that he anticipates that we've been talking to him about this. He felt like he was being an office, just that he might need to use that money. He might have some, you know, Service 8 and 6 to be when you look in. And he also has his need to possibly increase staff or increase the staff's credentials. But he's also expanding capacity. He just can't predict the income from that capacity until it fills up. It turns out that the, we're not in preschool is no longer necessarily going to have slots for teachers who've been bringing their kids there. And so he may get some business from high school teachers who have been using that preschool that had come to his preschool instead. And I think they expanded capacity. So I think his feeling was he might not use the 450, but he wanted to be safe on his budget and that it's a one-shot deal. He's not going to use it every year to support that program. That program is going to support itself after that capacity kicks in and it's starting to earn what he thinks it can earn. Right. And Joe's a pretty smart guy. And I think he would pivot if he didn't feel like it was sustainable or wrong. If it helps to add to that, he also said that his best guess is that after he uses that 450,000, he will return at least 200,000 to the retainer. Sophie. I'm going back to what I had asked our town manager. Is kid care limited to Arlington residents or is there a priority for Arlington residents? We didn't ask that question. I hadn't thought about it before, but as I was seeing all these numbers and varieties and increases and that's actually something we pay for our projects. No, actually this is John, the preschool pays for itself. Pays for itself. Okay. All the rec programs pay for themselves. Here. So all the rec and rec is, that's the point of the enterprise. I mean, if we were supporting it, you would see a line called transfer of funds and the transfer from general fund is zero for rec this year and it was zero for length this year. So. Is that even for salaries? Even for salaries and health insurance and all that. There's health insurance. Okay. Yeah. Just to foreshadow for some of the other enterprise funds, some of the other enterprise funds do get attracted on the general fund. Okay. So you'll see that maybe next week, right? These two are self-supporting funds. Which has been to reason for him not to prioritize Arlington residents. I would like to try to prioritize Arlington residents. It may be that he does. I just mean, it didn't come out of the main. Yeah. Okay. Anyone? Sure. Sure. And it makes sense that, sure. That's what you're meant to ask. Sure. Sure. Well, we're going to vote by the day anyway, sir. Well, we're going to vote by the day. Yes. Yes. Grant, and then I'll go. Thank you, Madam Chair. On the expense line involving the reservoir, it's a five, two, eight, nine, one, two, expense for length. And it's curious. That's, we're not using that budgeting board or combining it into supplies. I think they combined. Yeah. Or we're not doing it. It's combining the supplies. Still using it. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Ah. The managers increases, there's a $20,000 increase in field maintenance. And it's not in the DPW budget. I was just wondering if it's, but I can't find it in this budget. I'm just wondering where that got the slide. Oh, that's clear. But it should be in DPW. It may be in contracted services. It's probably in contracted services in natural resources. In contracted services? Yeah. Because it's a separate line of the field maintenance. It's 60,000. Yeah. I think they're not doing it. I think it's somewhere else. Yeah. I think that line item is the actual budget. I don't know what to do. And then the contracted services. Okay. I'll turn to that. Okay. Thank you. All right. Sophie. Can you go back? Back to the question that I put on tonight. First of all, what about, so health insurance is covered. What about like a worker's comp insurance or insurance in case of, I mean, in all these kids, like I worry about kids getting hurt or whatever, there's town liability though that wouldn't be covered. That is a good question. I do not know that it's not aligned for it here. I just, and I wonder, because a lot of preschools, private preschools carry probably a lot more insurance related to working with children or something. And how is the town covered on things like that? I can ask that of the HR director when we do insurance, workers comp insurance is in the HR budget. Right. And so I guess there are two insurance questions really, workers comp and then if there's an accident with a child. A liability insurance. What a liability insurance is related to this kids program. And other wreck, I'm sure there are waivers, I think. I know at least for activities, right? Current sign waivers. Yep. I don't know that kid care when it's the full time feasible program. We didn't ask about that. We didn't ask about that. If you can inquire and Caroline, if you can inquire and have trust. Any other questions? All right. There's been a motion has been seconded. All in favor say yes. Yes. Any opposed? I can answer. Any other budgets for tonight that we can do in 10 minutes? You want to do the. You can do the saucer. So. That's been approved. That depends on. I mean, I can do it. Let's start. Thanks. Thanks. Eric. Yep. This is. The assessors. Okay. Oh, so. 51. 52. Okay. So for one of the assessors. Next. Page. I'm at a meeting yesterday. Charlie and I met with. Data man, the director of assessments. Sorry. Yeah. Some, some basic data. Just on this. We have. 15,500 parcels. 20,000, 416 households, which is another option. No, it's quick. 400 businesses. And then a breakdown of about 8,001 families. 40. 100 condos, 2,002 families. For three families. And. 124. Many other. Many other types. Many other. Living Unicodes. This is the assessor's budget. So I'll go through the lines on this. This is just. On there. So let's go to the next slide. And I'll just go through the line. Our first positions, the positions were stable. There was nobody that either left or game or new positions. And. I still verify the steps against the classification. And Dana told me he actually went through. Made sure all the steps for. Okay. So that's good. Next. Please. The line items and that's going to be hard to read. So I'll just, I'll say. So the stipends are yes, another closing allowance from the union contract. The auto allowance is cause the inspectors actually have to go around and visit properties. So they can bill their 67 cents a mile. Computer maintenance is the Patriot software, which has two components. One followed by a consumer computer assisted mass appraisal or camera, which is their system for the inputs, creating the valuations. And then some of you may be familiar with is the online web pro where you look up. Resonances. And so a big question is going to actually do like some real searches on that. You know, say with spending. And this page and all of the other things. And obviously other people can do that too. The in-state travel is conferences and training for Dana and I'm going to talk about the deputy data collector rather, Mr. Suarez. Consulting is mainly when things go to the appellate tax board and I'll explain that process a little bit. That that point, they may need counsel and possibly an expert witness as Dana said, he's well versed in this stuff. But when you have to go to court, you need somebody with all the qualifications and they have a stable of people that they've used for that. And he also did warn that 2025 was a recertification year. So that means watching reports to the DOR and he may have to purchase some consultation from Patriot for that. And then finally, the otherwise unclassified is, as he said, was the time clock stamp service and some printer cartridges. So next slide. So that's that's the budget part. The abatements. So he said, as of now, there's 43 requested. The deadline is actually tomorrow. So there were 43 last year. I asked, you know, how many will go to the board of assessors and how many will get modified? He said about a dozen. He also said about dozen will get appealed to the appellate tax board. Those tend to be large commercial properties because otherwise it's not worth it. Because there's just not enough of the tax discrepancy there to fund things. So if it goes there, it gets negotiated. They use the comparative sales model, which is real estate appraisal, but also when that operating income of commercial property, both of those can be used to, but it basically means they'll probably be some worse trading and they'll figure out a number in the bill. And then that's it. You actually can't go to the court. He said he's never heard of it. So I suspect that issue. Next slide. The overlay accounts. So this was kind of touched on by the town manager. This is controlled by the board of assessors. It funds the abatements, exemptions, any adjustments from the appellate tax board, not the lawyers, because that's from it elsewhere. And then he unpaid collections. And it's got about 3.136 million in it. And as you saw, as they mentioned in the law against plan, it adds about 600 K to that overlay reserve, which is line G and then they deduct about 450 K. Of the surplus of that goes back to revenue. And he said, that's about a five and an average. So, you know, that's basically just budgeting. If they need to. They want to budget a generous number, but it tends to come back. Okay. Next slide. Okay. Revaluation. So we don't appropriate anything this year. We appropriated a hundred grand last year. Because we had to for the state. That'll be. Revaluating commercial and industrial properties and reinspecting what they call personal properties in the business. Computers, coffee maker, fish equipment, whatever that did came in much lower than he figured it was level with 19 with 2020. Yeah. Drive against inflation. So 57.3 K. And then the market reevaluation of properties now happens every year. So that's where we are with the evaluations. And then the next slide. This is a sort of interesting thing. It's moving to cyclical inspections. So with that. 42.7 K. And that's over. From that appropriation. They would like to rather than doing all the properties of near nine of the 10 year cycle. So say it requires you. We expect every 10 years. They want to use 37 K of that, where they're thinking about using 37 K of that for doing like 1500. You know, inspections this year. And then 1500 the next year. And then so on for five years. That would meet the state requirement. And then at that point, they could do one, like 750. And that'll spread out the cost of this. And the effort of this. And that's what we're going to do. And that's what we're going to do. And that'll spread out the cost of this and the effort of this. It can potentially capture new growth sooner, especially in the first five years, because maybe off cycle after that will be every 10 years, but you're still looking at it. And they said it would probably be a contract. They probably would hire someone. So given that change in the inspection model. That was worth mentioning. And then finally, well, we mentioned it. I think it's the override applied. They mentioned this. I'm not sure that hit 50%. It's the. August and November packs bills and 50% in May, 2025. You may already know that, but the thousands of people. Listen to this report. That and that is, that's it. Thank you. And questions. You have. Actually, sorry. I have to make the motion. So I move the taxation total of $344,942. Second. Any questions. So quickly. I don't remember if we've asked this in the past, but on the assessors themselves on the salary line. Three of them. Salaries. Is that tied to them being elected? Or is that. What's the. I mean, compared to other. Commission, you know, committees and things that don't. They each get 5,000 minus 100. Right. I mean, it's a stipend. I think it's like, you know, the select board gets a certain amount. Right. School committee gets a certain amount. That's just the amount. Well, I was just curious. I was told they only meet like once a month. I'm wondering, do you know how much time they spend in it? Before. Well, I started a fight between them, but I'm just, you know, added up. That's 15,000 when we're talking about how. Yeah, I didn't ask. And I'm not sure how comfortable he would have been. I could tell you about work for this life board. And then he said. And I'll pay this school. It's a small size. I've been compared to a lot of times with general. And it has not gone up in decades. And you know, the differences we see him on TV. We know what the school committee does, at least on camera and much more than that. We know what the select board does on camera and much more than that. Well, they have more meetings too. So what the assessors are doing is. When a taxpayer comes to them and says, you're charging me two months tax. They're. I believe this is true. They're. Assessing whether or not that person has a case. Okay. So that is a big part of the job. And then supervising and hiring the director. Actually not anymore. Well, they don't hire him directly. They are. They're very. Also. The assessors can also hear like it's financial hardship. So no, I didn't ask. I couldn't try to ask Dana, like just roughly. How much is he seeing it? Because I'm pretty sure he's going to be involved with. Most of what they're doing. Right. So he would buy a pretty good beat. Do they meet how many hours a month? Things like that. But at the same time, whenever professional rate, they might charge. It's probably going to get. Fast. Right. Just a point of. Any more questions. Or tofer. What's the point of it? Is it a point of information on the topic? Yes. Yeah. Okay. I just on the $4,900. It used to be $5,000. And it's. By a bylaw many, many years ago. These are the three elected positions. If it was $5,000, they'd be entitled to retirement. That's five years ago. They dropped it to. Less a hundred dollars. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. They dropped it to. Less a hundred dollars, 49,000 dollars. They're not entitled to retirement purposes. You'd like it. And they're not entitled any more. The same thing for the. People coming on the board of Slack, but a school committee. So that benefit has been taken away. Charlie and Linda. And that's, Oh, I just know that I had. A little discussion with one of the assessors. One of the assessors about 30 years ago, Dan Grissel, he was a little crutchety old guy. The first thing he wanted to know was what my address was. I don't believe the current members would ask you that question. I'm just telling you, it's a touchy subject. He's got to give me more questions on the assessors, but we should go with this. All right, we have a motion. It's been seconded. All the papers say yes. Any opposed? All right, yes. Thank you. I know fire and police will be ready on Monday. Everybody else will be ready on Monday. Back up. Second. I'll just remember the answer to a question that came up about libraries. Would you like me to answer now or? Will anyone else have budgets ready on Monday? I should be able to. OK. I shouldn't have a check that's on. I mean, I can for God's sake, so we will have a bunch of budgets on Monday. Rebecca, you have an answer to that. Al, you had a question about why the box offsets shows up on the budget and the other offsets do not show up. And I remember the answer to that, which is the box shop. One of their missions is to partially support 100 children's libraries because that little amount of money goes full. It's sad or it's all the other. I don't know if I'd like to support material. That would. And then rank that service does show up in the capital report, not the three days you have. Their motion to adjourn. So moved. All right, thank you.