 So I'm going to call the meeting of the finance committee for December 17, 2020, to order at 2.03 PM and welcome the finance committee, which is now one member less than before, which I'll say something more about in a minute, but first I want to say that pursuant to Governor Baker's March 12, 2020 order is suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law, general law chapter 30, section 18. This meeting of the finance committee is being conducted via remote participation. And in order to satisfy the remote participation rules, we have to make sure that everybody can acknowledge that they are and can hear me and be heard. So I'll just go through the list, Kathy. Yes, here it can hear you. Lynn? Yes. Pat? Yes. Dorothy? Dorothy seems to have stepped away because her room is empty, Bernie? Yes. And Bob? Yes. Okay. As I was saying, just for the public, Dorothy, can you acknowledge your presence? I've been on the machine all day teaching. Okay, so we know your presence though. And at least physically, whether you're still in class mentally, you can't tell us. All I was gonna say is that for anybody who's a member of the public who's watching, we have one member who resigned from the committee for personal reasons, Sharon Povinelli, who's a resident member. And the GOL committee of the council in its meeting tomorrow will discuss question as to whether to fill a position, how to fill a position if anyone, and then including anyone in this committee, who's not on GOL has an opinion that you'd like to offer to GOL, please don't hesitate to do so. The term that Ms. Povinelli was in expires in June 30th at the end of the year, fiscal year and so in 2021. So that's part of the thinking that the committee's gonna have, the GOL committee's gonna have to go through. So with that, I also have one additional agenda item that was unanticipated and I've sent an email to the members of the committee should have received a number of emails. And I hope that everybody's had a chance to check their emails and has an email from Sean and a couple from me that have various attachments that can kind of move today's meeting along, I hope. So with that... Andy, I have them, but I just printed them five minutes ago. I mean, when I get something the day of the meeting and I've got classes that day, it means I don't get ready for the meeting. Okay, I'm sorry about that. I think the one, but actually it's not that bad and it's a good thing you printed them out. The two that are essential for the discussion that you have not seen before, some of them you've seen before and were being sent because they're attachments that were helpful to the resident members of the committee who don't receive the council packet. But the two, the last one that I sent out had two attachments to it. One was in Word and it's a list of suggested topics that we should talk about in our first agenda item, which is the proposed guidelines that we wanna make to the council for the next year and a series of policy issues. I think, but what my thinking about that is, if we use that list or a list that is mended as you may choose, that we then can talk about each one and then as the result of that is that we will be, I think that I'll be able to do a draft for our next meeting that is based upon today's conversation. And Sean and I did a memo that Sean sent to you which is for the agenda item that immediately follows which is the, as much as time as we can spend to talk about the inventory issue and it's just the list of inventory items. But when I can put it up, I'll look forward and put it on the screen to you, Ken. The memo that I sent that has the list of possible issues for consideration if you know what I'm referring to. Andy, could I make a suggestion? I have that memo and it truthfully, it looks fascinating but I find size too small. I know sometimes people use a small font size, they're embarrassed because it's a long memo but I'd rather it to be a longer memo and bigger font. And so also when it goes up on the screen, it'll be hard for anyone to read it because it's a small font. Dorothy, you can change your screen view to be bigger. There's a view option way up at top. And you can do, instead of fit to window you can make it 100% original and it will pop out as a much bigger print. Andy, I have a separate issue. Yes, go ahead. And I'm just checking, I have a, I guess it's a future agenda item, so I want to make sure that there's a placeholder at the end of the meeting. I'd like to bring up issues around the hiring freeze that we set in the police department. And I'm not sure where to do that. We can put that in there, also under an anticipated business. Thank you. Though I'm not sure that it's any more a finance committee issue, but at least we should talk about it briefly. So I think the question on this memo and of course the problem is a list. And I hope that you've had a chance to at least look through it. And whether there's anything that you think doesn't belong in our discussion or conversely something that you would like to add to the list and we will come back at the end if there are additional issues that you don't have that at the end, if you've thought of an additional issue, we can also add it at the end. So the first run is just if you know of anything immediately that you think is missing or anything that you would propose to eliminate. Otherwise I would suggest that in order to get this moving that we just go through this and we'll just as you're looking at it say that it was developed by going through last year's guidelines that were adopted in January the pre-COVID guidelines. And I just highlighted each section that I thought was something that we needed to talk about again and then adapted it in order to have us be able to have the list, but it is modeled after last year's pre-COVID guidelines. Bernie, I'm not sure you know everybody else was involved but we actually ended up doing two sets of guidelines because we had to do an amended set of council guidelines after the COVID crisis hit and we were into a new budget reality. These documents I have sent to Athena too as I sent them to you, she gets copies of them and I don't think she probably had a chance to put them in the packet, but... I'm sorry, Andy, I just wanted to pop in real quick so they are available online to the public now. Okay, so they are in the packet and the packet is available on the website under government time council to finance committee and then you can find the packet there. So with that said, is there anybody? I see a bunch of hands up and I'm gonna take them in order and see them Pat. I'm sorry, I should have taken that down. That was my interruption from before. Okay. I apologize. I just did because I just got my participant list up. Kathy. Yeah, you asked about, I'll just do a couple that I'd like to add and I don't have a place for them but we've heard that the collective bargaining agreements are open or there will be and I'd like to put a discussion of that just brief a couple of sentences and it's in the context of where we're living with a flat budget, a flat dollar budget and there will be step increases. So I just would put it somewhere and I don't have the best place for it. Then it may go under your other capital needs category but I'd like to have a sentence or two about the possibility of setting up a maintenance fund. You know that if we are investing in a capital project or we have that we put some money aside to be drawn down and just raise it as a question of whether or not we should do something like that. So that's probably under that piece. And then this one, I really don't know where it goes but we have a category called community health and safety and we have racial equity and social justice and we have asked the town manager to come, we the council to come back to us in January with a discussion about staffing and potential alternative staffing and we've proposed two positions. So it's under one of his goals and it's either a subheader but we would be expecting to see in the guidelines and this gets down to a subset of the guideline something about that as a making allowance for it. So whether he's talking about an expanded force or a reduction in people we call police and in addition to other kinds of people I don't know what it is but just some mention that that's a piece. Then two others, I'm trying not to get this too big but under new revenue generation suggestions one thought I had and this was not original to me Lynn actually mentioned it maybe half a year ago. We have an open slot in the town called economic development officer or person. Should we in some way think about that person being dedicated to grabbing grants for us? You know, a grants getter in an era where we need them. So focused on getting us grants not just on what else we can do. So I wanted the word grants in. I think that's it. Lynn and I talked about an idea of, Lynn you have to help me with this but if you wanted to make an investment now and I'll use solar or there might be others and you think you're gonna get paid back by lower operating costs later with it is there a revolving fund where you can take a loan out of the fund and then pay it back as you accrue the savings? Could we set something up like that in town? Because as I understand the budgets you could save money but you couldn't necessarily keep it for the following year. So it would go back to pre-cash. So it's an investment with, so it makes a loan to do the investment in expectation that you're gonna be able to pay it back because and I don't know whether what it is because. So that's that would be an example for that. That's it. I'll come back and comment as we go through but I wanna get through everybody. Dorothy, Dorothy Pam and then Bob Hegner and then Bernie. Dorothy did you have something? Okay, I had muted myself. You know, when we're going on our meetings there's always, I'm constantly being surprised at grants and they pop up all over the place and I would kind of differ with Kathy in saying make the economic development person the grant person because clearly all kinds of people are getting grants right now but we don't know. I think there must sometimes I think there have to be surprise grants but I get the feeling that there are grants that people kind of know are coming or there's some kind of structure of it but we in the council don't know anything about that. We only know about it when we get the grant. So many of these grants seem to me and I'm probably wrong but some seem to be nice things that are not the basics. It's like jewelry and not the clothing. If we knew that we were getting grants or had a good chance of getting grants for some things then we might budget or think about the basic spending differently. So, cause I just feel like we're doing this thing at least as a council member in a complete dark room not knowing that actually this expense is gonna be offset with this grant and that one with that grant. Is there any way to have any kind of sense of how grants cause clearly they're paying for tons and tons of stuff in our town. So anyway, that's my idea that I'm putting out there is a question and a comment. Okay. Thank you, Bob, Hegner. Yeah, I wanted to add something to Kathy's discussion of the collective bargaining agreements and that is whether we want to consider sort of a broad limit on overall salaries and benefits. Like in the presentation that we saw last week looks like the salaries and benefits are roughly about 55% of the budget each year over the last 10 years. Do we wanna make that more of a target or a goal? That's something to discuss. And then I'm not sure where this fits maybe under the 11, but we should, I would like to make sure we touch on the potential decline in the school enrollment population. Okay. That's right. Thank you, Bernie. Just to go back and kind of recap some of the stuff that's been said, we're gonna be doing community bargaining agreements. And I think it's important that we stress that the use of reserves are for non-returning expenses that we shouldn't be using a reserve funds to fund the operation of the town. Because I know from story experience when you're negotiating a CBA's unions will frequently go back to those reserve funds and say, look, you have the money. So I'd really wanna, I'd really wanna see a stronger statement about the use of reserves. That would be one thing. Kathy suggested about Revolving Fund for Projects. That's something I really appreciate because it's almost impossible when you start, you put something in place and you start saving money to track that. But I really don't think the Department of Revenue's rules will allow for something like that. But it's a necessary thing to do. As you put cost saving measures in place, you should be able to look at those savings and say where you're reapplying them. And again, that comes from story experience. The piece about grants, I think is a good one. I think we've got our priorities. And I think under each of those budget priorities, there should be some effort made to catalog grants that will advance those priorities. So we're not doing grants on an opportunistic basis. We're focused on where we're looking at them. Having an economic development person to help pursue that would be helpful. And to get some overall direction and coordination on grant effort. And I'd speak up, please. I wanna go back to the solar fund. This is something that I know that Worcester has actually done. It's something, Andy, we discussed way back when we were doing the zero energy bylaw before I was ever on the council and before there was a council. So before we say we can't do it, I wanna actually explore and make sure that if there are other towns that have done it, we can. That's a good reminder because I find myself getting stuck in the town headset and not the city form of government headset and cities have considerably more leeway than towns do. So yeah, thank you, Lynn, for that. Other than that, people have pretty much brought up things. I'm interested in the moment, at least. Okay, Lynn, thank you for updating the list as we talk. You're so much better at it than I am, which is my, so thank you. So I think we need to go back up to the top. I would rather than try and comment on what everybody has said as they go along. I was gonna just, if I had any thoughts about what you said, I was gonna do them as we were going through. So going to the, just taking them in order, we said in last year's guideline sort of as an initial opening statement, that a key factor that was very important to the council was fiscal sustainability, which can only achieve by looking at multi-year planning. And that was sort of an overarching philosophical statement about budget philosophy, which I think actually came, a lot of these things came from either the select board guidelines or the old finance committee guidelines that ended up in sort of a combined document that became our first year guidelines when we did the FY20, which was the first time the council did guidelines. I don't know if anyone disagrees with the thought or thinks that in the context of where we are now with COVID budgeting, as I'll call it, whether multi-year planning is still a goal to try and strive for or people think it's achievable. So I'll just see if there are any comments on the first. Dorothy? Well, when it comes to one of my pet topics, which is sidewalks and roads, if they're not in a multi-year plan, the ones, they don't happen. All that's happened this year in terms of sidewalks is brand new ones, very much needed brand new ones. But people talk to me all the time about some of the terrible sidewalks that have been that way for years and years and people report it and report it and report it. And so, I mean, obviously they'll never, ever, ever get done if it's not part of a multi-year thing where we're actually promised that will happen. So yes, we want to have multi-year. Yeah. Lin has just started to add the words capital in there. And certainly multi-year and capital have been and continue to be and it's actually built into the charter that there has to be, I think the charter specifies five years, if I recall correctly. It's five, yeah. So that there is the requirement for capital. I think that what the question came up is whether the overall budget including the operating budget whether it's we should be thinking ahead, Bob. Your hand's up. Yeah, I do think that fiscal sustainability and multi-year planning are important goals and important principles. Maybe they're principles more than goals, but I think some of the issues that we will be that are lower or further down the list like use of reserves that impacts or that has an effect on sustainability and on multi-year planning. The collective bargaining agreements are going to impact multi-year planning the school population. So I think a lot of the issues sort of two through X I think sustainability and multi-year planning is a part of what we have to consider. Kathy? Yeah, just building on Bob's I think you use the word overarching Andy. So this is like, this is the big label and everything else comes underneath it. And I like the idea of principles. And when I looked at it to the rest of the world as well as to us does fiscal sustainability in itself talk about that we were least trying to meet essential needs. So we wanna be, we can't go out of business as a town we can't bankrupt the town, but is that part of, in the context of trying to meet essential that we may have to make some tough cuts but we're trying to and how do I define essential needs? So later when we get to a school budget or something if we set a school budget that if the enrollment does not drop and the only way to schools to live with it is to lay off people, we would need evidence they could still run the school before we would make that judgment. So that's, I just didn't know whether sustainability already has the notion of it's, we wanna be physically sustainable over multiple years because we've got to pay for essential services or do we need to use those words anywhere? So let me, actually I had some thought about as you were talking last year what the, if you didn't get a chance to read the guidelines which was one of the attachments because that was a longer document. And both the way that we handled it last year was we said that the current services that town provides are important to our residents and should continue, but that does not mean that there shouldn't be ongoing evaluation of all services and to try and make sure we're providing services in the most cost effective manner possible. Yeah, no, I like that wording a lot and it was easier to write those sentences when you start with a fiscal budget at the beginning of year that was a level current services, not a flat dollar but yes, I like that wording. So I raised this mainly as a question and not necessarily to redefine it but that we wanna be fiscally sustainable to meet these needs and those later sentences I think should stay in the document. I like them a lot. So I have a comment or two on this one. One is that, you know, we often sit here and we will be sitting here and we'll be talking about new things we'd like to see happen. Some of those things will come in response to the community safety. Some of those things will come in response to climate action, et cetera. I think what we need to be very clear about is that we can't commit to something unless we can sustain it. And so there really needs to be that ongoing assessment of not just what will it cost this year but what will it cost over time? And so when I think about this, I don't just think about what do we have now? I think about of what else might go on the wish list. So. Yep. So you would put sustainability of services or something like that. Yeah. Yep. The fiscal sustainability mean, mean meeting essential needs. And then I'm saying if new program can we sustain it? So it's the questions that came up on if we fix the North Commons, well, it looks like it does now 10 years now. We're gonna keep it up. You know, that's just an example. I mean, you know, whether we can't just pay a lot of money every 30 years to make that that we let it deteriorate. Yeah. I wanna add a little comment. I worked as a waitress years ago with an older waitress who did not wash her hair all week. And then she went to the beauty parlor and had it done. And I thought that's a horrible way to live. So for one day or two days of the week, she looked great. And the rest of the time, it just got worse and worse and worse because it wasn't the regular normal upkeep that should be going on if you're working as a waitress. So I totally agree that we have to change the practices of this town to be every building, every piece of land that the maintenance hasn't been. And I know that we've got workers who are working very, very hard. So it's gotta be that they haven't been given the resources or made it or put it on the calendar in the right way or they're having just constantly meeting emergency needs that they haven't been able to do that. I mean, I know they have done a lot of it, but they haven't been able to do as much as we'd like. So I don't, I wanna take that back a little bit. Yes, they have maintained many, many things, but we're not able to maintain things and many others as well as we'd like. Bernie has his hand up. Yeah, I just basically agree with the point that I'd like to make the point that new efforts, new programs, new tactics don't necessarily mean new money that we have to be prepared and this goes in with the evaluation piece. We have to be prepared to say how effective is this and can we do things faster, better, cheaper or can we do things differently that gets us further along? I think maintenance is a very serious topic. Prop two and a half when it first settled in, set up a perverse incentive. In other words, when you look at what first got cut in those budgets after two and a half was maintenance efforts because if it broke, then people were more or less forced to replace it. And I really think we need to emphasize for folks. I think we do okay, from my experience here in Amherst, I think staff do well to keep things up. But I like the idea of setting up a maintenance account especially along with grants because you can get a grant that starts you off with something and find out that five years down the road you've incurred a new cost. Thank you. Actually, this has come up a couple of times and so at some point I'm gonna ask Sonny or Sean to tell us a little bit about what it is that is feasible to put in regarding specialized funds, revolving funds or dedicated funds of that type because we don't wanna put something in there that can't be done. Sean, your hand. Thanks, Andy. So we'll weigh in as we go through each of these and we get to that one, Sonny and I can both check in. I think in terms of the first number criteria here, all those things look fine from my point of view. Okay. We should keep moving because we do need to get through a lot of territory today. So sort of implicit in this and because as part of the number one was but I put it into a separate number was whether we wanna actually say something about current services and the current services like we did last year as I described earlier. Current services are appreciated by the community and it's sort of came out maybe as a presumption level, a rebuttable presumption but presumption level. If anybody disagrees with that, let me raise their hand otherwise and I will go on to the next territory. One has his hand up. Yeah, I don't know, Sean, do you have... I lowered it and re-raised it just. So I don't know how you wanna handle this one. Again, our initial projections are for level funding, not level services. If the economic situation stays where it is and we do move forward with level funding, it's gonna be really hard to meet level services. I think we have some positive things for FY21 that allowed us to get by but to do that another year with level funding, it's not saying that it can't be recommended but just know that that would be a challenge with level funding. But we can, are you suggesting and maybe I should see if the rest of the committee, how the rest of the committee would react to this is to say that we appreciate the current services are important to the community but if decisions need to be made, then they should be clearly stated. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it is again, this, we from even going back to last year, FY22 was the year we expected to be very challenging and there are some things that could go the right direction for us and make it not as bad but I think it is important to somehow get into your guidelines if reductions are to be made. Yeah, like you said, to really clearly state the rationale for them. Any other thoughts, Kathy? Yeah, just building on what Sean said, I looked at the wording of our original, the December version of guidelines and I just wanted to change the whole sentence because it's not level services, it is level funding and to say as the second year of level funding, this is going to be challenging and may require tough decisions. Therefore, efforts to achieve efficiencies, look for places where you can live within a budget but not caught, I mean, just to acknowledge we are not funding at a maintenance of current service right up front when we use those two years in a row of this. And I think probably residents in town are aware of this but as far as I know, we have kept paying people even though the buildings aren't open and we have not had to do what UMass has had to do with furloughs, we've let some positions go empty but there's a certain point at which if you're not open for business and you're paying people, some people are still working but I think we just need to acknowledge that we're in an incredibly unusual time and this will be the second year of it. So I wouldn't, this first sentence, do we recommend continuation of all current services? I would just flip that around and just phrase it very differently, to right away say, we're in a belt tightening world where we're gonna be living within flat budgets and we're hoping that people can do what they need to do to live within the flat budget without cutting any essential services. I was trying to wordsmith it in my own mind to say that. That sounds like you've done a pretty good job actually. Thank you. Dorothy. There's a budget term which I don't know the name of but you can't do something new if you don't have any plan or budget for its upkeep. So here we are talking about doing the North Common which we all agree is a desirable project but we have a new park at Kendrick that had to go forward because there were grants and timing and new park at Groff Park and I'm looking at this and although I love the idea of fixing the Common, I'm thinking this is like me going out and buying a lot of new clothes I don't need right now even if I like them even if I'm sick to death of my clothes because I don't need them and we've got to spend my money elsewhere. So I think that this is part of I think we have to make some changes and I don't see that happening yet. Trying to figure out where is this related to services? Is it later on related to capital? Yeah, I mean Dorothy you've raised the question a few times and I think it's probably worth having some response to it. I don't think we can spend a whole lot of time on it today but question that's been raised in several ways is that are we being consulted about grants or grants being applied for because funds are available for a purpose or are they being applied for strategically and how into grants drive our priorities as opposed to priorities driving grants. It's always a little bit difficult because you do apply for grants where you think you can get them but it is a valid point that I don't know how to exactly handle it but I think at some point we probably should talk about it and I was going to actually bring up something along these lines in a later discussion when we get to the questions of the financial consequences of the SUFA proposal from what we heard about last night. But we'll come back to it within the guidelines and a little might even come back to it a little bit later. Anybody else have any thoughts that want to do that? Otherwise what we want to get the next major topic is when we did the town manager goals and there are several of us who were involved in the town manager goal process because we also are in the GOL committee but the council adopted the goals for the town manager which were also then understood to be council's goals so otherwise who wouldn't be asking the manager to work on them. And these are exact copy of the six goals that we ended up with in the process and of course one of them and I'm coming back to this on purpose because it gives Pat an opening to talk about something that she had raised earlier before we really got going into this topic of the guidelines and that is the one that's highlighted now. I think the word we had thought was is that there was gonna be a process that was going to kind of define public safety as we have previously called it and how it is delivered. And I think that the question if I understood and if I don't have this right Pat I really need you to raise your hand is that you were asking whether the hiring of two police officers in January makes sense if it precedes the recommendations that might come from the task force that is just starting to meet. So if that wasn't what you were thinking Pat please fill us in. I know that's a very good way of stating it. I'm concerned because we made what I think was an important gesture. We were looking at people wanting to completely defund the police 52% and we said no there's gonna be a hiring freeze until January 31st I believe. And that committee, the committee the community safety working group is barely up and running. It doesn't even have a full contingent of members yet. So it feels to me very important that we maintain that freeze through this fiscal year while that committee gets up and running and really looks at what could be transformative in terms of how we see we provide services that may or may not need to stay in the police department. So I very much want to bring that back to the council and have us extend that deadline and I'm not sure what the process is to do that. Yeah. Let me respond to a little bit and then go back to Dorothy's hand is up at this moment to what the document we're working on right now is the FY22 guidelines. And the issue you're raising in some ways is an FY21 issue because we adopted a budget in the adoption of when we adopted the budget we made that request that the time manager not fill a position the two vacant police positions. So it doesn't quite fit into the guideline discussion but that doesn't mean that the point you're raising isn't one that's worth bringing to the council. Yeah, I agree with that. And Pat and I discussed this just very briefly right before the meeting. I suggested it be raised in finance because it is a budget issue and that then we need to figure out how to bring it to the council. Okay, so we'll come back to this. Trying to get back to this as additional business at the end in the meeting. But I think that we need to recognize that we've got the, that these are what the guidelines are is about the next year. Dorothy, do you have something you want to say? I agree with the topic that's been raised but I just wanted to add something about our statements have to be with wiggle room in doing a COVID check with one of my classes at the end of the class just to see if in fact it was spreading. One of my students is a police officer in Holyoke or Springfield told me 20 officers that he works with are now have COVID. And so I said, well, do your best to make yourself safe. He says, I have to work with the public. So just a reminder that we can say that we'd think that free should be sustained so the committee can get established which I totally agree with but we have to make sure that we don't lock people down so that if there's a real problem with personnel because of COVID, our police don't have the choice to keep as safe as we might like them to that we don't get stuck in a corner somewhere. It's interesting, you know, part of the CARES grant has allowed us to hire extra fire in EMS people. I don't think, Sean, that's allowed us to hire extra police, has it? We're getting near the end of it. It may be able to be used for that if there was a need. If there was a COVID related need. I'm not sure if I've heard that we've had a similar experience to what Dorothy mentioned, but if there was a COVID related need, we could probably use CARES money, again, qualifying that we're getting near the end of it. And so the CARES money is less and less. Right. Yeah, so Bernie, I'll get to you in a second, but I think that there's a practical issue with this too. The firefighters that were hired were people who were UMass students who were involved in what is called the student call force. So they had an association with the fire EMS department already and they had training. The police officer, as we remember from last summer, there's a long turnover time between the point of hiring and when a police officer can actually provide service and be out on the street. Andy, can I say one other thing real quick that I failed to mention? Yeah. And when we do have staff, first responder staff who are out of work because they need to quarantine or they have COVID or whatever it would be, again, if it's related to COVID, we can use the CARES money to backfill for those staff and we have done that. And that may mean somebody else comes in and works overtime to fill a shift on a temporary basis. But that we have done for both police and fire, I believe. Bernie, stand up. Yeah, Bernie? Yeah, I think it's important to understand anything that you mentioned that with a police officer, you simply take one off the shelf. Even if you're hiring a police officer who's been through the academy and trained, they still need to have a field training here in town and that you're talking weeks or months before you can add someone effectively to the force. That's one thing. I really would like to hope that the two police officers are the two police positions are seen as a good faith effort on the part of the council to take the task forces work seriously and that people don't anchor on those two positions is that's what we have to work with or that's as far as we can go or that those two positions aren't necessary. I will end up being necessary for the successful work of the police force. So just my concern is that people will focus on those two positions and take that as some kind of a limit and I would hope that doesn't happen. So I think in this one, we're going to have to do the best we can in doing a draft, which is the next stage. I think what we've done in the last two years is that I did a first round of the draft and then Kathy did massive editing his vice chair to it and that was then what ended up being the draft for discussion of, we may be doing the same thing again this year. So we're going to have to do the best we can with it. I think they go back just a little bit up. So the whole list, last year we handled the question of additional, we said something like, here are some additional issues that you, that are important to the council. And we asked that you give some thought as to how they could be provided and that if additional funds become available that you consider these as items for adding to the budget. I'm not sure that all members of the council are going to feel comfortable with that sort of a statement this year. And we do, do we need some sort of overarching statement about the additional priorities that are suggested through the goals? Yes, Sean, you had something first and then I saw Bob Higgner stand. Just real quick. I think one thing you might want to consider in the guidelines is if additional funds become available and we can't maintain level services that some of those funds be put towards maintaining level services, where it makes sense considering everything else that you have here in terms of reviewing operations and making sure we're doing things efficiently. But I think that should be at least one consideration. Yeah, I kind of going along with that. I mean, I just see that these additional priorities under number three would be competing against the existing services potentially. And if there is a requirement for additional resources in order to meet these priorities then those resources have to come from somewhere else. We have to then not do something we would have done otherwise. So I'm not quite sure how to word this, but it seems to me that we've got a fixed budget and we can either do as much of what we have done in the past as we can or we don't do some of that and we do something different but we only have a certain amount of budget to work with. And Andy, I might just add for number three, those could be budget additions, but I also just view those as how the town manager deploys existing resources. And you may wanna have comments related to each one, but those overarching goals, they're not just about budget additions, it's about how staff are used and how we support the goals of the council. So I don't know if necessarily every one of those has to be a budget addition item next to it. It could just be how existing resources are used. I think that's valid. I think when we did this, we recognized that there might be some additional costs that some things were, as you just described, housing affordability, we have commitments, a lot of that funding doesn't come from the operating budget or the capital budget comes from CPA funds and grants and outside funding. The climate action is probably a little bit of both. Each one has some aspect to it. Kathy? Yeah, well, you did a perfect segue and as to Sean, I think you've categorized all of these under additional priorities as if they were budget spending. And I noticed the way it was written last year, you wove different things in, in terms of meeting different kinds of things. But I think if additional funds, this question, if additional funds become available to the extent there, this notion of an investment now that would save us money later falls into here. So some kind of priority setting where last year, we already talked about a priority of where you would spend it for second and third, but it's a list of the next places. So if we're about to have a disaster in some part of the current operating budget, that's the one Sean just said, we might have to put some money in, if we could invest in something that we can see a clear savings within the next few years. And I know we're not doing enterprise funds, but we had a brief discussion on the centennial plant that if the design of the plant could also think about solar, how much would it save in the electrical costs? And Guilford gave us the annual electrical costs of operating that plant, which were enormous. So I just, so that kind of notion that there might be some things that we could be prioritizing that way. So I don't wanna write this too long here, but I think it's just a sentence and you've already got these efficiencies. And this is where grants help you a lot, that if getting a grant, we just got that grant for the fire for the ambulance, it will save us probably wear and tear and it will save us gasoline and it will save us in a way. So that grant made total sense to get and we don't always get grants that have that clear payoff to our operating budget or long-term life of something. So I don't see how this lead sentence, the way you have it organized, we can fix that later, but additional priorities, we're the four big capital projects, all of racial justice, all of everything, it doesn't all fit neatly under that, but seizing opportunities would as a way of rewording it when we actually write the sentences. I think that what we're kind of evolving to is the understanding that Sean started us out with this way when we, as a council identified six areas that we would like the manager to pay attention to, there was sort of a recognition that some would require additional funding, some might save money and some are just incorporated within how you do business within current operations. And I think we can sort of point that out as an overarching thing, but I would be hesitant, but I don't know how the rest of you feel, which is why we're having a meeting. I would be hesitant to have the guidelines ignore this other document that we worked on very hard as a council, the priorities for the time manager for the next year. Yeah, I guess I didn't mean to ignore it, but I looked at the way you wove it in last time. And it's not, as you just said, it's not just budget, so it's within the budget areas of each of these priorities, these are the top priorities to be worried about. I mean, we didn't make a priority excellent education, right? But we maintain our school's reputation, so we were talking about new focuses or renewed focuses. Yeah, so that's why this started out as being additional. And you're right, I probably could have come up with a better word. Now, did you have something else in Ghana? See your hand. Oh, sorry, I will, I gotta put it down. Oh, okay. So is there anything else that people wanna say on this topic or we'll go on, keep moving through the list? So I have to go back, I can get mine up too. So we had a little bit of discussion already in use of reserves. I think that the other use of reserves question that was sort of implicit in, or I should say explicit in the presentation that was made by Paul and others at the financial trends meeting, was that if we make, if our revenues don't arrive as they are anticipated, that that's where we consider using reserves. As was suggested for this current year, that if we didn't get the state aid increase that we were committed to using reserves at that point, but we had cited even in the May second round of the guidelines that we would only use reserves if there was a fall off in revenue so that the budgets were being developed that we would try and at that point hold to those budgets. So is there anything else that you would suggest that we put in under the topic of reserves? Kathy? Just to connect it back with the four projects that and the third would be, not for operations, except if there's a shortfall and hold on to them for the expected need as we embark on the big capital projects, to re-emphasize that we built them up to help be a support for that. That was pretty strongly stated in the guidelines as you just hear the pre-COVID January guidelines. Yeah, so just the people understand, it wasn't like we were planning to die and bequeath it to our beneficiaries. We had- Exactly, yeah. We've been talking to you lately about guidelines. Yeah. I just suggest for people who haven't had a chance to do so recently to go back and look at how we addressed it in the January guidelines. Because I think it's pretty much the same thing that you just said. Yeah, no, I think it was well expressed there, but I just was putting it since we're doing rough outlines here. Anything else that people wanna add on this topic? Yeah, I do wanna mention one thing. There was a discussion during the financial indicators meeting as to whether or not we should be looking at the level that's put aside for capital. And also a question as to whether or not we should review the maximum minimum that has been out there for a while. That Asanyu was the person that brought both of those up. Yeah, Asanyu, if you wanna chime in, the second one that you mentioned, I think I said a few months ago we are reviewing our financial policies that are out there and we'll come back to you at some point. That is one of the areas that we've looked at and have some thoughts on about what that right level of reserves is. Both for the operating budget, the general fund but also for enterprise funds as well because I know that conversation came up. So at some point we'll be talking more about that. Yeah, being one of the sole survivors of that 2007 process that led to those current policies, I have to say that at that point in time our reserves were pretty low and we were trying to use best judgment to come up with that five and 15%. But in the end, there was no magic when we were barely at 5% to what we did. Andy, I'll just say that for the most part the base that you guys created was really, really good and really strong and set a nice structure. So really we just went through it and sort of said, now that we are where we are, does that change what we wanna set for policies essentially? No, I think much of what you guys worked on is still very much relevant to where we are. Anything else that people wanna say about reserves? There's one other thing and that gets back to an item that Bob raised at the very beginning, which was the reminder that reserves are not available should not be made available for current programs that would create recurring demands. And I think it was stated fairly specifically in the example that Bob gave about collective bargaining, though we might wanna just say salaries. This is an example as opposed to put it on the unions. Do we want to revisit the proposed maintain reserves at the capital at 8% or do we just wanna reinforce that or what do we wanna say about that? I was gonna bring that up when we got to number seven, but it was seven or I can't even remember if it was eight. It's number eight and your current list is number eight, yeah. Yeah. What happened to it? Right there. Number nine. Okay, it became number nine. Okay, thanks. Maintenance in there and I can move maintenance if that helps. That's all right. No, it's all right. The numbers didn't have any magic. They were thoughts. Question of override. I think that our general feeling has been we trying to avoid operating overrides, recognizing that we may need to go to voters for a debt exclusion override most likely for a school and that there's a limit to how many times you can ask voters to consider increasing their taxes, especially now, but I think that's been had been the thought previously. Yeah, go ahead. I would prefer not saying may need to go to voters for an override for the elementary school explicitly. Last time we said an override for at least one of the projects or one to two because I think the jury is out. We have choices and you know, I'm not gonna jump right in on what I think is affordable or not, but if we were at eight or nine percent depending on what we do with the library, we might be able to squeak out with the school, but I just think we're gonna have to confront are we talking about one or two overrides and do we need to protect the schools by, you know, right, so I just wouldn't mention which project it is. And the last year version said we think we might have to do it for something and we're hoping we get started on one of these in FY 21, which we clearly didn't, you know, so do we think we're gonna start on one of these big projects in FY 22, so. I actually agree with Kathy because I think that we don't wanna, you don't want the council to feel like they're voting today when they vote the guidelines. Yep. Yeah, so I just wouldn't name what we think we're gonna have to do, but it says, you know, use the override for big capital projects is a good way to phrase it, leaving it nice and vague as to which, or absolutely. Bob? Yeah, in the meeting last week, one of the counselors, I can't remember whom, raised the question about whether our debt service is at the optimal level. And do we wanna address that here? I mean, we could put in something to the effect to say, we don't think it's good to take on more debt now because we've got these big projects or just stay silent on it. That was the chair of the federal trustees, is the one who raised it. Oh, right, sorry. That was Austin who raised that. I'm trying to understand the statement because in fact, any one of the capital projects that is out there means we are going to take on more debt. If what Austin was saying, don't take on anything else because we wanna save it for the library, that's a different statement than we shouldn't take on any more debt. I think it was a, I shouldn't, I'll use a neutral word. I think it wasn't, that he wasn't completely clear in his own mind because he was saying, why not do this? And didn't understand that we were saying, we weren't saying we are not gonna do debt. We're just gonna say, we're not gonna ramp up on debt before we do the big projects because then we won't be able to afford them. So I thought it would be good to actually follow up with him that it's not that we're not planning on taking on debt. It's just we're reserving the room to take on debt for the big projects and not eating it all up with financing everything with debt. So Sean has his hand up on this. Yeah, I mean, again, we can all try to interpret what he said. I mean, my interpretation was that, we often show those slides about how low our debt is and how low a percentage of debt we have. And I think his remarks were based on it, is that really a good thing? And I don't think it's, for your purposes, I don't think it's a bad thing to have low debt, but again, debt service costs are at an all-time low or historic lows right now. So whatever you put in here, you may want to acknowledge that now is actually maybe a smart time to use debt because of how low rates are. And that as we prepare for these large projects or if there are other large capital projects within capital, where it makes sense to use debt, again, now relative to history is one of the more advantageous times, especially given how low our debt is in general. You wouldn't put that under override or I mean, we put that concept goes in somewhere. That would go under maybe other capital needs potentially or its own section or you can leave it out all together. Whatever you guys want to do. But that was my interpretation is, understanding how low interest costs are right now is not necessarily a good thing that we have really low debt because we're not taking advantage of those low interest rates. But we do use debt for some of the smaller capital projects and capital expenditures that come off the capital plan get bundled. And this is some short-term debt that's in there versus the long-term debt that requires a bonding. And I think there's a difference there that needs to be emphasized. What we're talking about for the large capital projects means a bond that commits the town to a 20 year or greater period as opposed to the one to five year borrowing that goes on to buy some of the equipment we need. Yeah, just on how low they are right now, it's just looking 20 year is around 2% and 30 years around two and a half for in Massachusetts for municipals. It's 10 years, it looks like a bargain. Like, you don't have to. My brother works in finance in the company. He works for, manages money for large corporations and wealthy individuals. And he's going nuts at the return on the bonds. He can't offer people a lot of return on their investment, the bond market and the in the muni bond market right now. The other thing too, but avoiding operating overrides, operating overrides almost invariably fail. You look at the list of overrides that DOR maintains. The success rate is about a 10% success rate for an operating override. People are much more comfortable funding and using an override for a capital project where they know they're going to see something on the ground and they know it's going to be paid off in a certain amount of time. So voters are more, way more comfortable with an override for a capital project unless you're a Charlemont and you want to buy an ambulance. Yeah, thank you for that point. And as far as the, getting back to the debt limit and then I'm going to call on Dorothy. Now, we had a policy that goes back to my select board days and with Sandy Pooler was the finance director that we were trying to deliberately not take out debt and let debt that we had paid off, get paid off in full and expire so that we would have capacity for major projects. And so the fact that we have low debt was actually a designed policy for that purpose. Dorothy? Yes, I just wanted to comment thinking back on our own financial life, how you get in trouble and you get in trouble when they offer you 0% for a year, refinance all your money and you won't have to pay any interest for a year and then you go borrow money. And yes, it's cheap, our interest is cheap but you still end up owing the money. And thinking of the financial crashes that we've had in our adult life and they are usually preceded by a moment of euphoria like, oh my God, it's so cheap to borrow now, let's just go do it. And then you do it and you find that the debt can last longer than the thing you did with the debt. So I just want to tamper the enthusiasm is what I wanna do. Well, those are decisions that we're gonna have as we go along in discussion that as we make decisions about debt going forward, not sure it's easy to put that in, because this guideline is about the budget, it's not about future decisions that are gonna be made. Anything else on this topic? Because then I should move on to capital. There's, I think we can lump the two capital together if we want, but we've really talked a little bit about the four major capital projects earlier when we were talking about the time manager goals. And will we... Yeah, I'm kind of, I'm gonna encourage that we not try to get into a long engaged conversation on this one, the four capital projects are still out there, okay. It's not an operating budget question for the year. So are we, do we wanna, the recommendation that was in the financial trend recommendations was that we stay with the 8%, whether we go to 8%, get back up to 8%. And that would go under the other capital needs? Yeah, it goes under number nine, whichever we're gonna reorganize this anyway. It's the recommendation from the financial trends report was where 8% came from. Do you want reactions to that? Yeah. Well, as far as I could see, 8% was the remainder. You know, once they, once we did flat budgets with the assumptions that we had on, you know, property tax revenue and revenue from other sources, we were left with enough to put 8% in. So to me, it's 8% is doable if all the other things happen and do we stay at 8% if we need to dip into reserves because there are revenue shortfalls. You know, last year we clobbered capital so we couldn't go much lower than we went. So the one question I would have is that, do we dip first into reserves to maintain services if state aid or do we go back down on eight? And I think I would sort of stay with the eight because of the queued up, the roads, the sidewalks, the queue that we didn't spend money on last year. But I'd love to see what the queue looks like because some things moved off the ask list over into the Community Preservation Act budget. Some things that were on the list that we didn't get to in JCPC or now over at CPA. The front steps of the town hall, various roofs all moved over to another place. But that's just a question, you know, do we, if there's a state revenue aid fall, do we first go to reserves or would we say we can't go to 8%? We're gonna need to be at seven and a half. I'm asking it as a question. I think I'd rather stay at eight. John has his hand up. Is it okay, Andy, if I respond to that? Yes. So I can see why maybe it looks like a plug figure because sometimes the 8% is a weird, comes out to a weird number, but the 8% was actually pretty intentional this year. You know, we looked out what was deferred, what was coming up for FY22 anyway, and 8% helped us get through a lot of it. So the 8% was actually intentional as a percentage that we thought could get us back on track and make a lot of progress towards getting back to the 10%. But I agree with you, we're actually getting in better shape because there's a lot of projects, the ambulances on the capital plan, we were able to do that out of the Ambulance Seeds Fund. There was a fire truck that we were able to buy out of a gift. So the plan actually looks a little better than probably the last time the group has seen it. So I would also just, I think capital is a really important part for this component for this year. So I would agree with Kathy, it's sticking with 8% and not dipping into that, to whatever extent we can. If something catastrophic happens, I think it's a different story, but I think we really need to emphasize capital for this year's proposal. Andy, I'd like to stay. I'm sorry, I'm not seeing you because let me move my participant list covering the pictures. Yeah, go ahead. I totally agree with this. There is a point where we cannot continue to ignore repairs in new buildings. Or frankly, they're just gonna come back and bite us. And so if it means we can't maintain some programs at the desired levels, that's what it means. But if we end up with a school building that we can't even occupy or a DPW or a fire station that we can't even repair anymore, which is about where we are, by the way, then we've gained nothing. So I really don't wanna see a step below 8%. And I felt like Sean just gave us words that at 8% we can cover some end-much needs that we weren't able to do the year before and we can get somewhere rather than it's a drop in the bucket. It is a drop in the bucket, but nevertheless, it's real money. So there's agreement on that. We should go on. I think that the challenge is gonna be in the writing of it, but Kathy and I work out the writing. We probably will get it fairly well, hopefully. So anything else to be said on the capital and any pieces of the capital at this point? Andy, now might be a good time if you want for Sonya and I to maybe weigh in on the maintenance fund and it sort of relates to the solar fund. Okay. So I'll let Sonya correct me if I'm wrong, but the best vehicle or maybe not the best vehicle, but one vehicle that could be explored for accomplishing those types of things could be like a capital stabilization fund. Several years ago, there was discussion around a capital stabilization fund. I think town median ultimately decided not to do it. They wanted just to stick with a single stabilization fund, but one way to sort of set aside funds specifically for capital, and what I think maintenance fund, I think maybe large scale capital or large scale maintenance, like a new roof or new windows or HVAC work or something like that, which could also apply to solar, which could be large scale capital projects, could be to consider a capital stabilization fund and then the challenge would be how do we put money into it? But that would be one way to sort of isolate money specifically for those things. Sonya, does that? Yeah, I don't really know what you're referring to with solar for capital funds. So if we wanted to, if the town wanted to make a, set aside funds for sustainability initiatives, such as solar, which would be capital because of the cost of it, depending on how it's financed, I mean. Okay, but you're not designating revenues from solar to go in there. No, no, no, no, no. This would be a vote from free cash, basically to a stabilization fund. Right, yeah. So this would be for the cost of solar or the cost of a sustainability initiative if we were to pay for something. But that would depend on the specific arrangement. So we kind of, that's why I was a little confused about what you're talking about with maintenance funds because that's what our stabilization fund is. It's for capital. I mean, we can create as many stabilization funds as you want, but it's for any lawful purpose. And I thought that was our purpose was to have it for, if you had to do a roof, if you had some repairs in a building that you needed to do. I know we were building our reserves also for the peak debt service on these four capital projects. But in my mind, that's what the purpose of it is other than having a rainy day fund for, this is where I wanted to sit. I said that I wanted to, that we should consider raising the bottom limit of the stabilization fund to 15% and never go below that so that we have it for a rainy day fund, but everything else to be for that maintenance fund. Yeah, I think that's the right discussion is how do we know what's for the rainy day fund and what is for capital? And right now it's sort of all together. And whether it's another fund or maybe it's something within the policies, that kind of state that maybe there's a way to get to it that way as well. Yeah, I just don't know if there's a misconception out there that the stabilization fund is for all the large capital projects. Well, to some extent it is, if you go back to the point that Sean started with, which was when Sandy went to town meeting when he was finance director and recommended the creation of the capital stabilization fund, what he was trying to do was to say, we have these major building projects and part of the reason that we are putting aside the level of reserves we are is because we need to have that available for capital purposes. And Tom meeting, they had speakers who said, but we always have the choice to use this stabilization fund for those purposes. So why do we need to have it isolated into a separate fund and rejected that proposal? But that was the discussion at town meeting. Yeah, yeah. What am I supposed to be communicating here? Lynn, just write exactly what we said. It was very clear, wasn't it? Just kidding. And I thought it was too. Yeah, no, we kind of had a discussion there. I mean, I don't know what the, so all of that was to say, was in response to the maintenance fund and the set aside resources for maintenance, but also set aside funds for solar that maybe the guidelines could be that we explore ways to do it or continue exploring ways to earmark or isolate those funds. Yeah, I think that we, I'm gonna go back to the people who raised hands after us in just a second, but it's sort of like the percent for art discussion that got us into so much trouble with the legislature. There's limits that parking revenue has on how you can go about doing these sorts of things. And what the problem was is that town meeting and that one created an expectation that was unmeasurable in DOR's mind. Kathy and then Bernie. Okay, I'm really happy with the explore ways to achieve this, you know, give us a memo back. And Sonya, I completely agree that the stabilization fund is earmarked this way, but I also saw us dip into it to buy Hickory Ridge. And it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to buy a piece of land. And so it's clearly was not maintaining capital, fixing capital it was because the money was there. And so I think to the extent we now have this first time you can, those with long histories can correct me, but we had this capital reserve fund because we couldn't figure out how to allocate it this year because it's so small, but it can only be used for capital projects on an urgent need basis. And if we don't use it all, I'm not sure what happens to it, but I like the idea that we somehow recognize that there's a certain amount of maintenance that has to happen every year. So giving us a memo back on how do we not buy the new truck if we haven't fixed the roof or we don't, you know, it's a back and forth on some of these, you know, force us to stay with the fix it. I don't know how we got to the point on the North Commons that the sidewalks are crumbling under your feet and jagged edges, but we clearly didn't have a fixed the sidewalk fund available to repair existing sidewalks. So it's getting a memo back on which kind, what are possible ways to do something like this to sequester money where the project itself can't finance, it can be financed, but then we've got the later remains of it to keep it, to the upkeep is on our budget, Sonia. So, you know, it's, so you don't have to answer it right now, but there must be some way of making us live up to our, we intend to do this. I just want to clarify, if I confuse everyone, I didn't say that this stabilization fund was just for maintenance fund. It is for all of the above. It's any lawful purpose. So taking money out to buy, what do we take money out for Hickey Ridge? That's perfectly fine to do that here. I'm just saying if we build our reserves enough that we can either have separate stabilization funds so it's clear to everybody or we can have a spreadsheet saying, you know, we're putting 10% for this, and whatever we put in there, we can designate which bucket it's going into. But it wasn't all meant for maintenance, like. But I did think there was a question that, Sonia, if I have this wrong, so that the capital stabilization fund that was established this year was just a term of art to be used to say, we're going to have this bucket of funds that is going to be available for capital needs during FY21 and the town manager would make recommendations on purchases to be made from that piece of funds. But at the end of 21, if it's not spent, it reverts to free cash and then can be reallocated for the next year. But it's not a fund that has a lifetime after FY21. It does, actually it does. It's not a stabilization fund, it's just a budgeted reserve. We didn't know which projects to actually put forth. So we just put that pot of money into a capital and it's on the general ledger and it's just called reserve fund and it's the $700,000. It's just like repurposing old capital. It'll stay there, you can take it. That's a funding source. So you can carry that funding source over into next year. If we don't spend it, we can fund some of those things that we didn't fund for FY21. So it does go away. I mean, it can, I can close it out. It can fall to free cash and if it free cashes over 5%, we can move it to stabilization fund like our policies say, but it's just a budgeted reserve. It is available. One, could you have a budgeted reserve continue? As long as we want it. Forever, you can just roll over year to year to year. Right. I don't like that really much. And I just had this conversation with our auditors about three weeks ago about that budgeted reserve to make sure I was treating it correctly and they were on board with everything I said. So it's budgeted reserve, it is there. You do have to appropriate it. You do have to appropriate it to the specific projects. So it would have to go as a council order saying that we're gonna fix the Northammer School roof and the funding sources from this budgeted reserve. So if the council, and then I'm gonna turn to Bernie because I know your hand's been up. If the council wanted to do what was suggested earlier in this discussion, which was set aside money for maintaining projects that we undertake in the future. We build a new school and we wanna have funds to maintain it. You could set up a budgeted reserve to do exactly that. Yeah, I don't know if they would be fine with millions of dollars sitting there but in this way, but what you could do also on a capital plan you can also have a budgeted reserve every year and if you don't use it at the end of the year you transfer it to a capital stabilization fund. You could do that too. There's flexibility there. So if you take 10% of levy for capital and you allocated everything you need for capital and there's say $500,000 you can move it. You can either budget an amount to go into the stabilization fund for capital whether it be a capital or you can leave it in the reserve but in the capital fund but the auditors expect you to spend that. They don't expect you for it to sit there. I mean, it's one thing to have a few hundred thousand dollars but what I'm hearing from you is to maybe have a million dollars or more build up there. I'm sorry, Andy. And Bernie has his hand up too. So, I mean, years ago I was the treasurer for my condominium association and we had various reserves replaced the roof, et cetera, et cetera. Some of these were long-term projects because obviously we don't put a new roof on every year. We're talking about. Well, right now the way I'm looking at the budget and reserve that's in there for capital, it's for any one of those capital projects that we didn't fund for fiscal year 21. So, I mean, that was my, that was our intent when we did this reserve, right Sean? Is to fund some of those capital projects and to have it as a reserve that way. So if something came up as an emergency we would fund it with that. Yeah, I don't think we would wanna do this type of reserve for a long term. Here because we anticipated we might need to spend those funds this year. Again, if we were gonna do something for the long term it would probably be in a capital stabilization fund or a regular stabilization fund. You're just trying to transfer to a stabilization fund. Okay, all right, Bernie? Yeah, part of the thought behind the capital stabilization fund when Sandy was here was to send a signal to the bond markets that we understood that we had certain long-term capital needs that we were setting money aside for and that we were prepared to fund a portion of those. So you sort of disambigulate it's rather than having this massive stabilization fund that has a bunch of stuff, a bunch of purposes tied into it. You isolate the money that you have for capital so that you signal the bond market that you're prepared to pay for this project. And that there's a fund there that's not competing with other needs. That's one piece. And the same thing actually goes for OBRA which we'll talk about later. I mean, really what you're doing is you're signaling the capital markets that you're doing good planning. And that tends to lower your bond that raises your bond rating and lowers your borrowing costs. You know, I understand about budget reserves that was a favorite thing I used to do. The Department of Revenue got very upset with me. They would prefer that I created a million little stabilization funds rather than budget reserves. So I think Sonya is concerned about that as well placed in the description that Sonya gave of a stabilization fund is the classic definition of it. So, but think about, you know when you think about these stabilization funds think about the signaling you're sending to the bond market. Yeah, that's helpful. So moving along, I think we've pretty much talked about what we want to under capital. So the next question I would have is are we comfortable with the revenue projections that were offered to us? So last chance to raise questions. But I also recognize that we may have to go back to the things that we did last year. Yeah, I mean, I think that what we're saying. Yeah, go ahead, Kathy. Just a second, Lynn. We wrote a note in either version one or version two of last year's guidelines to get a report back. I think this is one we're gonna need a mid-year report, you know, a second quarter report because it's, you know I know we get them anyway, but you know that we stay on top of this because it's the local revenues you have coming back up not to the previous levels, but coming back up to where they sunk to. And what happens if that doesn't happen is, you know the, we're gonna, so it's just, it's a sentence. Yeah, I'm totally comfortable with where they are now. It's just you're having to do educated guests and Sonia was 100% correct last year. So maybe she'll have another batting average this year that she'll be batting a thousand on best guests, best informed guesses are decent, but you know, UMass in theory is coming back. Will COVID ever leave us? Will any of the local restaurants and hotels ever open again? You know, it's a series of, we don't know, right? So, so that's it. I would just put a sentence in a sentence somewhere in the report that says, you know this is the best we can do as of November or December for what we think the world will look like in FY 22. Okay. So anything else we want to say about new revenue generation of what we've already, we had a little discussion earlier. I actually, I want to weigh in here because well, this may seem, this may be an area that the town manager needs to communicate to the town council in a much more deliberate way. In all of the inquiries I've done into the town, much of the grant writing is actually decentralized. So for example, the police department may be writing certain grants and planning may be writing other grants and DPW may be writing road grants. So I'm, it's not clear to me and I also will just bluntly tell you I lived in a pure granted contract world for much of my career. It never worked out to have a single person kind of being the grant getter because somebody who knows highways can write a much better proposal for DPW and likewise somebody who knows policing can do the same. If you're looking for somebody who can help coordinate some of that, yes, my organization ended up finally hiring somebody who is just outstanding at that. So I just wanna be clear that we don't think that a single person should be the expert in those various fields of town services. But more importantly, what I do think we have to watch out for is having grants commit other town funds without understanding completely and I think we are all very, very well aware that the previous legislative body, the town of Amherst committed with proposal for a library and we are now trying to figure out how we're gonna deal with that. And that's an example of looking at what is the proposal that is going in really asking of the organization and are we well aware in advance and looking at the impact of that matching commitment. My two cents worth here. Yeah, I just wanted to confirm exactly what Lynn said. That is our structure. The grant writing is decentralized. When opportunities arise that align with the department's initiatives they apply for them and we have a central person in accounting, Holly Bowser as most of you know, who helps the facilitation of the grant or the administrative side of the grant in terms of applying for it and managing the reports and supporting, keeping the files and things of that nature. But in general, the actual seeking of grants is done by each department. There's another thing that's under I which is we've no indication and I'm not asking for one right now that in the budget development process that the manager will make the decision to go ahead and hire an economic development director unless he's explicitly said it to somebody else. I have not heard that. And when you have a vacancy and the tight budget in your, as we do for this coming year, something that at least you'd expect them to think about. I added that sentence and I'm perfectly happy to take it out. That A, it assumes we have one and B, Lynn's term on, I always meant coordinating rather than this is the one person who does it. But if we don't have that person and we're not likely to have them in FY 22 or current. Yeah. So I didn't mean to jump that. I just, I don't know whether there were opportunities out there that we don't know about or if everybody's radar screen is up. I do think being strategic, everything we've said I think is right about grants. Grants shouldn't drive our spending later. We should be going after grants that are already totally in line with things we wanna do. I think the reason I don't actually, I wanna leave it here. I don't know how we're gonna address it in the guidelines but the business community is very focused on somehow or another. We should hire an economic development director and that person should be going after grants to improve downtown for example. So this is a conversation that's larger than the group of us sitting here. Okay. Sometimes I think there's a probably a way overblown expectation of what that person could possibly do. Yeah. Sorry, I will lower it. Okay, I didn't know if you had anything to add to this. I think we're getting towards the end. The numbers. Is there anybody, any reason that anyone wants to do other than has been done in prior years and has done in this year's suggested guidelines of having even percentage increases recommended for each of the segments with the adjustment for the schools for the reasons that we all know about now. We're saying flat budgets, right? All budgets across the board and with you stated somewhat differently for the elementary schools because of the whole question of how we account for the charter. The charter? Charter schools. Not the town charter, charter schools. Andi, can I just say a quick thing about this one? Can I say a quick piece? I do think that this is a really important one that the increases are equal for each department. I've worked on the school side before and now on the town side. I think this really helps all the departments feel like part of one larger unit and not competing with each other. I've heard of other towns that it can get pretty ugly and we had not had that. We all work really well together. And I think a lot of that is because of this. And in the past when one department has struggled, had something unusual, there has been flexibility and I think everyone has been open to that flexibility. But in general, the equal increases for departments I think has really helped the town be cohesive and smart with our operations. It also helps with the four towns meeting being the one who's spoken for the town and four towns meetings to explain that it's an equal percentage. But it was, I think I had to put it on the list. Yeah. Anyone else? OPEB, I think we've talked about earlier that Bernie gave us a strong reason why we support the OPEB recommendation. And I think it's consistent with what the town manager told us at the Financial Trends meeting. We're planning to move this back up, aren't we? Yeah, so this is a selfish one. Andy would be, if again revenues come in better, you know, OPEB would be one area we would look to get our contributions back up to where we were before because we did reduce it by 50% for FY 21. Do we want to state that in the draft guidelines in some fashion? I agree with that. Yes. Yeah, I think the same way you said the other one where again, if funds become available, this would be one of the areas to consider for using those funds. Okay, so then we get to the, this is a question we could come to later, but is there anything that we would like to say to the manager when you present the budget, we would like you to include information about this? Mary Lou is always anxious to have something in there about how town departments work together and about staffing levels. We're heard through things that she always wanted to have and that in the finance committee guidelines, Bernie, you'll be able to remember those days. Sean, when we got finished with this year's budget, you specifically asked us, were there things that we would like to see in the new and future budget documents? And I'm assuming that that continues to be something you're looking at. Yes, so I did get some feedback from at least one counselor of a few areas. And we are taking things that we've heard at different points during budget meetings and trying to incorporate them into the budget document. So hopefully this year's budget document just naturally will have some more information in it. Hopefully that's responsive to things you guys have asked about. Yeah, when I was on the finance committee, the old finance committee used to talk about problems so we never could resolve, which was how to compare staffing levels where there's departments like the library that has a lot of part-time employees and different departments measure percentage of FTE differently. And there wasn't, there didn't seem to be consistency and how personnel was measured, Kathy? Oh, I think one of the other suggestions, I'll have to go get my notes, Sean, but one of the other was to the extent departments have been doing something around energy efficiency to write some sentences about it, reducing greenhouse gas, converting, putting solar panels on that they note where they have done something. Yeah, so that's something I'll note that the explicit way we've done that, that's new for this year's budget is more around capital. In the capital request, we've explicitly asked the impact of whatever people have submitted, what the impact is on the town's sustainability goals. But in terms of other things that are not maybe explicitly capital, that's something we can look into. Anything else? So we dropped a segment about how departments help each other. No, I'm willing to put it in. All right, I'll take a look at the language from this year's for the FY21 guidelines from January that I sent you earlier and I will use that language again. If you have any thoughts about it, shoot me an email and we'll just go on, Dorothy. Perhaps this is the same idea or slightly different that what we've been doing during this COVID thing or what the town manager has been doing is he's been repurposing, reassigning the salary workers as needed to meet the needs of the town. So keeping flexibility and responsibility and keeping people working as opposed to layoffs. I mean, I think that's been something very good that's been happening. So I wouldn't, I'm not suggesting language but commitment to the staff and it's working in a responsible and flexible manner to meet the town's needs, something like that. It's a good point. I think we can, it may not go into this section, it may go elsewhere in the guidelines but it's a good point to get into the guidelines. You know, well, keeping people working even if they're working out of their ordinary job is at least to the random staff I've spoken with has made employees feel valued and has, if anything, it's helped them in terms of their seeing the town as an employer and a very positive light. It's been a good thing for morale, people feel valued. So I'm trying to keep us moving along being conscious of the time. Bob, is there anything else on the collective bargaining agreements that you would like to see added that we haven't already talked about? Since you're here. I would just reword that to say salaries and benefits as a percentage of overall budget or something just at the end of it. Yeah, brought a limit on salaries and benefits, benefit costs actually as a percentage of overall budget or something. Can I just mention that there are people who are not in bargaining units. And so when we talk about collective bargaining we also need to recognize that the non bargaining units need to be kept in a parallel step. Yeah, yeah, I would agree with that. Yeah, I didn't mean to limit it to the collective. I just didn't know where else to put it, but. I wonder if we should put it as a compensation section of budgets as opposed to collective bargaining agreements so that it doesn't appear to be focused on the unionized positions. So should we just say compensation of staff or what is it you wanted to say? Yeah, I think that's fine. Yeah, I just, the reason I'm suggesting this is that as you know, we don't know what's gonna happen with healthcare costs, with pension costs and that stuff can get out of hand real fast if you don't have some things to say, hey, wait a minute we only have this amount of money to spend this year how are we gonna do it? So that's all. Yeah, and I think that the other is, we'll have to make sure that when we get to the reserves back to the reserve section to include something in the reserve section too getting back into that shouldn't be used to bleed into operating budgets in any way, including compensation because it doesn't require a cost aspect. In the community safety and social justice we've talked about now when I come back to when we, but I think that let me go back to see a couple of hands up before we can draw to close Dorothy did you have something else? Yeah, I did, I looked it up. Kathy? Yeah, mine is more of an information request if we did not, if there were no new colors bargained into bargaining contracts can we, can we meaning town staff? Can you tell me how much if no one is laid off how much does the salary baseline increase because of steps? So current workforce with no additional money on COLA but they get step increases does it go up by 1% 1.5% because we were told best guess on health insurance Bob is 5%. So I just, there's a flat budget and salary and benefits are some share of it right now and if nobody gets laid off I just, I don't have any idea. So I don't know, I know the answer will be different from library because they have a lot of part timers who don't, who do or don't have the same kind of steps. So it's a, it's purely a question. I'd like, it's for me to understand how tight is a flat budget? So it's an information request not a something that goes in this document. Yeah, I don't, I'm not sure if there's anything any reason why, but for some reason including collective bargaining in the guidelines feels funny. It'd be interesting to know if we've done that in past years. You know, I'm just not sure how this intersects with negotiations and things of that nature. And, you know, especially if we start getting into specifics like COLA's and things like that, it feels a little funny and how that might again, intersect with the departments. Usually, you know, we, the guidelines set, you know, an increase to the departments the town, the school, and then those departments have to obviously work within that limit. So again, I don't know, I could be wrong. It just, it feels a little different than past years, but maybe it's not. So it might be something we just want to look at how that's been handled in the past. You know, Sean, it's interesting you say that. And I just want to, the way this presently states says to me, you know, if we think salaries should only be 50% of the budget, that's all they should be. To me, this does not say we should limit collective bargaining. I think the way it was stated before, it did imply that. Okay. This- Maybe it's the wording if it's been changed just better. Okay. And then this is a statement that does not imply putting our nose into bargaining, but actually just on non-unit staff. Okay. I mean, are you still uncomfortable with this? Cause I understand your discomfort cause I was very uncomfortable with the way it was stated before. Yeah. I mean, I guess, I mean, the other thing I was going to say is this sort of creates questions, but this doesn't actually, we'd haven't actually discussed what the guidelines are for this particular one. So these are more, you know, for a lot of the other things, you know, we sort of, you know, teased out guidelines. This one is really still in like the question phase of what is that broad limit? And I don't know what information is needed for that, but I think that's another reason why this one feels a little different cause it's not actually a guideline yet. Andy, can I just comment? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I deliberately wanted to leave it kind of high level and vague because there are many ways that one can achieve the bent, the outcome. And this, I did not want to prejudice any ideas about how to get there. Okay. It was just the idea of like anything else, you know, cost represent roughly 55% of the town's cost. And that's been the same, about the same level for the last 10 years, but it's never been kind of set as a target or a goal or something like that. I'm just suggesting that's something to consider. If it's not something that will be helpful, then I'm happy to just, you know, to drop it. I just thought it would be helpful as a way to indicate that there are limits to what we can spend on certain things. Yeah. I think in my point of view, I think that's fine. Again, I didn't know if it's 55% the number that has been set or as the, again, maybe not a strict limit, but as a target or is that still a discussion point? And again, I don't have actually strong thoughts on it right now. I just, that's the part I was missing was, what was that specific number that is potentially being recommended as a guideline? Yeah. And again, I did not want to set a number because I think that should be set by, you know, the town manager, the superintendent of schools, et cetera. I mean, it's something that those individuals who are responsible for those budgets and for those staff should be the ones who come up with a number in my mind. But again, it was just a thought. So maybe this one, so maybe this one reads something along the lines of, you know, town manager and staff need to be conscious of what percentage of the overall budget goes towards compensation or personnel and benefits or something along those lines. Yeah. And I think that's probably the best approach to take to it because I don't want the guidelines to begin to look like they're trying to get into the collective bargaining process because we're not at the table. We will not be at the table. That's the responsibility of management. Sean, would you state that again, town and manager and staff need to be? Yeah, you know, should need to be or should be conscious of the percentage of the budget that goes towards personnel and benefits or personnel costs which I think is a good one. And we are, because that's one of the things that when we do our financial indicators, we monitor. And obviously that generated the suggestion from Bob. So I think that's a good one that makes sense. Yeah. I think that's what I was thinking too, is we needed to come up with the right language to soften it. And I think that's a good way to do it. And I'm fine with that. Kind of just a CIO US, I think. Is that the right one now? Yeah, we've got conscience now. That's a good one. All sorts of variations on this one. No. No. CIO US, I think. You'll get it, Liz. Yeah, so I'll get it. CIO US. So, the where. Yeah. It's late. I've really got it cleared up. So I'm just gonna do this. The where. Okay. Do we wanna call this compensation of Stafford? Do we wanna call this personnel? Personnel. And so with that said, I think the only thing that's left is the community's safety and social justice in turning the pad on us a little bit since you brought it up at the beginning. Can we leave it as we had it in the, for the purpose of the guidelines and do we need to say something in a separate, in our report separately from the guidelines about filling the two positions and before the process is run and just report to the council that we had that discussion. I think that I agree that they should be separated and that the council should be informed in the report about us beginning a discussion about it, but I don't see it as part of a guideline. So why don't you knock that 16 out of the thing altogether, Lynn? And I'm gonna try and handle it separately in the finance committee report. The only thing, I think it, I guess then it would have to say something. I guess I think it should be there as something that we're looking at during the budgeting process, not specifically the freeze of the two positions, but what costs could be connected to community safety this next year. And I don't have an idea of how you, I just wanna point out that it's already up in three. That's true, yep. It involves, and it's here as the other part of it. So we've already kind of talked about that. Maybe your stomach's a little, I don't like these things. We could say something. Okay. Let me just wanna make one suggestion is to say something in the guidelines that we recognize that as budgets are developed around the issues of community health and safety that we hope that we expect that you will be conscious of the discussions that have taken place within the working group that's been established for that purpose or something like that. So I'll try and write something along those lines. Thank you, Andy. Okay. So is everybody satisfied with the discussion that we've had today? Because I think this has been really helpful for making sure that we have a consensus on where we are with the guideline development and gives us the ability to do the draft and get it back to you to look at as a draft in the next time. And we can actually pretty much stand schedule. So thank you. This has been a great conversation. The other thing that I think we needed to talk about is an additional item. I think we're down to just, if I'm correct, we're down to one item, not anticipated left and that's the SUFA grant. And is my understanding of what happened is that, or what this is about is that there's some money left in the CARES Act, which was reported to us in the last finance committee meeting. And this is a proposal that of how to use the balance, of how we could use the balance of the CARES Act funding. Yeah, Sean. Yeah, so I don't think this is a topic that would normally come to finance committee, but maybe because of how it came up last night is why it's here. Quite some time ago, we were looking at ways to do communication. That's one of the eligible uses for CARES Act. And this was one way that was identified as a way of communicating health information to the public. These signs go up in different locations and we can push content to them. So we can change the, if there's anything that changes suddenly like a new health law or health regulation, we can push that information to these signs and they have a rotation that they push out different types of information. So I know this is something that the town manager and Brianna who I think presented last night have been looking at for a while. And I think when we first started thinking about it, I wasn't aware of the public way issues, but I think that's why it came up last night. And so it's something that we've actually been thinking about using CARES funds. It's just taken a long time to get to this point. And we do have to move quite quickly on it. If we want it to be able, if we want it to be funded from CARES, we have to move pretty quickly because it has to be by December 30th as the deadline for spending CARES money. I thought we were talking about the SOFA thing, which I'm confused right now because I thought the grant was for the bus shelters and that the SOFA stuff was free for a year and we were trying to find out the costs if we were to continue it. Am I, I could be, I'm old. I might be- I could be wrong too, Pat. I thought the signs were the, I checked out before that part of the meeting last night. So I know that the SOFA portion part that I'm aware of are the signs. I think the bus shelters, I thought maybe we were talked about separately, but maybe I'm wrong, I'll defer to you guys. They were talked about separately, but one of them had a grant attached to them, which was the bus shelter. Yeah. The bus shelters was the downtown grant or the trans-pacing grant, wasn't it? Right. Yeah, I think that sounds right. So maybe I was way off on my original plan. Are we talking about the SOFA, the signs? Are we talking about the SOFA? There were two different proposals that we talked about last night. One was the signs, which is, I'm referring to a SOFA because that's what was being dubbed by Brianna and her presentation. And my understanding of that was, is that that was to be CARES Act, to $300,000 for the first year. No, it's not that, it's not that much. It's I think around 20 to 25,000 for a certain number of signs. I don't think it's that expensive. Kathy? Okay, so that was my question that didn't get answered last night. And I think what we were asked to do is come up with some questions that when TSO was looking at this, they could get more information. So I want to, even if it's free for us this year, coming year, because- I want to know the next year. I want to know if we like it. So we're talking about a one-year pilot that's paid for by CARES. If we like it, what would it cost to continue it? And what information will we have to make that decision? That's, to me, was the simplest kind of question. It's a bit like what we've talked about, don't build a building if you can't maintain it. If we think these things are really cool and suddenly we discover, is it 20 to $25,000 in year two, three, four, five, six? You know, so are we committed to this? And what was nice about the description is if we hate it, Brianna kept talking about four bolts into the concrete. Four bolts come back out and away it goes. You know, like it's, we're not having to prewire it. We're not having to do X, Y and Z with it. That they're easily removable. And it was both those get out information signs, but it's also these charging stations. Right, three of them. So the charging stations where you can plug in your phone or your iPad while walking around town. And the only question I had about those, and it's not finance at all, but I did, I'm one of the guinea pigs or maybe everyone had to do with IT security. And I had to go get a badge of what I know and don't know from the town, a series of things. And one of them, that warning was never plug your charging gizmo into a publicly accessible charging station because it can, you, I mean, may use how much of your information it can grab. It was like a don't do it if you have anything that you care about on it. So I thought, oh, would these charging stations be a new way for people to siphon our information off? So that was not a financial question, but I had a financing question about both aspects. If we like it, what's year two look like? And is year two through year 10, you know, what is the cost? So are we, I'd be happy to have free things for a year so we could assess it and have them be removable. So I don't have a question about this moving forward, but I think we should do it, go into it with our eyes wide open on if we get enamored with these things. They're in New York now, these little, they're not Sufas, they're another, and not that many people stop by and read them, but it was, but I think there's no reason not to try out something like this. They're super cool. So mine was purely on a year, what will it cost? What's the ongoing contract cost to us of doing this? And while there are concerns about publicly or accessing the chargers, they were going to be put near the homeless shelter, the Unitarian Church for people because they're not able now to charge their computers, et cetera, at the library and things that they were doing. No, I thought it seemed like a good idea and waiting for a bus stop, you know, it was another place, you know, where you could plug in before you got on the bus for a long trip and you forgot to charge your, or outside the library, which is an open nail, but I wasn't against them. Again, it was purely a, what's the cost of keeping them there and keeping them functional over time? Yeah, I think those are the kinds of questions. And originally there was some discussion last night about having us to a joint meeting with TSO in conversations that I had with Darcy over the part of a day since our meeting. I think that we concluded that first of all, that's not feasible given the time squeeze of getting the TSO's answer back to the council. That her preference was is that we identify financial issues that we think are important for TSO to be aware of and to the extent possible that we get answers back to TSO, which could come directly from staff or could come through us. Yeah, I did go online this morning and just looked up Sufa and tried to get some sense of costs, but I couldn't find anything definitive at all. So it really may need to go back to Brianna and to, because she must have access to that information. Yeah, have you, Sean, do you have anything on? Yeah, no, I'm looking at the, what we have in the first year costs is 25,000. I think the part that maybe there's some uncertainty is these signs have the ability to generate revenue as well. And there's some revenue sharing piece to it that can reduce the cost of the town. So I think that's where there might be a little uncertainty in terms of future years, but we can try to get more information on what's the base price each year if we don't generate any revenue. So we can just say that Darcy asks us to send her questions, that's my question. So Andy, you can just supply it to Darcy and Brianna so that when TSO reports out, they can tell us. That was it. And the same thing with chargers, not just these signs, but the chargers, charging stations. Yeah, it may not be a finance issue though, that sounds like. Social justice. The security of the charging stations to the people who use them. Bob has his hand up. My question is who's gonna manage the content on this? And I saw in the briefing that they can sell advertising in it and it seems like it's, we're biting off a lot of somebody's time to manage this. And so is that what the $25,000 is, Sean? Yeah, so SUFA manages the content. I believe we have some ability to also sort of the content to make sure that there's nothing being put up that we would oppose, but SUFA manages the content. But they wouldn't be managing our COVID announcements. So that would be. We would push that, I don't know, I haven't seen how the technology works, but we would either push that to them or we would have a way to push that out. But, and what I'm looking at right here, it clearly states that SUFA would manage the content. Thanks. I have my hand up. Yes, go ahead. Okay, my computer ran out of battery for a night. I missed a little bit of the conversation as I was running around finding plugs and getting back on. I just wanted to comment that I am not in favor of these signs. I am totally in favor of the charging stations, which are small and look like little tables that could be put near benches. Even in the pictures that we saw, it just was some more messy stuff on the street. There's already a lot of messy stuff. There's these little real estate things. There's trash cans. I also didn't like the color. That's cause they match the ways finding signs, which I don't find attractive. And I just think it's adding more chaos and it's unnecessary. I think sometimes you get a good idea and it sounds like fun and I'm not for it, but I am definitely for charging stations and the placement of them was obvious and common sense and was good. But just another piece of internet content that you don't totally control. Like, I used to love Instagram. Now they want to put all kinds of things on it. They're putting ads on it. And it tires me out. I have all of these. Time is tight and I think it would be helpful if we kept reflecting on issues around finances and not personal opinions about design. And this will come back to the council. So it's not, decision isn't going to be made by TSO. They're only making a recommendation to the council. And we're only suggesting the financial aspects that TSO should be considering and the information that we can get channeled to them to provide. So the finance isn't ignored. Kathy. Can we ask, I'm not going to weigh in on what I think of these, Pat, I agree with you, but can we ask if it's $25,000, how much of that is the charging station and how much of it is these info things? And same question for year two and three. So we're getting it as a package deal. If we sever them, does the price tag go up? Just something about the two components of what's being proposed and have it as one price tag. You know, it might be that if we separate them, the cost of each one is more expensive. I have no idea, but getting it separate as well as together. If that had not occurred to me to think of their, their two things we're getting here. So what I have is the $25,000. Is that the correct number? The exact cost is that I have here is $25,550. It does not divide between the signs and the charging elements. No, it does not decipher between them, no. And that was a question that Kathy was asking if it could be provided, which is probably something that Brianna would have to answer. And then same questions for subsequent years, what is the cost to the town? Do we have ongoing costs? So we're going to have to bear once the, out of the regular budget, once the CARES Act money disappears and recognizing how tight we expect the budgets to be in the next couple of years, how we feel about that and how that divides out between the two. The amount of time, staff time that it's going to take to manage this project and if that has been considered, whether there are other ongoing costs that we're not aware of. I think those were the basically the questions that came up. Yep. So I will write that as a quick memo back to Sean is finance director Brianna. Since she's one, obviously include Paul on it. Sonia, just to let you know that the finance committee is suggesting that these questions be investigated and reported to TSO for their consideration when they meet, I think it's Thursday, their meeting. It is. Late like end of day, Thursday. No, they're, yes, they're meeting at four. And we are not going to try and join their meeting. We're going to leave it to them. I think that name that's fine with Darcy is Darcy prefers it that way. Great. Okay. Anything else that needs to be considered? Especially since we have a meeting that night too. Yeah, I know. We have no public comment for the sake of the recording of the meeting. I do want to note that we did have time reserved for public comment, but that there's no public in attendance today. So is there anything else that anyone has? Is if not, I think that we can consider ourselves. Oh, sorry, really quick, Andy, I haven't sent the invitations for the budget forum on Thursday, but I'll be sending invitations to the finance committee members so that they can attend and you can call a meeting of the finance committee together at the budget forum. Okay. And this for Bernie and Bob, you know that this is something that's required in the charter each year and is just being placed now so that any comments that come from the public are heard. And I would expect, but do not know, that there will be some public comment probably on the police budget. So, I think it's just a question of us being able to hear it so that when we look at our final draft guideline discussion that we're aware of what the public had to say. Do you need, do you need a quorum of finance to be there? Yeah. It's a council meeting. So a quorum of council. Public forums or council meetings. Okay. I've got two conflicts. I'm going to try to be there for at least part of it. Yeah. I think the one we wanted to do was again, call it as a finance committee meeting so that the resident members of the finance committee can be more than in the audience. If we don't do that, then they're left into a different position. Correct. I think it's very nice if we can have it as a finance committee. So we will call it as finance committee meetings so that Bernie and Bob can attend. Okay. So nothing else then. I guess we should consider sales. I'll call it just to run, give it a round number and we had a, I think a very productive meeting. So thank you all. Okay. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.