 So, first of all, please permit me to confirm that all the members and persons anticipated are present and can hear me. So members, when I call your name, please respond in the affirmative. So Grant, Gibby, and I'm here, Jane Blondell, John Ellis, Carolyn White, Mary Margaret Frankelman. I see you and hear you. Arif Padaria. I'm here. Jonathan Wallach. Charles Fusket. Brian Beck. Brian Beck. What did he say? He's on mute. Brian, you're on mute. I know I was trying to click it. I couldn't find it. Peter Howard. Here. Shailene Pocrus. Darrell Harmer. Here. John Deist. Alan Jones. Here. William Keller. Here. Al Tosti. Here. George Kosher. Here. Christine Deschler. Here. Dean Karman. Here. David McKenna. You didn't mention. I'm here. You didn't call any of the court. Oh, you're right. I didn't call any of the court. Any of the court. I'm here. Sorry. It's okay. Small print on my list. Did John Ellis answer? No. Did. Jonathan Wall. I can't answer. No. Okay. She didn't answer. Oh, thank you. So let me continue please with the protocol with respect to remote meetings. Liz Diggins. Are you present? I am. And. We participate as speakers. Adam chapter lane and Sandy pool or I don't know if they are present yet. Not yet. So the open meeting, the Arlington finance committee is being discussed. And the public bodies are allowed to participate remotely. Consistent with Governor Baker's executive order of March 12, 2020. Due to the current state of emergency and the Commonwealth due to the COVID-19 virus. In order to mitigate the transmission, we've been advised and directed by the Commonwealth to suspend public gatherings. And as such, the governor's order suspends the requirement of the open meeting law to have all meetings in a publicly accessible physical location. Further, all members of the public bodies are allowed and are allowed to participate remotely. So this meeting allows public bodies to meet entirely remotely. So long as reasonable public access is afforded. So the public is all along with the deliberations of the meeting. Ensuring public access does not ensure public participation unless such participation is required by law. This meeting will feature public comment only in writing by email. Elizabeth Diggins at. E Diggins at town.arlington.ma.us.com. For this meeting, the Arlington finance committee has been convened by video via Zoom application is posted on the town's website. Identifying how the public may join in comment. Please note that the meeting is being recorded. And some attendees are participating by video conference accordingly. Please be aware that other folks may be able to see you and take care not to screen share your computer. Anything that you broadcast, may be captured by the recording. All supporting materials that have been provided to members of this body are available on the town's website. Unless otherwise noted. The public's encouraged to follow along using the posted agenda unless the chair knows otherwise. We're now going to be turning to the first item of the agenda. Before we do so, Prove me to cover some ground rules for effective and clear contact over business. And to ensure accurate meeting minutes. The chair will introduce each speaker on the agenda. And after they conclude their remarks. We'll get down the line of members inviting each by name. Provide any common questions or motions or. Ask if anyone has any particular question they wish to. Please hold any comments until your name is called or you are recognized. Further, please remember to mute your phone or computer when you are not speaking. And I would suggest that we all. Follow that. And take, take a look at doing that. As I speak. Please remember to speak clearly and in a way that helps generate accurate minutes for any response. Please wait until the chair leads. Heals the floor to you and state your name before speaking. If members wish to. Please hold any comments until your name is called or you are recognized. Further, please remember to mute your phone or computer when you are not speaking. Please hold any comments until your name is called or you are not speaking. If members wish to engage. In colloquial. Other members, please do so through the chair, taking care to identify yourself. Finally, each vote taken in this meeting will be conducted by roll call. Thank you. So the first item, let's let me first. You've all received a copy of the agenda, I believe. So, and we have gone through the open meeting protocol and. Roll call. I would just like to make a couple of comments thanking members of the committee. For the efforts and work they've put in so far this year. Christine Daryl and John. Did a fantastic job on the Arlington police department report. We'll refer to that a little bit later in the meeting. Annie and Al Jones and Daryl George Cozer and Grant are working on the information systems working group. And we will, I hope, and through the initial training on that. And we'll be giving us a overview presentation later today. A reef was critical with helping Liz and I and recruiting earlier in the year. And as you know, Jonathan Wallach has signed up and has been actively participating as our delicate to the capital planning committee. In preparation for the town meeting. Al Tosti did a fantastic job. Training as all on the complex matter of the Arlington housing and public schools. And working as a day factor member. Of the APS budget subcommittee. Christine and Al have joined me in the long range planning committee. And of course. Liz Diggins is involved in all of these things. And I thank her for her. Efforts. Anyone who would like to make any other comments on that, please. Feel free to announce your intentions. Silence. Okay. That's what happens when you shut the. You shut the microphones down. So the next item of the minutes. The minutes of the. Was it. What was the date on the minutes, Peter? 1123. Yes. Thank you. So the minutes of 1123. 23 have been distributed. Are there any comments? Anyone wants to make on those minutes. Any edits. Okay. In that case, a motion to approve the minutes is in order. Al Tosti. So moved. Is there a second. Second. All in favor, please. By acclimations. Say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. that Shailene has joined us. Hi, Shailene. We'll go. Hi, sorry, I was stuck in the waiting room, possibly in the volunteer meeting. I'm here now, good to see all of you. That has the high technology virtual waiting room, exactly. And Charlie, I've also joined. And Jonathan has joined. Jonathan Wallach has joined us as well, OK. Also John Deist. And John Deist, OK. Good, thank you. So, and Peter, for the record, I know that Julie Wayman, Don Seltter, Sandy Pooler, anybody else? I've also joined the meeting. Mattia Healy as well. I have notes here, Pete, that I'm having on the visitor sign-in sheet. OK. We can compare on those two. All right, thank you. So Sandy, are we expecting Adam? He's in. OK, good. Then we can move to the next item of the agenda. So tonight, the first finance committee meeting of 2021, I'm pleased to introduce town manager Adam Chaplain and deputy town manager and finance director Sandy Pooler. So I would mention that despite the various eruptions of political acrimony in the last years that have been popping up around the country and in our society, there's general consensus that Arlington is a pretty well-run town. Our schools are good, services are reliably provided. I recall that one longtime town manager said, snow removal and trash collection are the only two services that count. I'm not sure that's true. But our community safety is well-preserved and health and human services are delivered to citizens in need, whether they be youth, struggling adults, veterans, or seniors. This state of affairs arise from many sources, the school committee, the select board, the town meeting, other organizations. But it's no small part due to the efforts of our town manager and deputy town manager. And I also think from our finance committee viewpoint that they have worked hard to develop a strong financial management team within town government. With their presentation tonight, they'll set the tone for the months and years ahead within the envelope of our many fiscal constraints. I'm sure we'll benefit from the things they can tell us, but I'd also like to remind you members of the finance committee, in the words of Al Tosti, tonight you have the town manager and the deputy town manager in your grasp. And you should take advantage of this to learn as much as you can about the condition of the town. So with those brief remarks, I would be pleased to turn the meeting over to Adam Chapter Lane and his team. Thank you, Adam. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you very much for those kind remarks. And I suppose I'll take grasp better than clutches. Sounds slightly less ominous. We're also joined tonight by Julie Weyman, the management analyst in my office, who's going to play a role in tonight's presentation as well. So if it's OK with you, Mr. Chairman, what I'd like is for Sandy to begin with a brief update on where we stand in this current fiscal year, FY21. I'll then walk through FY22 and a little bit about our longer term outlook. And then I'll ask Julie to talk to the committee about the current state of the capital plan and capital budget. Is that acceptable, Mr. Chairman? Please. Please go right ahead. Great. So Sandy, why don't you kick it off? And then either Charlie or Liz, whoever's controlling, if somebody could make me a co-host so I could share some things on the screen, that would be terrific. Liz, I think you'll have to do that. I'm not quite there. You should have sharing capability, Sandy. Do you not? Let me find out. Thank you, Annie. I suppose you can see that. Yes? Yes. Oh, well, magic. Yes. So one of the things we've been doing over the last year and a half or so, two years maybe now, is to do a quarterly financial report, which has been emailed to the committee members, looking at our revenue and expenditures at this point in the year. It is an important report for us, I think, internally, just to keep track of things. I often find, as I put the numbers together for this, I send an email to a department or to the treasurer, to the comptroller, just asking about something. And not very often, but often enough, you find that something got missed somewhere or put in the wrong place. As I said, that is the exception to the rule. And what I wanted to talk about tonight was just where we stand in FY21, which I think will also put some context into the remarks that Adam is going to give about how we've been putting together the FY22 budget. You all were emailed the report. This slide just summarizes essentially where we stand on each of our funds. So on the revenue side, the general fund has collected 49% of its budgeted revenue. That is pretty much to be expected this time of year, since most of our largest source of revenue is taxes. And in the second half of the year, once we have our actual tax bills instead of our estimated tax bills, those come in a little higher than the first part of the year. So we're tracking fine. We spent 69% of our general fund revenue. Again, I'm not worried about that because we certainly spend some things ahead of time, i.e., there's some costs that we incur, whether it's our IT contracts or paying our fees to our allotment to the retirement fund and so forth that come to upfront. So I think we are generally on target there. The Water and Sewer Fund is having a good year, both because the select board has been a little earlier this year than in the past about raising fees so that they take effect as of the July 1st bills. And so revenue is ahead. And our expenses are at the same point, although, again, some of that has to do with certain spending that happens earlier in the year, such as debt payments and so forth. We also have had a good year in revenue because this summer was a drought. So we've been selling more water than we anticipated. So I think the Water and Sewer Fund is in good shape. AYCC collected only 37% of its revenue to date and spent 67%. That is largely because of the delay in the state budget being passed. So it didn't get passed until October. The state was not able to pay their share of the revenues that are due to AYCC. They haven't come in for the fall really yet. We're told that they are coming in soon. So I expect by the third quarter we will see that all caught up. Councilmaid's transportation has collected 12% of its revenue and spent 35% of its expenses. That is all mostly because the numbers are small and there hasn't been much COA transportation this year because the senior center has been shut down. Again, we've been looking at that and where the numbers are coming in. And I think overall that's going to be fine by the end of the year. The one fund that worries me now is the Rink. It's collected only 27% of its revenue while it's spent 61%. It has had a series of cancellations and other changes to its ability to run because of COVID that have held it back from collecting sufficient revenues. I've been talking with Joe Connolly about this a lot and we are looking at perhaps transferring certain costs that are incurred in the Rink now, such as some of the staff time, over to the recreation fund because people just frankly have been working more on the recreation side. The recreation side, we've collected only 17% of revenue, but we have spent 27% of our expenses. We do anticipate revenue is going to pick up in the spring and at the end of the spring where we collect the number of fees for programs that occur in the summer but come into the fund in the spring. So there's always a little bit of a time lag that way. And there is a sufficient fund balance in that fund that I think they can make up some of the deficit by reallocating some of the Rink expenses in there too. So this is a very 50,000-foot level look at where we stand. Overall, I think we're doing well. I did want to just focus in on some of our local receipts. Anything that's in pink here means it's less than 50% collected during the year. So some things are way low, like even though motor vehicle excises in pink because it's pink most of the year, it's because we get our files from the registry in February and we collect the vast bulk of that in February. So it's on par with where things have been in other years. Our meals tax and hotel tax are way above our estimates, but our estimates are very, excuse me, our estimates are very low this year. These used to be $425,000 each and now they're 50 and $60,000 respectively. So even though we're collecting more than we budgeted, we're still going to be about $350,000 short from what we would have expected in a normal year. Other things are sort of running ahead and behind. I'm not too worried about them. It is interesting to note that cemetery revenue is running behind this year and running behind other years. I think that's just because fewer people have actually had burial ceremonies. So that is a COVID impact. Our licenses and permit revenue have been coming in nicely. So there's still a lot of activity going out there and that is after a motor vehicle excise, our largest source. And our investment income is already met. It's here to date. I just wanted to show you this last slide to look at where we stand relative to every other year going back to 2012, six months through the year. As you can see, 2018 was our peak year for revenue. We've had slight declines every year. And certainly this year to date, we're about $700,000 below where we were last year and about a million dollars below where our peak is. Again, I think we will meet our revenue forecast, but we will not talk what we've collected in prior years. And we're hoping that in the future we can get past this. It does bolster the decisions that we made for the FY 21 budget to lower our revenue estimates. We did that in conjunction with a long range planning committee and members of this committee. So I think that has been a good decision for us. And we do continue to monitor these things. I will. Thank you. Answer any questions if people have them. Otherwise, I'm happy at this point to turn things over to Adam to talk about his budget. Or whatever you'd like, Mr. Chair. Are there any questions for Sandy? Right. Okay. Adam, please go right ahead. Right. Thank you, Mr. Chair. Thank you, Sandy. So I'll, I'll. I'll just go through the budget proposal and again, some of the context that went into the thinking in the formation of the budget proposal. So some of you have probably heard me say this and you, and you've likely read it in the budget message, but this environment that we're operating in is probably one of the most uncertain, if not the most uncertain budgeting environments that we've been in in a very long time. Uncertainty about what state aid might be, even though we now have the budget, there's a lot of uncertainty. There's a lot of uncertainty. There's even deeper level of uncertainty with what, what we'll see for school enrollment next year. As I'm sure many of you know, enrollment really dropped this year in the school department. And though we expect that we'll rebound to some degree. Understanding what that will be is, understanding what that will be. I'm not sure what that will be. I'm not sure that we'll rebound to some degree understanding what that will be is another layer of the uncertainty. So I put that out there as context for why. This budget is a little bit different than years past in that we're making recommendations that we fully expect will be discussed over the course of this spring with the finance committee as we lead up to town meeting as we learn more from legislative budgets as we learn more from what might happen. We won't really learn more about what school enrollment will be like, but we might learn some more things about the school budget that will help influence what ultimately is recommended the town meeting in the spring. So with that, I guess I'll start with the town side of the budget. And I'll say that almost entirely the town side of the budget, the town departments that have been presented to you represent a level service budget. We have two areas of new investment that have been included in one is a carryover from this fiscal year. And one is a continued investment in an area of importance that we've put priority on. The first area that we've continued a current investment is in public health. So this fiscal year using federal cares act money. We created two health compliance officer positions to assist with contact tracing and other efforts in regards to pandemic response and management in the public health department. Cares act funding is available now through the end of this calendar year through December 31st. So we're going to keep those positions on and Cares act funded through the remainder of this calendar year. But the budget before you for FY 22 proposes keeping them on for the balance of that fiscal year. We're doing that because we think it's prudent to make sure that we have the resources in place to get through this pandemic. Again, I'm very hopeful that we're all vaccinated and out of this much sooner than that. But we want to ensure we have the resources dedicated to be sure that we have whatever we need in place in case this all takes longer than what we're currently projecting. The other additional investment in the town budget is training money for our diversity, equity and inclusion division. So you may recall that one fiscal year ago we created a diversity, equity, inclusion coordinator position. Since then we've elevated that position to a director's position and pulled it out as a distinct division within health and human services and also added administrative support for that position. So in FY 22, we're proposing that director's position, the administrative position that was added within this fiscal year as well as training dollars that can be dedicated directly to the diversity, equity and inclusion function. But again, overall, outside of those two areas I just mentioned, the budget really is a level services budget where there are increases. It's directly related to increases in the cost of delivering services as they currently are. Moving from town budgets, I'll talk a little bit about the school budget. School budgets, I'm sorry, let me dial back one second. One instance of us doing some things a little bit differently and the town budget is we did list four positions that if revenues were better than what we're currently projecting that we would consider asking for. They're outlined in the budget message. There's a library position, an inspectional services position, a position related to public records in the town manager's office, and a position related to permitting in the engineering division. I'll say tonight, given what we've seen from the governor's budget, I don't think we will be asking for those positions, but they are currently listed in the budget book and if things did develop much more positively, I might want to ask the finance committee to consider a further conversation. But right now, again, given the governor's budget, I don't think that's something we'll be asking for. So moving to the school budget, I've already mentioned the uncertainty about enrollment and the uncertainty about enrollment really colors a lot of the conversation around school funding. So working with Chairman Foskett, Mr. Carmen, Ms. Deschler, and the Long Range Planning Committee as well as Sandy, we came up collectively with a framework of how to think about school funding, sort of a four-part framework. The first part of the framework was looking at the general education spending for this current fiscal year and figuring out if potential surpluses that could be present within this current fiscal year school department budget based on the lower amount of students being enrolled this year could be turned back to the general fund to help the general fund going forward. Additionally, wanting to learn more about if there are surpluses currently occurring in the FY21 budget, what do they mean for ongoing school budget needs in FY22 and beyond? That is an ongoing effort. I know Dean Carmen is really leading that effort working with the school budget subcommittee. And I know Sandy is working closely with Mike Mason, the school CFO. I guess without, there's not much more to say about that than that's an ongoing effort, but it's part of this framework of understanding whether or not there may or may not be surpluses within this current fiscal year budget and being able to access them appropriately to benefit the general fund. The next piece of the framework was assessing and analyzing special education spending. As I'm sure most of you know over time, we've committed to growing special education spending at 7% a year because historically that is tracked with what actual special education costs have been, but not 7% every year, but on average over a 5 or 10 year look back. At the request of Chairman Foskett, he suggested we really take a look at how special education costs were matching up with special education budgets. And Sandy working with Mike Mason has done a great deal of that work and seen that costs are very closely aligned with budgets. And it doesn't seem to be the data we've seen so far doesn't seem to be suggesting there are major changes to be made there. Though those conversations will continue throughout this spring as well. The third piece of the framework was looking at the school committee's five year strategic plan that was part of the override commitments that the select board voted two years ago. So you may recall as part of the override, it was committed that we would fund 600,000, 600,000, 800,000 and 800,000 in the four fiscal years of the override plan or the long range plan. In the first year that 600,000 was met. The second year being this current fiscal year because of uncertainties last spring about what the school year would look like and what the budget year would look like. We funded 240,000, excuse me. I'm getting my numbers back with Sandy. What did we fund last year? 140, 140. Thank you. 140,000 last year. Going forward, I know myself and Sandy agreed and Chair Foskett and others agreed that making sure we maintain the overrides commitments to funding that strategic plan for the schools would be important. So we have rolled in $230,000 in FY 22 and a planned additional $230,000 in FY 23 to go on top of what had been the previously planned 800,000 so that by the end of the four-year plan the schools would be made whole in terms of what they had expected to receive for strategic plan funding. I've had discussions with the superintendent about that and she seems to view that favorably in terms of how they could actually practically implement and spend, implement the plan and spend that money. The final piece of the framework for the schools which I think is the most impactful is how to treat the growth factor. So again, as you know for, I think it's the past eight years, now maybe seven years, we have agreed to a formula with the schools where utilizing school enrollment growth from the current year, we would take that number and multiply it by some percentage of per pupil expenditures to come up with what we call the growth factor and that would be additional money added to the school budget allocation to recognize enrollment growth. When that formula was first put in place it was 25% of per pupil expenditures as certified by the state's department of elementary and secondary education. Several years later it was increased to 35% of that figure and then as part of this override plan it was increased to 50% of that PPE figure. Now this year, unlike any other year, not only did the schools not see the growth they had projected but they went down. So we again have an expectation that students will come back but we really don't know how many will come back in the fall. So what we're proposing is holding back the growth factor amount that had been planned for FY22 in the long range plan and putting it into a special finance committee reserve such that when enrollment is known in the fall the school department can come back to the finance committee to request funds that correspond with what their actual enrollment is. It's a new and I think somewhat unique way of looking at things but I think it meets the time and meets the challenge of what we're seeing. So again, that's the four part framework looking at general education costs now. Special education costs investing in the strategic plan and then trying to prudently budget for but not automatically allocate growth factor until we know what the enrollment is for next year. So overall this all leads to in FY24 what is a pretty still significant deficit when the override was passed two years ago we did understand that in FY24 there would likely be quite a large deficit and the projected deficit now is actually less than what we projected it to be when the override passed. However with this pandemic and the corresponding economic impacts have really done is take out any of the benefits that we would have expected to receive via our conservative revenue budgeting. So as Sandy had highlighted in his year to day budget reports we're not collecting nearly as much in local receipts as we would have been otherwise without the impact of this pandemic. So we're not going to see the type of free cash growth or excess collections as we've seen in years past that would have put us in a position to possibly continue to reduce that override or that deficit in FY24. So we are looking at FY22 and 23 understanding that there's likely to be hard decisions to be made within the next two fiscal years but with all of the uncertainty being balanced and with the knowledge of decisions to come for FY24 we do think the FY22 budget as proposed is a prudent balance of all those matters or of all those items. So I guess I'll stop there and Charlie do you want to take questions on FY22 before we go to capital or do you want to roll into capital first? I think why don't we pause for questions Adam because I think especially the issues that you outline with respect to approaching the school department budget have a rather dramatic effect and you might comment on what is your feeling as to the size of the override required in fiscal 24? Sure. I'll start with that. If nothing was to change and if you look at the long-range plan it goes out at FY24, 25, 26 just to close those three years again if nothing was to change you'd be talking about an override in the amount somewhere between which would be tremendously larger than overrides that have been passed historically in Arlington or frankly anywhere in the state. So I think that putting it like that Charlie really helps paint the picture of the significance of the challenges that lie ahead. Thank you Adam. So let me ask is there anyone in the committee that has any questions for Adam on the town or school budgets as outlined here? Yes Jonathan, you have to unmute yourself. Thank you Charlie. Adam, in terms of the money that you're recommending the enrollment growth money that you're recommending going to the reserve fund so if I understand what you're saying that if actual enrollment growth is 22 is if there is some actual enrollment growth we're going to apply some of those reserve funds to fund the enrollment growth in 22. So to be very clear what we're saying is if enrollment rebounds to last year's level and then beyond then we would say it's what I'm saying ultimately would be the finance committee's decision if it went forward we would be saying then the school committee could come and access those funds. So not enrollment growth from today's enrollment but enrollment growth beyond sort of what we would call the status quo of last year. I understand. And just to follow up on that let's assume that the rebound just gets us back to last year's enrollment so and that money continues to sit in the reserve fund would it then be applied to you know 23 or 24s enrollment growth in excess of the status quo or how do you foresee those funds being utilized. So from a mechanical perspective if the funds were appropriated into the finance committee reserve fund in FY 22 and unutilized they would roll back in at the end of the fiscal year into the general fund which would then become part of the town certified free cash so then the FY 23 budget would be we would have all these same conversations again about what the FY 23 budget should look like and those funds rolling back into the general fund would be very helpful to the overall conversation but they're not directly tied together because of the accounting rules. Very good and the amount that you are recommending going to the reserve fund what enrollment growth does that assume over above rebounding to past Sandy it's based on the 150 student figure is that correct? Yes, originally it was thought there would be an additional 150 students this year adding about a milk of a little over million dollars into the reserve fund and how many students do we need to get back to get us back to where we were? 287 we lost 287 this year from where we were last year okay thank you thank you Adam Hi so this pertains not only the conversation that is about the school system but in general it's been a tough year as we all know 2020 a lot of us run companies and are deeply embedded in the ecosystem and have had to lay off a number of people whether in our companies and so forth so my question is in terms of not only in this school committee or the school funding but overall have you had any cutbacks do you foresee any cutbacks and if not why not so could you just comment on that please so we haven't proposed any cutbacks but historically for many years and until today we try to whenever we sense or see financial concern we hold positions vacant such that if cuts became necessary we would be able to consider cutting vacant positions rather than laying people off I think the town's had a good track record even long before I worked here in trying to avoid layoffs based on both the personal toll of them as well as the financial toll of laying somebody off and still being responsible for employment payments and health insurance payments for a significant amount of time. I have a different tack to that right being responsible is one thing the country has seen a significant number of layoffs you are running a company effectively right Adam so yes I feel badly about some of my own company folks and that is understandable but you know in order to keep the enterprise alive in order to keep the ecosystem that I'm running and building alive I have to take that hard hit so the question I'm asking is in our town we all have also faced the same economic hardships all of us have effectively this should somehow translate into the ecosystem because the school enrollments are down effectively services productivity all of that is I can guarantee you is down somehow the other you can calibrate it you can see that less services were being used we are all been home we haven't gone anywhere we haven't done many things so for that if I have five people again I'm just being theoretical a bit here but I'm trying to get to the core of the matter if I've got five people working at a certain job serving a hundred folks in my town and now those hundred folks don't need those services in that given year do I need those five people and paying their salary so reducing the load there effectively is something that I would think about doing even though I would feel heartache about not having jobs for those five people so again I'm trying to get to that matter more than anything else because here we're talking about an overarching budget and constraints I'm not hearing specifically anything about tightening the belt here so frankly I realize this is a governmental institution but at the same time I want to be a responsible citizen as well as you know bound by economics so could you comment on that angle please yes absolutely I guess I'd say a few things one I I honestly can't think of what service has been less strained through the pandemic from the town point of view than it was prior I'd be happy to engage in a conversation but when I think about where our staff are you know staff is predominantly in public works fire and police and workload through the pandemic has not gone down in those three departments in fact in some instances it's gone up so I guess to some degree I don't fully accept the premise that workload has been down in the face of the pandemic but that said I still acknowledge that budgetary reality sometimes have to come up against I'll ask I'll ask it a different way I do sorry to keep pushing on this but it's an important component for me to understand so we've not laid off people necessarily first in our company we took pay cuts we took pay cuts in the management team which I'm part of we took significant pay cuts and then in the teams and the staff we took lesser so percentages what are you doing towards that to that end because ultimately it impacts the budget and the longevity of this town and the economics so again I'm not hearing or seeing any of that let me interrupt for a second Arif I think as opposed to asking questions you're becoming somewhat argumentative and debating an issue and I think we're really trying to get information from the town manager here but I think a partial answer to your question is something that Adam just referred to a few minutes ago when he said that the future need for an override is going to be in a 13 million to 15 million dollar range just to cover a few years it's actually the governor on our expenditure levels and it's up to the town management and the finance committee and a long range planning committee to come to a consensus on how much that override can be or should be and when and that's going to drive staffing levels and activity levels and permit or disallow personnel growth or shrinkage so it's operating a little bit differently than in the private sector but the pressures are still there and if the override is at an unacceptable level and the voters don't support it then the town actually faces the town employees will be facing catastrophic reductions and the town's people will be facing dramatically reduced services I don't know if I've said that accurately enough but I think that's really the answer to your question and if I may Charlie just you hit it right on the head the paradigm in Arlington has been for a long time that when an override is passed within the confines of that override period service maintenance is expected and promised frankly by the select board so I and these are obviously things that can be discussed and changed but my current operating parameters are service level maintenance for the life of the override and then as Charlie described when that period is over if decisions are made to no longer maintain that level of services either by the town selected and appointed leaders or ultimately by the voters rejecting something at the ballot box that's when the service level change is ultimately decided okay thank you I just might add Adam that I think the service levels aren't cast in concrete if we have severe financial restrictions you know anticipatory cost reductions can adjust the demands for future overrides I think that I think that's fair I think that's fair Any other questions yes Alan Thank you Mr. Manager I haven't had a chance to review the budget what's the status of the trash hauling and disposal contracts when are we when are we going to have to go out to bid what year will that fiscal year will that impact So the current contract that we're in ends at the end of FY22 so a year from this June 30th so that would potentially impact FY23 we've been going back and forth with our waste hauler for over a year now in just last week they gave us a proposal that would change our cost structure for FY22 and four years beyond that the idea being you know they're claiming to be bleeding money now because we pay zero dollars per ton for our recycling and the market is charging a significant amount per ton to handle recycling so we've been in this really favorable position for this decade long contract so we're analyzing their proposal with our recycling coordinator and public works director and then ultimately we'll decide if agreeing to something now smooths out any bumps over the next few fiscal years or whether we're better off waiting until next year to go out to bid so it might be a little bit of a longer answer than we were looking for but we're sort of in this scenario where we are safe until the end of next fiscal year we're going to see if there's a way that could be mutually beneficial for the hauler in the town to extend something now. Is that both the hauling and the disposal contracts? So disposal of solid waste of trash is separate it's one contract right now for hauling, physically hauling and recycling disposal. Okay just a couple other quick questions about health. You have two new positions we're going to get federal money to pay them 100% for the first six months of next fiscal year and then town money would have to be used for the second six months. Is that correct? Correct. Now if the pandemic hopefully ends within the next fiscal year I'm assuming that these two positions will be eliminated? Correct. If there's no longer need for services then yes we won't keep them on longer than needed. Okay. Thank you. Thank you Al. Any other questions for Mr. Chapter Lane? I have one question. And I do too. I'm sorry. I'm having a hard time seeing who's on first year. George is first and then me. Thank you very much. Madam in the provision of level services can you just briefly describe if that's at variance with what the plan was when the override was passed which had increases or is level service consistent with what the override intent was for this year? So the override commitments for level services except for an investment in mobility improvements in the amount of $200,000 a year and then $50,000 a year for senior transportation those are being met the $200,000 in the first year of the override was in the operating budget but we in FY21 this current fiscal year moved it into the capital budget and that's where it is now it's $200,000 a year for senior transportation though it hasn't been much used this year for some of the reasons Sandy spoke about is still committed to in the senior transportation fund. And one more quick question is when does our trash disposal contract come to an end? So our trash disposal with wheel operator I'd have to verify but I believe we have four more years on that we renewed that last year. Thank you. You're welcome. So Adam I have a couple of questions about personnel. Can you remind us all when our next round of contracts will need to be negotiated? Yes they all current collective bargaining agreements expire this June 30th so we are actually beginning bargaining with all units for successor agreements right now. Okay and so this will have an impact on our future expense under the override etc. Absolutely yes. Okay and in the past we have generally tried to keep increases to salaries at or below 2% correct? That is correct yes I mean we've historically we've always looked at comparable communities we've tried to both comparable communities and what they're granted for COLA's as what pay rates are in comparable communities but we've also used the CPI for some guidance on what COLA's will be and historically over the past three maybe even six years I believe COLA's have probably averaged below 2%. Okay so are those COLA's intended to be an adjustment for increase in the cost of living for our employees or are they I mean if I'm being honest we call them COLA's right and they're applied mostly to people's base salaries but they're just negotiated pay increases I mean there's terminology and then there's the reality that they're negotiated pay increases. Right so in the past for example we may have signed contracts with our employees where they got a one or one and a half or a 2% raise when the cost of living is actually going up faster than that. That's correct. Okay so and then on the health insurance side have we adjusted the five year plan for decreases in our health care growth rates like we used to do 7% and then we were down to 5% as the cost factor there are we able to reduce it further or so right now so we've been budgeting 5.25% growth as a premium growth for a number of years now right now the GIC is projecting a collective growth across all plans at 5.8% we'll know more in about two weeks about what those costs might actually be and then they'll be finalized by March 1st I was expecting better numbers based on lower health care utilization this past year so I hope to learn more about what's driving that but it doesn't seem like we're going to be able to lower below that 5.25% for next year. Okay and then final question you referred to using our holding open positions strategy are you currently holding positions open that are in the budget? Yeah so there's currently a number of DPW positions open we've been strategically filling positions but there's still a number that are open there are we have started filling vacancies in police and fire but over the next few months and then beyond that we'll still keep we don't have a hiring freeze on but we will make sure that we have a certain amount of vacancies open so that we're in that safer type position. Okay and how many of those open positions currently are in the police department how many are you filling can you give me an idea about that? So there are five vacancies in the police department and I believe we're sending four people to the academy right now. Okay Great You're welcome. Thank you Annie. Any other questions for Adam? This is your chance you know. Dave McKenna has his hand up. Dave where are you Dave? Go ahead Dave. Adam my question about the on the contracts that all contracts that you negotiate are ended June 30th so all the currently agreed to contracts and June 30th right now there is one bargaining the patrol office association that we are in arbitration with so that there is no agreed upon contract for that unit but yes all agreed upon contracts expired June 30th. My concern that is that some of the contract that's still in negotiation is correct? Correct So how many years has it been since they settled? It's just been since the start of this current three year period so it's back three fiscal years so back to FYS 20 I guess it'll be 1920 and 29. So my only concern is one that's hopefully when it does settle that people don't get the wrong idea when they see that it's a retroactive pay raise you know it's going to look like it's inflated high but in reality it's based upon the previous three years. Correct Correct yeah so any award from the arbitrator would spell out what any financial award for each of the fiscal years would be and we would just need to make sure like you're saying that we properly just see what the award actually is. And we have been budgeting to sufficiently contract. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you David. So any other questions for the sound manager? I'm sorry I missed you before David but you're off the screen. Shane. Thank you Mr. Chairman. Thanks Adam. Can you just talk a little bit more about the diversity equity coordinator position and sort of what her role is, what sort of responsibility or authority she has? Sure. So when the position was created it was focused on working with our Human Rights Commission, Rainbow Commission and Disability Commission as both staff support and advisor and professional advisor as well as working with the Human Resources Director to advise on both the recruitment and retention of a diverse workforce. So that I would say the core of that work has remained has stayed intact. She's working very hard regularly with those three committees and commissions that I listed. Additionally, I would say she's doing a lot of work internally working with departments who are interested in their either offering more diverse programming or strategizing around improving their workplace culture. She's also spending a lot of time that we definitely didn't anticipate working with the community at large. She's now a key part of these racial justice teachings that we've been holding. It's a five-part series that over 60 people have signed up for and two sessions have been held so far. So she's she's become instantly a really integral part of the team and I myself and Sandy as well and Julie spend a lot of time working with her on a weekly sometimes if not daily basis. But yeah, I would say it breaks down into direct board committee and commission support HR support and then training both internally employee-faced and externally community faced. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you Shane. I just wanted to apologize if I didn't have any questions. I want to make sure that you have every photo at the same time. I have to switch back and forth. If you did want to say something and I haven't recognized you, please speak up. So thank you Adam for that. Are there other questions that members might have? I don't see any hands up. If I might Adam. They're sort of about the elephant in the room at least in the room that the elephant that I see and Dean Carmen might correct me if I don't recall these numbers precisely. But my recollection is that there was a surplus in the school department in fiscal year 20 of about $1.8 to $2 million and that there is another surplus that's somewhere between 1.3 and 1.8 million in this current fiscal year 21. So if this is an ongoing situation this is something that can dramatically affect your $13 million you know the override threshold. And my concern is that as a town we recognize that this money should be coming back into the general fund to reduce the overall overall taxation that the citizens will be tax increases the citizens will be facing in the event of the future override. You have any direct comments that you'd like to make on that? I guess only that I think from your comments tonight and conversations we've had at other meetings we've had a lot of discussions. I don't see eye-to-eye in that regard. I know as you mentioned Dean has been doing great work on following and I don't want to say chasing following those figures and discussions at the school committee budget subcommittee level and what I would hope is that the committee is willing to engage with us via the long-range planning committee to return the entirety of it back to the general fund at the end of the fiscal year so that it can become part of free cash and then accessible for use in future fiscal years or if there is some other means of benefiting both the schools and the towns position like they did last year utilizing some surpluses to pay in advance some special education that they'd be willing to do that so there can be as you're describing sort of a fair benefit to the general fund from any surpluses that exist. I think that paying forward on those costs needs to show a reflection in reduced budget demands in the future year. That's a fair point otherwise it will just continue to carry. The second question not unrelated has to do with the student population growth or student population loss slash recovery and so I think we have a position where we're looking at that fiscal year 2022 budget number and saying okay this amount of money is going to go into a reserve fund which can be spent if the students come back and above the level of the 287 students that we lost last year but I also think that it's long been understood at least on the finance committee that the student population growth formula is a variable in other words the budget goes up when the growth in students go up but the budget should be going down if the growth in students is going down and so there is a question as to what the demographic trend is because I think we expected a leveling off of demographic demand sometime around 23 or 24 at least from the earlier demographic studies that we did several years back and it's possible with the COVID and other things that happen that we may not go back into a growth mode so are you in agreement that the student growth formula is variable and this means that those costs come out of the school budget? I would say that my understanding all the way back to 2011 we started doing the growth factor 2013-14 that all the way back to then it was always clearly stated in long range planning committee meetings that it was intended to be a two way formula. Thank you. Okay, so last chance for questions on the town budget. May I ask one more question? So our last override if I remember the number correctly was five and a half million dollars on the operating side and we are discussing numbers in the 13, 14, 15 million dollar range for 2024. Are we is there a process in the long range planning committee or any place else to develop options or alternatives that might be going to the voters for some amount that is not as high as the 13, 14, 15 million. So since we've taken the liberty of talking about elephants in the room I thought I would introduce my own elephant and just ask if that has been a consideration in the discussions whether it might it might become one as we go forward this year and next. So I would say that the long range planning committee could just as accurately be called the scenario planning committee because of all the committees that we have we produce countless scenarios and have produced countless scenarios over the years all the way back to 2011 when we had pay as you throw scenarios and no pay as you throw scenarios and you know working through dozens of scenarios so I think in short the answer is yes that probably soon we will start working up various scenarios that map out what map out what different amounts of an override look like with different amounts of no override look like what it looks like both from an override point of view and what it might look like from a town and school budget point of view so I think the answer is yes. John you are on mute John we can't hear hear me? Yes of the towns we compare ourselves to Arlington has about a third of the average commercial revenue about five million dollars a year I know the town has done some studies about commercial zones and given the financial situation I wondered what you thought the opportunity was for growth of commercial income up to levels comparable with the towns that compares itself to. I think there may be some targeted ability with a few key sites in town for some commercial development I know there is a large residential development proposed in the MIRAC or a portion of the MIRAC properties off of Mass Ave some of the additional MIRAC properties in the automotive dealerships could be a site the goal of the gym site could be a potential property that would be looked at as well as Arlington call and lumber beyond that and frankly the planning director could give a much more in-depth answer than this over time we've really only seen the potential for significant year over year commercial growth being possible through mixed use development along the commercial corridors and Broadway and Mass Ave large scale commercial development is challenging and much of Arlington save maybe those three sites and maybe the vacant lot that St. Camillus owns up at Poets Corner because the transportation networks in the existing roadways in Arlington can't really serve a commercial demand right it's hard to get to those sites from just about anywhere so that's a limitation so I think the answer is yeah there are a couple sites with potential but I don't really believe there's some hidden hidden site where that could just spur year over year commercial development thank you Adam John does that answer your question thank you just harking back to Adam's previous comment about the scenarios in the implications of those scenarios I just wanted to mention Arif that's the that's the way the town responds to your concern concerns raised earlier in other words the that override hurdle in the scenarios to address it sort of govern growth or reductions in staffing and in other expenses so anyone else Charlie it's Dean Dean and then Eddie can I add a clarification to something you had brought up for the and your questions that most people probably don't have background on yes please go right ahead so in Charlie's questioning he referenced a school surplus and was talking about what to do with it so just so everybody understands the background of the last fiscal in school year so June of 2020 the school department found that they had spent less money that they had budgeted what they chose what the school CFO did at that moment was he returned $600,000 to the general fund he put $400,000 into the special ed reserve fund and then he chose to prepay this year's special ed out of district $1.3 million so when we're referring to these surpluses that need to come back to the town at some point we're really talking about the $1.3 million how it got created and how it would impact the town's budget going forward now before I go any further I do want to make it very clear that if faced with the facts and circumstances that if I was faced with the facts and circumstances I was looking at in June of 2020 I would have done exactly what he did okay so there's no degree of criticizing the decision making it's just simply looking at it and saying okay if we get past the crisis you know what is going to be our long term budgetary policy for dealing with surpluses and some of this is a history that predates most all of this probably is driven by history that predates the current CFO it will be here long after he's gone but I just want to make clear that that's what we're looking at it's not like the school department is doing something nefarious or terrible or what not it's just understanding okay they took great actions during a crisis now as we move out hopefully back to normalcy how do we handle it thank you Dean Andy yes so is the scenario planning committee modeling pay as you throw for 2024 Adam given that we now have a zero waste committee and we know pay as you throw is one of the prime ways to drive the production of waste down so I'd say right now no that's not on the table I have felt for a long time that given I guess I've always felt like given the Arlington specific need for consideration of tax overrides that a pay as you throw fee just wouldn't work so it's not currently being discussed if recycling costs go go up that's sort of the higher end where things go up that might prompt us to have to do something so I think I'm saying it's not currently on the table but it doesn't mean that in the next year that it won't be something we discuss thank you Adam so I think at this point it's appropriate to turn the committee the meeting back to your next phase of your discussion so you could move ahead on that please Adam right so Julie, Julie Wayman management analyst is going to walk through the FY 22 capital budget and plan thank you Julie go ahead thanks Adam so first I just want to mention that the capital planning committee is going to be coming before March 10th so at that time we will be going into the plan in far greater detail so tonight I'm just going to basically go over what you see on your screen which is our 5% calculation sheet just to give a sense give you all a sense of where we stand with the numbers so this sheet is in the manager's budget on page 198 if you want to look back at it but it breaks down for us a nice summary of the plan so at the top in red you can see how we intend to pay for the capital plan so the first two lines are our non-exempt debt service the first line being our prior debt service and the second line being what we anticipate our debt service will be after the sale of our debt next month the third line down is the cash cost to the plan and the total plan for 22 coming in at just over 11 million dollars you can see 23-26 are also right around 11 million dollars as a reminder this is just our non-exempt debt service so this does not include our FY 22 exempt debt service which is about 6.3 million dollars so this next box down in blue are our direct funding sources so while the plan does cost 11 million dollars we do have a number of other sources that we deduct from that 11 when calculating our percent of the total town budget so you can see here a number of funds you can also see the sale proceeds from the sale of the disabled American veterans building and you can also see that we pull out the override commitments when we're calculating that 5% so the final box here down in green is where we do that calculation and so we take what our net cost of the plan of that 8.6 million and we divide by what we anticipate our FY 22 budget to be and in 22 we are at 5% you can see that in 23 and 24 we're above 5% though 25 and 26 we anticipate being a bit below 5% and on average over that 5 years we are coming right now just below 5% I also want to mention that when we come back on March 10 we are hoping that these numbers here in this row are going to be a little bit lower again these are the estimated debt service numbers once we sell the debt we did we were a little bit conservative with the interest rate so you know if they do come back a little bit better these numbers might be a little bit lower on the 10th and then finally you'll see in the capital budget that there is a request from the facilities department and the school department a co-request for $150,000 for engineering studies so this is to allow the facilities department to look at the HVAC the roofs the infrastructure and also energy efficiency upgrades to some of our schools so we are anticipating there will probably be some future capital requests based on these engineering studies and that's going to be it for the capital plan for tonight thank you Julie are there any questions about the capital plan yes Al is it appropriate at this point to ask for an update on the status of the high school construction project it is sure sure we have our high school building committee meeting tomorrow night so I might have been better prepared on Wednesday but yeah I would say in general Al we are on schedule and on budget there maybe maybe even under budget and we have some ability to take a look back at things that had been pushed out of the project and consider adding them back back in there are there's a potential schedule impact for some of the steel work that we're currently working through in trying to get the contractor back back on time through starting a little bit earlier in the mornings and we're working through some of the details on some of those potential add backs and whether or not they would have a potential schedule impact or how that could be worked around but I would say in in broad strokes we are both on time and on budget and things are proceeding very well I think that was a kudos from some of the audience there Adam we'll take it any other questions on the capital plan I think Alan Jones sorry Alan thank you this is for a retrospective of the last town meeting the town meeting approved an increase in the DPW renovation plan and part of the increase of that cost was to shift some of the departments from the original high school plan which increased the cost of the DPW project which presumably will also decrease the cost of the high school project of all has that been accounted for was the high school budget decreased by an appropriate amount based on the increase in the DPW budget was but that all happened before the debt exclusion for the high school so those decisions to move facilities move IT those happened to get down to that $290.8 million figure which that exclusion was based on you want other questions yes John Deist yes Adam are there any more surprises relative to that upgrade of the DPW which is proceeding well now well this is not intended to be a little bit all I hope the next surprise is that when we get our bids back that they follow the trend of the high school bids and that they're significantly lower than estimate so I hope we can start to tighten things up outside of that I don't I don't anticipate there being any any other surprises I suppose probably greatest for when they actually start putting scoops in the ground because of the contamination there's potential for there being greater risk than what was identified when they profiled the soil but they've done a lot of pre-soil characterization to try to figure out what's there so we should be but I would say if there is risk that's the greatest risk area thank you you're welcome thank you Charlie I'm just curious if we have an estimate of what the total value of the town assets are our formula is based on 5% of expenditures which is sensible but there's also another way of looking at it which is if we look at our capital spending each year and we look at our asset base we can divide one by the other and you know I have a rough estimate of how long we think our assets are lasting the question is have we ever looked at that and often in government of course you don't spend enough really to keep things up because you expect periodic rebuilds with state funding or other kinds of funding obviously there's a lot of small capital items that we do have to keep up because we're not going to pass a debt exclusion for the smaller stuff but I'm just curious if we have an estimate of what the total of what fraction of that we spend every year in the capital budget so I would say the best document that we well I guess there's two things we could look at either our property insurance values or what the assessor is valuing the properties at I'm going to guess and Sandy jump in here if you disagree that looking at our insurance statement of values is probably going to be a more accurate depiction of the values than the assessor I don't know that the assessor are going over doesn't really have a framework for valuing like a large scale governmental building so I think we have a starting point I'd have to pull it out and we could divide our capital budget by it I'm not positive that even that statement of values would necessarily be accurate we could dig into it a little more and see how accurate it is so I can't cite it for you tonight but we could definitely do that I would just add we do in our annual CAFR which is our audit and Ida in her office leads on we do have a schedule of our depreciated values so there is a set of values that way but it's based on depreciation which is not really the cost of repairing replacing something that is something that the town has dealt with numerous changes over the years trying to figure out how much work needs to be done on or at various locations it's one of the reasons with our new facilities manager he took out a number of projects that had been guesstimated in the capital plan for some work at various buildings and said instead give me $150,000 to do an analysis of what shape these are in as Julie said looking at HVAC, looking at roofs looking at their energy efficiency I think in the long run trying to get to that number of what these repair costs are going to be is probably the most important I would just also add that I work in a number of different communities and spending 5% I would say my humble opinion is probably the minimum that one needs to spend in order to have a sufficient spending to maintain your assets and it may not even be sufficient in my opinion so that's my two cents if I can add to your two cents Sandy the 5% represents the non-exempt spending that we undertake but in the last 20 years the town has spent probably including the high school probably close to a half a billion dollars in capital expenditures on the school systems roughly Mr. Chairman yes so following up on Sandy's comment the CAFR lists as a footnote that lists the town's assets before depreciation on an acquisition cost so you know it's a little bit of an ok it's probably an understated metric because for example the high school which is like 100 years old would have no base would have like the acquisition cost from 1920 right plus additions using that as a metric the town records 259 million dollars of capital assets on its books before depreciation which is less than the cost of the high school that's why I give that long preface so I'd be ready for that comment okay any other comments thank you all capital budget did I see okay well Julie thank you very much for that presentation bringing us into these varying subjects so that sort of brings us to the well I don't know is that the end of your subjects you wanted to cover Adam, Sandy, Julie or do you have more that's all that we wanted to present but if there's other questions anything else the committee wants to discuss happy to answer any other questions so Adam's opening himself up to your clutches again so are there any additional questions after this discussion you would like to ask the town manager and his team okay well Adam, Sandy, Julie thank you very much for a very informative presentation and I think that will give us the fire and ambition to dig into these expenses in each of the departments and then we'll be back and discussing them again with you in the future that's great thank you all very much thank you everybody great job that's work how are we doing for time here oh we're just about on time amazing okay so the next subject is our information systems working group strategy and Andy La Courte is going to bring us up to speed on what their vision and activities are so Andy turn the meeting over to you great hopefully everybody can see my screen so I'm going to share the screen while I walk through these slides and then we go to questions I will stop sharing the screen so I can see everybody's faces but somebody will have to help me monitor hands so I want to remind you all what it was that Charlie asked the information systems working group to work on at the beginning of the year and so we were looking to do a handful of things so provide a platform for increased collaboration for the committee improve the process by which the committee produces its report avoiding some of the inaccuracy and miscommunication about changes that currently occurs and that is mostly that we make decisions in the committee they don't necessarily get communicated directly to Sandy very quickly documents get produced Sandy and Alan kind of struggle to keep their versions of the budget coordinated so on and so forth and we're hoping to smooth out some of that those issues no fault no blame on anybody it just has to do with the systems we have available at the moment to manage that and the fact that budgets are best done in spreadsheets we can't actually count on an application that's going to be easy to use and then we wanted to create a historical record of our work and we wanted to increase capability to do more historical analysis and a model future impacts to the budget external sources of data so on and so forth the email Charlie sent me was very articulate on this point I would let him articulate his thinking beyond that if people want more detail on the kinds of things that he was thinking of so we have been working on these things and a sort of a near term midterm long term model and the near term for us was to increase you know to create this collaboration platform and to see what we could do to begin to work on the improvement of the process of producing our report from the budgets produced by the town and coordinating that communication so we have fewer moments of being startled or having to correct things after they've been printed etc and creating historical record of our work the historical analysis and modeling capability is probably further down the road than anything else that's sort of our long term strategy and that improving of communications is both things we're working on now and what I would call midterm to the process because it will take a while to figure out exactly how we can better coordinate so what that leads to is the question that I think is probably on everybody's mind which is why are we implementing 365 and SharePoint so we're doing that for a couple of different reasons so the IS Working Group believes and I think based on the survey we did of the committee a lot of committee members believe that we need a better way to share documents and Office 365 and SharePoint are the tool that the town is adopting and so in order for us to also coordinate with all the department heads and all the other people in the town that we work with using the same platform is kind of important in addition to Office 365 and SharePoint ultimately the town I believe for remote meetings will be moving to teams and we will all have access to teams to use as a tool for remote meetings although I suggest that many people want to go back to in-person meetings after we are out of the pandemic for some of us continuing to do remote meetings is more in line with how we work now with all the rest of our in all the rest of our life and it'll be nice to have that tool available to us to communicate with department heads etc using SharePoint will also allow us to create that historical record of our work read and produce and review a lot of documents not all of which actually get posted to the website not all of which are pertinent to decisions so on and so forth the structure that we've put in place inside SharePoint will allow us to keep all that work product year by year and be able to look back and forward at what we did last year what we're doing this year what we did five years ago so on and so forth and those documents will also be available to the town because they will be in the town's system and platform and therefore create a record that is responsive to any foyer request that might come for our work product and then this tool makes it easier for us to share documents and changes to the budgets with the finance department because they will be using the same tool and so it's just a question of sliding a file over to a different folder for Sandy to give us something or vice versa and we have a plan for how we might create a picture on a daily basis of the changes that come out of our meetings to a budget so that it can Sandy can immediately see how that compares to his budget it's a spreadsheet manipulation kind of thing that you know probably don't care about the details of but we're hoping that will help with some of this you know misalignment that sometimes occurs between what Sandy has in his documents and what we have in ours so that's sort of the big picture of why we're doing this and I'm now going to stop sharing my screenage take any questions you have about this and see whether or not any of my compatriots on the committee want to weigh in and expand on that at all and I can see Alan's editing my slides so he may want to jump in so Alan are we going to say something I just wanted to correct Office 365 to Microsoft 365 it's changed whatever so so Andy that actually is you know I think Alan has suddenly made a good point there because one of the advantages I think are that whether it's a PowerPoint or a Excel spreadsheet or Word document or whatever any of us that are working on something here together can actually edit these documents in real time while we're sharing them isn't that correct yes yes we had a fun exercise in training session number two where Bill Keller made a document and then Darryl and Alan and I were all adding things to it before everybody's very eyes so I think I think that's a quite a bit of going to be going to be a benefit as we go through our our meetings with our with our departments so Darryl or George did you want to make any comments as well after our meetings this week our training sessions this week and I thought on the whole the training went pretty well you know it is new some people it's just going to be a matter of getting exposure to it and increased comfort with it but I think that the benefits will reveal themselves pretty quickly I guess I'd just like to add that if folks have questions or would like some more information about how to use SharePoint to please get a hold of one of us Annie, Alan, Darryl or myself and we're happy to set up a time to walk through any particular questions that you have we understand that this is kind of different for anyone who hasn't used this before which is most of the committee so if you weren't able to make the training sessions or would like against an extra time we are available really throughout the spring the winter and spring but especially early on if you've got questions don't hesitate to reach out please George Bill Keller here with a quick question we've all been very helpful and especially today we spent quite a bit of time going over things and as much remedial help as possible I'm not the most tech-savvy person in the room but as coming slowly I guess my question is were these training sessions recorded so that it be in some fashion where I could go back or someone could go back and just review the training without coming back to one of you each time we have a question to help this new information and platform cement itself so we did not record the training sessions Bill but better than recording the training sessions might be just one of us getting on zoom and recording walking through the slides with a demonstration of the steps on the screen because in the trainings we were sort of adapting on the fly to whoever was on the on with us and I'm not sure any of those trainings would have produced a particularly slick training video but we could consider doing something like that or there may be some training slides out there on YouTube that we can find I certainly send a lot of YouTube videos out to my Salesforce clients to help them do that and while I have the floor I just want to acknowledge that Grant Gibby has also been on the committee with us and has done a lot of work to help us get to this moment he just didn't have he was between computers and so him helping out with the training was going to be tough so don't want him to be left behind so any other questions for this team while we have them yes Peter you're on mute Peter in the training session there was a mention of a structure of files so as far as I can tell there isn't much structure there now you said there would be a file for each working a little what do we call ourselves past groups maybe and shall I go ahead and establish a file for for general government and so Peter there is a file for general government I can't find it okay so perhaps we should offline I should walk you through that maybe just for the sake it wouldn't take more than a couple of seconds just to bring up a share point on your screen and share it and show people where that is so this is our share point site okay and so we have a file for each year a folder and then and then the cappers and paffers are here and then I think there's some well Alan are you messing around with my stuff you're in the IS team site you should be in the team I want to be on let me go back I want to be on finance committee I lied okay let's get to the right spot guys okay so there's an Arlington budget folder at top level so if you let me back out of here so if I'm on the office homepage and I go to share point I get here and I go to the finance committee and then this is the finance committee homepage where our meeting schedule is set up and so on and so forth and I go over here to documents then I get to what I call top level folders top level folders is for this year for the Arlington FY 2022 budget year and if I go into that folder there is a folder called FY 22 assigned budgets and inside that folder for each of our groups who work on budgets together thank you very much I didn't think to look there yeah so I and I know folder structures can sometimes make people crazy because you kind of go why do I have to do so many clicks etc etc but it is about sort of keeping things organized so I need to quickly find something I can find it but I also want to remind everybody that up here in search if I'm at the top level and I want to see the manager's budget for example I can just do a search for it and it will come up so search is your friend so where are the can I ask another question sure where are the minute history of the minutes going to go okay so what I am encouraging Liz to do is to create a folder for each meeting here so you can see we have a February 1st 2021 budget where'd you come from where'd you come from if I'm at the top level in documents and I go to the fiscal year then there's an FY22 meetings meetings there okay and then inside that we're hoping to create a folder for each meeting date so will the agenda go in there also yes that is the theory that the agenda would go in there and the minutes that would go in a folder that night what about the draft minutes so the draft minutes Peter would depend on how you want to produce them right so if you're planning on writing them out in a word doc on the computer as we go then I would say start them in the folder for the meeting but if you're still going to do them by hand and you're going to produce them afterwards I would produce them and upload them into the folder for the meeting as a PDF by the way into the folder for the meeting that they're going to be voted on in because that's where we're going to have to read them am I making sense no that's fine you need to do that I think you and Liz need to work out kind of a rhythm about that so my mind I guess what I would suggest is having draft versions then having a final version that that would also exist in the town side on the town website on the website I don't think you mean on the website Peter that's where it is now drafts not the drafts no the final the voted one version yeah the final version will go from here to the website oh but yes I mean should it be in both places the final version would likely be in both places yes I'll be posting it in both places I believe like we usually do it's just in different folder Pete yeah what would be in a different folder the final version is just not going to be held on my computer somewhere in a folder that says minutes it will now be in this FY 22 you know the specific night of the meeting that you approve it so tonight's meeting minutes will be in Wednesday nights folder the final version right and then I will I'll definitely post them in document central and then onto the town website as well so we can put the drafts and the final version folder you just referred to would the draft go into that folder to any for Wednesday or would the only the final go into it people reach yeah whatever people are going to vote on is what should go in the meeting folder which is the draft until we vote on right I would just change the name from draft the final yeah so I would say that's more a document than a separate document Alan quite often there is a difference between the two well make the changes and then call it make the changes vote on and call it final you do you want to keep the history or not well okay let's I may be getting that's an offline conversation yeah so I think maybe Peter you and Liz and Annie can sort of or Alan can work this out afterwards all right okay thank you any other questions for Annie or comments I have a question Charlie yes John it's a general question about what we're traditionally our meetings with department has how are we supposed to cut up those this year so you have a couple different options so I'll tell you what I recommended to Bill when we discussed this when he and I did our one on one I would say your first line of defense is to talk to the department head and say hey can you set up a zoom meeting on a town zoom account and invite our committee members to it so put the onus back on the town employee who probably has already been using zoom consistently your second line of defense is to say okay I'll set up the meeting and the meeting would also be done on the town zoom account that we use for finance committee meetings now and you could get either Liz or I to help you schedule that and put the link in and so on and so forth if you are familiar with teams teams is available through the SharePoint site and you are welcome to use teams to set up your department head meeting but it's certainly not required and we just didn't feel like we had the bandwidth to train everybody on teams and we certainly didn't want to switch our meeting tool right now when most of the rest of the town has not instituted teams yet so that's kind of where we're at okay I'll just comment that I got an injection today I got the vaccine today yes that's awesome so maybe a person meeting is even possible maybe well you know there's a meeting following social distancing rules and masks and so forth is certainly possible but I think I saw a very interesting article in the Wall Street Journal today about the NFL and what they found out about the infectious nature of the COVID and that it's much more easily spread than advised by the CDC you know if you do want to have an in-person meeting first of all you got to make sure that the town department is okay with that and there's a facility available to do it in a safe manner and secondly I think based on what I read today you have to be really careful okay well I'm sitting on my couch in my library right now which is very comfortable and a lot more comfortable than most office chairs there you go okay any other questions for for any or anybody on the information systems working group yeah are we all supposed to bring our caps to the meetings I'm sorry yes apparently although I only have a dog oh hahaha okay good all right so thank you very much on that any appreciated I'd like to move on to another subject which is this point of new initiatives I said I'm a little sorry somebody I think Dave's talking Dave I wasn't talking but now if you're asking me I just want to let John Dyson know I'm getting this second shot 30 good good for you very good okay okay so let me share my screen and if that's gonna work that's gonna work okay so I would like to mentions that I sent out this document today and mentioned in the agenda that I'd like to set out some new initiatives for the finance committee and you might think we've been talking about a new initiative for the last half an hour which is true but I think we can handle more than one initiative at a time so excuse me but I'm having trouble there we go so what I'd like to do is talk about the background as to why I'm suggesting these initiatives and what the objectives are and then I'd like to spend a little bit of time talking about the three detailed initiatives now I have spoken to a lot of you about these in the last several days some of you I missed and sent some emails to some I called and we need to link up but I ask that you just bear with me here and then we'll catch up on this more during the next week so the background here is similar to some of the reasons why we set out with the information systems working group to change our platforms and the we've had a long and successful history of working with the various departments in the town but the world is changing it's becoming the town moderator wants an all electronic all digital town meeting the working world is moving towards higher degrees of collaboration in the context of all this we've also had trouble from my viewpoint recruiting new members we have we have some excellent at large members but the statute says that we have to have or we're supposed to have a member from each precinct in the town and the town manager act has allows us to use at large members only for a limited period of time so we've got to focus on how we get back to our membership being drawn from each precinct in the town so as part of this thinking I'm proposing that or suggesting that we have three fundamental needs one as suggested by various people Dean has mentioned it Alan's mentioned it that we need to document and plan our activities and secondly as I was just mentioning with respect to getting new members we have to figure out a way to publicize the story of the finance committee and get new members to join it and then thirdly I think we going forward we need to deepen our knowledge of the town and school operations especially in the context of the structural deficits the discussion we had with the town manager tonight where we're talking about a 13 or 15 million dollar override is pretty shocking so we have to figure out a way to understand how we can help the town contain its expenses in the face of our consistent structural deficit so I the first thing I want to mention is that you know I'm presenting these as ideas this is not any edict being handed down from on high and I'm trying to address the three issues of recording our records and policies and how we how we act and work getting our narrative out to the public and categorizing or cataloging all the information that we can about the current historical nature of the town departments now the reason I propose these working groups is that I also have a personal objective here and that is I would like to see the responsibility and authority for the direction that the finance committee takes get spread out more than it is throughout the committee I would like to see the finance committee empowered to affect our future direction and I'd like to see us have a process where we grow our own leadership for the future now that's very high level and grand ideas I don't know exactly how we're going to get to implement it all in practice but at least if we think about these things we can think about how we're going to get there so with respect to the whole idea of getting the narrative of the finance committee out to the public and helping in our recruiting I'm suggesting that what we should have is what I call communications working group and Arif Padaria has agreed to be the leader of this group and I've talked to some of you about joining it and reaching out to a couple of others that I haven't quite caught up with yet the idea is that this group will sort of develop ways for us to get our narrative first of all to all the department departments in the town so they understand not just that we come around and look at their budgets but that we have an overall philosophy and way of working with the town, with the town meeting what we're doing and why we're doing it etc and then we need to get this story out to the public because if the public doesn't know what we're doing they're not going to want to people don't necessarily will not necessarily have a motivation to join the finance committee and if we are going to be successful in recruiting people from each precinct we have to have that public interest and hopefully demand from the public to join the committee I've asked Arif and I'm looking forward to his leadership here in creating a way to achieve these objectives and we'll come back to that to the charter there in a second then with respect to our I'm just trying to get rid of my blocking my own screen here with the Zoom so with respect to the idea of documenting where we've been and where we're going I'm suggesting that a policy procedures working group or a policy working group and think about this in sort of two categories one is to just write down maybe it's an Arlington finance committee manual or some document like that on our new shared share point facility but something that describes all the things we do and how we do it and why we do it it also can describe the various relationships we have I found out recently that Andy is our delegate to the vision Arlington committee and I didn't know we had a delegate to the Arlington and so I'm sure we have other relationships like that that we should at least record for everybody else in the committee to know about and then there may be things that we want to consider about where we go in the future how do we elect offices and what sort of governance do we want to have or we might want to think about more working groups and support services fitting into the functions of the committee these are just concepts and I've asked Christine to leave this group and hopefully we'll come out with something that's workable and usable by the finance committee in the future and then the third is what I call the operations research working group after Christine published and Jonathan and Daryl published the report last summer a number of people on the committee suggested that we could probably do this with other departments and I think Andy suggested DPW there were a couple of other suggestions and in the long run it would be good to have a resource like that for all of the departments so my thought is that this operations research working group being led by Al Tosti would come up with a plan to prioritize how we would do this who would do it, when it would happen etc. so that we would be building up a database of information about the town and schools so that would be available for reference by finance committee members as they carry out their work in the future so these are just three ideas to move forward in some of the objectives that I mentioned earlier so what does this mean with respect to process you know what you've seen here in the slides as I said earlier these are ideas so I'm hoping that the working groups will develop their own charter and schedules in other words I'm not anticipating or other than making a suggestion here about the directions that we might take I'm hoping that the working group can develop the plans and recommendations of how we go forward but only the finance committee makes the final decisions in other words the working groups come up with a plan or recommendation or whatever but it should be presented to the finance committee as a way forward and gets sold to bought in by the full committee I've tried to structure this so that the working groups are less than a finance committee quorum so that we don't run afoul of the open meeting law inadvertently and we have to be careful about that and then I hope that each working group will plan regular updates or reports the committee to keep the committee apprised of what's going on just for example the way Annie has done tonight and I think she did in one of the earlier meetings in the fall this is just sort of a concept very light blueprint or path that we might take to address these three areas and I'm hoping that the groups will grab ahold of this come up with more concrete ideas and present some plans on how we can move forward in these areas so what I'm going to do in the next week is send out a couple of emails that will gather together all of the names of the people in the various groups that I've been talking to which is not completely organized yet but it will be shortly and then you can that are working in these efforts can get together and collaborate with the team leader and figure out how we go forward so I think that's the process that I'm suggesting and I hope that the people can embrace it and I'd be happy to answer any questions that you might have about all this stuff no questions so I got a question Charlie I wanted to volunteer to be a member of one of those working groups how would I go about doing that send me a note you know I just candidly anybody can volunteer to be on anyone what I've tried to do is be light on the people that are working on the information systems working group already have some commitment so I'm trying to spread the load around a little bit I feel bashful about taking on more burden for the greater good of the finance committee I think that's great any other thoughts or questions I can't tell I guess I have everybody on the screen here sometimes I see two screens and sometimes I see one I don't understand I have to get the zoom thing down so okay so I guess the one comment I want to make about these working groups is that not only do they define their own charter and objectives but also set their schedules these are not meant to be something that gets done in a week some of these things are going to take a couple of years maybe even more to get carried out in full but what I'm hoping is that everybody will be participating in these and together sort of directing where the finance committee is going in the future sounds a little heavy probably but I hope we can all yes George I think this is wonderful have you had discussions with the town manager about sort of the issue of where is kind of a useful division between things that are primarily financial and budgetary which are our focus and which issues get to be more managerial and whether we should or maybe you've already had a conversation about how to work sort of harmoniously and kind of pulling in the same direction because I think whenever we talk to our departments you know all sorts of issues come up that are sort of in that gray area and I guess I'm just wondering if we want to perhaps have a consistent policy across the working groups that at least is guidance on what we focus on or whether it's not an issue so I'm just curious where we are going to be on that George I think that's a very good point and it is an issue and I actually talked at some length about it with Al Tosti especially in this operations research side and I think Christine did a wonderful job in the summer of going into that Christine and her team and into that study without an invasion of the police department you know I mean so it's I think there's a fundamental issue here is that we want to collect data and we want to analyze but we don't want to get into management of the departments or the committees or boards anybody that is you know interacting with the department even if you see something that's doesn't look right you know this is the idea is if it has a cost to it and a cost that we don't need I think we all know enough to bring that back to the finance committee but we don't try to tell the department manager or the people in the staff what they should be doing or how they should be doing it that's entirely the prerogative of the professional management in the town did I hear somebody say something sorry Charlie I think I was talking and I'm not muted oh okay that's alright I just want to make sure that if someone has something to say that I recognize them sorry which precincts are we missing how many are we missing there are three it's four eighteen do you remember the other precinct Liz I think it's precinct one Charlie what no John Ellis is from precinct one I think right John three I don't see anybody from two I'm looking at this precinct one Shane is from two four and eighteen are two that come to mind I can't remember the third one it's one okay so one four and eighteen no it's not one well maybe it is one maybe I'm assigned to a different one this year one four and eighteen one four and eighteen okay thanks you're welcome okay well anybody has any comments or questions or thoughts about any of this please feel free to post me you know in the future and don't feel that you have to do this you have to be on one of these working groups if you're already fully engaged and you know have a busy schedule that's fine too I'm just trying to create an environment where we can get some more things done and more people can have an impact on the directions that we move in the future so I guess the most important question before we open ourselves up for a motion to adjourn is how are we doing on budgets so I can mention a bit about our own so next week we have calls planned for our finance some of the finance subcommittee budgets so I think in the next week and a half so we should have some areas of the finance subcommittee budget taken care of would I mean I'm happy for Al to speak Al I'm sorry maybe I took your thunder or you're the leader of the group so you should speak probably but I just jumped Al did you want to say now we're you know we're cranking along speaking to budgets but we don't have any budgets to present in the next two meetings Wednesday or Monday Dave you and Peter normally crank out the general government budget in the first hour of our new existence what do you think the schedule is well I have to get with Peter and we have to figure out a plan on what action we're going to take but once we do that we'll be coming to you but it will probably take another week or so to put that together okay so maybe let's let's say that we'll postpone Wednesday's meeting and Monday's meeting and have the next meeting a week from Wednesday does that give everybody enough time to get started on budgets that's great I think Liz do we have any hearing yeah that's what I'm going to that's what I just wanted to bring up I'm looking at the calendar now next one is on February 22nd with the arts culture okay so then we'll let's say then that the the next finance committee meeting what I didn't hear what you said the next finance committee meeting will be Wednesday February 10th okay thanks is that good yep okay so before we entertain a motion to adjourn I want to thank everybody for you know all the effort we'll put in so far this year and the last day after 2020 and I just want to make sure that you all drive carefully going home going home tonight very snowy out there hey Charlie I have a request the presentation that you just made I don't have it in my email so I don't know if you had sent that or not well I think we did send it out but guess what I was successful tonight I was doing it on SharePoint there's a folder there that says chair documents and it's in there and I did it without calling any or Alan or Charlie I guess the only thing I would say is that if somebody puts a new document on SharePoint I guess I have to turn on a notification of some sort and I'll figure out how to do that yeah that would probably be a good idea okay thank you and just for everybody's knowledge I'm starting now to use the new email program so I won't be sending anything to the town email but I'll be using the Microsoft program which will automatically forward it to your town address but I did send out that document so it concerns me a brief that you didn't see it okay I'll check again just to make sure I didn't see it either Liz no okay I'm going to look into why that wouldn't be there I'll send it to everybody as well how long ago did you send it I sent it this afternoon so you went into Microsoft email okay I thought it was automatically forwarding to our personal emails it is everything should be yeah Liz I want to help you out with that I think Jonathan try sending to your town.arlincon.mod.us address and it should be forwarded to your personal address send to your arlincon.online address and it should go to your town to your personal address that's not working let me know okay email me again you can follow up with that we'll talk about see how that's working okay any other anybody have any other business or questions they want to bring up tonight motion to adjourn don't move second all in favor thank you very much good night thank you everyone good night