 All right, we're recording. Go ahead. So I'm going to call the finance committee meeting of Tuesday, April 20, 2021, to order at two minutes past two o'clock. It's supposed to be two o'clock meeting. We're soon to Governor Baker's March 12, 2020 order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law general law chapter 30 a section 18. This meeting of the finance committee is being conducted via remote participation. And as a standard, I will go through each of the members of the committee just to make sure that everybody can hear me and we can hear them. And then we'll, Lynn will put the agenda on the screen for a moment. And we'll just discuss the agenda order for the day and proceed accordingly. So going to members of the committee, Dorothy Pam. Present. Please. Present. Bob Higner. I'm here. Bernie Kubiak. President. And Kathy Shane. Athena. Yeah. Please. Send Pat. The thing. Okay, so we'll go ahead and. Do you want me to put it up, Linda? No, I have it. No, I have it. Thank you. Okay, so I'm. Just quickly review the agenda. What's going to be somewhat of a time consuming, complicated. Matter is going to be the other post employment benefits discussion and presentation. I think it's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be, it's going to be, is that there may be a lot of questions about it. And it is a. Pretty complex and. Topic in the major. Liability of the town. But. The. It's not going to be here until two 30. So what I was going to propose is that we talk about the. Auditor procurement and selection process. First. Because Anthony Delaney is present and then. That means that a Panthony doesn't want to stay beyond that one agenda item. That it freezes afternoon up. If he wishes. And of course the other major item is we do need to return. To the regional school budget discussion because we need to make a recommendation to the council. On that matter. And. I will then see if there's any public present at the moment. There are, there's no members of the public present. But we will check again to his public comment. On the agenda item. And then we will go through this brief discussion of the budget calendar. And I think those are the agenda items for the day. So with that, if there's unless there's any questions. From any members of the committee. About the agenda. I would propose that we. Go to what's listed on your screen right now. And then one can take this down. Auditor selection process and. That is not going to be able to join us. Which is indeed unfortunate because Pat was the one person who I think was on the original audit committee. She was, but I also. And Dorothy. Dorothy. So you got us. Okay. So we received. At the council at the last council meeting and. A memorandum from. Time manager. With the recommendation for the auditor selection process. It included. A proposed request for proposal that. I believe was largely or entirely prepared by Anthony Delaney. Who is with us. Should there be questions. About that and. About the, and then there was also one additional piece which. Is the proposed charge for committee that. We would need to get back to the council because council would need to create the committee. And it is. Put together. A corg in to the memorandum that we received. So. Do we need to have a review of the. Memo and the proposal or is everybody had a chance to read it and feels comfortable with it. I don't hear a request. I'm going to assume that. Everybody got a chance to read it and doesn't need a presentation. We should just open it up to see if there are any questions or comments. Yeah, I just wanted to was some, I'm not sure what page it's on, but in the, the, the scope of work. There's a series of number one, number two, number three. And there's, they're not in sort of parallel construction. It's just a, it's just a minor thing. But I like to see an RFP. You know, kind of. Parallel construction of scope to work. Yeah. I can. Prepare a study and then the other, you know, There's just not parallel construction. Some of it is just. Yeah. I'd have to pull it up to see, but anyway, it's just, it's just, it's a minor thing, but. I like to see an RFP's. You know, kind of. I can pull it up. You can, you can see it on page four, Lynn. What, what Bob's talking about. Yeah. So the first one is conduct the second one says an examination. Third is an examination. It's just, it's just parallel construction, you know. Conduct an examination or, you know what I mean. Examine. Or examine. Yeah. Whatever. Just, just. These things. And then there's a, I think number six is. Completely different. As well. When we get. You can move it down to six. We'll take a look at it. It could be a. Communicate. Right. Yeah. If you just reverse it, say, communicate those charges and then put at the conclusion at the, as the less. Right. Yeah. It's pretty easy to turn these. Yeah. It's, it's not a big deal. It's just, it's just kind of a. As I say, it's, it's something I like to see an RFPs. Like having responded to. Dozens, if not hundreds of RFPs in my career. Paul. You had your hand up. Yeah. So we can fix that. That's, I should have caught that. I didn't. We reviewed this so we can fix that easily. Okay. Thank you. Dorothy. Well, there are two points I made at the. First presentation. And one was why is 10 years experience not enough. And the second one was. Since you asked for a sample audit, yet you do not include it in the point system. So I just would like some clarification on those. You give me a page number. That I can't. I actually remembered what I said, but I'm not sure. Okay. There's so many pieces of paper. I'm finding that if I can't remember it, it's never found. Andy, can I respond to. Yeah. His first point. So, so after Dorothy's comments at the council meeting, we looked at that. Evaluation criteria as well. And, and we actually, I mean, not actually, we do agree that that particular one, we might want to come revisit. And add some more. But we were also thinking that we might want to add something to that one about. You know, so much experience with clients that are a similar size as Amherst, because someone could have, you know, 50 years experience, but it fits with really small towns. And that might not be. You know, symbolize what they can do for us. So, so we were going to review that experience one. But we're going to modify that. And in terms of the years, I mean, the hard thing with RFPs is you have to have, you have to draw a cutoff somewhere at different tiers. The, you know, there's, you have to have the same number of tiers for each one. And so we can review those different tiers. You know, I don't think there's a, someone that is 11 years or somebody that has 10 years that there's a huge distinction, but you do have to draw the line somewhere so that you can score them. But we can review those, those different levels too. But either way, I think we are going to modify that particular one on experience to include, to include something about the size of the, of the customers, either add a new criteria or modify that one. Sounds good. And actually. The process we assume is what we really need to focus on. Because I think that it's set in the timeline. It wasn't until June that. It was a later date for the approval of the RFP itself. Yeah. Well, we have to post the RFP. So that we do have to get the RFP somewhat settled because we have to advertise that and give people time to respond to it. But I think we, we did make it. So there's plenty of time. So that. We don't need to rush to get this done. Do you want to move, you say, approve the RFP document? Do you want to have that earlier than June 21st on. So. So when we built this, I mean, I see there's sort of two pieces to this that we were looking for your recommendation on. I think the process itself of doing an RFP process and the, and the different steps, and that can include the timeline so we can review the timeline. And then the second piece is the, that evaluation criteria that we were just talking about. And then obviously we'll take any input on the, sort of the grammatical pieces of that. You can email that stuff to us and we can fix that up. We came up with the June 21st timeline because we were trying to work around the month of May as much as possible for you all because you're going to be meeting. Quite often during the month of May and having long meetings on the budget. So I felt like you either, you either need to see it, you know, prove it before May starts or give you a little bit of time after May ends to finalize it. But that day, again, we're sort of fluid. So that this timeline can fluctuate. You know, as long as it makes sense based on the, the meeting schedules. You know, you and Anthony are comfortable with the July one. Publication date is the trigger date for the process. Yeah. Again, if that goes back a week or forward a week. That's fine. From a standpoint of council input, I think it would be better to make. The RFP document available on June 7th. That way, if there's any changes necessary, we still have the 21st to approve it. Okay. So. I mean, my suggestion would be in the end is, is a final document that. Change. When you do changes, at least initially to this committee, if you could do. A version that shows the edits so that we see where the changes are, as well as the final version. And that'll make it easy for the. Committee and not have to spend much additional time. Kathy, you have your hand up. See. Bob drew our attention to the evaluation criteria. And what I looked at. Was it's not points, but we give you can be an H. A, which is your great. And A is your pretty good. And then you get down to something less. If there was variation. Doing letters like that. So if. If, if there were three committee members and they didn't, not everyone gave the same proposal. And HA, you'd be averaging HA's and A's. So are you thinking that that's like a four, three, two, one, or four, three, two, zero, you know, that, you know, the U is kind of no good. What, what's your thinking on, I'm assuming you've used this kind of waiting system. At some other points. So when you, you a means unacceptable, you know, to me, if some part of this was a UA, it almost knocks you out, but it certainly knocks you out for that criteria. So I'm just asking what you would do if you had two people rating or three people rating and they didn't all agree. What's your thinking? Andy, can I, can Anthony and I respond to that? So the first, the second part you said there, Kathy, I think you're right. If somebody got a UA, that would almost knock them out from the equation because we're saying that that level for whatever it is, you know, we're not going to accept. Anthony, do you want to add a little bit more to how we kind of combine the different ratings to, to, at the end, just to rank these or prioritize the applications. There's not a, there isn't a formula really, or a rubric. And in fact, we're discouraged from developing one this, this highly advantageous, advantageous scheme is prescribed in, in chapter 30B. If there's an evaluation committee, you'll generally be coming to some kind of consensus overall, you'll come to some kind of consensus overall rating. For how you're recommending these proposals to the town manager. So. Yeah, there isn't a, there isn't a strict rubric for it, but you, you might say the two highly advantageous and two advantageous scores at average out to an advantageous and. Okay. It is, it is, it's inherently subjective, I guess. Yeah. So I was mainly asking, and just, you know, just when you're doing, when you're doing, this cleanup, you've got the four possibilities where you is the lowest, but the next one down has a UA in it. So just clean it up. So it's just a, you know, that's. Yeah. So it's just UA would be unacceptable too, I guess, but it's, you'll see in the next, it's not a very good, it's not a very good, it's not a very good. It's not a very good, it's not a very good, it's not a very good. And it's not a very good, it's not a very good, to be unacceptable too, I guess, but it's you'll see in the first thing on, you see that first one it's UA then it's a you. Okay, so you go up. Yeah, I know that Lynn has your hand up. When you go up a little bit higher and you give the definitions I'm not sure that UA is a just defined term. No, I think it was just a typo. We'll fix that one so it's just you. That's what I meant. And the you was defined. It's only UA only appears in the one. Yeah, so that was every, it's just a mistake. Everything else is a you. Yeah, so we got that one's noted then. Yeah, and the one in Lynn, just let me say one thing and then I'm going to recognize Lynn. I have one I'm served on the selection committee like this and in that experience. I believe that we did rate by consensus for as a committee that it was not individual ratings that came out, but the consensus rating of the committee after the meeting. So, Lynn. My questions are along the same line. So let me start. Do we want each of the three people on the committee to do a review then have them discuss the consensus. Based on the interview, and then the next thing is, what is the criteria do we have to take best lowest qualified bid, or what is the final criteria for our recommendation. I think, I think Anthony wants to respond to that one. So the, yeah, so the the rule for award, I believe is actually at the end of section one, right before section two, which is pulled up in my. It's right at the end of the evaluation criteria to the responsive and responsible vendor submitting the most advantageous proposal, taking into consideration experience staff capacity references and plan of service as well as proposal price. So that's our, that's our award decision with our award decision would be based on the evaluators will right will give overall scores to the proposals the town manager will open the price proposals and if the highest rated proposal is also the lowest bid then it's an easy decision but if the highest rated proposals are more expensive that then he has to weigh them and and decide what the best overall award is. So are we making our recommendation to town manager will ultimately decides. Correct. The committee makes the recommendation to the town manager town manager. Or actually since ratings the town manager makes a decision as to who he recommends and but it is a council decision as to who gets the award. RFPs are awarded by the chief procurement officer. That's 30 be. Yeah, but when we get into a problem which is actually I'm glad you just said that because that was what my concern was. I'm not sure how we deal with the fact that it is the council that is doing the hiring, according to the charter. All I can assume is that the council has to vote to authorize the manager to enter into X contract. So Andy can I weigh in on two things real quick. Yes. So just in terms of the process. What you said first was correct which is the RFP review committee, you're going to be doing your evaluations and coming up with a consensus evaluation, which is sort of a rating for each application and then you're going to hand those over to the town manager you're not necessarily making a recommendation you're just your responsible for evaluating the applications from the quality standpoint. And, and then the town manager will see those ratings compare them with the price and determine which ones he he think is the most advantageous for the town. Yeah, and so because this is a, so this is exempt from 30 be so that that adds a little bit of a funky wrinkle to it. But we are trying to follow a 30 be like process. So, because we have this contract set up where it can be over three years. That is the reason why we have it set up as of right now to be brought to the council for final authorization, because generally if something's over three years then it would go to the council. We can look into this more and come back next time once we make some edits to this with some clarification on the product on that process approval process but that was the intent of the original, why the town manager would make a recommendation and the council would sort of. Okay that recommendation and finalize the contract was because of the length of the contract, potentially length of the contract. The length of the contract because it's the council were to disagree. As far as the who to select. So, near the top of this document you have on the screen, the section of the charters right there. Yeah, I believe the charter speaks to the council. Determining the process. Yeah, it doesn't say we award the contract Andy. Yeah I don't think it says you hire the auditor I think it just says that you, you have to adopt a process for it. You have to manually provide for an outside audit of the books and accounts of the town, and the manager is only is required to provide enough money in the budget to conduct the audit. I think you could read it two ways. It's vague. Definitely deliberately. I mean, provide, we just have to make sure it doesn't say anything about three year contracts doesn't say annually contract with on. Yeah, so. Yeah, I know I realized that Paul has his hand up, Paul. So I think you're right on the track. The, what the town council is, you're supposed to adopt the procedures for selection of such an audit accountant or firm. That's what the task is, typically all contracts, you know, under the charter all contracts are signed by the town manager, not by the council. So I think, you know, you can set whatever process you want to. And then we will abide by whatever that process is. And I think this is that's what this discussion is about is the process that you wanted to follow and what Anthony and has put together is. Well, how do we procure other services we follow 30 be there's a fixed set of rules for following 30 be and so that's the process that we put together in this RFP that council wants to do a different process. You can choose a different process is what my interpretation would be. I don't know if there are other comments. Because I'm actually this funny position because I'm perfectly comfortable with the process as proposed, but just trying to make sure that we're protecting the charter. Charters with the charters authorizing the council to do. And how do we do we feel that it's appropriate for the council to be charged with providing for an outside audit without heavy being the one that's final is selecting the auditor. Sonya you have. I have a question actually for Anthony and Sean on this. It was my understanding that if we don't have to go out to bid for an order but if we do, we do have to follow 30 procurement laws. So I don't think we can tailor this either we're going out for an RFP and it's following procurement laws or not for an RFP so I'm a little confused with that Anthony. So if it's exempt from 30 be then we don't have to follow 30 be in procuring it. I would be very nervous about calling it an RFP and making it look 90% like a 30 be RFP but then having a wrinkle that doesn't follow it. If we're going to adopt the form and the appearance of it I'd like to follow it 100% of the way. It's basically my concern. Yeah. Bernie Kubiak did you have your hand was up earlier I just didn't. Yeah I was just going to say I don't, I don't see the conflict between the town manager actually signing a contract and implementing the audit versus the, the council not hiring the person they're they're they're the firm. And the way I'm again the way I'm reading this is, you know, that it's the council's responsibility to approve a process. And then to say whether or not they like the outcome of that process and if they'd like the outcome of the process tell the town manager to as a purchasing agent to make it so. And I'm also, again, this is a little going backwards a little bit I'm looking at the minimum requirements and you know if you get 10 governmental units the size of population of Amherst. You're basically saying no more handsome he's given his contract. I think that he's got to be a little bit more flexibility in there. But I'm, you know, familiar with 30 be because I lived with it for 30 years. And then some and, you know, you, you, this is a process that fairly well parallels that parallels it I'm not. I don't share Anthony's anxiety over following a 30 and making it look like 30 being following it 100% and I do believe that once the council makes the award it's a grease the process has been followed and makes the authorizes the expenditure and then it's up to Paul to sign the contract and move the thing forward. Dorothy has our hand up. Yeah, I see Dorothy's hand up Dorothy. Well, what I was going to say was clear before Bernie spoke. I would say, yes, strong government is essential that the town manager that the town council presents a process makes a recommendation. I wouldn't say award the country used to use Bernie use some stronger terms there. I would say the council makes a recommendation and the town manager uses his or her discretion and awards the contract. Otherwise, we would not. The city of Amherst is a very contentious town. I feel that people would really want to know that it's in the town manager's hands, and that the council can't get into some kind of tug of war, and whatever, or have a split thing. So I think it's very important that we keep the words or the understanding that the town council can do the process and make a recommendation, the town manager awards and signs the contract. And I guess I'm still a little bit confused and I do see a couple of hands up is to you know it's not awarding the contract it's awarding the contract whom to what firm. That's what I meant. And so the selection of the firm. It is come into today's meeting thinking that the manager is making a recommendation to the council, and the council approve the recommendation and then manager goes forward and creates a contract. Who does the committee report to do they report to the town manager or to the town council. If we go over to that document which is also in today's packet was proposed is the recommendation is being made to the town manager. Okay. And then the town manager makes a recommendation to the council and the council says yes or no. Is that right. Yes, it's devoted. Okay, that sounds reasonable. Sonya. I wanted to go back to the years of experience and what we're, what, at least what I was thinking about when we were putting that in the proposal is that we rely on our auditors a lot for information throughout the year like if a new regulation comes through and everything. We call them up and they're right on top of that they know exactly what we need to do when they work with us on that. So to me. I'm looking for some an experience auditing firm that's going to be able to answer those questions for us. So that's where I was going with the many years and like communities. So I just wanted to explain that. Can I. Yeah. Sonya I totally appreciate what you're saying because of my experience with nonprofit audits. It seems to me though that you could have a new firm, but you could have people within that firm, who have that level of experience to the professional associations, where they're on top of all of the rules and regulations that the government so I I also think therefore you need to look at the statement and make sure it accounts for the use of resumes to show experience for the firm. But I told somebody in this somebody in the group that we hire needs to be extremely educated on state and local municipal finance and on top of what's coming down the road and how we may have to change our accounting procedures to in anticipation of future changes. Let me give a hypothetical situation and see what comments Sonia and john and Paul might have to admit is suppose somebody who we've worked with and have good experience with for a period of time at Lansing decides to leave and form his or her own firm or join another firm that is trying to develop governmental municipal governmental work within Massachusetts and relying on that person. Do we want to consider that firms bid or not and how does that how would that hypothetical fit into this process that we've said forward. Well that would depend on the situation. Normally, if a firm breaks up like that you can't do business with the town that your firm you just left from for at least I think it's two or three years I'm not sure exactly, but normally you can't do that so there's kind of There's a hand, there's a hands off. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good point. So it really have to be somebody who has good municipal experience but from another firm or there's no news for us but there's nothing we can do about it for a couple of years at least. Right. Anything else. Time we're going to need to. Our guest is here. Yeah I wanted to move it along to that reason. So Andy can I just recap what we've heard so far. So we're going to take a crack at making some adjustments to the RFP document. I think most of the comments I heard we're around the experience and evaluation criteria but also the experience minimum qualification. And so we're going to look at those a little bit closer and we will bring back a red line version of attracts any changes that we make to the next time for you guys to review. So in the meantime, we'll, we'll confirm the process for approving the contract so next time we can just put that put that away. Okay, so I'm going to just pause to see I'm perfectly comfortable with that is how to conclude this discussion for today is there any comment from other members of the committee raise hands so that I know. That we'll go, we'll do that and. Okay, so I think that thank you. Good conclusion Sean. Do you want to lead us into the next piece because I think that we now have this run a ball with us. Yeah. So, thank you Linda for joining us Linda is, I believe the owner of KMS actuaries right Linda. And Linda and I spent a lot of time talking this year. We had a long time actuary Daniel Sherman who you may all remember who retired last year. And so we went out with Anthony's help we went up to procure a new actuary, and Linda won that procurement, and she has come highly recommended from everyone we've spoken to. She audits some other large systems that she's the auditor for the Hampshire County retirement system. Our auditors were familiar with her and spoke very highly ever. And so we, you know, we've learned a lot and. And yeah, so I'll pass it off to to Linda to walk us through the OPEB valuation that we just conduct is based on June 30 2020, I believe is the, at least the disclosure date. And Linda can give us more details on that. Thank you, Sean, and thank you all for inviting me to your finance committee meeting. Sean, did you want to give me some sharing rights or maybe Athena does for my presentation or do you would you rather just everyone. No, let's get we're going to get Athena can you give sharing rights to Linda because I think because of the number of slides it made more sense for Linda just to navigate from side to side. I should be able to share screen down at the bottom. Yeah. Yeah, I'll see that. Yep. Excellent. Okay. So we are here to talk about the OPEB valuation OPEB meaning other post employment benefits and it's other than what it's other than a pension plan. New Hampshire retirement system is a pension benefit provided to the employees of Amherst mass teachers retirement system is a again pension system that basically pays the benefits to your teachers within the town. But this is the other they, and it was a standard put forward by the GASB to recognize the promises made for the liabilities associated with it's pretty much retiree medical dental might fall in there or some other smaller benefits but you know for the most part we're talking about the promise to pay your retirees or or contribute a portion of that benefit, once retired and to be covered under your health insurance program so that's what we're talking about today different than pensions. So we're going to just kind of go over what is OPEB what do we mean by that what are the accounting standards that are basically, you know, subject to these OPEB standards. We're going to talk about the valuation what we kind of do to do that, and then we're going to talk about what everybody usually likes to talk about is okay are these numbers for real. Is there any way to control these numbers every time we get a report we feel like the numbers get bigger and bigger and bigger so we'll talk a little bit about some of those things. Okay, so just as an introduction. My name is Linda Bourneville Sean is right. I am the owner founder of KMS actuaries. We're a small firm located in southern New Hampshire. We have three full time employees and as of yesterday one part time employee it is my husband who does all of our business kind of stuff and he just went out and retired on me so he's a part time employee but we have one or the credentialed part time employee and all that means is that we have spent a better part of our young adult lives taken exams to earn credentials to do actual work. So these letters next to my name but pretty much are described underneath. The most important credential we have though is the MAAA that means I'm a member of the American Academy of actuaries. As a member of it we are responsible for a code of conduct as well as actuarial standards of practice. And what that does is it gives the public some comfort in the work that we do. We follow these cookbooks that are kind of presented and prepared by the membership. We are a self regulating organization or self we're not like the CPAs who have the AI CPA kind of overlooking their work. We actually are self regulated there are no state agencies or anything like that who overlooks our work so we have these things called the ASOPs where it then gives us kind of a cookbook to to do the work. So over 30 years of experience doing this stuff, most of it in the public sector back in 1988 actually when mass passed its retirement laws on prefunding retirement benefits. I was at William Mercer and the infancy of my career and worked on those retirement systems so very familiar with public public sector, it is a pretty much about 95% of our business at KMS is with the public sector and we do a lot of this work throughout. Okay, so what again, kind of already touched on the other post employment benefits. What we're doing is we are trying to measure that promise that the town made to its retirees, and that promise, right, was is made while you are actively working, but it's sort of a, you know, in writing there is this document that says but upon retirement, you know, we're going to pay for some of your health insurance. Generally, the accounting accounting profession looks at that as deferred compensation. You are kind of deferring some cash in hand at the time when you're 20 years old 3040 50, while you're working to provide for something once retired. Well, you got to somehow measure that but it's something that's going to happen in the future. So, thus, an actuary comes in because that's our expertise is that we build models based on a current membership today to predict some costs that aren't going to happen for sometimes 5060 or 70 years into the future. Some people call it actuarial mumbo jumbo. It is a big model there's a lot of assumptions that go into it. So, and we'll go over the more, you know, the more important of those assumptions and how we do that. So one of the things once we disclose these liabilities you know what are they used for where they're going to go on the balance sheet for one thing in the town's financial statements. And then there's an expense calculation that will go on your P&L. One of the things that's also happening at the same time here is that the town is actually setting aside funds to pre fund this benefit. Similarly the way Hampshire County retirement system sets aside and has done so since 1988 to pre fund some of the benefits. The goal is at some time that that trust fund will be large enough that no more is needed to be raised and appropriated through taxes, but that you could actually draw the benefits that are paid and what is that it's a percentage of the premium paid for your retirees out of that trust fund. Okay, now that was a decision made by the town because nobody including the gas be or the state Commonwealth of Massachusetts requires pre funding OPEB benefits. As you know, Massachusetts law does require pre funding retirement benefits. Alright, so for mass retirement systems like the Hampshire County system or the mass teachers system. There is pre funding going on but that is not really required in the municipalities for OPEB, but many towns and cities have opted to do so for the reasons we're going to go, you know, get into those a little bit more. So that's kind of what some of the benefits of that pre funding is. So just keeping that in mind, the gas be is not telling you to fund that what the gas be is giving us the cookbook for is how to prepare these liabilities that are going to be a long sheet. Okay, so kind of what I just said, the government accounting standards board they're the governmental agency that kind of promulgates the statements that are that are applied here and this is gas be 74 and gas be 75. Under the gas be standards, your auditors which I heard you speak a bit of right before I got on the call, your auditors are going to take that information from our reports. They've, you know, part of their due diligence is making sure the assumptions that we've chosen are reasonable within their area of expertise of knowledge of this stuff. We're going to take these accounting principles and apply the work that we do to land them properly onto your financial statements. Again, I said, a member of the American Academy of actuaries, we have a code of conduct, as well as actual standards of practice and so these kind of three pieces are what we use to build the model. Okay, so there are many assumptions in this model that are used to again predict what are we going to be paying out into the future. And then we're going to try to put a number on that that is meaningful as of June 30 of every fiscal year. This report results are as of June 30 of 2020. And at all, you know it is just the most recent one that we've done we do these reports every year, and they are to be recorded on your June 30 financial statements and we're not there yet we're not at 2021 yet and we can't really begin the work until after the end of the close of the fiscal year. So similar to the auditor's work we do the work once the year is over. But the discount rate is the rate that you're going to hear most people talk about. It is the assumption that is by far the most important assumption that we need to establish. And this page is thick with sort of a methodology that could be intuitive when you think about it. Again, we are trying to predict these payments being made out into next year the year after theory year after that 5060 70 years into the future. How do we discount those rates, or those benefits back to the present. And we now have assets set aside that technically is what we want to earn enough interest right we want to we want some investment return on those assets to pay for some of these benefits. So our first kind of order is that we have to look at what do you have in the bank, what is what are your assets that are set aside. Do you have enough assets set aside at this point to pay for one year of benefit payments. If we think you do and it's easy to give us a statement that has your OPEP trust balance and we discount that first year benefit payments we think we're going to have to pay using that long term return. We don't look at that in the second year we asked the same question do you have enough assets in the bank, your two years from now. Is there enough to pay for we keep looking at that. And what the gas we says is you may keep using your long term rate of return until you run out of assets. And that's kind of Amherst because you have enough assets set aside, and you have a funding policy that kind of keeps replenishing the assets as they're paid out. We can predict that you will at this point in time, not run out of money. And that's a good thing. That means we get to use your long term rate of return as the discount rate for every single year into the future. We look at that long term rate of return well we look at your OPEP trust. We look to see how it's invested. Is it mostly equities, is it fixed income assets, what is it invested in. We look at the capital markets and we try to assign a long term rate of return for this portfolio that the town has adopted. We're at a 7.3% invest long term investment return rate, don't hold on to that and bring that to the bank and ask for 7.3 returns on your money. This is a very long term outlook. This is over 30 years because you know, think about that we've got liabilities in here who aren't that aren't going to be paid for many, many years. Okay, the other thing too. This is as of June 30 of 2020 when we are looking at this probably in the fall. The pandemic was what you know we are well into that the markets were starting to react to the pandemic. And so a lot of those especially the fixed income securities, those outlooks have outlooks have pretty much significantly declined over the year. It's probably going to happen when we look at this again in 2021 that 7.3 is likely going to be a little bit lower. So we look at that every single year we look at the OPEP trust we look at the investment policy statement, and we decide what we think is the best, the best discount rate to use in discount rate liability terminology, the lower the discount rate, the higher the liabilities are. Okay, because that means my assets. I'm not expecting as much return. Right. That means I need more in the bank to fund the same benefit so as that discount rate drops your liabilities are going to go up. There's also a municipal bond rate that we need to use in analyzing this discount rate, because you quote won't run out of money. You are not subject to those municipal bond rates but you can kind of see I have that on slide six. The difference in just one year made it was over 130 basis points change between the two years good for municipal financing if you needed to go out for a bond and borrow money, not so good when you need to report a liability. All right, so that's kind of the story of the discount rate and how we develop that way. So we know the purpose of the valuation we're going to periodically review the liabilities and the assets and periodically means every June 30 because that's your fiscal year and we're going to make sure that all those assumptions and methods that we use every time are appropriate. They are consistent from year to year. They're reasonable, you know, you, you know, we would not be allowed to use a long term rate of return like eight, eight and a half, 9%. Even if your portfolio, you know, returned all of those returns historically, we don't look back, we always try to look forward on what our expectations are going forward. So once we can, you know, we have all this, these liabilities and assets kind of measured, we are able to develop all the accounting disclosures that you'll need under the standards. We can calculate what's called an actuarially determined contribution, what do you think you should be funding every year to get to fully funding this liability. And then what about what about our benefits what what about if we change our cost sharing arrangement with retirees and we go from 20% to 25 or 30% or what if we remove the life insurance component of this benefit so we can do some benefit option calculations to see what the impact is. So what did we find out in 2020 we look at your assets, and the assets are not quite hitting our expectation but that's okay, because we relook every year, and we kind of reset the, you know, we reset things, this is still a small trust compared to the companies that are that are valued but so we're a little under 2% as of June 30 2020 and that's been kind of typical that June 30 marks have been a little bit lower than say December 31 December 31 tends to be a little more volatile. And you would see that if you saw the returns like for the Hampshire County retirement system. And the kind of things we include in our model. If you know the Cadillac tax it was part of the Affordable Care Act that said if you have a Cadillac tax you are going to pay a 40% excise tax every year on some, you know, the excess of the value of that plan over some years. Well, in December of 2019 that was repealed so we pull it out. And what we say is, if we think the retirees going to pay 25% of the premium for your plans, they're probably going to have been charged the 25% of this Cadillac tax. And it actually really came into being because it kept being deferred on when it would become effective. I believe it started in 2018. It got deferred to 2019 and then it got deferred to 2022. We value it because remember, we're putting forward a model for future expectations. So we had some expectation that in 2022 attacks would kick in. It's gone now. We compare what did we have in 2019 compared to what we had in 2020 and what's going to be some things that create gains or losses. Well, your health insurance premiums change every year so we're going to be looking at that. You're going to have different people. You know, perhaps some older retirees are living longer than we expected. They might be staying in. Maybe you hired five more people than you had in the valuation before. So there's all kinds of experience gains that go on or losses. We have about a $3.6 million gain in this particular valuation. For OPEB valuations, those are very hard to kind of predict because we're not quite sure how your health insurance premiums were going to fare in the future. We have an assumption for that. But I can tell you that we never going to hit that assumption. We're trying to kind of get it on average. Okay. But there may be some gains and losses that are going to be that will emerge. And assumption changes. That's again looking at our model. What's what what makes sense. I mentioned that we did have a reduction in that long term rate of return. Because the market outlook head is kind of dropping so we had an assumption change that brought us down from the seven and a half to seven point three. So just a little screen on your membership. You can see and again, don't don't think the town of Amherst hired, you know, 10 more people. This could just be a point in time in which the data was collected. Right. So maybe there were some teachers who retired and left on June 30th who weren't quite, you know, quite replaced at that point. You never see this thing, even if you have sort of a no gain no loss total employees. You're going to see like a little bit of fluctuation there. And then of course your retired employees and survivors retired employees can cover their spouses so there'd be some of those in here. And then the survivors would be the, the retiree has since passed and the survivor would be their spouse who is covered under the plan. Who's generally included in this valuation. It's usually the same people who are covered under your retirement systems the Hampshire County retirement system as well as mass teachers. So it's more like, you know, definitely the full timers there may be some hour requirement for you to actually be eligible for the OPEB program it's but it's generally not you know the seasonal kid you hire to take care of your landscaping at the town hall in the summer. It's generally not those people. Linda, can I just add one quick thing here. Yeah. And just correct me if I'm wrong so just for those watching this number includes town employees and Amherst public school employees which is the elementary school system. It doesn't include the region or Pellum who again we kind of go together as a group for health insurance purposes but for this valuation purpose, they get their own OPEB valuation so they're not part of this number. The elementary schools are because they're under the town umbrella. That's exactly right. There are some towns that have full regional school districts that have no teachers. There's others that are the opposite that have all the towns from K through 12. But this group is split. And also as sort of a group project we do the town of Pellum and the school district so we kind of know who's in where and who needs to be put in what what report and what category. So good point Sean that there were some teachers who are not included. Okay, so our model has sort of three components we just talked about the census data. That's part one. And Holly provide us with, you know, file with every employee and every retiree and their health insurance information. Do we want to stop for questions. I'm totally cool with that. Other questions. I see a hand up. Mine is just on two things you're about to say on how many pre Medicare people do we have and how many do we have our non Medicare where our system is paying for all of them. Just a question on of that 504 I want to know how much on this system is having to cover. Okay, I will have to go back to the report hold on. I have your report open as well. If it's in the main report I can find it so section seven, seven of the report will list how many retirees and spouses are in each of the plans, and it's like subcategorize as non Medicare and Medicare. Okay, I'll find it out. Yeah, no, you point you brought up a great point to talk about the health plans. Once somebody is 65. Generally, they are eligible to join Medicare right. And these are retirees by the way, while you're active this rule doesn't really apply. In the old days, they left it up to the local towns and cities to force those 65 Medicare eligible retirees off of their HMO type plans and onto Medicare supplemental plans. A few years ago with health reform, the Commonwealth put that in statute that now like they're the bad guys, the state is now like requires the locals to really kind of keep track of this and find out who are your employees who are becoming Medicare eligible and making sure they do move over on to the Medicare supplemental plans. Those are extremely less expensive than keeping them on an HMO. What's going to happen if you keep older retirees on an HMO those people not only are you paying a lot more out of pocket for them when they really don't need to be, but they're also part of your experience rated group of all of your active employees. They're creating higher premiums for everybody if you keep 70 and 80 year old folks onto your on your pre Medicare plans. So, it's always a good thing to require Medicare eligible retirees to elect a Medicare eligible. And I have that in the second bullet there. These are the health plans of all groups the pre Medicare plans are those retirees who are under 65 generally, and are on the active plan so the plans that your active employees are actually covered under your these retirees are part of that group as well. Then once again, you become eligible for Medicare. And then you would go and elect a supplemental plan. That provides a variation depending on the plan you select of the reimburse or the part. The portion of the premium that your tire is contribute. So it's somewhere in 20 to 25% range that falls in line with about the average in Massachusetts on what the what we call the employer subsidy it's somewhere between 70 and 73% I believe, of what the employers are contributing. The law actually requires no more than 50% you can charge your retirees so you are a little lower than in other words you have some cushion they are to possibly increase your retiree contribution rate, but you are not up to the maximum at this point. Part B premium and that's the Medicare Part B is actually reimbursed by the town as well. That's again only kicks in once a person turned 65 is retired and is on Medicare. And then these are like, you know, it truly is the proverbial drop in the bucket when you start looking at life insurance compared to health insurance. The premiums are quite insignificant, but it is an OPEV benefit. It is contributing toward a life insurance policy for your retirees. So these are the plan provisions kind of part of the cookbook right we've got our data, we've got our plan provisions, and then we have our assumptions that are put into the model to develop these liabilities. I already beat the long term investment return right return concept to death so we're going to skip over that and the discount rate same terminology, the long term rate return the bond rate, we look at those two together to come up with the discount rate and that's what you'll see throughout the report. The next most important assumption is the healthcare cost trend rates. And that's what I was getting at earlier in that we have some premiums that we know about today. What the town is paying for the active employees, the pre pre Medicare retirees as well as your Medicare retirees, but next year, what is what is that going to be well you probably haven't even gotten your new enrollments yet to get your new rate so we have to put in an assumption for that. So what our assumption currently is 7% increase for the first year, it drops I believe to 6.55 in the next year. It kind of keeps grading down to an ultimate rate of 4%. It goes for a long time this grading out to 2075. Society of actuaries actually has built a trend model that we use, we put in input such as inflation. We look at your plans to see if they kind of fall within, you know, typical, typical plans in Massachusetts, and they do. And that's how we come up with this healthcare trend rate. Well, what's going to happen in two years when we do the next valuation, you know, will your rates have gone up 7% in the first year and 6.55. You can pretty much with confidence tell you no, you know, but that's our model, and that's what we're going to have to kind of reconcile when we go do the next valuation, and that is what are the premiums that you're now charging two years later, and how do those compare to the health rate. And that's an experience gain or loss if they went up more than we thought that's a loss. Right. And if they went down, you know, if they went up less than we thought, you'd have an experience game in that situation. So the other, you know, more, I want to say, important assumptions under the health side is a participation rate. We don't think that every retiree who leaves and hers or every employee who leaves and hers at retirement is going to elect coverage. Why is that well, maybe they have a spouse still working. They have a spouse who works at a place that offers better benefits at retirement. So there is some selection here on whether or not people are going to elect so we do say that only 75% will actually elect coverage upon retirement. You could also create a gain or loss because if at the end of the day 100 people retired and you've got 80 people who elected coverage well guess what there's a there's an experience loss again, because more elected it than not. By the way, you do not have 100 people retiring in a year that was just an example to, you know, make the math easy. You know, I did mention that you can cover us a retiree can cover a spouse as well so we need to also figure out well you know not everyone's married. Not every spouse wants to elect they might work and get benefits somewhere else. So we think that only you know at this point 60% of somebody who actually elects coverage will elect a covered spouse as well. And then payroll growth. That is really more for how we bring numbers forward in future years. And we assume payroll growth this benefit has nothing to do with payroll but the gas fee wants us to use a method that kind of assigns payroll. So that's an important assumption in some of the modeling that we do, especially to create the discount rate. We've got three pieces we've got data we've got plan provisions and we have assumptions economic. We also have some demographic assumptions for OPEB for us it's easy for us to select these assumptions because we look to the retirement systems that your employees are covered under and being the actuaries for Hampshire County we don't even have to ask anybody what those assumptions are because we pick them. What are those other assumptions well when are people going to retire. Not everyone leaves at 65 you know some public safety employees are able to leave at 55 with full benefits under under Hampshire County. So we have a whole lot of different rates for retirement becoming disabled terminating dying before you even retired, you know, eligible to retire by all three types of employees general are your, you know, like Sean is a general employee sits at a desk mostly public safety will be your police and fire possibly some EMTs and other maybe like like department types. And then of course your teachers. Mortality is another and very important assumption it really comes down to how long do we think people are going to live. So in an annuity type benefits such as this you know you're paying a piece of something a piece of their premium every single year for as long as they live. As long as they live long, then these liabilities going to be bigger. So our assumptions are trying to match reality to some point so we, we continually look at that mortality assumption and continually improve it. Although currently the jury is out on whether there is going to be some, you know, peak of this mortality improvement and will the next generation actually maybe live as long as we are. Pardon me. So as I mentioned before statement disclosures, the net OPEB liability and why is it net we subtract the assets you've set aside from these liabilities, those are going to be on your balance sheet, the town's balance sheet, effective June 30 2020 and after after the financial statements will have a section in the notes with a nice since 2017 building of this OPEB liability for anybody who you know you can look at it our reports also show the full since the beginning of these standards we're going to show kind of like the progression of how these things are changing. The OPEB expenses really how does that OPEB liability change year over year with a few exceptions, we get to defer some of the items in that change. So we're all detailed in section four of our reports on our report on how that expenses computed. So, sorry I forgot to add a very important note in this slide and that is all numbers are in millions here. It's not $75 it is 75 million. This is your total OPEB liability it's taking that model and developing these liabilities under all those assumptions your data and your plan. You had this is as of June 30 2020 7.3 million dollars in the OPEB trust. Not going to put Sean on the spot but do you know where that is at this point, maybe a little higher. It is a little higher we have another. We would have made another contribution this year I'm not sure if we've made it yet. And I believe the returns have been doing pretty well, but I don't have an exact number I can get that. Yeah, so that's like every day right. I always say you're unfunded or your funded ratio or your net OPEB liability. That's a very changing thing but this is a snapshot on June 30 of 2020. So, on that day that was 7.3 million as Sean said every year the town is making more contributions. There's investment gains and losses hoping the gains are more than losses, and that should be building as we go. You can see just in the one year period it increased over 20% here that if I do sharing that position by the way is the auditors words or or nomenclature for the OPEB trust assets. Kathy. I don't I don't mean to overstep the chairs. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, I'm on the expected benefit payments. It's a 32% increase and I went back and looked at the number of people you expect to be in which wasn't a 30%. So is that what where does the 32% come from. Okay, so expected benefit payment is going to be in our model, what do we expect the following years, payments to be what are they what do we think they are and that's with, we've got a premium at the Val dig, we're going to increase the premium. We've got, perhaps maybe some new retirees that we didn't consider. Why did it increase so much. I think this was because we think the part B reimbursement was not valued. We didn't do the June 30 19 valuation so we kind of had to go from a report only that we knew about right and kind of go forward and so our liabilities went up. Pretty significantly as well. I think it might have been the part B was probably a big piece that and that was like $10 million I think. Yeah, there was, sorry, just real quick. Yeah, there was one piece that the previous actuary did not include in our OPEB liability, and it was the Medicare Part B piece and I don't know enough about the actuary practice to know, you know, if it was sort of discretionary whether or it was included but when Linda reviewed everything she felt pretty strongly that that should be included in our OPEB liability so that was a hopefully a one time sort of adjustment transitioning between two different actuaries. But it was a one time sort of big increase in our liability. It was a phase of 2019 but now it's in 2020 so that right so part of that 26.6% increase that you see, there's sort of a, you know, two or three components that make up that increase but one of the big pieces was the inclusion of the Medicare Part B into the into the mix that makes up our total liability. What share of part B do we pay as a town. I don't need an answer right now. We get to that. Section five, section five. Thank you. Thank you. I'm cross looking at you guys aren't easy. I'll tell you, it was like a kind of complicated. No, no, I just, that's one of the up to a certain number, but then you compare it to some other thing and I think that we're like survivors. It may be something actually even different. But section five does explain our plan provision and it would be in there. And the one other thing I just wanted to add as well. Enterprise funds are all part of this as well. So sewer transportation water and solid waste. They're part of the total liability number but they're also making contributions each year or at least the ones that can afford to make contributions are making contributions each year. So it's not just the OPEB that's in the general fund in terms of the contribution and there's also contributions in water and sewer and I think a little bit in transportation. And now that I'm looking at your OPEB expense how it went up by $10 million. So a, we kind of looked at this as a benefit change we didn't really know where to put it. The GASB doesn't give us a lot of choices. It's either an experience gain or loss, a benefit change, or an assumption change. Benefit changes under GASB 75 are immediately recognizable. In other words, you can't defer any of it. So that's like it was, I remember it was $10 million. So there's the difference between the expense in one year is that we had to put it somewhere for that change. But again, that $14.9 million will probably come down more to like the 5 million in future years. It's a, it was a one time fix. It is a benefit payable to a retiree as part of his, you know, medical package if you will. So it is technically open. So this is this all summarized in our reports and as Kathy was asking the questions like, you know, all of the, I want to say our inputs are disclosed at the report section five is the plan or the plan provisions section six are the assumptions. And seven is the census data. So that's like kind of the three pieces of the model and then all the results are in front of that. So you got yours five, six and seven. Sean mentioned the enterprise funds. We actually also provide breakouts of the results in section nine of our report for each of those like the water and sewer and those groups. And this is kind of what I was getting at that there's certain things we recognize an expense and, you know, expenses going to or your liabilities are going to kind of go up for, you know, common reasons one every year somebody, somebody works one minute they're earning a new benefit. That's what the service cost is. It's the value of the benefit that your active employees earned in the current year. So I was going to add that interest right we know that in our mortgage payments, there's always interest applied on the balance from the year before that makes your liability go up. But then if you pay your payment, your liability should come down. So there'll always be a service cost and an interest cost in your kind of moving your total open liability from beginning to end of the year. I just pointed out in the these checkboxes the difference between expected and actual experience those gains and losses we get to defer some of those because the gas we say we don't want your expense to kind of be wildly variable. So you can defer over a period of time, some of that gain and loss, the benefit terms though what they say is benefit terms are subject to or under the control of the plan sponsor. They don't give you a break there. They say if you're going to change benefits, you're going to have to immediately recognize those and that's in either direction by the way we have to add that part B reimbursement but if say you took it away, it would be a minus in your expense year and assumptions and then earnings on your OPEB assets also get to be deferred again under the theory that we don't want much we're trying to nail this down in a model and if you start looking at market values and how fluctuating they can be. So you're going to have to defer some of those gains and losses. And if you have but you do not pay out administrative expenses out of the trust, you would immediately recognize those as well. So it's just sort of a little schematic on how we look at this expense and change in our liability. Okay, so some of the things people always ask me about is oh my gosh you know thing calm is asking why is this number so big what do we do what do we do. The three pieces that I talk about the plan, the data right your census. Well, you know if you hire the people that you need to run the town I just can't imagine that you're going to hire the people and say we don't want those people because we have these benefits we have to pay for, you know so there's that fine line. So you've got your census data. You've got your program, the plan that you're offering. And then you have our assumptions so assumptions I can change liabilities easily right I could change that 7.3 back to 75 and down go your liabilities or whatever but again we're bound by the ASOPs or those have to be reasonable. So what has happened over the past few years well back in 2012 pension reform came along and you're saying well what how can pension reform change OPEB liabilities well. What it did is it said for anyone hired after April 1 of 2012 in order to retire under a full mass retirement benefit, meaning no reductions, you now need to wait to your 60 instead of 55 for certain things so those are for your public safety for general employees it delayed from 65 to 67 well in pensions that doesn't really mean a big deal because all you're really doing, you're going to be reducing benefits if you retire early. Think about OPEB though OPEB has no reductions for early retirement a premium is a premium, regardless of your age so if you retire at 55. Right, and now I'm going to pay for a portion of that HMO for 10 years. Right, well if it's just 10 years and it's going to go up because premiums do generally go up, but what if I defer and don't allow that 55 year old to really retire until 60. Now I'm down to five years of that more expensive HMO type program, but just because I retired at 55 doesn't mean I got a lower benefit so OPEB is very expensive when you allow people to retire early. So what the pension reform did is it pushed a lot of people into a different category of retirement. And because we use the Hampshire County retirement assumptions, it actually reduces OPEB liabilities because we're thinking retirement is really what's going to, you know, somebody's retirement benefit I think is what goes through their mind on when they're going to retire. When am I going to retire when I retire when I get my full 80% of salary. I need 32 years in order to do that or I want to, you know, wait till I'm 65 because I'm going to get a better benefit or 67 so it does push things off. Believe it or not from 2012. All the hires post 2012 April 2012, but half of your employees are already in that category. So, so the older folks they're hanging on they're going to stay there because I got a better pension benefit right and they're going to retire under the old pension rules. So pension reform helps OPEB. Prefunding to an OPEB trust kind of already talked about that because we get to use a lower discount rate so that's something that that impacts the assumption we use to value to value the benefits. I mean, and that's, you know, that's one of the pieces currently but later on, you know what is the purpose of the trust. Well you want to be able to pay out these benefits that 20 to 25% of the premium out of that trust, because you want your trust to work for you, you want investment return to accumulate in the trust and use that rather than raising an appropriating taxes. Okay, so you're trying to use the trust, just like retirement uses the trust with the investments that it earns investment return that it earns to pay benefits in very mature pension systems about 60% of the benefits are paid with investment return. All right, so that's the bowl. Right, it's kind of like what you want to do. Linda I think that those questions from Dorothy Pam. Hi Dorothy. Hi. So, I'm still thinking New York City in lots of ways police and fire have early retirement in Amherst, our police and fire on this same schedule. So police and fire so in Massachusetts, they called the multiplier, you get a multiplier times your years of service and the maximum multiplier is 2.5%. And a general employee gets a general employee hired before April 2012 gets that 2.5% multiplier at age 65 public safety gets that 2.5% multiplier at 55. So, all things being equal if you have a group that called group one and group four, if you have a group one employee they earn the exact same amount of money, they earned. They retired group one at 65 group to 55 with the same number of years, they've had the same benefit but the 59 year old is going to get paid over a longer period of time. So that liability for him is much higher. Okay, so group for employees on both OPEB and pensions are much more expensive than group one employees. Public works there, because I mean, a lot of manual labor I mean I mean the big distinction sometimes is people who do top jobs which are physically challenging, as opposed to desk work. So does pretty sure the public safety is is pretty much restricted to your police and fire hazardous. I know there's some election by local boards to adopt EMT coverage as group for electric light departments those guys who climb the polls guys and gals I should say who climbed the polls could be hazardous. I believe those, and I'm not sure if that's a local option or if that's automatic, but most electric light employees that we see our group for us. I don't know about public works I'm kind of thinking now I'm thinking those folks are still group one. Okay, thank you. You're welcome. So, what do you do to get there. That's another question we get a lot is how do we get that OPEB trust fully funded. These plans are in their infancy I'm going to flip back a bunch of slides where we talked about you know the funding, we're like a 10% funded. All right, not like pensions right now that are mostly like 60 and above. Most I have to say, but you know the foot the funding of OPEB is kind of in its infancy in many places all over the country. 10% is probably you know on the high end in Massachusetts believe it or not. So, what some and many towns are doing is they're looking at ways to you know systematically fund for this benefit so the town has adopted a funding policy and Sean and I are kind of talking about that and still talking about it to see. We could probably do some modeling of what where you are and how you're going to get there. There's a whole lot of different ways to skin this cat right many towns don't really fund what's called an actuarially determined contribution like retirement systems do. Many say here's my dollar amount that I can afford. Here's a percentage of my budget, my budget goes up 3% a year. I'm going to fund an additional 3% a year. So there's not a whole lot of, you know, formality to many of these funding policies at this point. Unlike pensions that it's in statute, they don't need a funding policy at Hampshire County it's in the statute you must fund this particular dollar, you know this particular amount developed this particular way. So, as I mentioned, many possibilities for prefunding. And one of the things that's become kind of popular to look at is and I keep kind of going back to the retirement system because it's a big part of town's budgets right, and there'll be a day I promise when the retirement systems are fully funded. It's not in our lifetime because I know what's going to happen what's probably going to happen is legislatures going to say up yet another 2008 close to 2040, we need to extend the schedule. But right now, 2033 is the end date for Hampshire County retirement system. And I don't want to say that your contribution turns to zero, because as I mentioned, there's always a service or normal cost to be funding your new people. Right, new people have no, you know, they don't have a liability, but we're trying to pay off these unfunded liabilities, but every year you're going to get new benefits earned always have to pay that. And you got to turn on the lights at Hampshire County so you got to pay him some money for administrative expenses, but your unfunded liability will be fully funded, according to the most recent valuation by 2033. That's going to free up a lot of money. Right. So what we're doing with some of our clients we're modeling this kind of process where early years and 100,000 here couple hundred thousand but man in 2033 there's going to be this big infusion, not necessarily of the entire unfunded liability, but maybe some percentage of that payment that is being earmarked for pensions. So what's going to look funny in your budgets is that you're going to see this, you know, between 2033 and 2034 this big drop. So some say well let's put that big drop into open. You didn't hear from me but I know the CARES Act funding dollars can be cannot be used for pension bailouts what they're calling it, but I hear some chatter about okay but you didn't hear that from me so you know you can take that, whatever. There's a lot of different possibilities for prefunding, and there's nothing, you know that stops the town from say adopting a policy and then two years later saying that this is not really working for us or we've had some change or we had a windfall. We changed our health insurance for all of our active employees I see that a lot. And we, you know we saved X many dollars in the next fiscal year so let's put it aside for OCAD. So there are a lot of different things you can actually do to prefund those. And that's all I have. Bob Higner, see your hands up. Yeah, I thank you that was a very, very helpful presentation. I do want to come back to Medicare and what aspects of Medicare, the town is contributing to. I understand Part B, the premium, you know that 14850 minimum premium, but there's a lot of other parts of Medicare as you know. There is Part D, which is the prescription plan. There's, for those people who are above certain income levels, Irma Part D kicks in, you know if they had a spouse or something. And then there's Medicare Advantage plans which are basically, you know, Part C I guess it is, but they're sort of a substitute for Part B and Part D, and other things. So, is it only Part B, the medical insurance payments that the town is contributing to? Okay, so once, once retiree becomes turned 65 and is eligible for Medicare, he'll go sign up for Part A, which is free. Okay, use that in your quotes. It's, you know, the retiree pays nothing for that. They do pay their Part B premium. Right. And then they choose a Medicare supplemental plan that's actually offered by the town. Okay. So the town is acquiring, I don't know, it's not the right word, I'm lost for the word I want to get. They're basically coming up with that plan that is offered to your 65 plus Medicare eligible retirees. So it's the portion, it's the portion of that premium and part of the Part B. Now that Medicare supplemental plan probably includes prescription drug. I can flip open again section five is going to. It's page 20 Bob in section five so the medics plan is 360 a month, which based on what I know in Massachusetts probably has drugs in it. So that's on top of Part B. Okay, so that's the supplemental. Yeah. Okay. And that covers part that covers prescriptions then. So it's, it's almost 4400 a year for that plan, you know, before not the town town pays 80% of it and the employee pays 20, but the total cost is high enough that it probably has drugs in it. Yeah, if it's, it's, if it's 400 a month, it would have to have drugs. Yeah, because we have medics. And it's much less than that per month without the drugs. Is it unusual for towns in Massachusetts to pay a share of Part B, or is that, does that often happen. It does not often happen that we do have some clients that pay all our portion of that Part B. But that is not okay so what the town did many many years ago is adopted 32 be. Part B to be is what dictates all the health insurance coverage for public employees. Once you adopt certain sections of that part, chapter 32 be right you're kind of bound to it, there is nothing in there for Part B reimbursement. That's sort of an extra. I don't think life insurance is part of, of the part B but sometimes say, you know, it's, it's really an insignificant cost. And, you know, we can offer part of that premium to the town as well, or to town retirees, but part B is kind of unusual, just because it's not really part of, you know, it's not part of 32 be. We've done some work with some clients where they've, you know, grandfathered some of that stuff out, or they, you know, they won't harm the current retirees or retirees who might retire within x many years from the present, but it might be or, or like pension reform, I always say it's like it doesn't impact anyone not yet in the womb. So, if you, if you just kind of you could cut it off at some point for people who aren't even hired yet. So that you're not taking away, you know, a perceived promise to anyone who you've already hired. You kind of get around making that change that doesn't impact, you know, people who are already on their fixed incomes, right, your retirees are the ones who cannot adjust. That's the issue, they can adjust, because they're, they're retired. There isn't a way to, you know, to modify their savings or whatever because they're now on fixed incomes. I want to know for unionized employees who, if it's in collect bargaining agreements, any of these terms and know that's something that would have to be. It is. It is and at least the, the school contracts, I believe. It is. Yeah. And that's what we've heard to in other communities that, you know, that's, that's where it becomes a little difficult when it's part of the contract. Not as much the terms around retiree insurance but some of the benefit terms are in the school contracts because when we switched over to Maya that was something we had to work through. Specifically on the question of coverage of Medicare Part B. Yeah, technically in the union contract like for the teachers. I don't recall but I don't I can't remember. Top of my head. Okay. Anything else in the committee in the way of questions. Andy, can I say one more thing. Yes. So, Linda mentioned that we've been talking about sort of the funding plan for OPEB. And I think our current funding plan for OPEB was developed. Andy, you may remember it may have been developed with support of the finance committee. It's been sometimes since it's been revisited. And so that might be something, maybe a late summer early fall topic we come back to is reviewing our funding plan and seeing if it still makes sense going forward or if we want to make some adjustments and and as Linda said she can model some of the things out for us because one of the other important things is to make sure that we can continue to have a strong discount rate and that we have a strong plan and so we can model out different things and see what that does. So just throwing that out there is potentially a future topic for us to discuss. And the answer is. I think one of the things that was done when Sandy Poole was the finance director and, you know, large part of the discussion that Linda brought forward about the connection to the Hampshire County retirement plan and when that will be fully paid. So this is part of the calculation of a large part of the calculation in that prior discussion of many years ago that I. Yeah, I have a very nice spread, a very nice spreadsheet that he left behind that I can update update so yeah. Sandy left behind I'm sure. I will take no credit. Other questions. Thank you for bringing forward the point that we probably should spend some time after budget process. Coming back to this just reviewing the funding plan. And we can report that to the council as we just generally forward the report. None of us will be able to adequately explain because we don't have Linda's years of expertise and doing that. So other questions that people have from the committee for Linda at this point. I know we have a couple of public attendees. I just want to pause for a moment, because if there are any, we do a public comment in all of our meetings, Linda. So I wanted to make sure that I give an opportunity for members of the public who are here as attendees if they wish they can raise their hands and I will truly note that and so that they can be recognized. And in the meantime, Dorothy your hand is up. Yes. I do we have a deck is that been made available to us. Yes. Okay, great. It's very, very useful. Thank you. Thanks. It's in the packet Dorothy online. Yes. It's in the online packet and I believe that everything that it was in what I sent you earlier because we have received it in advance. So I don't see anything from attendees I don't see any further questions from the committee so. Thank you. Thank you I don't know if we'll see. You're quite welcome. Any questions. You know it's hard to get in touch with me. And a year or. Sean will. Okay, so we will report this one to the council and we will return to the subject after the budget process. To work with Sean to review the funding plan. And to. There is still. Is adequate. In our needs and anything else from the committee on this subject. If not, thank you very much. You're welcome. I'm just trying to figure out how to get out of here. Go ahead. That's okay. Andy question, when are we going to have a break. Do you want to have a cut? So we do a five minute break and then come back. I'm for one. And we need to talk about this. We need to talk about the regional schools if we do. So we do need everybody back because we have to make a recommendation. The council and regional school budget. And I think that's pretty much it for the agenda. The last item. We'll be very brief. So. With that noted. Andy, I just have one question and assume five minutes. I have one question. Andy, did we get any additional information from schools? Cause I'd asked about. Number of people who work there and student population. When we had the council. And I don't think we received anything. Is that correct? Okay. I don't think we received anything. I don't think we received anything. I don't think we received anything. Most Sean knows of something. I did not receive anything. Sean is shaking his head. The answer to be no, no, I'll double check my email, but I don't believe we received anything else on that. Okay. So. Three 47. We will come back. We were just waiting for. Kathy. Okay. So. I'll say everybody's back. Let me just run real quickly. Just confirm that you can hear me and we can hear you. Dorothy. Here. Okay. Great. Present. Bernie. Jane. I'm here. Lynn. And Kathy. Here. Okay, good. So. Kathy. Here raised a question right at the end about information that we'd hope to receive. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. But. My recollection of the last meeting, what I was going to come to process in a little bit, but. We really did two different things in the last meeting because we both reviewed. The proposed budget and assessment. Method for the regional school. And we had a very healthy discussion about some. Of our. Underline. The budget and. The budget. The budget. Kind of what the long-term projections are for. Education funding and the, some of. The questions like. What you were. Referring to, I think, Kathy and. Employment data to get. That at the longer term questions. And for the regional schools. I think that was the. We were going to see if we could contact the other towns and set up some kind of. Multi-town discussion. To. To get. Andy, you're. You're breaking up a little bit. Does anybody else see Andy breaking up a little bit? Andy, you're going in and out a little bit. From a. From a signal standpoint. It's unfortunate, but I'm not sure. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to bits and pieces of it. Did you get, did you get the just to run it by or. Yeah, I think, so I think what I. Unless Lynn wants to. Restate it. Except for the last part about meeting. With the four towns. And I think we agreed that we would try to do that, but not until late summer or early fall. Right. So I guess the question for Kathy was, is the, is the information you requested? Is that something that can be answered as part of that follow-up. Piece or is that something that I should. Get a. Check in with Doug and Mike on. Right away. I think it'd be fine to get it later, Sean. I just. You know, I've, I searched, but can't find if I wanted to look at. I want to go back a couple of decades, but I wanted to look at it. You know, I can find some, but I want to look at student enrollment in middle, middle and high school. And then I wanted to look at employees, people working there by the big categories that were sort of administrative, not in the classroom. And then classroom to the two types that you always put it out and then support staff. So I know what, one of the things Doug said, if I went through the line by line, I could recreate total people working there now, but I'd have to add up the math department, add up this net. You know, I just was thinking, I would just like to see the trend on that. So. It's partly, it's partly the way I think, you know, when our kids were in the school, there were a thousand more kids. You know, in the two systems and I want to look at it. So, so what has happened to the staffing of the school as the enrollment's gone down? So it's not a particular year, but I can't find a continuous series. So that's what I was looking for. So, so sounds like what you're looking for is as far back as possible, sort of a trend of enrollment and staffing and staffing with subgroups. I know in 2011 or 2012 or so, that's when we sort of adopted a formal staffing trends report. So they'll definitely have pretty comparable data and a similar format going back to 2011 or 2010. Prior to that, I don't know. That's when they'd have to sort of recreate some of that to get it to a similar format. So I don't know if 2010, 2011 is sufficiently far back enough. Well, I think that's, you know, I'm not trying to create a lot of work. So even if they said, you know, if you do 2010, could you do 2000? You know, could you back another 10 years? So it wouldn't have to be. Yeah, I think as far back as Excel, as they had Excel is probably how far back we can, we can recreate because we, you know, even before the staffing trends report, we had, we had a personnel cost sheet in Excel that had full-time equivalencies and things like that. So as far back as Excel. And in some of the old finance committee reports to the town meeting, there were some things. I'm not remembering, you know, I have a couple of them. So I know for, I think they did it for elementary, but it's just, yes, it's, it's for me trying to figure out what's been happening over time. And then I've been also looking at how much we pay per student compared to other towns in the area. And so I've been trying to sort of jump over to say, what does Wellesley pay? So just, you know, just, and it's sort of a context for not, not for the formula, how we divide it between the towns, but for the total, the total for the middle and the high school. So. Okay. I'll relay that request to them and, and try to get a timeline for when they could have that ready. Okay. I have two things. And by the way, I switched over my connection. So let me know if it's better. So far. Better. It is. Okay. As I recall a report, and I haven't gone back to look at the slides that he presented, but it seemed to me that Doug had presented a couple of years and was contrasting a few years. And also is doing some comparisons to towns that we've talked about previously. Long Meadow and Northampton in particular. And so some of that data may have been, they may have been working on it anyway. So we should check that. And the other thing to be helpful is when we get to the elementary school discussion, if they can, if that is available for the elementary school presentation, that would be good to not have to defer that discussion. But as far as the four town, it makes sense for us to just see if we can do it with the other communities. And so I was going to start making some phone calls to the people that I know in each of the other towns and see if there's agreement, a joint process, which was kind of what Mike was requesting that initiated from the towns and he promised full participation and support for it, but he didn't want to be the one convening it. So that meeting came up. What we have to do today is we get back to the original bottom line proposal that the school committee passed a budget, which has a bottom line number to it. And an assessment method that went with it. And that is what council needs to vote on. And they're looking to us to make a recommendation on that piece in particular. So, Lynn, if you don't have it, I do have it on my available to put on the screen. And Andy Dorothy has her hand up too. I don't know if you didn't see it. Yeah, I do see that. Okay. You want the, the budget or the. The budget. I think it was a one major pretty much. I have it. Yeah. Dorothy. Just a quick thing in terms of comparing. Staff. I, and Sean would know a lot more than I, but I suspect there have been a lot of changes in regulations and kinds of services. That have to be provided now that did not have to be provided with the budget. So, I think that would be a good idea. I'll, I'll give you a personnel. Then and now the relationship to student population, because I, I just know there's a lot of different programs and regulations. So you'd have to have some of that information besides in addition to the numbers to make, be able to make sense of it. That was really, I guess more for Sean to see. Yeah. No, I agree with, I agree with that that there's a lot of. There's a lot of ways to compare the numbers. Andy, if you have it handy, it's going to be best if you call it up. Okay. Because the other thing that. I think that we had heard in the last. In the last presentation on the superintendent. The point that he's made numerous times, which is one that over the years as enrollment has declined. That there was programs that were eliminated along the way. Some of the language selection, for example, is eliminated. The general call culinary arts. Program and childcare programs were previously provided and eliminated. So it's kind of hard to, you know, I think Dorothy's point is comes in there too, or choices that had to be made as declining enrollment force decisions to be made to trim programs. And the other is, and this one, I have less ability to put a handle on how to deal with even, but that is year to year. There's changes in the number of special education aids and other unique special education costs. And how that fits in because some of those are employees to the extent that we're doing in housework. So. Yeah, if anything you can suggest, not now, this isn't putting it on the spot. Yeah, I will, you know, I do understand that it will be rough, but if you do trends over time and I pull in some from other towns, when we're talking about larger regulations, that's affecting everyone. And I know the charters, the charter advent of charter is pulling money out of a budget in a different kind of way. So I think this is just, we used to produce some of these numbers and getting continuous numbers would be great because I can go to desi. I just thought it would be great. To be regularly producing them. So my suggestion is as follows that. You and I and Sean and the other members of the finance committee want to participate. I don't know if you can let me know, but at least the three of us have a conversation about what it is that you're looking for. And then we can see if we can explore what's possible. Okay. So what I, let me see if I can, it's going to be always hard to do this while you're also being the one, but I'm going to try getting over to the first moment and see if I can get to the right thing that we need to have up on the screen. You did the agenda. I know I did. I'm having a little bit of problem because of this question. And I'm happy to do it too. Which tab. Andy, I can bring it up too. If you have it. Yeah, I just wanted to guide you. You want the one pager that shows the assessment. One pager. I think what we want, because I think that's what we're really, you know, ultimately what. What we're. After the side we are recommending. All right, give me just one second. And I will pull that up. It's on the, I'm just pulling up what's on the website. So I'm just going to share my browser for seconds. Okay. There were three parts to it. I've got it on my iPad, but it was. The dollars. Do you all see it on the screen? Is this what you were looking for? Andy, this some chart here. Yes. That's that big enough. Large enough. Yes. Now. I don't know if I'm wrong, but the recommendation from the school committee is the terracotta. Yeah. Yeah. It's the, it's the red, the reddish color. So the numbers that we would be recommending are. The budget. And the assessment. As shown. And we have the orders we can bring up to, if you want us to bring the orders up. Yeah. That would be helpful to do that. Just to switch over. To the order in a moment, but. Are there any questions about what it is that the committee is recommending. The school committee is recommending. That the school committee is recommending. Vis-a-vis the chart that's currently on the screen. Cause. We're. At this point, still feeling that there are long-term things that we would like to understand, but. We have to recognize that we have to vote on a bottom line budget request and. An assessment method. I think we would need a motion. Ultimately. I don't want it instantly. To recommend that. And these are the numbers that are reflected in the order. Correct. Sean. Yeah, they should be, we can double check them with that. These should be the numbers and from the order. And just. Kathy has her hand up to a fewer. Okay. Okay. It's, it's, it's not so much a question on the numbers we're looking at, which are very clear and the. The Amherst share. The increase of 2.1% was what we gave them in the guidelines. You know, so the school, the regionals come in. Within our guideline. So my question is. The larger context when. You know, when we're looking at the school level. On whether. When the discussion of public safety was happening. On whether there would be any recommendation to put. Some of the money. If we change the way we do policing. Into a school budget to offset something. And Paul said that would come. We'd see that in May. So I'm just. I'm just going to take a moment to get into the discussion. And I'm just going to take a moment and we're just a sheriff. I'm assuming. Those decisions would not or will not affect the regional school budget. And this is the town manager deciding what, what if other. So it's, it, that's my question that we're looking at. They gave us a list, some of which were cuts. That got us down to this number. You know, what if it gets down to a certain level. If it gets down to a certain level. People or staff somewhere. One time savings and other kinds of savings because of a. Reduction in enrollment. So anything else that would happen would have to happen at the town manager level. But I'm not sure it could happen in regional because. The other towns would have to pay a share. So that's my question. Yeah. Can I speak to that a little bit, Andy? Yeah, I think you're exactly right. For the traditional budget process here. Because any increased that Amherst brought forward would then increase the other towns as well. And they all have town meetings that they have to prepare warrants for and things like that. So I think it'd be difficult for that to happen through the traditional process. You know, I think when somebody brought up potentially gifting money at one point. You know, I don't think that's been done before to the region, at least not since I've been here where there was sort of a separate gift from one town. Let's say we couldn't explore it if that was the direction that the town went but I'm not sure how viable that is either. I think that was a suggestion from a public comment not from a counselor. Right. Well and one counselor also raised it but it was, you know, in this larger context. Yep. Okay. Thank you, Dorothy. I guess I must have missed some discussion I never thought that money from the police budget was going to go into education I thought we were asking for social workers. And responses to problems that the police deal with right now, but giving a broader variety of responses. I don't know what you're talking about on that. When your music, however. Thank you, Andy. The town manager's budget has to be made available to us on May 1st or ever May 1st is a Saturday following days of Sunday. So it will be made available to us on May 3rd. Until we see that budget, we will not know what his recommendation is going to be. And as you know, it has to be an up and down. Up down, you know, take this out. You can add things in you can try to rise. So I just want to be very clear. We have never had a conversation as a council that said, take money from the police budget and give it to the schools. There have been comments made by people in public comment, there may have been comments made by a counselor, but we have never had that discussion. So, anything else or if not a minute. Yes, Sean if you'll switch over to the order. The proposed order for the regional school funding. And then I will go back and see if there's public comment. One more time because we're now into a different subject. Do you see the order on the screen, Andy. Yes. I think you've got the perfect orientation of it. So I'm looking to see. I guess there are there were two orders come to think of it so let's stop first. There's actually there's three total number. Oh, there are three. Yeah, that's right. Capital. Yep. And then the, yeah, the number of the number on that matches. But we saw as far as the total budget. Yes. Yep. Yeah, this should be the everybody has that they can double check up but this should be the total budget from the 65% and this should be the, the Amherst share. 16748 783 is what I wrote down. Yeah, I checked. It's an exact match. Not surprisingly. Yes. So, does any, I mean, at this point, the appropriate motion would be to recommend these three orders. And for adoption by the council. Someone wants to make that motion. Andy, I'll go ahead and do it. I recommend. Yeah. Thank you. I would like to recommend to the town council approval of order FY 22 dash 01 and order approving the Amherst column regional school district assessment method. I second it. We have motion that's been made in seconded. Is there any further discussion on the motion. I'm, I'm going to say to the public who are here as attendees, if you raise your hand, I will assume that you're asking to speak as public comment and I'm going to recognize you before we move forward in actual vote on this or the other two proposed orders. So seeing no one raising their hands. I'm assuming that there's no request for public comment on regional school budget. And so I see no hands raised from the committee so I'm going to presume that there's no further discussion. I'm going to proceed to recognize each member of the committee. And of course, the, I am going to recognize resident members of the committee as we go through we are not going to record their votes as boats, but we're going to record whether they want to be indicating their support of the motion on the table and that's so as you call you if you're a member of the council, then indicate your vote, you're a member of the committee who's not a counselor, and indicate whether you support the motion and I am just going to go in order as they appear on my panelists list. So, Dorothy Pam. Yes. And Lynn. Yeah, yes. Bernie Kubiak. I support the motion. Kathy Shane. Yes. Jane Schaeffler. I support the motion. Bob Higner. I support the motion. Okay, and I'm voting yes. So the vote is four to zero. The abstentions one member absent and three resident members of the committee indicating their support. So, I think we can proceed to the next order. Sean you want to put it back one more time on the screen. I scroll down did it scroll with you. Okay. No. At least it didn't mind. Are you not looking at FY 22 dash zero two. Yes. I can see that. This is now the dollar amount rather than the share. Yeah, rather the first was the assessment. Yes, now it's on there. Okay. Okay. Okay. I recognize you. Your hand is up. Yep. I move that we recommend to the town council, the approval of an appropriation and transfer order FY 22. Dash. Oh, to Amherst, how I'm regional school district budget assessment. Your second. I second it. Okay, the motion has been made in second at any further discussion. Okay. We can proceed to vote in the same way. I'll start this time by indicating that I am going to be voting yes. And Kathy. Yes. Dorothy. Yes. Lynn. Yes. Bernie. Or the motion. Support the motion. Jane. I support the motion. So again, the vote is. Four to zero. No abstentions. One member absent and three resident members indicating their support for the motion. So. Sean, I guess we have one more order. In that is capital. Yep. And I scroll down on this one too. So you should see it in a second. Yes. So this is a. This is a reminder it's $500,000 aggregate amount. There are, it's broken into three parts below in the chart to show. How the numbers are derived and what the intended uses are. The. The other thing that I will point out is that the. Assessment method that we previously voted on. Does not apply to capital. That authorization. Capital debt authorization. According to the regional agreement. Is done by a separate formula that is entirely. The EQV in each of the. Four member communities. So. Lynn, your hand is up. Okay. I'm going to move that we recommend to the town council. They approve order. FY 22 dash zero three. Amherst Pellum regional school district capital debt authorization. Second. Second. Okay. Second. Any further discussion. I do. I do see that there are two hands up. So we're stopping for discussion. Kathy. Sorry. I didn't, I'm trying not to slow us down, but as Andy knows, he was on the joint capital planning committee and Sean staffed it. The $15,000 for renewable energy study. We had recommended that. The city council, the town manager take the resident proposal for solar canopies and combine it. Consider that these two as part of a study. So I would just like our report to recognize, to cross reference that Andy, when we make this recommendation, I'm completely for this. This entire piece, but just to signal out that, that there was a discussion of that $15,000 and JCPC also. So I would just like Paul to decide. How to make all of that work. And I'm assuming Sean. I'm assuming Sean that. That Doug and others were aware of the, the two pieces, because it actually came from some high school students. So. Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Yeah, I'm going to talk about the report. When we conclude this. Dorothy, you had your hand up also. I was wondering about the exhaust fans and the unit ventilator. I guess I thought maybe things like that might be covered with cares money. Yeah. So can I weigh in on that Andy real quick? Yes. So that's a good observation. You know, I'll double check with Doug. My guess is those are not eligible because I know those two particular items have been on the region's capital plan for quite some time. And one of the things I know it cares is if it's, if it's something that you've sort of identified as needing a replacement and you're kind of replacing it as it comes up on your capital plan, that they are not. Deeming those projects eligible. So I can again, circle back to Doug and see what he thinks on that one, but that's my guess is that it's, they're not eligible because they've been on the capital plan before COVID happened. Yeah. So I think that would be slightly changed. No, I know, you know, we work with the state a lot. So it's, they're, they're pretty strict on eligibility criteria. So. There's a, the rescue plan funding is. Still being discussed debated what's in there. And so there's always a possibility that. Can. Supplement or or. Be put in place, but for now we know what we have. So, Sean, it's my understanding, but you will know better than me that. If a decision is made for. Any reason not to go forward with a project. That we will have if the council votes in the other town meetings agree. Or that. There's $500,000 authorized, but that doesn't mean that they actually have to spend. Or. 500. If it ends up with something is dropped from the list of later date. Yeah, you broke up a little bit, but yeah, just because this is a, I think what you were saying is because this is approved, that doesn't mean they have to borrow the money. It's just given the authorization to borrow the money. And. Unless the town of Amherst votes no on this, then it would have, it would become approved unless one of the other towns votes no, this is, this is the one that you don't have to have a vote on. You just. Only if you were going to vote it down, you would have to vote on it. But you can also vote affirmative if you want to send that. Positive. Message as well. Sonya has her hand up, Andy. Yeah, I just want to clarify that we're not really authorizing. This is just the capital plan that the region. Pretty much submits to us every year. And for the most part, we've never really voted this or approved this. It was just a letter that they sent us that this is the plan. And unless we had, we had like 60 days to contest that plan. If we didn't want to cover it. But when we switched over to the council government, we started to do this order to approve it, but it's not adding to our authorization for debt. This is the region. So basically what we're saying is the region is telling us they're going to, they have a plan for $500,000. And. They normally borrow for all their capital projects. We're saying that, yes, we will pay ourselves. Of this $500,000. Just want to clarify that. Yeah. No, thank you. Sonya. That is helpful that you pointed that out because. You are correct. In actuality. It is a negative. The way that it's stated in the regional agreement. So that. We would have. The other towns. Don't necessarily say that. So that we would have the other towns don't necessarily have to vote. Yes, they just have to choose not to vote. No. Exactly. So. We have. Decided to go and affirmatively say something. In large part because of just how the timing works out that it gives us the ability to make a decision. But in any event. Okay. So can we proceed to a vote? I'm going to again start by saying that I am voting yes. Yes. Dorothy. Yes. Bob. I support the motion. Bernie. Port the motion. Kathy. Yes. Jane. I support the motion. Okay. So the. Voting is again. Four to zero. Four in favor of zero pose. No abstentions. One member absent and three resident members indicating their support. So that concludes the business portion of this. What I was going to do is try tomorrow to do a. I'm going to send it to the committee. I'm going to send it to the committee. I'm going to send it to the district of this. The school regional school section. Of a report. And then send it to the committee. Just so that comments, but the comments would have to come back solely to me. And that'll. And I'll try and get Kathy's point in, but. I'll send it back to you and I'll just plug it in. So you're welcome to. Head it that way. So it sounds like a reasonable plan to the, to everybody. Just. See if there's agreement. So the last part of the. Discussion today. The last item on the agenda. I think it really gets back to. Calendar, the budget calendar for the year. And. Our plans for the next council meetings. And as you've now gathered from the discussion several times over. We do realize that. When you look at the. Charter. The charter very clearly provides the due dates when they fall on a weekend. Get extended to the next working day so that. The only change to the. Budget calendar that was presented to us dated. 4121. At this point is the. I don't think that there are any other anticipated changes at this point, which means that. On May 3. There's a council meeting which the budget would be. Presented for discussion purposes. And. Referred to the finance committee. And. As well as the capital improvement program. Which I believe is. Also extended to. May 3 for the same reasons. And that that's. Essentially the agenda for our next meeting. Any questions. On that. Yeah, it's not a question, but a request. As per last year. I would appreciate a hard copy of the budget. Document. When it's available. Yeah. Can I respond to that? And one other thing. So yeah, I think we can, we can make sure that happens. And then the one thing I don't think we did. And maybe it can be. Done via email. Is. Committee assignments of which committee members would be responsible for reviewing what sections of the budget. Last year we sort of like divvied it up. I didn't know if we wanted to do that again. I guess the question for. Yeah. The question. To start with is whether that was a useful exercise last year or not. No comments. Focus. Yeah. You know. I thought it was useful. Bob and I did public works and the enterprise funds. And he raised some things that I hadn't thought of. And I thought the composite was good. So. I just thought, and then we did do. Them in advance. So I think doing them in advance is good. So I found it useful. I did. Do questions on every piece myself too, but it was really nice to know someone else was focusing. And then I got assigned library at the last minute, because I'm one of the people that was going to do it. Couldn't do it. So. I found it useful. I read more carefully. The one I knew I had to come up with questions. And I'll add Andy that this, the budget documents a little bit different this year too. So it might be good also for that reason, because we, we made some updates to the budget document. That might help people focus in on. So that because it might, it might be a lot of new material, some areas. I would say that I think I would prefer to have Andy assign me my portion. He would have a good idea. So we have public safety, public work. Community services. So we have public safety, public work. Community services. General government. Library. Elementary schools. Enterprise funds. You may want to. Yeah. Enterprise funds could be their own section. So there are any specific requests. So the. Well, this is Bob. I'm happy to do public works and enterprise funds again. Since I looked at them last year. Unless somebody else wants to do it. Okay. If you don't want to say. Kathy. I was just going to say, I'll do public safety and fire. Public safety and fire together in one section. Taking on an interesting one this year. That also includes dispatch and animal welfare. Take the whole group. Take the whole group. We're taking them all. Take them all. All right. I'm going to say. Kathy. I was just going to say I'll do public safety and fire. Public safety and fire together in one section. I believe. Taking on an interesting one this year. That also includes dispatch and animal welfare. So. Thank you. Good. So. Gen. Dorothy, do you have. Well, probably. I could do it because I have a helper, but would that be a conflict? No. Nope. Not. Like to do library. Elementary schools and so on. I think is actually an important one. Let me jump on that one. When you'll do elementary. Yes. Okay. I'll do community services. Or. Maybe. Jane, you don't have to. Since you've not done it before. What we try and do with this is just to go through it become a little bit more familiar with it. If there's any. Overarching questions we try not to bother the staff too soon. But we certainly want to make sure that somebody's. Being prepared to lead with questions and. To take a little bit of extra time and be prepared to lead with questions. And if there's something that's really problematic to be able to. Kind of a through Sean. You raise the questions initially. If it seems like there's something that's just totally missing and information that you think is essential. To get that to Sean. I would love to take a section just give me whatever you want me to have. I'm happy. I'll take whatever. General governments. Exciting. Get the, get the accounting office. Can. Oh, sign me up. Sounds like a rock star. Okay. It's the best section. I can't. You're looking right. Okay, so. Bernie, you're the one who's, who seems to be left out, but that's. That's the way. Bernie can help me with schools. Okay, whatever. Oh yeah, we need something for conservation and, and planning and inspection. That's right. Planning conservation. So Bernie, is that okay? Planning. That's fine. Thank you. I knew I was missing. So. Pat, because she wasn't here, it gets away, Scott free. No. It's what's later. No, I'm going to. She'll probably end up wanting to work with Kathy on public safety. That's what she did last year. No. Yes. Nothing. Okay. And public works and enterprise funds are two big sections. So if, if you wanted to split that up, you could. It's up to Bob and you guys. You know, actually they're big Sean, but because of the way they internally. The staff, like 50% of a person is in one part. And that was hard to sort out where to think we weren't counting people twice. And it was useful. And can you just, you know, when we, I know we're doing rates, water rates next time, but I'm. I'm going to, I'll send you questions through, through Andy, but. You know, when we do water and sewer, just trying to figure out whether we're nearer to knowing what the cost of Centennial is. And then as it built into the rates or not. Question I have. Okay. Okay. So I think that we're set on that. I don't have anything that was on the anticipated 48 hours in advance. If nobody else does, I think that. We can call it a day. And. Hard work is yet ahead of looking at the budget book. Is it going to be. As, as thick as in prior years. I don't know. It's a, it's a surprise. Inline version. Yeah. It'll be that the big price every year was the color. Yeah, it'll, it'll be thick, but we're also trying to do as much as we can to make it digestible, depending on how much you want to get into it. So there will certainly be. You know, executive summaries and we're trying some new stuff with Brianna and communications that. You know, we're trying to make sure that we have some, some story mapping stuff that might make it easier to go through. So, so I think you'll get the best of both worlds. Hopefully. Lots of information, but also if you don't want that much information, just enough to get you by. I thought it was going to be a graphic novel. Almost down for a paper copy too. Okay. So it's at this point. We wanted to be able to win a GFOA award. Oh yeah. Hopefully it's closer. It began to feel a moment ago, like this. This is your task. This is your task. And then we're all going to have to go out in the field and pull the papers and they would, the tension would be building up as we do a review and then come back in and bring it in. Kind of that feeling when it's looking at me skeptically. It's not a paper copy. I think it's, I think that means it's time to adjourn. So the objection I'm going to declare us. Adjourned at 439pm. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all.