 All right, go ahead. Okay, so I'd like to call the finance committee meeting of March 7, 2023 to order at 3 p.m. And thank everybody who's able to be president, which I think is most of the committee, except for Bob who had let us know in advance that he's not gonna be able to attend. So I need to make the usual announcement that pursuant to chapter 20 of the Act of 2021 is amended. This meeting will be conducted via remote means. Members of the public who want to access the meeting, they do so via Zoom or by telephone. No member, no person in attendance, excuse me, no in-person attendance if members of the public be permitted, but every effort will be made to ensure that the public can adequately access the proceedings in real time via technological means. Of course, this is a Zoom meeting, so there is no possibility of in-person attendance. But in any event, I want to also remind everybody that the meeting is being recorded, so that I should be aware of it. And with that, I will check to see that people can hear me and be heard. We'll start with Anna. Hi, everybody. Lynn. Present. Bob is absent. Matt. Present. Bernie. Present. Kathy. I'm here. Indonesia. Here. Okay, well, so thank you. So let me just say on the agenda, we're gonna spend a few minutes at the beginning to talk about just do a brief introduction to an item that we have on the agenda again for next meeting. And that is the compensation request that was requested at the last February meeting of the council by, it was a joint request by Michelle Miller and Alicia and Chris Alicia's member of our committee. So she's gonna speak to it briefly. I don't wanna spend much time on it, but I do think it's important to get the introduction and I wanted to do it at the beginning at Alicia's request. And then I'll quickly see if there's any public to make public comment. And so we can get on to other things. The purpose is the, so Alicia has the opportunity to introduce the topic to the committee. And then secondly, I have some thoughts about issues that I think we need to ask Sean if he can help us or find somebody to help us investigate and see if other people have similar requests. So with that, I wanna turn it over to Alicia to make the introduction of what she and Michelle had presented to the council and that's been referred to our committee. Alicia? Yes, thank you, Andy. So I don't have like a big speech or presentation written up for you all. I just wanted to present this, it was referred from the council and really just to explain a little bit the intent with this motion. We were looking to figure out barriers to participation in public government and try to address those barriers in order to hopefully achieve more diverse, more inclusive council and to be able to sustain that moving forward. So I'm really just hoping for feedback or input as to how, well, if we want to move this forward and if we can move this forward. Okay, well, thank you. I think I'm gonna try and do something and see if I can make it work which involves sharing the screen for a moment and then. Andy, I can do that. Do you have the presentation that was made and at the council, it's the enclosure in today's packet. I have that. Share point. And for those people who are not aware of it, there seemed there was a little bit of a technical glitch as we went along. So it got added the share point in fact, not to the web but packet, but Athena's adding it. She just added it now. And so basically the request as you can see has three parts to it. And one is councilor salary. And second is the family care reimbursement and the third is health insurance benefits. And the reason that this is there is a time clock on this but it's not an urgent time clock in some ways. The charter provides that it sets the initial time compensation for counselors for the beginning and then provides that any council can vote by majority vote to change the compensation for the next council. But it has to act within the first 18 months of its term. And since our term began at the beginning of January, then it's really the beginning of July is 18 months. But it was important to the two sponsors that we be conscious of that time clock. And that's why it was referred to the committee. And that chart that Lynn is coming to was also a very interesting piece for us in consideration because you can see comparisons that they obtained for other communities through research that was done by the co-sponsors prior to the presentation. And I think that the other thing that I just will note sort of as background since I'm trying to cover this quickly is that the charter also says that in addition, it has to be subject to appropriation and the appropriation either has to be in the original budget as we adopted or it has to be in a subsequent budget if we did a supplemental budget. But one way or another, if it was done, it would have to be subject to appropriation. So I'm gonna tell you what my principal questions are and then see if anybody else has any, we don't have to identify them now. You can send any requests to add to the list after the meeting by an email which should just go, it shouldn't go at all, but it should just go to me and to Sean. And the questions that I had was about health insurance is to whether our health insurance plan that we provide for our employees will permit it. And I think that there's a whole series of questions that come there because it also has to do with our personnel policies and the policies of the people in the town, the personnel department who administer the health insurance and second of all the terms of the policy as far as for part-time employees who gets covered and what are the requirements for copay for proportion. And I think that if it was gonna be treated on the same basis of other employees and any other factors that might be considered in the second was in the end to try and do at least a rough estimate of the cost of the request. So those were my thoughts on questions. If anybody has any that they wanna raise during open meeting, I see a couple of hands up. So we'll go quickly through that. But as I say, I wanna limit this because I'm really trying to move us along to hearing from the auditor and our actuary who worked on the land on the OPEP plan. Kathy, thank you guys. Andy, I just wanna point out, Lynn I think had her hand up first but she has to do it with a hand. Lynn. Thank you. So in addition to the cost of each of these, all three of them, salary, childcare, healthcare, it's really feasibility. And in that case, I mean, can we do it? And what is it going to, what's the trade off? What can't we do if we do this? The precedent of any other groups have done this. And does this impact the school committee as well since they were part of the charter? And how many other, how many contracts does the town presently have under negotiation that are not resolved and are past the deadline of resolution? Great, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, okay. So I, Lynn covered what I would call the big picture and I think we need all of those. So I have a, only a kind of a small one to add and I'll save comments and all of this for, I think that's what you're trying to do, Andy, when we get the information back. Great. And can we do one of two things? Could any of the counselors who wanted to take part of their, I've always thought of it as a stipend, not pay, part of their stipend and put it into a pool that others could draw in for childcare. Is that technically possible? That's a question. If yes or no, can we do a rotating pool that we, I don't know what the right number is, but say $5,000 is in a pool for childcare. So people can come in person to a meeting and we see, we try it out for a year and if we did something like that and it wasn't fully expended, could it carry over to a second year? So the idea of a pool and could it carry over? So it's the feasibility of the pool rather than the specific number. That's it. But I echo everything Lynn just said. I think this is actually a very expensive proposal. Yeah, and at this point, as I said, I don't want to discuss it, I just want to make sure that we get the questions. I'm trying to load on you. Anna? Yeah, Andy, I think you covered this, but I want to reiterate it just in case my, I'm really excited about the first two parts of this, especially, I think that those are really helpful. I think where I get a little bit stuck is when we get into the nitty gritty of health insurance or health benefits. And so I'm curious to know, Northampton went through this in 2014, which by the way, that was a while ago. And they were talking about the availability of health insurance to all their municipal employees. And so I'd like to know what our current availability of our health insurance and other benefits are to especially part-time employees to make sure that we're not privileging ourselves over other part-time employees or other folks who work for the town. That would be very, that's very important to me. Thank you. Thank you. And Bernie? Yeah, thanks, Andy. I don't think that chapter 32B would allow elected officials to get health insurance unless it was open to all elected officials who receive a stipend or all elected officials. So that's a question really for town council, town attorney. My recollection is you can't, you're gonna open the door to every elected official. Secondly, and I'm saying this as many of you all have experienced the dilemma of being an elected official, getting a $1,200 stipend for weekly gazillion-hour meetings and all kinds of other community stuff that we did as selectmen. And I have a problem, I have a problem if we're confusing elected officials with employees, they're not. They are employees under ethics, but in effect elected officials are elected officials. They don't get vacation time, they don't punch the clock, they don't get tracked. If they never show up for a meeting, they still collect their stipend. If they do no committee work or if they do dozens of committee works, they still collect their stipends. They are not employees. So let's not go down that road of confusing town employees with elected officials with town employees. There's no comparison. I think what I would see is that we look at the adequacy of the stipends that are paid to council members. And if council members choose to use those stipends to cover child care costs or costs of elder care costs, then they're certainly welcome to do that. It's not a salary that's being paid for service. So, you know, and I also think we have to be careful about other elected officials and what, you know, where they may want to, one compensation. So I'll write that up a little more fully and send it off to you, Shawn. Bernie, I think that the problem, unless it's framed as a question that is something that staff can look into and it's being, other than you suggested, one item that has to, that might go to town council, but otherwise, I think we probably, it's edging into debate, which I was trying to avoid. Okay, my apologies, but I think that the question would be, why should we consider elected officials in the same grounds as town employees? Yeah, and I assume that the only insurance we could offer, if we could offer insurance, would be through Maya and somebody probably has to talk eventually to somebody at Maya, but I think that the relationships and the health insurance piece of Maya are really through either Shawn's department of personnel, Shawn, and then I'll come back to Alicia and we're done. And then you can move on. Alicia can go first. My question's unrelated to anything. Yeah, you can go to Alicia first. Alicia. Yeah, thank you. I just wanted to respond to a couple of the things, the questions that Bernie posed. And I guess I maybe should have spoke a little bit more to my experiences serving as a counselor in my opening, but again, like I wasn't very prepared for this meeting and I'm multitasking. So it becomes a little bit difficult, but this is precisely the reason. And so I'm not saying that this proposal is not to insinuate that counselors should be considered regular town employees because if that were the case, then maybe we would have proposed hourly pay, which would far exceed the number in front of you right now if counselors were paid hourly for the amount of hours that they spend on meetings. I know many of you know, if you've attended a council meeting that they often can go six, even eight hours a night. So that is a full time job, like a full day of work for a full time job in one day for a meeting. And then also if you're adding on committee meetings, which for just me myself, I'm serving on the finance committee, which can be two to four hours. And then also the elementary school building committee, which is an additional two to four hours a week. We're already working as much as working a part time job. And if we're talking about inclusivity and making sure that people have the opportunity to serve the town, we have to talk about what that means for people who don't have the privilege of time or the privilege of wealth. And so it really limits who can serve. So this is not about saying that like, it really is just about inclusivity and making sure that we're opening this opportunity up to a lot of different people because life looks very differently to a lot of different people. And as we all know, a lot of the world revolves around money and what people can do with their time depends on how much money they can make in other places and how they can support and care for their families in a town that's becoming ever more increasingly expensive. And so that burden for people with children like myself becomes even more harder to manage. And so the idea with stipends for childcare or reimbursement for childcare is that at least elected officials are not taking on additional burden. And so I know at this point for me, if I were to pay for my childcare using my stipend, I would have already used my entire stipend. My monthly payment doesn't even pay for me to get a babysitter to cover all of my meetings in a month. And so now I am losing money. Like I am paying money to serve on the council. And some people really cannot do that. And so then what does that mean is that they will never run for council. And that does not mean we don't value their ideas or that they wouldn't be a significant asset to the town and to how we conduct our business. And so again, this is a lot about just making sure more people can run for council. And right now, the only people who can run for elected official are people who have the privilege of time or the privilege of money. Yeah, well, thank you. I appreciate your response. And I wanted to give you the time to do that because since you were responding to other people, but we do want to cut this up. This will be back on the agenda for the next meeting, but I felt it was important for the sponsors and Alicia's representative sponsors to be able to at least introduce it to the committee today. I'll call on you and let's see if we can move on to the next item. Thanks, Andy. Lynn, could you scroll to the top? I just want to make sure when we cost this out it's in a way that's helpful to you all. So the part one is pretty straightforward. Actually, one question I did have for committee chairs, is that just the four primary committees of the council or is it include other committees like JCPC or budget coordinating group? Maybe a question for Alicia in terms of the intent. Yeah, it was just the primary committee. The four primary council. Okay, thank you. All right, so that was question one. Question two was on the child, the family care reimbursement. So I was thinking about this and trying to think. So for the first bullet reimbursed councils for the cost of family related care provided during council meeting. So I was trying to think of how many hours to use. And as Alicia described, the hours can be volatile for month to month. So I was going to do two meetings a month at six hours a meeting. Does that seem reasonable for an estimate for that first bullet under family care reimbursement? Yeah, I think two a month for a base is fine just for us to get the expectation so that we can understand expectations. But yeah, but just to expect that that's gonna fluctuate. Okay, and then so that's council meetings. And I was gonna do something similar for the next bullet point, which is just general committee meetings. I was gonna do two a month, but maybe do four hours per meeting for that one since they generally are a little bit shorter. But I think in TSO, finance committee generally meets twice a month. And then the next one, that one's pretty straightforward again. So I was gonna do 52 weeks a year, five hours a week for that third bullet point of for planning for council meetings. Yeah, I think all of those things sound like just about what I was thinking when I was calculating as well. Okay, good. And I think that might be it. Yeah, I think the health insurance will, we started looking into a little bit, we'll definitely bring back information on that. I agree with whoever said, I think if it's offered to counselors, it'll probably have to be offered to all elected officials, but we'll verify that. And I think the only other thing we were gonna look at too is just make, see if there's any retirement implications. Generally, there's other rules that you have to, other requirements you have to have to retire with health insurance, but we just wanna verify there's, whether there's any scenario in which a counselor could carry health insurance into retirement. So if there is to factor that in as well. But we will bring back responses to all those questions at the next meeting. Well, thank you. I really appreciate it. So Athena. I have ongoing calculations, Sean, about council and committee meeting time when I calculate for minute takers for the budget. And I think the estimate for council meetings is probably a little too modest because we have special meetings and so on. And sometimes there are public forums and so on, but I can help come up with an estimate if you'd like. Maybe you said, yeah, if we can work together on that one too. Sure. Good. Then Alicia, let's finish up, but I wanna let you be the close. Thank you, Andy. I was just wondering if, as my question is to Sean, if he can also factor in the school committee, if it does come to the realization that we would have to include other elected officials, if that could be included in the estimates. Yeah, we'll add in school committee and library trustees if it turns out that way. There's also two other bodies, there's housing authority and, oh, trust. Will, too, is elected. Yes, so if any of those apply, if we could have those. And then my other question would be if you could also offer suggestions to how, like whatever you come up with as the estimate, how we could make that work using, I don't know, other things besides town funds, for example, grant funding or any other possible sources that this initiative could be funded from, aside from viewing it as something that's taking away from other initiatives. Okay. Okay, and I think the last thing I can think of and I will move on is that we probably ought to check on what the communities on that chart, you don't have to go back to the chart, but what those communities that show that they're providing compensation, if that's their current policy. And because they may have changed the policy since the information was obtained. So we'll have to figure out who's the appropriate person to do that little bit of checking. Yeah, I can talk with Northampton. I speak with my counterpart there. I actually have already spoken with them. I know that that's still their policy. So yeah, we can pick a few maybe and just kind of understand how their systems work that'll, I think help us with these questions as well. Okay. So I think, thank you. I had an agreement with Sean about time for this, that we would try and move on to the two big agenda items. And I just want to ask quickly, there's one member who's an attendee, who's also a counselor. And so if that individual, that counselor wishes to make public comment to this committee, please raise your hand. And it's not going to turn it back to Sean to do the introductions for the next piece. And I see no request coming. So Sean, go ahead. Thanks, Andy. So the next agenda item is our review of the FY22 audit. We have Scott McIntyre and not say, let's not say a Shakoda. Correct me if I mispronounce your last name please. So formerly from Molanson and Heath. Molanson and Heath has transitioned with another company and now they are technically called Markham, but they have committed to providing the same service and the same just relationship that we've developed over the years working with them. And sort of the, one of the benefits we've always had is they're always available to answer questions. Whenever there's something complicated that pops up or, you know, Sonya and Holly both do a very good job of being proactive when it comes to accounting issues. And so we expect, and they've committed to that same level of service. So we're happy to have them both here to review the FY22 audit. And we also have Sonya, Retiree, and the, as a panelist here who, when you see the management letter and all the bad comments, Sonya's here to address those one last time. And so I'll turn it over to you, Scott, to start walking the committee through it. Thank you, Sean. And as Sean said, I'm Scott McIntyre. I'm one of the principals here at Markham. And as he indicated, he merged up with a national firm called Markham. I can answer any questions that the committee may have on that when we get done going through the audit. But if, with that said, I'd like to hop right in. And Sean, you're going to allow me to share my screen, correct? Yes, you should have. Are you, do you not have access yet? You should now give it a shot. One minute. Probably when I do a little bit more of an introduction of the audit process, I'll then start to share my screen. And I'll start, of course, with our independent auditors report. But before I walk through the independent auditors report and the financial statements themselves, I think it's very important as part of an audit communication to just give you folks an idea of how the audit process went. I think it's probably the most important communication you can hear from us. The numbers today shouldn't surprise anybody. They're your numbers. You do a good job with your numbers. I think the numbers are what they are. And I don't, again, I don't think they're going to surprise anybody. But so as a result, we think the most important communication is to just let you know that our audit of your June 30, 2022 financial statements went very well. Another way that I often categorize that is to let you know that as a result of the procedures we performed, we did not need to propose any significant audit entries as a result of our work there. In other words, when we came in there to do our test work, we found the books and records to be in good order. Key reconciliations were performed on a regular and timely basis. And all of that, that led to the fact that we did not need to propose any significant audit entries as a result of our work. That's actually one of the required communications that we need to make to the committee today. Two of the others include letting you know that there were no differences of opinion and how to apply generally accepted accounting principles between the town and our firm. Sometimes an accounting standard could be looked at two different ways and there can be differences of opinion. Happy to report that there were no disagreements on how to apply generally accepted accounting principles. And the third of the required communications deal with accounting estimates. And there are several of your financial statements. The largest of which are your net pension liability and your net OPEB liability. And associated with those are, I call them related accounts, deferred outflows of resources and deferred inflows of resources. Again, those are estimates, but they are performed by actuaries and they follow their own set of standards just like we follow auditing standards, they follow actuarial standards, but there are some key assumptions in there such as discount rates and things like that that make this an accounting estimate. I have, I bring this up because it's part of the required communication, but I think that as part of our audit process we review those estimates and the assumptions and we find that there are no significant issues with the assumptions that you're using. Other estimates in the financial statements include things like an allowance for under collectibles in the estimated useful life of your capital assets. Again, I'm required to communicate this to you and we found no issues or no deviations from norm, if you will, in the estimated useful lives and what you've done from an allowance for uncollectible receivables out there. With that said, I'm gonna take just a second and begin to share my screen so that we can begin walking through the financial statements and I'll, there it is. That should pop up in just a second. It should pop up to the independent audit and I lost my camera there for a minute so I need a second to find everybody. I have some page references. If some of the committee members have a hard copy I will be referencing some page numbers, both hard copies and the PDF page numbers, but the audit report starts on page one which is page four of the PDF and this is what we call a clean or an unmodified opinion. It's no different to the type of opinion is no different than it's been for many years, but it's still, it is the highlight. It's really, to speak very frankly, it's what you pay us for. They're your numbers, they're your financial statements. This is our opinion on your financial statements and what it says, it goes on for three pages, if you will, but in our opinion, based on the auditing standards that we followed, in our opinion, your financial statements are materially fairly presented in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles here in the United States of America. Now, I do wanna point out, because I've been asked this a couple of times in this audit cycle of June 30, 22 audits, this opinion looks very different than your prior year opinion and it is, but it says the same thing. In essence, our standards changed and instead of starting with the standards that we followed, it now starts with our opinion and it gives you our opinion, our basis for our opinion, which includes the standards that we follow. Again, it's a clean or unmodified opinion, just like it has been in prior years, but some people have noticed that this looks very different and it does look very different. It's essentially what used to be at the bottom of the report is now at the top and what used to be at the top of the report is now down at the bottom. Nonetheless, it looks different, but it says the same thing, which is that it's a clean or an unmodified opinion on your financial statements. Following our opinion starts with your management's discussion and analysis. This is a great resource to go back to at a later point in time to understand why certain key account balances have changed. I'm gonna walk through a little bit more of the basic financial statements and hit some high points and I'm gonna wind up coming back to a key area in your management's discussion and analysis that hopefully will bring fiscal year 22 into focus and why jumping ahead a little bit, why the key account balance that everybody focuses on, your general fund unassigned fund balance, why it changed. There's some great, you know, great statistics in this management's discussion and analysis that we'll come back to at a later point in time. But I'm gonna go to page, print page. I'm sorry, I heard a question. Mr. Chairman, are you taking questions as we go or? I didn't, did somebody? No, I think it was somebody that was unmuted. I unmuted him. Okay, thank you. So I've hopped over to page 15 of the printer, page 18 of the PDF document. And this is your statement of net position. Now it's important to remember that there are essentially two sets of financial statements in your report. It's both a long-term perspective and a short-term perspective. This is the statement of net position is your long-term perspective view of your accounting and financial reporting. As I scroll down the asset side of this, you see it includes all assets of the government, including, you know, your capital assets. And as I mentioned before, related accounts to pension and OPEB are these deferred outflows of resources. Now on the long-term perspective of accounting or financial reporting, people don't look too much at the asset side of the equation. They really focus on the liability in that position section of this balance sheet. Statement of net position is just a fancy name for a balance sheet. And the focus for governments right now are really too on the long-term perspective are two accounts. And those are your net pension liability and your net OPEB liability. And I know you have Parker coming on afterwards. So he can probably answer, I can try to answer OPEB questions, but Parker's probably way better at doing that than I am. But a couple of key things to point out on this pension liability in the OPEB liability. Net pension liability, and I'm gonna focus on the first column of numbers here as your governmental activities or essentially all of your governmental funds, your enterprise funds are your business type activities. To keep it maybe a little bit simpler, I'm just gonna focus on the governmental activities. And you can see at June 30, 2022, your net pension liability had a liability balance of 30 million, almost 30.6 million dollars. That's down substantially over the prior year. A year ago that account balance was about 42 million dollars. And it's important to, I think for people to understand why that liability is down from June 21 to June 22. And that this balance represents your proportional share of the liability of the Hampshire County retirement system. And for the current year, that the discount rate that's being used is about 6.9%. A year ago was 7.1. And normally when there's a drop in a discount rate, you would see what the liability go increase. In this case, we started decrease. It decreased because investment earnings for the year were substantially better than anticipated. It brings to mind that I think it's important for readers to understand that in your June 30, 2022 financial statements, that 30.6 million dollar liability is measured as of 1231.21. County retirement systems in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts calendar year end. And it's permissible in your June statements to essentially reference a balance that was measured as of a year earlier. In this case, it's six months earlier. Why is that important? Because through calendar year 21, investment returns were quite strong in the system. And they beat expectation. When I say beat expectations, you expected to earn roughly 7% and you exceeded that expectation which helped bring down the liability. Now, I point this out because make no prediction of what this liability will look like at the end of calendar 22. I don't think those reports are available yet, but I think it's probably reasonable to expect that there may be an offsetting increase in this liability that when you measure it as of 1231.22. Takes us to the net pension line, pardon me, the net OPEV liability right below that, as with a June 30, 2022 balance of about 74 and a half million dollars. That 74 and a half million dollars is essentially unchanged over the prior year. And I'm sure Parker will talk more about this, but the fact that the number was unchanged is really, you have to look a little bit deeper and it's well laid out in his report. There really were a couple of things that happened in fiscal year 22. Plan experience had some significant gains, but investment earnings through 630.22 did not match what the expectation was. Similarly, there was a change in the discount rate from June 21 to June 22 that brought it down almost a half a point which increased the liability. So all of the experience gains were mitigated if you will by the drop in the discount rate and the small shortfall that you had in investment earnings compared to expectations. So a lot going on there. And I'm sure as I said, Parker will talk more about it, but all of those things that went on essentially kept that liability unchanged for the fiscal year that ended on June 30, 2022. Pardon me, that's really on the long-term perspective financial statements, that's really what most readers focus on. We think it's an important part of understanding the financial statements as a whole. It's not always appropriate just to look at the general fund. We're gonna do that in a minute, but there are these long-term liabilities that don't get reported at the general fund level that are important to communicate to those charged with governance in a meeting like this. Now, I'm going to hop over to print page 18 or PDF page 21. And this takes us to the town's governmental funds balance sheet. When I talked earlier, I talked about a long-term perspective and a short-term perspective. This brings us into the short-term perspective financial statements. And even with the MD&A and the long-term perspective statement in that position, we just looked at most readers are still going to turn to this page of a document and they're gonna look at the general fund and they're gonna focus on the unassigned fund balance. And we'll get there in a minute. Just wanna talk about a couple other things first, if I may. The first other item I wanna talk about is this fund right here. It's your ARPA fund. It qualified as what is known as a major fund because of the significant balances in the accounts in this fund for fiscal year 22. It meets the definition, as I said, of a major fund. So that balance sheet is presented in two pages from now. The corresponding statement of revenues and expenditures will be there as well. That's new this year. The column to which write your non-major governmental funds, that's sort of a conglomeration of all of the special revenue funds, the capital project funds and some permanent funds that don't meet the definition of a major fund get aggregated into that non-major fund column. There was one more item, I'm sorry, in the ARPA fund that I wanted to point out. You'll notice that the cash position of the fund at $4.7 million is completely offset by unearned revenue, a liability of that 4.7. And the fund has no fund balance, if you will, no equity or position at position. That really comes down to accounting standards that indicate that you're really not permissible to recognize the revenue until you meet certain exchange requirements. One of those things is essentially you have to spend the money before you can recognize the revenue. The money was received by the town and recognized in the town's general ledger, but accounting principles generally accepted in the United States say that this money can't be recognized as revenue until you spend it. So there's that matching between revenues and expenditures. So the cash is just completely offset by this liability called unearned revenue and you will earn that revenue when you spend it. So the last thing I wanted to point out on the ARPA fund. So let's focus on the general fund for a minute. And again, the focus is down here in the fund balance section. Total fund balance of $27.5 million, almost $27 million of that is unassigned fund balance. And above that is your assigned fund balance. Those represents year-end encumbrances from the general fund appropriation that are carried forward into fiscal year 22 and honored, pardon me, into fiscal year 23 and honored in that fiscal year. I'm gonna come back to this number here in a minute when I recap things with the MD&A. But I think it's important to point out that this account balance of just under $27 million is an increase in this account balance by about $2.2 million, a healthy increase to that critical account balance. It also represents about 13% of general fund operating expenditures, again, indicating, you know, credit rating agencies like to see that, you know, north of 10% and you certainly have met that. Now, I think it's also very important for the reader to understand that this unassigned fund balance of $27 million is really two components to that. In your general ledger, this is very, very common, you have both a general fund and a stabilization fund. For gap purposes or generally accepted accounting principles, those need to be consolidated into one fund. Everybody in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts accounts for them separately. That's the state mandated guidelines, but for formal purposes, formal gap purposes, they get consolidated into one fund. So if you look at that $27 million, and we'll look at it more closely when we get to the MD&A in a minute, but if you look at that $27 million, about $10.1 million of that is your general fund in Sonya's general ledger. And that 10.1 becomes the starting point for the Department of Revenue to calculate your free cash. The other part of it, you know, just under $17 million represents your stabilization fund. And right now, or pardon me, as of 6.30.22, all of that stabilization funds was classified as what we refer to as your general stabilization account. It's set aside for the future, but there is no purpose constraints associated with that. More on that as we continue through. I do want to hop ahead two more pages to page 23 of the PDF. And it would be page 20 of the print. As focusing first on ARPA, you can see that there's no change in fund balance. That's because of the matching, recognizing revenue to match the expenditures that are incurred. With that, we'll just hop back over to the general fund. And there's two critical things. There's a couple of critical things here to point out to readers. A lot of times the focus is on this third number up from the bottom. In other words, what did our fund balance go up by? In this case, it went up by $2.2 million, which essentially is the same as the unassigned fund balance went up. But I think it's also very important to look above the transfers in and out. We'll talk about transfers in and out in a minute, but I like to look, and I think financial institutions and credit rating agencies like to do this as well, that just from a revenue and an expense standpoint, you had revenues that exceeded expenditures by about five and a half million dollars. Now you come down to the transfer section of your operating statement of your general fund. You see about $6.6 million of that being transferred out. And over here in that non-major fund column, you see the money coming in. I think that's very important for readers to understand, I know it is for credit rating agencies, because what's gone on here is, I'm not telling you folks in Amherst anything you don't know, but you're funding some of your capital with your operating budget. It's being transferred out to a separate fund to account for the capital projects. That shows that the community is willing to finance some of its capital items through its operating budget and not always going to the open bond market to borrow money for capital projects, but that's telling the reader that the community is committed to funding some of their projects with its own operating revenues. It's equally as important, I think, to understand, and this is very well laid out in your footnotes, this transfer in of about $3.3 million. And likewise, that's also coming from your non-major governmental funds, but I think it's important to understand which fund it is. You have an ambulance revolving fund as almost every community in the Commonwealth of Mass does. It generates a certain amount of revenues and periodically those revenues get transferred out to for expenditures. In almost all cases, it's for financing of an ambulance. And that's what occurred in fiscal year 22. $2 million of this $3.3 million is being transferred out of your ambulance revolving account into the general fund. I point this out because a lot of times understanding what's coming into the general fund is very important to financial institutions and credit rating agencies. So I just wanted to make sure that the reader understands that. Now I'm gonna hop all the way to the end of the report, focusing still on the general fund. Print page 69 or PDF page 72 is your budgetary comparative statement as your final budget, the actual amounts, and then a variance between those actual amounts with the final budget. And I'm gonna drop down to the bottom. Well, I'll start a little bit at the top here. Revenues came in greater than anticipated by about $3.2 million. That actually exceeded fiscal year 21 when you had about $2.4 million in revenues that came in greater than anticipated through the budget process. Last year was about $2.4 million. Down on the expenditure side, monies that were appropriated for the various departments for expenditures, unspent and unencumbered amounts were about $1.6 million. A year ago, that was about $2.3 million. And of course, the majority of this 1.6 is up here in the general government, public safety and education functions as well. So collectively, the favorable revenues and favorable expenditures has a positive budgetary impact of about $4.8 million, the number I have highlighted there. Now, if we stop there, things don't make sense. Why did our fund balance go up $2 million when our favorable budgetary results were just under five? We have to look at the amount of fund balance that was used during fiscal year 22. And that comes down here, your use of free cash used $450,000 free towards your operating budget. So essentially you're expecting your outflows of resources to exceed your inflows by about $450,000. You transferred about $2.8 million to a stabilization fund and you transferred about $1.8 million for capital purposes. So this $5 million here is a total use of fund balance. Pardon me, a free cash of about $5.1 million. Sorry, my screen where I see all you folks just went blank. And so I got a little bit distracted there and I need to take a second and just punch in my password. Sorry about that folks, so that I can see you as I'm trying to communicate here. So about $5.1 million in free cash that was used. You know, you net that use of free cash of $5 million with the favorable budgetary results of 4.8 and you have a negative $282,000. Now, as I mentioned at the top in your management's discussion analysis is a great section in there that kind of shows how things changed in your key, that key account balance that I talked about, unassigned fund balance. And keeping in mind that net after use of free cash the impact for fiscal year 22 was a negative $282,000. Now, if we go back to page 11 or page 14 of the PDF you see a nice chart here in the middle. And again, this is part of management's discussion and analysis and hopefully this is really gonna summarize fiscal year 22 right here. I mentioned earlier when we were looking at your unassigned fund balance that there are really two components to it. Is the general fund and your destabilization fund. And total unassigned fund balance went up almost 2.3 million, but you can see the breakdown of it. You can see that the general stabilization account went up two and a half million and just the general fund alone went down very small amount, but it went down by that $282,000. So hopefully that just ties in how the budget versus actual page drives change in that key account balance that everybody wants to see of unassigned fund balance. You do have to look at the unassigned fund balance in the two pieces that we've talked about where there's strictly the general fund which is the starting point for free cash certification and then the stabilization account. There is one more thing I wanna point out and I won't turn to another page but in the back of the report there is a note about a subsequent event, an event that occurred subsequent to 6.3022 and that is that after 6.3022, the community voted, let me turn to my notes here, pardon me. After 6.3022, Amherst voted to transfer about $7.6 million of this general stabilization account to a capital stabilization account. I think that's probably a really, really important subsequent event for a lot of readers to know and I'm already gonna jump ahead towards fiscal year 23 because I want you to at least understand what will likely happen in fiscal year 23 is that now that you've taken $7.6 million of general stabilization and committed it to a particular purpose, that purpose being capital that stabilization fund will no longer be part of unassigned fund balance. Coming back to your general fund balance sheet indicated that this unassigned fund balance includes those two things, general stabilization and your general fund. Look, you have nothing up here in your committed fund balance. If stabilization fund is committed to a particular purpose, that purpose being capital it would be shown as committed fund balance. So nothing else happens during fiscal year 23, $7.6 million of this account balance right here is going to be liquidated out of unassigned fund balance and moved up two rows on your financial statements to this, pardon me, this committed fund balance. Once again, about 7.6 comes out of here and goes up to the committed fund balance in the general fund. So if nothing else changed during fiscal year 23, you are going to see your unassigned fund balance go down by about $7.6 million. But when I say it went down, perhaps a better or nicer way to say it, it just moved up the ladder. There are certain constraints on those monies now that the community is committed to spend those for a particular purpose. Not as if fund balance didn't go down in total, your unassigned fund balance went down and committed went up. I think it's important for everybody to understand that because it's generally speaking, unassigned fund balance is the first place that all readers go to understand the financial statements. I'm sure as we, you know, as 23 comes to a close and the financial statements have put together, management's discussion and analysis for FY23 will highlight exactly why that unassigned fund balance. Again, unless of course you had favorable budgetary results of $7.6 million and you might, but everything else being equal, you can expect that unassigned fund balance to go down by about $7.6 million. And it will be well outlined in your management's discussion and analysis. With that, I'm gonna stop sharing my screen and I'll turn it back to the chair. It was a fairly quick walkthrough of your financial statements, but I wanted to try to, you know, touch base on both the long-term perspective and the short-term perspective and tie in budgetary results of operations with how that drives change in your unassigned fund balance. But I will certainly try to answer any questions that the committee may have. Name, are there any initial questions in the committee? Lynn? I actually do have one. Just going back to your very last point, do you see that as impacting how, for instance, we're rated for bond rating or anything like that? I do not. I do not think it would be seen as a negative. Quite honestly, it could be seen as a positive. Again, similar to what I was saying, as far as when you transferred out, I think the number was like $6 million from the general fund to capital that shows a commitment of the community to finance some of its capital with its own revenues. This committing of the unassigned dollars for that purpose would have the same attributes, if you will, transferring that out to capital project funds, which is something that might happen in the future. Lynn, and if I could just add, thanks, Scott. Again, our policy is to keep 15% as sort of unassigned, which is really the upward percentage that the credit-rated agencies look for to give you sort of maximum credit, and then anything above that 15% is what we're moving to capital. In my experience meeting with the S&P, they really do sort of under, they try to understand the context and they actually ask you questions and you can explain, and again, to Scott's point, they use anything that shows sort of long-term planning. They generally appreciate and helps improve your management score and things like that. Thank you, appreciate that. And all I can say is congratulations on a phenomenal audit, Sonia. Great retirement present. It doesn't beat the chair, but it's pretty good. It's my parting present for the town. Are you going to pay for the walls with it? No. No, I'm quite serious, Sonia. It's a real statement. I sit on audit committees for two other organizations and this is like unheard of to see something this clean. And we owe you for years and years of great work and of getting us to these levels of standards and changing with the times, et cetera. Thank you so much. You're welcome, but I want to say you're in good hands with Holly and Sean as a team. Yeah, we know that, only because you trained them. Yeah, I want to thank you for the presentation because I think you started out with what was some of the key information about that these are our books and you were trying to make sure that what we presented to you was correct and accurately stated and that you confirmed that and explained some of the key lines in what we should be looking at, which I find very helpful and we'll try and go back and make note of it for next year that I'll be able to even do a little bit of my own if I'm still at it. But in any event, thank you for the presentation. I think it was very detailed, but very informative and very well explained. Are there other questions from the committee? Andy, well, people are thinking of questions. If anyone is interested again to see any more detail about FY22, the fourth quarter report is on the accounting website. I know we presented it here, but if anyone wants a reminder of where we had savings and that led to the increase in our fund balances, it's all laid out in that report. Yeah, I guess one question that I'll ask this again when we get to OPEV is when you get to things in retirement and OPEV assumptions get made about discount rates and what to expect. And we're really in a volatile time as far as what interest rates are. And so I'm never quite sure where the discount rates relate to what's going on in the economy at large. But so do you look at that to make sure that you're comfortable with the lines, the rates that are being applied? Yes, auditing standards require that we look at the assumptions and we look at them in comparing them to what's going on out there with so many other clients and do they make sense? And the changes that result from both your pension case and your OPEV discount rate was lowered for fiscal year 22. There certainly is a trend out there that that is happening, particularly in the pension world. There's some odd things that are going on in the pension world, pardon me, in the OPEV world where for those that don't have a trust fund, they use the 20 year municipal bond rate. And what do you know? And June 30, 2020 and 21, that just came way down June 30, 23, 22, it came back up. So it caused some changes that don't always make that much sense, but it is in accordance with the standard. But taking a look at the key assumptions is a critical part of what we do. I was just looking down at my notes and if I may, Mr. Chairman, one of the things I noted about pension was I indicated your liability based on your proportional share of Hampshire County. If you look at the Hampshire County funding schedule, it is presently, whereas I have about a year ago, it was scheduled to be fully funded by 2032. So not nine years from now. And if it holds true, that means at the end of fiscal year 32, 2032, you know, your assessment could go down significantly. And I just wanna, I bring that up to add some perspective to the liability. That's the liability that went down a lot from 21 to 22, but it's still nonetheless, even though it went down, it's still a significant liability. So I also think it's important to understand that in context, you are, as all members of the Hampshire County retirement are, you are paying down that liability through your annual annual assessment. And presently, it could change, but presently that pay down portion of your assessment to the County system is scheduled to mature in fiscal year after fiscal year 32. And if the discount rate goes down, does that extend the time before it's fully paid? Well, I think that would, that would probably require more of a legislative change to bump the period to fund it down. It would require legislative changes through the Commonwealth. But if you drop the discount rate, you know, the annual cost may increase, but unless there's a corresponding legislative change, it would not, it would not automatically extend that sharing of the unfunded liability in fiscal year 32. And would that require more contribution from the County system? Yes, yes, it would. Yes, it would, you know, I don't want to, I want to be complete here, but I don't want to make it too confusing, but I feel that with that question, I want to, you know, raise the point that with Hampshire County, when the current standards came out, there has to be 67 and 68, there is now a very distinct difference between accounting for the pensions in the funding of the pension. Funding is based on criteria X. Accounting is based on criteria Y. I could certainly talk about what X and Y are there. You know, and if you'd like me to or can, it's probably pretty boring stuff, but there's the best way it was articulated to me a number of years ago was that instead of accounting and pension, accounting and funding of pensions being the same, they're now divorced. You have funding and you have accounting and they're really based on a whole different set of parameters. So all based on the same underlying data, but the parameters that go into measuring these things are different. I bring that up because of the nature of your question, but I also think it's just important to maybe add additional perspective to what this pension liability is. And then they just build enough of your question. The discount rate certainly matters, but there's other things that factor into the schedule. I mean, the returns, they're smoothing things that the retirement system does to help buffer short-term impacts. So there's a lot of things that factor into the schedule, whether it be probably some negative impacts from the recent drop in the stock market, there probably will be, but if it bounces back quickly, then it'll get a raise. So I think there's a lot of things that go into that schedule and it gets adjusted. They have an actuary just like we do that looks at everything that goes into that and they do a schedule going forward. So as far as I know, they're still on track. They may have bumped it out. I'm not sure if it's 2032 or 2033 at this point, but the good news is they are committed to fully funding and it's not, they used to be really far in the future. It's not so far in the future anymore if as long as the economy holds up okay. Yeah, I bring it up because obviously what most of our time as a finance committee is put into is developing budgets and overseeing the budgets who are being followed once they're adopted and making recommendations to the council and those kinds of topics. And if the requirement for funding for any of these retirement accounts either Hampshire County or OPEB increases, then that money is set aside at the beginning of the process before we figure out what we have for other purposes. So it is something that we ought to be keeping an eye on which is to what the trends are is it really affects what we can commit to be doing as a town through the services and capital projects that we think are appropriate. So I share that with my fellow counselors just so that you're linked back to the fact that this is significant stuff. Anything else on the audit from the committee members? So I don't see anything, Sean. All right, well, Scott and Isaiah, thank you so much for coming today. And if there's any, if anybody does have any follow up questions you can send them to Andy and I and we'll get them answered for you. Thank you all. Thank you. Have a good day. Thanks. So Sean, you want to introduce yourself? Yeah, so the next topic is along a similar vein. It's our other post-employment benefits annual sort of actuarial update. And so we're required to do a full study every other year and then an update in the off years. And this is looking at the liability associated with our retiree health benefits primarily. There's a few other things that Parker will describe that are in there, but it's really what is the sum the town has committed or promised to all of its retirees, both current retirees and future retirees around health insurance. And so Parker, who's an actuary, does some very complex math to figure that out and he's going to explain that now. Well, thanks everyone for having me on. Appreciate it. Scott pretty much gave all the highlights. So I guess this is where I dropped the mic and walk away. No, I mean, so no, I mean, again, thanks for having me out. And obviously the whole financial team that you guys have is what makes all this stuff happen because about all the data, we can't do anything. So I definitely appreciate all the help that they gave us. You know, the question just came up about the pension thing. I would just tell you this is that, as I told my clients, if I had to bet, I would take the over on the funding date only because 2022 is a bad year and their choices are to either increase appropriations or extend it by a year. I would bet they'll extend a year, but we can take that bet another day. But, you know, so that said, there's a lot of assumptions to go into these things. We'll talk about these, I'll share a screen here and let me move this over here so I can see what I'm doing. All right, share a screen. All right, should be presentation. So hopefully you guys can see this presentation here. I follow those according to plan. Yep, we can see it. All right, so we'll go through this. Again, I'm happy to go through the entire report if you want, but if you're at 57 pages, I found most people like to boil it down to what happened and tell me why. And if you have particular questions, chime in anytime, feel like you have to wait till the end, you know, whatever works for you guys. So I'll give you the quick 30 second overview on our firm. We've been around since 98. I've been doing this stuff a lot longer. We work with about 500 municipal entities. We have clients in 37, 38 states these days, Europe, South America, Australia, have an office out in Las Vegas that I'm at quite frequently, as well as here. And that's enough for that. So this guy kind of said, what happened over the year? Basically a lot of things happened and yet nothing changed. You know, you started the year with 84 million of liabilities, you ended with 85. You had 10 million of assets, you ended at 10.5 and you're net OPEB liability, what most people call unfunded, went from 74 million, 500,000 to 75 million, 500,000. So really a ton of things changed and yet nothing really happened. And we'll talk about why in a second. The income statement in a municipal context, it doesn't mean a heck of a lot. I mean, if you throw this in here, just so you can kind of see what happened, but we're not doing earnings per share and bonuses based on that. So let's not get too hung up on it, but the service cost is the value of benefits being earned during the year by active employees. So if everything, if nothing changed, if everything went exactly according to the plan, your liabilities would have gone up by about $4 million, which is really service cost, less the benefits you pay out, plus the interest on the liability. Now things, a lot of things changed, they stayed basically the same, but all things equal, they go up by about $4 million a year. So when people say, oh my God, our liabilities went up by $4 million, what happened? Exactly what was supposed to happen. That's what we would expect to have happen. Financial statement expense, like I said, we're not doing earnings per share, it doesn't really mean a heck of a lot. Your employer share of the costs, these do include something called implicit cost. And I'm happy to dive as deep as you want into it, but basically what it means is the premiums being charged by the insurance companies do not represent the true cost of providing medical coverage for retirees. That is mainly for retirees that remain on active plans. So 62 year old retiree on average will use more medical costs or services than say a 25 or 30 year old active employee. Your average premium is based on about a 42, 43 year old employee. So 62 year olds on average are gonna use about twice as many healthcare services. So we need to adjust that cost for GASP purposes under OPEP and accounting standards. Your trust contributions were up a fair amount this year. Good for you. So your net OPEP expense just went down slightly. The big one is the discount rate went from 680 to 639, this discount rate conversation came up a couple of minutes ago about discount rates. And there's a lot of things to go into a discount rate calculation. There's really five main ones I tell people there's basically how much money to go back a slide. How much money do you currently have? What are you paying out in benefit payments every year? How are you investing the money? How much money are you putting in each year? And then watering municipal bond rates, as Scott mentioned, they went up a fair amount from year to year. And your guys case given how well funded you are is really based on how you invest your money. So you guys have a relatively one of the more aggressive portfolios in the state in good years, that's great. In bad years, not so much. But again, I would tell you, Scott kind of hinted at this. In fiscal 21, you guys earned about $1.7 million more than expected on the OPEP trust. In fiscal 22, you lost about $1.2 million above expected in fiscal 22. So you came up short in 22 by a million two, you were high by a million seven in fiscal 21. So over the two years, you were basically right on the number. So I tell this to people, so you don't freak out, we're going, oh my God, we lost money last year. Yeah. And guess what? The year before you made a lot of money and none of you were looking to go, well, we made too much money. We got to give that back. We didn't deserve all that. No, you have good years, you have bad years. Over time they balance out. So again, over time we're expecting you to earn about 6.4% on your money. Do you think you remember, this is not meant to represent any given year. So, you know, you don't go, hey, we lost 12% last year. Why do you adjust to return? The return assumption has nothing to do with how much money you made in a given year. If you were in 25% last year, our discount rate would have still been 6.39. The two are not related to each other. The discount rate is basically the forecast is based on a survey about 35 to 40 investment advisors about what they think each asset class is going to earn net of inflation. And then we take that into account and in fact are into, you know, how basically how you invest your money basically. So what happened? Well, as Scott mentioned, you had two really good things that happened. Say you have $15 million compared to expected. One is you had a lot of retirees that were previously inactive healthcare plans that got out of those. Either you bought them into Medicare or they got into Medicare by themselves. However that happened. But for each active, for each retiree that remains in an active healthcare plan, that adds about $300,000 to your liability versus if they were in a Medicare plan. So it's very important to get people who are eligible for Medicare into Medicare when they turn 65. Also healthcare premiums for the Medicare supplement plans which is where most of the money is when down by 1% over the two year period versus the expected about 12% increase. So these are things that actually, I tell people assumption changes don't change the cost of the plan. They just change when we recognize costs. These items here are actual real cash, actual savings. Now on the right hand side, we talk about things that went against you. We changed the discount rate that increased your liabilities by $4.4 million. But here's the reality. I can make the discovery zero or 20%. The cost of the plan is the benefits you pay out the door. It has nothing to do with discount rate. Just like we modified our assumption for future healthcare costs increases that added $10 million to your liability. Now let's hope that healthcare costs come in cheaper than we expect. That would be great. And you'll get gains in future years. But we've been seeing a lot of 10%, 11% renewals these days. And so we've updated our short-term forecast for higher healthcare costs than previously assumed. And again, hopefully everybody gets flat renewals. They get show, nice thinking. Sorry about the microphone falling. All that fun stuff. But yeah, so we're hoping, we're hoping it doesn't come to that. We have to make our best estimates as of a given point in time. And as of right now, we're forecasting healthcare costs will go up about 9% a year for the next couple of years. So what is this big kind of assumptions we have? Kind of like on the pension side, the discount rate was 6.8. We brought it down to 6.39. That added about $4.4 million. What's the probability that everybody's going to terminate employment each year? Just because you hired Johnny or Mary at age 21, what's the probability you'll still hear at 22, 23, 24? Okay, they make it all the way to retirement age. What's the probability they retired 55, 56, 57? Okay, the elect to retire. What's the probability they elect to take healthcare coverage? What's the probability they elect to cover their spouse? Or are they married in the first place? And then healthcare costs, we mentioned. Actuaries make this thing far more complicated than it is. And I just say that up front. We have this 9% model that grades down to the year 2060 when we get to 3.6%. And we factor in GDP increases each year and resistance bands. And we have all kinds of wacky things. The net reality is, if you came up with a single rate over that period of time, it's about 4.65, 4.7%. So we have a lot of weird stuff going through there, but it's going to simplify it. Think about four and a half to 5% a year and you'll be pretty much right on the number. In terms of the benefits, as Sean mentioned earlier, healthcare costs is what this is really about. I mean, there's a modest life insurance benefit. It's largely irrelevant to the equation. This $85 million, about 84 million in change is on health insurance, so that's where the money is. Your average single healthcare plan is about $749 a month. Your average Medicare supplement is about 352. I would tell you that compared to what we see in your area, your active plan is a little bit cheaper than average. Your Medicare supplement is slightly above average, but they're both within 5% of the average. So you're pretty much right on the number. You know, it's important, how do we compare it to everybody else in funding? You know, we're funding this thing, why are we funding, how do we do? Well, you guys right now are at about 12% funded. That puts you guys basically in the top quartile, you're about 75th percentile. 72% of people are under 10, 81% of people are under 20. So right now you're about the 75th percentile, you know, plus or minus a couple of percent. So you're pretty much doing better than most. Obviously you could do better, you're in very good shape and have a very good plan to get there and we'll show that in a couple of slides. So the obvious comparison appears, again, everyone has who they deem their peers to be. We just tried to pick some people of comparable size and hopefully geographically reasonably close. So you can see, you've discovered 639, the state average is about four. You can see people here in the mid-fives, depending on how they're investing, how much money they have and the things I spoke about earlier. Service cost. I try to explain this to people in the simplest terms, it's 27.96 per person. So the easiest way I tell you to think about it was, think about Johnny or Mary works for you and they make $50,000 a year. They're receiving $2,796 in terms of deferred comp, payable as medical benefits in retirement. So it's really, it's a non-cash benefit that they are receiving. You fund the ratio of 12%, you're above the state average of seven. So you're doing well in that regard. Your per-covered retiree costs a little bit above the state average or $6,000 versus 5,500. Part of that is because you still have 13 retirees that are over the age of 65 to remain on active plans. And that's gonna be because they didn't qualify for Medicare. They're almost certainly former school teachers who were hired before 1986 and never paid in the Medicare. That's a cost of doing business. I mean, unfortunately, that's something you gotta deal with. But again, over time, that will largely take care of itself. Not a lot of 3986 teachers would get to retire. This just breaks up the service cost by bucket. You'll see that public safety tends to be the highest number, not surprisingly, because they work the shortest career. They tend to retire earlier. So therefore they have a shorter career and therefore if they retire earlier, they get the benefits over a longer period of time. So hence they have a higher service cost. Again, it's not a big deal just something people find interesting. And the all-important, what does the future look like? This question came about appropriations on the pension side. The difference I would tell you is on the pension side, those appropriations are effectively a bill, a legal bill, you get a bill from Hampshire County, you have to pay that bill. On the OPEB side, the payments are, I don't wanna say aspirational, but they're not required. So you guys are doing it, you're doing a nice job and you have a pathway to basically be fully funded by about 2041. So you guys are making very good progress in that regard, much better than many others. But if heaven forbid in 2025, you're having a tough budget year, this is $1.3 million, you don't legally have to put that money in trust. It's great if you can, it'll be well received by the radio agencies and those future taxpayers will definitely say thank you that you did that, but it's not a legal obligation. So there is a difference. Now, you can see the liabilities over time go from 85 million to 300 million over the next 40 years. I encourage people to look over on the right hand side, we put things into today's dollars in present value terms. So your liabilities go from 85 million up to 95 million over the next 40 years. So about 12%. I would say that in the overall scheme of things that 12% increase over a 40 year period is very manageable. Now your pay-as-you-go cash out the door costs go from 3.2 million to 4.5 million, that's about a 30% increase. So that is a bigger increase. But again, the plan will be fully funded and you'll be withdrawing funds in 2046, 2047. So the idea much like a pension plan, once you're fully funded, this operates very much like a pension plan. Each year you're gonna fund the service costs and you're gonna withdraw the benefit payments to look just like a pension plan. So really in your pension plan be fully funded in 2032, 2033 thereabouts and you have a much reduced contribution, it'll be the same thing here on OPEB starting in 2040, 2041 if everything goes as planned. And I can assure you everything will not go as planned. I don't know what will go different but people may live longer, assets are going to do what assets are going to do. People are gonna go to the doctor as much as they choose to. We're gonna have multiple iterations of healthcare reform between now and then. What happens with Medicare? A whole lot of things can happen. So assuredly this will change but as of today it's our best forecast given the laws in place today, the plans in place today in your investment policy and funding policy as of today. And that's really all I got. Questions, comments, concerns? I'm looking to others first, if anybody else has questions, Kathy. Thank you for that. As you were talking, I was scrolling through the wealth of information you've provided to us. And so I just have two questions and I'm not questioning the assumptions but they matter for the conclusions. I'm not sure why but you have the total enrollment in retirees going up to 2027 and then dropping back down. So wondering why? What are you seeing there? Since the number of people matters for the liability and then my other one is on way back your inflation rates assumptions. Health trend, yeah. The trend for medical care. Look great when I get out 20 years and what leads you to think we're gonna be in that world? Sure, yeah. I mean, so as I said, actuaries, this is a healthcare model it's brought by society of actuaries good, bad or indifferent. And the basic gist of it so it's the second question first I'll get back to your number of people. So the basic gist of it is and I've been doing this stuff for let's see here over 30 years at this point. I will tell you that actuaries for the last 30 years and probably before that you've always said, oh in 10, 12 years healthcare costs and hit some kind of a chipping point in relation to GDP and at some point in time healthcare costs can't keep going up with these rates because it'll envelop the entire economy. Well, we said that 20 years ago and 10 years ago and five years ago and yet they keep on going up. In theory at some point they hit a resistance level. I mean, that's the idea behind this model that the society of actuaries has developed. So basically if you happen to be looking at our actuarial report on page 33 or 43 on PDF. That's the one I'm on, yeah. Yeah, so you'll see this all thing about our general inflation is 2.5% a year and then we have overall the economy through to about 1.1% a year forever and beyond. Real GDP, not nominal GDP and we'll have healthcare costs go up by 1% 1.1% of each year above and beyond the inflation rate. But the idea here is that right now inflation meets with healthcare costs reach 21% of GDP by 2030 and we said once they hit 22.5% that that's pretty much the point where at that point basically it's gonna go by general inflation and GDP only. It's not gonna get an excess marginal cost above and beyond that let's put it that way. Am I 100% in belief that? No, I will tell you this and I've said this for many years. I left to my own devices, my healthcare treatment rates would probably be about 1% higher than what we show. And I say that because I've been doing this for a long time and I've been hearing the same story for the last 30 years and oh no, it's gonna return. Yeah, it's never happened yet. So from a purely, you know, much like Scott's world we have to stay within generally accepted actuarial principles much like general accepted accounting principles. So I don't wanna be on an island by myself with a higher healthcare trend than everybody else. But if I was putting my money on it yeah I would assume they'll be slightly higher than what the forecast is. Just because I've been doing this a long time and it's always been higher and you know. Kathy real quick, I'll just say I actually pushed Parker on the other side. I said our local experience has been better than the earlier percentages, you know is this rate too high and he set me straight. But I think we've seen locally our experience at times beat the rate and then we get a the nice thing when that happens is we get a nice positive adjustment on our OPEB liability for that sort of one year. You know, and we've just had several unusual years for Medicare generally and every because people didn't want to go to the hospital. You know, so, you know, the Medicare program got a few extra years of life or decades of life just by anything that was elective you wanted to avoid because of COVID. You know, it was a trend. So it said both of those help us. You know, I'm not, I wouldn't change this. And so my last, so my other question is about people because fewer people. Yeah, so what happened with the people? So I was trying to express this in a more positive way. So basically for purpose of evaluation for our future projections we assume the active population stays stable. So every person leaves you replaced. But some people retire and some people I like to say they stop taking coverage. It's just a much gentler way to phrase how our retirees fall off their rolls. Let's put it that way. You know, because obviously with mortality everyone's not going to live forever. And so basically you have new retirees coming in and some retirees, you know, going off. And so you guys right now are still on the retirees side still in the growth part of the site, the number of people but that will much like everybody else in municipal America you guys are have a very mature population. And in the next 10 to 12 years you have probably half your population that is currently half of your population is either at retirement age or within five years of it. So about 40 to 50% of your population will leave active employment in the next 10, 12 years. And so they're going to retire but your existing retirees many of them are going to cease taking coverage. And so over time that will go up and it will start to level back out again because it's the picking the Python argument you have a big people cohort of your population that's moving through but they will eventually make their way through. So that's why we'll hit the spike and it'll start to come back down a little bit. But it'll stay relatively steady but it will come up a little bit and come down a little bit. Okay, Andy I have just one more and then I'll. So what we're doing and the decision the way we're funding it which predates all of the counselors here you know that it's and I'm not questioning the decision it sounds like what you're saying is we are pretty aggressively funding this and hearing that we might be fully funded by 2046 is I used to work on this side of the world what I say used to 10, 15 years ago that's pretty aggressive. If we weren't as aggressive are there negative consequences to it? So if we, on the amount we're putting in each year and I'm not doing a, if we put in $50,000 let you know something on the marginal side rather than Parker I'm going to let you start but I want to after you respond I just want to add a couple of points to that question. You could certainly reduce your level of funding and stretch out the period would that be negatively received by rating agencies? I can't say you guys are in reasonably good shape the biggest thing is to have a plan and follow the plan whatever the plan happens to be but the other side of that is with you know Scott was bringing up earlier on the pension system you also have a pension windfall coming in about 10 years and so what we see a lot of people doing is having a policy to redirect the pension windfall to OPEB so they can get funded quicker. So they would have a policy that says in 2033 when that pension windfall becomes available we're going to take that $10 million a year and redirect it to OPEB and be fully funded by 2040 or 2038 or whatever the numbers. So there's different policies to get there it's not one size fits all it's whatever works for a given community the reason I think we see people doing that and this is you know excuse me and you guys see this in 2033 or whenever that time comes there's going to be a bunch of people lining up for that big pot of money that you know the pot of money at the end of the rainbow and so the question is if you don't put in your claim on the money now somebody else will and so whether that's somebody wants to build a new park or a pool or an OPEB plan or whatever it is there's a lot of different wonderful capital needs in the community it's a matter of how you decide to weight them not my job I don't have to be elected to anything but these are the kind of things you guys have to think about and so that's why I say it's when you see people using the pension money when it becomes available it wouldn't be a disaster if you cut it somewhat but the problem I guess I always tell people is once you start going down the path you know in case of emergency break glass once you break the glass you tend to break it over and over again so I always caution people to be careful about that so I just quickly wanted to add maybe not quickly so I wouldn't say we're aggressive Cathy I would say we're solid I would say we're not and we're better than many communities but I wouldn't say we're super aggressive our contribution has stayed sort of in the same ballpark for the last several years and we haven't been able to increase it as much as we would like to under our plan the reason why I was a little bit higher this most recent year is because we underfunded it the year before and then we did a catch-up contribution this past year to make up for it I think the other thing I wanna say is a couple of other things I wanna say so we have prior to Parker with our previous actuary just last year we did do an analysis of how quickly we could fund our OPEB if we were to divert the savings from the pension system in 10 years or divert 50% of the savings we did it we ran a couple of different scenarios with the actuary to show what the how quickly we could fund OPEB so we've got that analysis that we're looking at and potentially gonna update our funding plan around OPEB with that we can come back to the committee at a future date whenever you want and discuss that more and then the last thing I think I wanna say is our retiree health insurance costs are growing really fast right there I mean if you look at the school struggles some of the town struggles and you look at our retiree health insurance costs you'll see it back five, six years it's gone up several hundreds of thousands of dollars and that's one of the reasons why we're trying to fund it just like the pension system has grown significantly it's gonna keep growing and then if we don't set aside an asset that can start to match that liability it's just gonna keep on growing and so when you look at the chart in Parker's report of what our sort of annual expense is gonna be it goes up really high it gets pretty scary I think looking down in those future years especially if we don't do any funding especially if we don't start continue growing our asset and growing our trust fund to help cover those payments so I just wanna keep in mind that we are set aside money and it's not for no reason it's because we have this growing retiree expense that every year gets greater and greater and that we do wanna just like our pension system if we can fully fund that next year I think then we do wanna turn our full attention to OPEB because if we don't then it's just gonna keep growing as a portion of our budget the goal would be to fully fund both and then we'll be in a perfect place where we can fund anything we want at that point but- I just wanna weigh in to build on what Sean said this is the plan we have is pretty standard in a lot of cities and towns where you're gonna substitute the pension funds into the health liability but what I have noticed with our bond rating agencies is that this is an indicator of how disciplined we are in our budgeting if you are really putting money aside this they look to this as being it's not significant financially but it is an indicator of how disciplined you are in your financial practices and so we like to be able to show that we're continuing to make that contribution to health insurance for that purpose because that's so important to us in the coming years because we're gonna be borrowing a lot of money and our bond rating is gonna be so crucial. One of the quick thing I would add to that and this goes back to Scott's presentation and as OPEB we are the problem children we're 74 million and that 122 million on the balance sheet so if you're looking for a place to address it's a good place to go we are the big shiny target for all the negative press and bad things that rating agencies talk about it's OPEB and pensions are one and two and sadly we get to be number one. Yeah a couple things one is I guess I have to exception to none of the current counselors were around when this plan was created. No, no, I'll take that back Andy. Sorry. Because it was when I was on the finance the old finance committee way back when and Sandy Cooler was the finance director and John Missanti was the town manager who actually sort of developed the plan back then. And I think that there were reasons that we did and I guess I remember those discussions pretty well. You know what we were doing up until that point was pay as you go. And pay as you go is a disaster as you go the bigger the disaster. And what happens is that there will come a time when if we have a responsibility to the town's future as well as to its present at some point the town will be able to afford to do nothing. Another discussion that I recall is at least at that time it was unclear whether the GASP standards were going to require that we showed the total OPEB liability as a liability on the balance sheets. And it sort of got around it by saying, well, now you tell them the number in a footnote but you don't have to put it in the balance sheet. And that certainly helped us in the end feel better about it. But in the end what we also recognized and I think it was what Paul was alluding to John is that if we stayed totally on pay as you go I think that we were convinced at that time and I think still I still think it's right that it was gonna negatively impact our S&P rating and drive up our borrowing costs. So there's a lot in this whole OPEB question that in a lot of history to it but I'm gonna stop talking and recognize Lynn. So you can thank the baby boomers for the recent increase. We all decided to retire out and we are a big bubble. So these are two historic questions. How did we get here and who bankrolls this? You say how did we get here? Do you mean by this this planning itself? You mean? No, how did we get to the point we had this liability? Is it because we were just doing pay as you go? Well, yes and no. I mean, it's much like, I guess let's back up in the 1950s and thereabouts when people put these plans into place healthcare costs were very cheap. Oh, we'll get people benefits. It only costs $10 a month, who cares? It's tiny money. And so you made promises without knowing what the ultimate cost was because it was cheap, who cares? It's no big deal. And under 32B, the ongoing joke is it's like the Roche Motel you can check in, you can't check out. Once you decide to adopt the benefits you've got the benefits. Unlike my other states where you can walk away and say, no, we don't wanna do this anymore. Not in Massachusetts. Once you decide to come in, you're in. And so you have the benefits. Well, in the pension system was also pay as you go until 1985 when they said, hey, we gotta do something about that. And they started addressing that. On the OPEB side, in a perfect world when these plans were set up in the 50s people would have been funding them back in the 50s. They didn't. And so you guys started funding probably in 2008, 2009 thereabouts, but that meant you were, you know 50 years behind schedule. And so you've got a giant hole to dig out of. And unfortunately you can't go back and assess the taxpayers in 1962 and 1972 and 1982 and say, hey, you got services in these years. Here's your bill. That can't happen. So unfortunately today's taxpayers have to pay today's cost plus some prorata share of the prior cost. That's 74 million of unfunded. So that's unfortunately where we are. That's how we get here. But yeah, it was pay as you go for a very long time. And unfortunately healthcare costs have gone up by many, many percentage over the last 40, 50, 60 years. And so that's kind of really how we get here. And to the earlier comment about, you know GASB and said, you know, GASB 45 came out and said, hey, you don't have to put on the balance sheet, put it in the footnote. Great. And then we come to GASB 70 and says, yeah, forget about that. You're putting it on the balance sheet. But, you know, ultimately, as I tell clients back in GASB 45, I would tell them, guys, people buying your bonds aren't stupid. They know how to flip to disclosure section. They can find the number. It's not a big deal, whether it's on your balance sheet or not in your balance sheet, it's exactly the same thing. So it doesn't change anything there. But yeah, I mean, but the other side of this, you know, the title together is the advantage of funding. GASB can't make you do anything, but in a sense, they make you do it by, I'll call it peer pressure, but it almost is. If you're funding, you get a better bond rating and therefore you get to borrow cheaper. If you decided, hey, we don't want to fund, well, guess what? Your $86 million liability now goes to $120 million to reason to municipal bond rate. And now your bond rating goes down. So that becomes more expensive to borrow. So you go, well, I can put a million dollars in the trust fund every year, or since we borrow money, I can pay after a million dollars in interest costs to my borrowers and my liability is still there. So it's almost like you have to put the money in because it's cheaper to put the money in is than it is not to put the money in. So that's kind of how we got here. I think there was a second question there that I may have ignored. Who bankrolls us? Your taxpayers. Okay. I mean, that's ultimately, you've got to come up with the money. I mean, and that's why I think going to Sean's earlier comment, you're taking care of today's taxpayers, but also the future taxpayers because we don't, these costs are going to escalate many times over over the years. And at some point in time, you end up like Jefferson County, Alabama or Detroit or Sacramento. And you go, guess what guys, we can't pay the bills. The number comes due and the money's not there. And so you guys are trying to be responsible by setting the money aside in planning for the future rather than just, you know, I give the example all the time, about Congress and we have a lot of stuff going on now is, you know, 10 years now they're gonna come up and say, oh my God, Social Security is bankrupt. We never saw this coming. What are we going to do? And then they will do something. Before then they will do nothing. And I say that because we've all known since 1991 or thereabouts, exactly what's going to happen in 2034, 2035, not news, it's basic math, hasn't done anything yet. And based on the last we did in 83, we're going to wait for the crisis and then we're going to do something. And so that's why I say, you guys are being responsible by doing things now rather than waiting for the crisis to hit. I mean, if it makes anybody feel any better, I chair the audit committee for the Girl Scouts of Central and Western Mass and the Girl Scouts nationwide, when they did consolidation, they ended up with a huge payback that they're now doing over time on their retirement funds. And it's a mess. So, thank you. I appreciate it. Andy, I also want to just point out that we have another person in the audience and you did a public comment earlier. And Bernie hasn't. And Bernie hasn't. Yeah, Bernie is the same though. Bernie will be uncharacteristically brief. I think we got a lot of good news in these two reports. And the good news is, is that we're disciplined and we're consistent. And that's a rarity, I think, in government systems, not just local governments, but governments in general. And so we're being very careful about not crowding out how we can spend our money in the future and really trying to manage things for future taxpayers. And as John Maynard's being said, in the long run, we're all dead. Someone will have to show up and pay the bills. We're trying to take care of that. So my thanks to our presenters this afternoon and to our staff for their carefulness. Thank you. So other questions, one that I have is just a, you made a presentation using slides that were different from the report we received in advance. Can you provide the slides to Sean so that we have them available for the committee for the future years? Yeah, Parker, you may have sent them. I'll double check, but if not. I'll send them in two seconds. Yeah, I'm gonna get off the call and send them right away. Thank you. Okay. Like I said, I just generally boil it down to that because I go through 57 pages, people zone out after about page four and I go, it's like, I would just boil it down to stuff people actually care about. Yeah, no, but I thought it was very helpful. Thank you. I appreciate it very much. Is the requirement now to do actuarial studies annually? Because I noticed we contracted for two year increments. Yeah, it's yes and no. I mean, there's a full study done every two years and there's a roll forward in the in-between year. So in fiscal 23, we're gonna roll forward all the numbers and update the assets and update the benefit payments and things like that. But it's not, we're not gathering all the information. Again, it's a much simpler process. It's really update the discount rate and update the assets. It's a much simpler process. And my last question is laden the report and what you talked in your presentation, you talked about assumptions. Yep. And I gather that those are assumptions that you and your company make from your experience in the area that they're not coming from an outside source. Yes and no. I mean, so certain assumptions. So for example, certain assumptions that would be used on the pension plan, we're going to use the same assumptions for two reasons. One is they're using the same assumptions that came from Parac, which is the state. And the reason for that really is it's tough for me to say that for OPEP purposes, people are going to terminate employment or die or whatever at a certain rate. But in the pension plan, they're going to live longer or shorter. So we wanna make sure we're consistent between the two plans. But on the Parac side, so the state does experience studies every five years basically across all municipal employees across the state. And so as I run this all the time, where clients will tell me go, well, our experience is whatever. Our people don't retire at 62. They work until they're 67 or they do this or they do that. And they're, guys, you don't have enough credible experience. We wanna look at a much bigger pool. So we're looking at statewide averages or statewide experience studies for really the demographic things of mortality, retirement rates, when are people going to retire? How long are they going to stay employed? Our non-massachusetts assumptions are really more related to healthcare. And the discount rate, which again is using a survey of about 35 to 40 investment advisors where we get our rate of return assumptions from. You mentioned, I'm taking a shot on this one. Just mentioned Parac. And I don't want to say what that is. So because isn't that where we're at? Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, Parac. So the Public Employee Retirement Administrative Committee, it's the statewide entity that runs, manages all the pension systems in the state. So they are basically the reporting agency that everybody has to get their assumptions approved by. And there are reports and funding schedules approved by. So they also do a bunch of valuations or a bunch of pension systems as well. And they value the state plan and things like that. But they do, they're a large committee that basically runs all this, oversees all the state pension systems. Probably a nice way to phrase it. And ROPEP funds are invested with the state retirement trust. So some communities have their own individual investment advisors. We've chose to go with the state because they've had really good experience. And there's logic with going with a larger group that has more, the highest level of investment expertise in the state. Yeah, I just wanted to mention that for the committee's sake because also to find out if that's still where we were. Yeah, we're still there. I remember that when Sandy was in your position, that was a decision that he recommended to the old finance committee. Yeah, yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense to stay with them. Okay, anything else that the committee wants to ask about? Okay. Andy, I just want to clarify. Do we need some votes on this and the audit report? I don't think there's any votes. It's more that we've presumptivity. We've done it in the past. We didn't last year because we just, you know, we get the reports, but we can't reject them. So to accept them doesn't make sense either. Okay. The reports are what they are and we have the responsibility to review them on behalf of the council. That's what our charge is. But then we'll also be putting them in the packet for the council for the next meeting because they will accompany the finance committee report. Is that correct? We either put them in the packet. I mean, that's something you and I should talk about. But you put them in the packet or just refer to them in the report as being in the packet for this meeting because in the end, I expect very few counselors to actually sit down and look at the entire report and not glaze over. I would agree with that. Okay. I'm gonna sign off and I just wanna say thank you and bad everybody. I didn't wanna just sign off and leave without saying something. Oh, I was gonna do that. I'm glad you did because thank you for being here and thank you for all of your good work over many years and in this past year in getting that audit together and getting Holly ready to take over and fill your shoes, which I know was discussed the other day. Yeah. And I just wanna say, I appreciate- Whether she can wear your shoes. I appreciate all the feedback on the audit but I also wanna point out that it's really the finance department as a whole as a team that pulls these audits together and they deserve as much credit as I do on it all. So I just wanna make sure everybody realizes that but thank you. Holly. I was just gonna mention for folks that both the full audit report and the full actuarial report are on the accounting's webpage of the website. So if anybody wants to dig in and read it all they're both there. Okay. Great. Bye everybody. Thank you, Sonia. Bye. And thank you Parker. Again, for your presentation if there's any other questions that come up I'll work with you to get the answers and get them back to the committee. No worries. I just emailed you the presentation. So any other questions, reach out at any time. Thank you. All right, thanks guys. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. So I wanna close out the meeting as quickly as I can. So I was gonna go ahead and do one quick thing. I can find the, here's what I want. This is the current version of the master plan calendar. I think the most recent revision date and what's happened in the past is irrelevant. But I wanted to point out that we didn't have any financial pieces in the council meeting that we just had. I think that we've now not placed any in for the 20th, but for the committee meetings that next meeting then if there's agreement that this is all correct, which is why I wanted to quickly run it by. We have the roles here that are in this section discussion, recommend action on appropriation and debt authorization for the school project and return back to the council compensation discussion. And John, is that still, what do you think there's a reasonable plan for that meeting? Yeah. Yeah, that looks good. And if there's anything that comes up on the, I think we always leave a placeholder. If there's anything that comes up on the 20th at the council meeting that that might get added as well. But I think based on what we have right now in front of us, those make sense. Okay. This is being updated whenever it seems appropriate to do it. Yep. And Andy can interrupt. So Sean has to run, so he's made me host. So thanks, Sean. Thank you all. Bye. Thanks, Sean. So just real quickly, what you see is that unless there's been a change that the council forum on the appropriation and debt authorization for the school project is scheduled for April 3rd. And that's the same meeting where the council would vote on the elementary school building appropriation and debt authorization. And so we have to decide yet whether to post it also as a finance committee meeting. And then we're also be getting into the regional school district budget because they'll be delivered and by the superintendent and referred. And so that means that at the beginning of April, we need to start addressing the regional school budget issues to try and get them out of the way. And I also just wanted to say that when we talked about council compensation and I was pushing it even though we hadn't till July as you start looking at the next pages, you realize that by May 1st, we are getting the budget from the town manager. And then there's a whole series of bi-weekly meetings that we have for several weeks in order to get each of the sections of government. And Sean's already lined those up so that the staff are aware when they would be with us. So I will send this out to the committee again in the newest version. I don't think that the newest version has gone out already, but Kathy and Lynn, let's just see what you think about this. Andy, can you scroll back a bit? Just scroll up. Okay, I'm just looking for, and Sean has just left. I think there's plenty of time. Paul, what I'm looking for is we may get an informal and unofficial more information from MSBA before that April 26th vote. And if it's not the same as what our estimate was, I'm looking for when we would talk about that. So that's what I'm looking for in this schedule. That was my question. I think we'd have to see if it's not, it looks like the finance committee has a meeting on April 4th and then not another one until April 25th. So we'd have to schedule a special meeting. Yeah, so that's what I'm just saying that I think we, so Andy, you just think in terms of penciling in something, I just want to hold some things in mind, even if it ends up being that we don't need it. And that the 26th is a Wednesday. That isn't a committee meeting. That will just be, we'll be reporting out on it. So just people understand that's a date, but it's not, it's not a meeting. That's why I wrote MSPA down and didn't put it down as committee or council. Right. So I was just, yeah. So that, that's all I was just saying that there, there might need to be something between the, yes. I'll stop. That's it. The 26th state was for Margaret's. No, that isn't accurate. That's a completely accurate date. It's just that it, it looks like we will have, I'll call it informal. What's unofficial. What's the best way of calling this fall? It's, they're not, they're not going to, if they don't completely accept everything that as we submitted, they're going to tell us is what I think. But you don't know the date yet. Correct. Because the problem is, is that, you know, there's the Tuesdays that fall over April 11th and April 18th. And I think that April 18th is the vacation week. And it's also the week when. I think that the week four is likely to be when the house waste means budget will come out. We will have the next time. To view it. And I think that the other thing that needs to be added to the. I think the other thing that needs to be added to the calendar is that Sean had said that he was going to. Do revisions of the. FY 24 projections. Yeah, based upon the. Governors proposed budget. And I have to see whether he's going to do that. Soon or whether he's waiting until after the house, and then that has to be plugged into the schedule to lend it to you. And then I think we can close it out. Yes, April 18th is the school vacation week, but if we needed to meet on that Tuesday. We might want to do that. My comment actually was toward the end of the. The first thing I wanted to do is to make sure that we have the meeting scheduled. And whether I'm asking you as chair, whether or not you want to schedule those meetings where we're reviewing the town managers proposed budget. As committees of the whole. And the second is, do you want to hold any of them in the evening? Because I, what I'd like to do is make sure that we start posting them, but I think that's the way that we're going to do it. And I think that's the way that people want to come to the more thorough discussion. With a various departments. They do so. And if you could scroll to that, I'm going to miss a few of them too. So I had emailed you at one point. Yes, you did. Yeah. The. Question of putting posting as a committee of the whole. And then you can just bring them into the meeting and let them ask questions. If it takes it over to. A core of the council. Right. So for that reason, we might want to do that. But this section. Of the report, I didn't think about it because. It really came from Sean. Trying to put. Everything together in a single document just so that. Wouldn't go as crazy this year of trying to keep track of it as I have at times, admittedly. Well, and then I, I need to plug this into the overall council agenda documents. So that's one reason why I'm looking at it. I don't think we need to answer that question today, but I do think we should answer it before the end of it. All right. And I think that that's. Most of what's going on. I think there was one other thing. I'm the agenda. I should just report on really quickly and on it. And help with this too. And then I want to adjourn. Sorry, Andy, before you go to that, can I make a comment on this piece? Yes. So I do think to Lin's point about offering up opportunities for input in the evening. And keeping that in mind as you are looking at the, at the scheduling of these. If possible. And I think that that's. Most of what's going on. I think there was one other thing that I wanted to make clear. And I think that if possible, I know, I know this is a possibly a painful ask for, for folks on the finance committee, but if you're able to make at least some of the opportunities beyond just the big budget hearing, possibly be in the evening for folks who work during the day, it might, it might provide an alternative opportunity for engagement. It's a vague thought, but I hope you'll keep it in mind as you continue to go forward with that. So Sean's not here. I'll just leave it all if he has any comments about that. And that is that all of those ones that are have budget sections. Sean had cleared them with. Department heads that are for the appropriate sections. That's totally fine. I think I'm looking at the. Maybe it's like the finalizing the recommendation. I, I'm not sure. I'm just trying to think about this is, it's a half form thoughts. I hope folks will have a little patience with me here. I'm trying to think about the best way to make sure that we've got. All of the avenues and I know that Paul and Sean and work really hard on, on providing different avenues for feedback, but I do think that it can be challenging when everything is during the day other than the one. Hearing. Yeah, we can put them at night. If the finance committee wants to, it's just, we can accommodate whatever you think is best. I don't necessarily know that that's what I'm, I'm recommending. I think I'm just trying to, I'm trying to look at this and see how broad it is in terms of offerings. And it, it seems like. Am I wrong that the only opportunity outside of normal working hours to in person engage on the budget would be the public hearing. Is there another opportunity that other than that? Let us, let us, let us talk it through a little bit and, and bring a proposal back next time. I think it's a good idea. And with, so the interest from multiple members of the finance committees. Are there some evening meetings that can. Help the public to engage in it more thoroughly than they can during the day, right? Yes. And I don't, again, I'm not saying we should move to that. I think maybe having the option and looking at it next time might be helpful. Okay. Question to counsel to right. Whether it would help counselors. Who wish to end. So, I'll look into that. The other thing that I was just going to say is in the water, we take this down because. Not that I don't think we need it anymore. You know, The last, the other item on the agenda was water and sewer regulations. And it says discussion of. Council action in town services, not reach committee meeting. And Anna and I were both there. Basically what TSO is planning on doing. Is. Working on the water and sewer regulations. The other item on the agenda was water and sewer regulations. And it says discussion of. The other item is. Working on towards the idea that was discussed when this came before the council and the. Motion was made to. Not. Not included in any change in the regulations that would automatically go into effect. That TSO. I think it was the unanimous agreement. Once to. Make a recommendation. Of what goes into the motion. Or the council meeting. And what was being envisioned was a motion that would. Have. Set a date. By which we recommend that. Staff come back. To the council. Two years from now. With a recommendation and what we would. Suggest through that motion. Being in. In that recommendation. What factors to consider. In that recommendation. But. The goal is fairly obvious. And what I said was that I was going to bring this to the committee. So that. We would solicit. To suggestions. From both committees about what might be in that motion. So. You can now correct my statement. Nope. I think you got it. I'm in the process of crafting said motion and then. I'm in the process of crafting. I'm in the process of crafting. What, what has been helpful is a member, at least one member of TSO has emailed me specific questions or topics that they'd like to be addressed. In that, in that. Time frame of study. So if folks could not tell me right now, but if folks could email me in the next couple of days would be great about what they'd like to, what they'd like to make sure we have answers on. That would be very helpful. It doesn't necessarily change the crafting of the motion. It changes what I include as the subsequent list. After it. When you're muted. Yeah. And that motion is going to come from TSO. Correct. Do we, we decide whether. Those regulations have to go back to GOL. I think they do. That's where they are. I think they do. Right. And we also decided we're going to have a hearing. Once they come to the council. Right. All right. Got it. Thank you. Okay. So anything else that anybody wants to raise. They didn't anticipate. In advance. That I didn't anticipate. Okay. And we also decided we're going to have a hearing once they come to the council. Right. All right. Got it. Thank you. Thank you. I didn't anticipate in advance. Seeing none, then I think that. We can consider ourselves adjourned. Thank you all. Thank you all. This is a learning curve meeting.