 You're all set. Okay, then I thank you very much. I'm calling the finance committee of October 6, 2020 to order. I was posted for 2pm. It is now 206pm. And I think that most members are present. This pursuant to Governor Baker's March 12. You order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law, general law 30 a section. This meeting of the finance committee is being conducted by a remote participation. So I am going to. In a moment. Go through and check each of the members to make sure that they can hear me. And they can be heard the agenda for the meeting is on the screen as we go through this process. This is for the purpose of the open meeting law to make sure that we have a sufficient connection to satisfy the requirements of the open meeting law. So I'll ask person to acknowledge their presence. And start with Lynn Guzmer. Present. And Pat d'Angelo's present. Kathy Shane. Present. Dorothy Pam. Present. And Bernie Kubiak. Present. Bob Hagner. Present. Sharon Pavanelli, I believe is not currently on the call. We'll keep an eye out for her. The agenda is momentarily on the screen. We're going to take it down in a second so that we can see each other and documents. And other documents will be shared as we go through the discussion, but I am going to proceed in the order of the agenda and try and keep us moving so that we can do a lot of work in a two hour period. So, are there any questions about the agenda? If you have any questions, then why don't we take that down and Sean, were you going to put up the fourth quarter in your end budget report or just have that or is Sunday going to Sunday you're going to summarize. Yeah. Quickly. So this is the fourth quarter report, which shows our year and where we ended up with fiscal year 20. And it's posted on the in the packets and it's also posted on the accounting web page. If it's not right now, it is happening right at the moment. It should be there up there shortly. And it has three parts to this. It's got it has the written explanations and then it has revenues and expenditures in detail by department, the expenditures by department and revenues by category. And then it has your big budget reports, which I'll tie in to all the numbers that are on here. We ended up this year has been a really challenging year. We ended up with a revenue deficit which we were expecting to about a half a million dollars but we ended up at 458 with a revenue revenue deficit and then we had a surplus appropriation of $2.25 million, which is due to we had a lot of things that we didn't do this year because of COVID, our regular operations that we didn't do when we charged everything we could to CARES Act and FEMA. So this helped us to end up with an increase to our fund balance of almost $1.8 million. And my notes all signed up here and then I just messed them all up and now I can't figure out where we need them at all. So the $1.8 million is pretty much in line with what our undecided fund balance grows every year. Just in previous years, it's been mostly coming from excess revenue from what we've budgeted this year. It happens to be the appropriations because of COVID-19. So we're in a really, really good place considering everything that's been happening. I can go through the things that came in a little bit over our projections for revenues were some cemetery lot sales, investment income that was already locked in at the time. So that came in better than expected. Our licenses and permits are already out there. That's mostly through the beginning of the year. We have our strategic partnership agreements with UMass and Amherst College and everything in that came in. Actually our hotel and motel taxes are in here as above the 5% projection, but this is a little misleading because this is all grouped up with cannabis taxes as well and that's not budgeted. So whatever we lacked in meals and hotel cannabis helped us make that up because it's not budgeted. The penalties and interest came in a little higher and rentals were came in better than we expected. The ones that were affected were mostly our economic revenues, which are fine. So on the 4th, licenses and permits, Medicaid reimbursements, motor vehicle excise was down a bit, meals tax was down, and I put meals tax down here because that one was down. We're up top. The cannabis kind of set that off a little. The expenditure side turnbacks in general government ended up being about $966,000. And this includes 712,000 employee benefits. Back. This is actually the final year of our increase for health insurance. We increased way high before we went to private insurance. And it take the budget takes a while for it to catch up. So that was good for this year that helped us out. And the other is just where departments were salary reserves, they'll think and allocated out to other departments because they're most departments were turning money back as it was because of COVID that we didn't fill vacancies. So there was no need to allocate any of those out to cover any deficits. The departments that turned back the most were, well, public safety was mainly police. They had some, they had positions that have not been filled. Public works is pretty much right on target. Community services. That is the senior center leisure services. A lot of those programs got shut down. So there was money return there. Elementary schools returned almost $400,000 to the schools closing down our operations. And I believe that was mostly from transportation savings. And our assessments came in lower than anticipated for charter and choice. And I think Sean could probably explain that better than I could. And then the enterprise funds, we had deficits. Where do we hold on the enterprise funds? I was thinking about that. I should have said at the beginning, it might be helpful to stop and let people ask questions about the general fund and then hit the enterprise funds after if that's okay. Yeah, that's fine. I'm sorry, I didn't number the pages in this full document with the attack on the attachments but if you look at the year to date budget reports that are attached, there's revenues and expenditures, you can actually see the excess and the deficits by department. So if you have any specific questions about that. I'll tell you that there's a lot of retirements that have been pending and there's a lot we've been doing a lot with transitional staff. So if you see deficits. It's not really that we overspent it's we were anticipating we're anticipating people that are retiring this year. And we can't because there's so much savings in this year, we were able to carry over funds in order to pay the payouts for the people. So it doesn't affect the fiscal 21 budget. And that's a legal thing to do. Just so you know. Okay, thank you. So let me share and you weren't here when we took, when we confirmed connections before so everybody else good here and be heard you're you're with us now. Yes, you hear me. Yes. Okay. Great. So what I'm going to do is we'll go through the see if there are questions on the general fund portion of the budget I'm going to save questions that that I have for the end and then because if they're asked by others I'll just not ask them. So, I'm going to go in order. I think Lynn was first to raise hands. So Lynn, do you have question. Yes, I had done mute sorry. So, I just want to go back to on the revenue side and ask under miscellaneous non recurring. The Amherst College 125 and the UMass 120. I didn't realize we got 25,000 from Amherst College. Is that not annual however, that's based on based on ambulance calls. So it fluctuates spend from anywhere from 80 to 135. And 120 for UMass also ambulance. Well, that's the last year our strategic partnership and right agreement that we had and right now that's that's not negotiated for the upcoming years. But that it does that include the money that the schools got here now. Okay. All right. And then my only other budget revenue. My only other question under revenue is the penalties on fees. I thought when we allowed deferment we weren't taking interest but this suggests we were. Well, this is for the for most of the most of the beginning of the year. I see. So it doesn't include from middle of March on. Right. Thank you. Those are my only questions on revenues. I have some others on. We can go with expenses. I just didn't want to get into the enterprise funds separately. Okay. And that so then I guess I would like an explanation on the elementary and the assessments on the choice and charter tuition came in lower than anticipated, Sean. I can speak a little bit. Those. So the, the schools that typically one of the big things I think was, there's typically a lot of additional work that goes on throughout the year time cards that especially a year and around professional development. Just a lot of that didn't happen the same way it's happened in the past because of COVID and some of the professional development they did was related to remote learning and that could be covered by cares act so that didn't have to come out of the budget. But the other big was the transportation contracts. So the transportation company didn't provide transportation the same way they always do throughout the entire year. So school districts had to sort of renegotiate with their transportation companies about what would be sort of a fair payment for the year. And so the cost for transportation came in quite a bit under because we didn't, they didn't pay them for the full year of transportation. And the assessments. So on the assessments, these are essentially how much, you know, it's based on our charter school enrollment and our number of students that choice out. And I believe when we look that at Sonya on the chart enrollment, I'll confirm this, but I believe when we looked at the charter enrollment was the big one. And the enrollment was down a handful of students from what we projected on the budget side. So the way these numbers are budgeted is their budgeted based on cherry sheets, which are often very conservative estimates of how many students will attend charter schools. And then the actual is based on the actual enrollment. So there's, there's often quite a bit of variance between what the cherry sheet projects for charter tuition and what the actual is. And that could be up or down based on a particular year, but there's usually quite a bit of variance there. Yeah, it's usually down. So that's why it seems a little strange. But not that wasn't related to COVID per se. Um, you know, I don't know if families made any choices about, you know, what schools they were attending, you know, during the second half of the year. So I don't think it was related to COVID, but I don't know for sure. And then under revenues, you said they're below projections. Do you have a total dollar amount for that area? Below projections. Yeah. Yeah. If you look at the subsequent pages. Okay. So if you look at the budget versus actual state statement, it'll actually show you what was budgeting and what actually came in. Yeah. Different things. So which one of you look the totals. Um, for each category or on here, what's over. So which one are you looking at particular? The total. I'll just go back and look at those. I don't know. Okay. So the total revenue deficit we have for the general fund is 458,730. Got it. Okay. It's not going to laugh about this, but if you remember a few months back, I said, we're going to be about $500,000 short. He was right. I've always been very, very. Amazed at your ability to project. I mean, I don't know, I don't know, I don't know how many actual expenditures later on in the thing. Not in this report. But we can talk about that with Paul, how we want to share that information. We are starting to do our reporting to the, through the state of actuals. So we've only done through June so far. And we'll be working on the second cycle soon. And just learn real quick to give you more specifics on the charter enrollment. I pulled up the reports. And we ended up with about 85 students from Amherst elementary, going to charter schools. And we ended up with 87. So we were about seven students under. What they projected. Okay. Those are my questions on the first two pages on the first three pages, actually. Yeah. Since you mentioned carousel funding, I'm actually going to interject only because it just fits right in. Okay. And one of the things that I had cut, it had was a request from another member of the council. Who looked at the report and then. Sent me one question. And I don't think that there's no way to answer it now. And I think you've already partially done it. But I just wanted to let you know it said. You know, you know, I think you'll be asking a finance committee for an accounting of how we have spent CARES Act funds so far and what's in process and what's left. And this should be public information. That's available. But I don't want staff and I'm reading. I don't want to have staff to have to do extra work. And I think that would be a great way to add the information that you have. But I think that might be a good idea. And I don't think that many of the finance reports were sent to the state with a little explanation that might. Be fine to suffice. The questioner's curiosity. Yeah. So, so we can again, I'll connect with Paul about how we, how we want to kind of share that info just as a general overview. You know, we did spend. And, and particularly in the end of. mainly on PPE, cleaning materials, supplies, disinfectant, sanitizer, you know, all the stuff you could imagine, and additional first responder costs. And there were some other things, some other costs mixed in, shelter costs and things of that nature. Hard part right now with giving exact amounts of money spent from CARES is that there are most of the CARES categories we also have to submit to FEMA for. It's a requirement of using the CARES Act money is that we submit to FEMA and FEMA will cover 75% of the costs they deem eligible and then CARES will cover just the 25% in those cases. So a lot of our costs are FEMA eligible. We think we submitted our first application and we're working on our second application. We still have to hear back to see if they are going to reject or accept all of the costs. And until we hear back from them, we won't know exactly how much FEMA is going to cover and how much CARES is going to cover. But you know, the people there's there was quite a bit of money given out in CARES Act money, and that doesn't include all the money that we potentially might get from FEMA reimbursements as well. Thank you. I'll try and see what I can include in the draft report and then run that by you. Hi, thank you. I'll go back to the other questioners because we're trying to get questions on the general fund portion of the report and then we'll come back and do enterprise funds. Dorothy Pam, you had your hand up. I have a question about projections. And we came in under a lot of projections, which looks really great. My question is when were these projections made? I mean, I know I should know this, but I don't. When were they made and were they made with COVID in mind so that they were lowered? Are these projections, the usual projections, or have they been adjusted for the situation we're in now? Sonya, do you want to take that one? Well, we didn't really, we just projected what COVID, the effects of COVID on our revenues. Back, Crips, when was it March towards the end of March? We just figured with a shutdown on all this, we just tried to figure out what revenues that we haven't collected yet that are realistic. So we just went through there and it was just like an internal projection. I can find the dates and I can find all that and send it to you. So my question really is, because it just came in looking too good, but it's good because you made reasonable projections and you, and you came in on it. But if you had the projections from before COVID, these numbers would be quite different. Well, I do have, this is projections before COVID. What happened is they came in, they came in less. What I projected was how much less they were going to come in. Right. Yeah. So I think Dorothy, just to add to what Sonya said, the budgets were pre COVID. So we, when, when these budgets were developed, we didn't, that was back in the spring of 2019. So we didn't have any idea about COVID back then. So that's why these things are coming in better, in particular on the expenditure side, because we didn't know about COVID when the expenditure budgets were developed. And then Sonya was projecting revenue deficits throughout the whole, you know, she kind of always updating that projection throughout the year. Because to me, it looked like some of the revenue, the revenue, the revenue must be down a lot from like a year ago, two years ago. But since you projected a decline in the revenue because of COVID, it doesn't look as bad as it really is. This is what I'm really trying to get at. Yeah. So, so we really didn't project a decline in revenue for FY 20 in terms of the budget because we didn't know about COVID at that time. Really, where you'll see the projection in decline in revenue is for FY 21. For FY 21, you'll see that the revenues were decreased significantly. And that's because, because of COVID. Okay. So the budget is based on COVID and a slow recovery. Okay. Thank you. Kathy? Yeah, I want to go up a little bit. I'm in expenditures for now. The amount, the benefits came in in terms of a saving Sonya. You said this was mainly from over projecting them earlier in the switchover. Is that I took that then we can't expect this to happen again. But I thought we also got some money back because our use as in the rest of the country, even Medicare was way down under COVID and some insurance companies were giving premiums back because they realized none of us were going to the doctor at the hospital. So how much of that 712? That's in this fiscal year. Yeah, we're going to have a half a month of premium holiday. But that was for this fiscal year. Okay. So none of that was first. This other is back. So we'll get something this year, but not at this level. Right. Okay. Then on public safety, you said it's mainly during the staff turnover. I was wondering whether we had budgeted for overtime, particularly in fire and the fire EMT and the engine fire EMT engines weren't running over to the hospital. Same thing. Did we come in under what we had budgeted for amount? I know our revenues were down in the ambulance, but I'm just wondering if we came down in hours worked, hours built, however we build in the amount of time that that's potentially overtime. No, there wasn't any, there wasn't really any savings in fire department. They actually overspent their budget. There was a lot of repairs to vehicles that were done. Okay. So most of the savings in public safety came from the police department and the facility, the police facility is also under public safety and a chiller went last year early on. I don't know if everybody remembers and we fixed that chiller and we are waiting to see if there was going to be enough savings in public safety as a whole to cover what that chiller cost and there was, but it does reduce the amount of money coming back. It was mostly positions not filled and with fire, we were able to hire with COVID the last three months with COVID extra firefighters, but there was a lot of things going on at the fire department. So there really wasn't a lot of savings in the first three months of the last three months of fiscal year 20. Okay. Can I just ask you just mentioned the chiller went and you could use some of the savings. So when we're in a situation where the operating budget is coming in well below what we expected, can we move money over to something like a chiller? This happened at the very beginning of the year and normally back in the day when we had town meeting, we would always have that reserve on transfer appropriation of $100,000 for emergencies like this. So now because it's not just a two twice a year town meeting with a chiller like that, as long as we get permission from the state to emergency spend, we can and then we cover it after the fact. So we didn't have to go and ask for supplemental appropriation for this. So we just covered it with savings. Okay. It gets complicated. Okay. And then my other question is building on to Lynn's talking about the assessments and charter. We're always, so if we were and you are now in the projections for the next fiscal year, do you use the actual rates of charter enrollment that we just experienced, or do you go back to whatever the state says? And I'm just wondering how much we can fine tune our choice so that, I mean, it's of course great to get 420 back when you've over budgeted something and you wouldn't like it to flip the other way, but I don't have flexibility with that. That's a state number that gets booked in and we have to book that number. Okay, that answer. So you just have to book the state number in and then you could be lower high if their number is lower high. Okay. Okay. Thank you very much. Karen. Andy, can I jump in real quick and just let Bob know that if he wants to raise his hand, he can press star nine. He's joined on his phone. I didn't notice that. So Bob, star nine. Yeah, I can hear everyone. People off and on. My internet connection is wobbly. Okay. Well, if you want to raise your hand, do so. Sharon. I have a question also about projections. The cannabis, which was not budgeted for FY 20, is there a projection for next year and is that going to be budgeted in? We did not budget for a 21 cannabis for 21. We didn't put it, use it as part of the revenues. We're looking at it for 2018. Normally, we don't put, start a budget on things until you've had at least two or three years of trend. Yeah, that I guess that was my question. So do you see a trend in that? I know that that was shut down for a while. We only have really the one year for trend and we just opened up another one of the facilities just opened up. So I think there's another one coming. So it's going to be a while before we get any really kind of steady trend on that. Okay. I was thinking it was at least two years. I guess I must be ahead of myself. Must be thinking of Northampton. Great. Thank you. Actually, that was the other question that I had. So I'll just finish out the comment that I had thought about. I think it would be very helpful if we, and I know that there's at least one counselor who's not on the committee who's raised this question and other contexts of wanting to have more information available about what's coming in in revenue, both the fees that come in as a result of the host community agreements and excise taxes. And if we could get some breakdown as to what's coming in, and so that we can project into the future and have a sense of what it really means for the community. I think what everybody is anxious to know is when we're going to be able to actually have numbers so we can start budgeting against and what we're choosing to budget against for it. I know that there was a lot of community concern at the time that we were originally setting up the host community agreements about things like assuring community public health and education, work with the schools, things like that. So I think it's a mechanism to continue those conversations. So I'll just say that I don't know that there's any response right now, but the request is out there for more than one person. So I will let him, that information is on the quarterly reports every quarter. So if you look at the revenues on the quarter, it is broken out cannabis tax and there's fees. Does that include any payments that are other than the tax that are provided by the host community agreements? That's the tax that comes in through the state. But there were additional fees. Right. And that's under fees. And I haven't broken that out yet because the only fee that we have so far is cannabis is host agreement fees. So you'll see there's $206,000. That's the host agreements. So $200 and that's, I think there might be $600 for short-term rental in there, but that's it. So it's $206,000 for the host community agreement and then the excise tax is separately listed. So that information is included in these quarterly reports. I'll take a further look and then get back if there's additional questions. In the meantime, Bernie Kubiak, do you have a question? I think I've unmuted myself. Yeah, the marijuana questions got answered, but I've got one that sort of concerns, that scares. I know that folks have been really rigorous about trying to build against the CARES Act. I also know that the Department of Revenue just released new guidance. And so the question is really, is that new guidance going to alter the way we've been able to use the CARES Fund? Is that going to be favorable to us or unfavorable? So it's affected some. It hasn't really changed anything that I can think of in terms of what we've already used CARES Act funds for. There's something else that changed recently that might. FEMA, MEMA, which is the Massachusetts Emergency Management Group emailed us about changes that FEMA is making in terms of what they will reimburse for, particularly around PPE. And so they've encouraged us to get another FEMA application in for all of our expenses prior to September 15th, because FEMA is changing how they consider some stuff after September 15th. So that may mean that we get less reimbursement from FEMA and then would rely more on our CARES money. Some of the things in the new CARES Act guidance weren't so much changes. It was more clarifications of what is going to be considered eligible and what's not going to be considered eligible. The main things really haven't changed in terms of we still have to be unbudgeted. So it's going to be necessary due to COVID and we have to incur the expense prior to December 30th. But they gave a little more specificity around certain requests and can we buy vehicles or can we build new buildings? They clarified the answer to those types of things. But there wasn't actually a ton that change with the new guidance. It was more clarification, I would say. Okay. Yeah, because I know from newspaper reports that FEMA is basically going to wipe out the reimbursement for PPE. Yeah, that's more on the I believe that's more on the FEMA side. FEMA was saying that if you're not buying PPE for first responders while they're actually on a call for COVID, then they're not going to reimburse for it. Whereas before, you know, PPE for teachers and PPE for other municipal staff working with the public, that we were considered to be eligible. They've sort of brought that in to be a very specific PPE for COVID specific calls for emergency workers. And again, that's sort of the after September 15th piece. Okay, thanks. And anything else on the general fund? I think the one thing that I was the last thing I was going to ask was the on the page that's on the screen now where it says like licenses and permits, actual receipts were 142.5% year to date, mostly due to some large fellow projects. That does not include liquor license and that kind of fees. Now under, yes, it would include that. 20s. Yeah, I think that this is additional. It's really not a part of this report, but I just want to throw it out there is that I think the finance committee might like to know if there's going to be a renegotiation of liquor license fee charges for the next round, what that amount might come to and how that's going to affect future budgets, but that's not in something that needs response now, just so that you know that there's an interest in it. The town manager has started talking to us about that. So yeah, I know and he mentioned it very briefly last night and it seemed to be a work in progress in the future question, not a past question. So is there anything else on the general fund part of the budget? If not, I'm going to ask Sonia to take us through the enterprise funds and then get questions on the enterprise funds. I think that's where we are in the process. So the enterprise funds are the ones that got hit pretty hard this year. Water and sewer was a combination. It was COVID and the consumption numbers were a bit, were high higher than what's been half the trend started to go down with consumption and it takes a while for budgets to get adjusted because we do these so far ahead of time. So our sewer our sewer fund ended up with a $753,000 revenue deficit and we returned $104,000 in expenditures which gave us a net of $648,525 and that hit undesignated fund balance. And Sonia, maybe after you read these I'll just I'll give the the ending fund balance because that information was requested. Is that okay? Well, I was just going to say. You're going to say it perfect. Go ahead. So this week I filed for our free cash and retained earnings certification and I have certified numbers yet but the estimate for fund balance and sewer is about 1.69 million. So that's what around where we're going to be. And then on the water, is that what you were going to say, Sean? Yeah, perfect. Thank you. And then on the water fund, our revenue ended up with a $544,000 revenue deficit and we returned $45,444, leaving a $500,000 deficit and our water retained earnings. I'm hoping we'll come in at 1.78 million. I didn't want to put these documents out so their public record until they're actually certified from the state. Sonia, can I just ask you and Sean, is that about what we were seeing when we were looking at the budget for this year that you had expected that kind of draw on the reserves? Yeah, it was in the ballpark. We had projected losses. I'll pull that out to see where we were, but I believe we were pretty close for water and sewer in terms of what we were projecting for our deficit. Yeah, we were pretty on top of those when they came in. And a solid waste, which is usually the problem child and it still is, but that actually came in with a little bit of a growth here. Our revenues came in at almost $6,000 more and our expenditure to turn back is $102. So that gave us a growth in the fund balance of $6,068, which left us with an $86,586,500 fund balance. Now that's a little lower because, no, yes, that's a little lower because we took some money for a match for a roll off truck, if you remember. So that's already subtracted from all of this. And the last one is transportation. We stopped writing tickets, which hurt. So our transportation fund, we had a revenue deficit of $303,000. And what we did is we altered our retained earnings by $244,838 so that we wouldn't have a revenue, I mean an expense deficit as well. So we made that a net zero this year so that we wouldn't have to put a deficit on the tax rate. And that's pretty much it. And I will say that we're at the end of September now, so probably in a week or two once all the revenues are posted, we could do the first quarter report and kind of give everybody an idea of where we are with all the revenues for the first three months of this fiscal year, just to see if they're on with our lower projections that we did for fiscal year 21. Yeah, we may include some of that information as part of the financial indicators report. We're still pulling that together, but we assume people will be interested in that. So that might be a couple of slides on that as well. So I've got questions and comments people have regarding the Enterprise Fund's loan. Yeah, could you just go back to that Enterprise Fund page please? I just want to make sure. So either by raising the money for sewer, the amount people pay for sewer and water or in the transportation fund situation by absorbing the debt elsewhere, we're going into FY 21 without carrying forward these deficits. Is that true? They all net out in the fund balance revenues and expenditures. The general fund actually took the hit for the transportation fund because we have our indirect cost. We lowered the indirect cost for transportation. The general fund continued to take a hit for FY 21 a little bit. We lowered it for FY 21 and for FY 20. Okay, I just wanted to make sure I understood that we're not going into FY 21 carrying any of this deficit forward. And we did adjust revenue projections for FY 21 to factor some of this in. It's just how the magnitude of the impact of COVID on these things will be, that's what we're monitoring very closely. We assumed one semester potentially gone with the colleges and the impact that has on consumption for water, sewer and transportation, but we still don't know what the second semester looks like and just the overall, you know, decrease in the population in town. Yes, got it. Thank you. Dorothy? Okay, so I have a question about solid waste. So we know that we lost revenue from UMass, but then I remember reading in general things about the United States that a lot of towns found that their sewer use had increased because people weren't going out to business or going to another town. They were all staying home. So I'm wondering how that is reflected in these numbers. Well, sewer revenues are based on water consumption. So it's like 85% of water consumption is what gets built out for sewer is what comes in goes out normally. But we're not seeing big drops. I mean, the last time I looked at it at least, we're not seeing a big reduction in the water and sewer usage of sort of the normal town accounts, the residential accounts. Really, where we're seeing the big drop is in our college accounts college and university accounts where there's just fewer people. But have the so usage of private residents, if everybody's home and they're using more water and they're using more sewer, their fees to the town will be going up. Is that not correct? It is if they're using more. We can look at the numbers closer. I don't know if I saw that they were using more on the residential side, but I have to look at it again. Okay. Well, I know that's what happened in some towns. So just curious to know if that was kind of balancing things out a little bit. That's all. Okay. Anything else or not? Kathy? Hi. Sean, we're, we've got three full months of water and sewer use. And you said we're going to wait and get a full six months. Did we, we did not know when we initially looked at rates in June, I think we did not know that UMass was not going to come back at the extent, you know, they, they were still planning on a lot more people on campus. And then, you know, I know the students didn't know until the end of August, just before they were due to come back. So do you have a first three months and then the best guess for six months on how much off we are going to be, I know we lowered our revenue, but are we going to be off a lot for the current fiscal year on revenues compared to what we thought we were going to get, even though we had already lowered those? Yeah. So that's what we're looking at now with DPW and, and the water folks over there. We're looking at how much our production, you know, what we estimated and how we came to those numbers versus what we're seeing. Again, we'll include information in the financial indicators report on enterprise funds because that, that along with some of our local receipts are probably the two most concerning areas of our budget, just not at the present time, like there's something jumping out at us. But just as we go forward into the year, those are the areas where I see the most risk if we don't see a rebound from where we were in the spring, that are not the revenue numbers could come in lower than what we budgeted. So we do have an idea it is lower, but we have to project out what we were waiting to see is sort of September and October. Now the college students are back to some extent, what those numbers look like because during the summer it was well below, you know, what it normally was. And the reason I'm pushing on it, as everyone here knows, we did a big hike in water rates and sewer rates. And then going out, starting this year or next year, we're starting to take on the debt service and the water fund both for the study and then we start taking it on for Centennial. And that was already built into a rate increase. But my understanding of the way we were moderating those increases was to draw down on reserves. And we're, we just drew down on reserves for the fiscal year that's over. If we're going to start drawing down on them again in the, in this fiscal year, I think my math says the rates are going to have to go up more than we had said. And so if we could have a mid-year, like January, you know, does it look like that's going to happen or not? You know, I know it's still going to be guesstimates and best estimates, but early warnings on some of this, because people were surprised by the increase. And people who asked me, I also said, that's not just this current year, but it's going to keep going up, you know, because we had the projection. So just trying to get ahead of that so that we don't have a may surprise for people, you know. Absolutely. I don't, Sonya, correct me if I'm wrong. I don't believe that we were relying on reserves to fund any of the debt. You know, in the future, I don't think the reserves were kind of keeping the rates down, but maybe I missed that, but I don't believe so. We weren't. So none of it came out of reserves because I thought Guilford said part of the study costs were going to come out of reserves. Yeah. I mean, there may have been specific, like capital projects. There's always some capital projects we do each year. Potentially maybe a specific capital project was earmarked from reserves, but I don't think there was ever a plan to sort of use ongoing reserves to support any of those large projects or keep the rate down. But we'll double check and get back to you. Okay. So yeah, but I hear you guys, I hear again, it's one of the highest priorities for us is monitoring the water and sewer consumption. So we'll keep you informed as we go on. Okay. Thank you. I know we have some members of the public present. I just want to remind everybody who's watching meeting now or watching it later on. If you are interested in the documents that you see on the screen or in the other documents that were provided to the committee, if you go into the town website under council and then committee's finance committee and then pack it for today's meeting, you will find all of these documents are available to you. So back to the committee sharing you had a question. Just a quick question. Again, maybe you said more about this, but I just heard you say about the solid waste fund. It was a blip that they actually had a surplus. Is that is that just a one-time thing or, you know, or is that perhaps ongoing or just you could say something about that? I think it's just our revenues came in a little better than we projected. That's all. I don't think we've raised our rates like mid-year last year. So I think this is just showing that. And I think we benefited sort of what Dorothy was talking about before with people being home a lot. You know, we definitely heard a lot about people cleaning out their garages and doing yard work and more of that type of thing. So, you know, we speculate that that may have helped contribute to the revenue increase that we saw. Anything else? I guess the one thing that I'll just show you if you have any comment on this. And I'm always anxious about the transportation fund because parking fees vary in their circumstances such as we're in, but PVTA expenses, I assume, remain constant. And I assume that all of that is factored in it is essentially part of what was being absorbed by adjusting the amount that's being reimbursed to the general fund. Actually, PVTA was covered still. So that's still part of a fee coming into the general fund. So transportation is still covering the PVTA. And I did talk to Doug Slaughter about that because he still has a role. I don't know if it's on their board, but he's very well versed in the PVTA. And when I've spoken to him, it did seem like there is some flexibility to reduce costs a little bit. They have sort of their summer runs and that cuts back a little bit on bus routes. And he wasn't sure if that, how long those summer runs would continue with fewer students at UMass and if that would impact how many total bus routes there were to potentially have lower costs. So we'll get more information on that. So if I can go back to answer the water and sewer retained earnings use for future years, there was no retained earnings use for the future years to offset any of the debt. The only use of retained earnings was in the sewer fund for fiscal year 21 because it's so unknown. Thank you. Anything else on the fourth quarter year end report? We've covered both both parts of it, the general fund and the enterprise fund. So Kathy, your hand up. Did you have a final question? Yeah, I had just a final, a future looking question for Sean. At an earlier meeting, Sean, you said you were looking at parking fees, permit fees, fee setting policies. Do you have a sense, and it's partly because I've got a half written memo I was going to send you, but do you have a sense of how far along you will be when because the stickers that people get, so they have a resident parking permit, if we wanted to look at some of those, not just the meter fees, if we could be saying there's a source of revenue here that we could adjust should we want to. So in terms of parking, I think we did pretty good in terms of looking at comps and being able to pull comp rates from a couple other communities. We did look at all fees and other fee areas were a little more difficult to find comps because sometimes fees vary pretty significantly just in terms of what the fee is for. So it's hard to compare apples to apples sometimes for certain ones. But in terms of parking, I think we actually did a pretty good job. So we have some of that information already. Okay. Thank you. So if there's any nothing else on the year and fourth quarter report, we can get on to the next agenda item, which is the FY 22 budget process and a good separate calendar on that. And it's now on the screen. So I don't know if you want to give any review. I had a question under comment and then but I'll see what else the committee has first. Okay. So we sort of have two of these. I'll just do a really brief overview. There's sort of one big one looking at the whole year. So people can kind of get a sense of where different pieces kick in and then there's this sort of couple months looking forward at what's coming up. So this is the full year one. Let me get a little bigger. And there's no specific dates in here. It's more about sort of relationships between different entities. So we've got the town manager. We've got other committees like the elementary school committee, the region school committee in the library, the budget coordinating group, the finance committee and the town council. And this is all under sort of the regular budget process. So just doing a quick overview of sort of the order of things. And there's a lot of staff and other things that happen in between that I've sort of carved out to try to focus it on the major, the major tasks that we have for the budget for FY 22. But essentially the town manager, we do this financial indicators report in November, which I believe is scheduled for November 9th. That sort of kicks off the budget process in a lot of ways. The next piece, it comes down to the finance committee. Actually, sorry, the next piece of that is the actual budget forum that the town council will hold. Andy, is that a town council budget forum or is it a finance committee? Council is required to hold the forum. The hearing that happens later is committee hearing. Great. So then there'll be a budget forum and I think that's the week after the financial indicators report. The finance committee, I believe typically has a deliberation after all of that. And it talks about, you know, the different components of the budget and that will happen sometime. It might take longer this year, given all the things going on, but that'll happen in November. And then ultimately down here, at the end of November, the council would issue some sort of budget guidelines. And again, some of these things, these are just rough dates. Some of these might get extended or changed because of COVID and all the uncertainty. Once the budget guidelines are issued, then there's sort of a break in time for us to really work on developing the budget. And that's where a lot of the staff activity happens, meeting with department heads, doing all of our projections, getting all of our inputs. And then BCG, I believe, is required to meet once a year. So that's, I think last year happened in February. And sometimes there could be more meetings of BCG depending on the year. This might be a year where there needs to be more meetings of the budget coordinating group because there, again, there could be some uncertainty and require some coordination between different budgets between the schools, the library and the town. The next piece that comes up is we need the school committee and the Jones library, I believe approved budgets by the end of March. So the town manager has those budgets ready for his overall budget that's presented to the council. Then we go down here to town council. There's some presentations of the regional school information because the regional school is taken out of the regular timeline, at least in the past, it's been taken out of the regular schedule of considering the budget. And that's because of the other member town. So when they hold their town meeting, so the council has typically worked on the regional school a little sooner. Same thing, the finance committee will have a hearing on the regional school and a recommendation and I'll skip over a little bit more. So there's lots more discussions, presentations that go on with the finance committee. Ultimately the finance committee will vote a recommendation and then it'll go to the town council for approval. So sort of a general overview, all these dates and will change a little bit. But there's obviously a lot of weaving in and out from different committees and staff. And then sorry, go ahead, Andy. Maybe just make a general comment and then I'll finish up and get on to questions from other members of the committee. The assumption we're making right now is that we're adhering to the dates that are incorporated in the charter that we're not, even if the governor's emergency is continuing that we're going to assume a budget on the normal schedule and not to what we did this last year. Yeah, that's our assumption at the current time is that we're going to try to get back to doing the full year budget based on the dates in the charter. You know, we were close to being able to do that last year. We decided to go for the one month to see if we got any more information. But yeah, for this calendar that we're looking for at this point, it's based on the charter. Yeah, and I'll just add one little piece to that is that we will find this out if we have four town meetings this year in either Zoom format or otherwise. But the reason that we take our budget for the regional schools out of order is to try and coincide with town meetings of other towns. If we find the town meetings of other towns are not on the traditional end of the April beginning of May dates, then we might reevaluate that. Yeah, that's a good point. And one other page I just didn't show you, but just so this committee is aware of sort of the other timelines for capital. A lot of the dates for finance committee in the council in terms of reviewing and discussing sort of the same, but the joint capital planning committee's work really takes place over the months of February and March. So they'll have several meetings throughout those two months and we don't know what capital will look like next year. This is based on sort of a typical capital allocation, but again that obviously could change. And then CPA, we did make a change to the timing of CPA this year. So I think the committee should be aware of. I think last year the CPA sort of took place in the late winter, early spring along with everything else. This year we decided to move it to the fall so that it kind of have its own time slot and maybe be focused on its own. So it wasn't intermingled with everything else. It also helps because we'll know by the end of the CPA process what projects have been recommended. And that will help JCPC and capital because in the past there's sometimes been projects that were being considered by both CPA and JCPC and they weren't quite sure was it going to be approved by either body. At this point, with the way this calendar is set up, we'll know before JCPC starts what projects CPA is recommending. So that's the overview. And then in terms of specific dates, so some of the stuff we've done, just as a reminder to the finance committee, we are trying to do an update of the full budget document. It's not, we're not looking to kind of make it 100% different. You know, people are used to certain types of formats and the way certain things are presented. But we are trying to provide more information and streamline the information a little bit on the back end and maybe make it a little easier to go through. So we're still taking feedback so people have reviewed the budget document and think there's certain pieces that could be changed or improved. You can send that over to us. We talked about reviewing the water rate structure, which we'll talk about later on. We have already started projections for next year with limited information. We have all the CPA dates in here and we've begun working on the financial indicators report. Here on the 9th, that's when the print, that's sort of the next big budget date that's coming up for the financial indicators report, followed by on the 16th, the council's budget forum, a few more community preservation committee meetings, and some of these dates will, you know, it depends how many proposals we get. We want to stick to this calendar as best we can, but we ultimately need to see how many proposals come in for CPA. We've got a tentative date for finance committee to discuss an initial recommendation on budget guidelines, and again, a tentative date for town council to adopt those budget guidelines. We have a final report date for community preservation committee, the BCG date, and a kickoff date for JCPC. Any questions on some of the things that are coming up? Let me just say one thing, and then I'm going to ask Lynn. And that is that I will want to circle back and talk about the dates for budget guidelines from the council, both the finance committee recommendation of the council and the council's discussion. I think that might be a more complex process than it has been prior years, and I'm not sure those dates will work, but I'll see if we get comments on it. Lynn. In fact, that's one of the ones I'll comment on. So first of all, November 9th is correct. That is when we are having the financial indicators previously known as the four boards, now only three boards. And I want to make sure that all of the finance committee resident members are aware of that date. That meeting will be at 5.30 that night, and we'll make sure you are invited. The meeting that is in fact going to be the hearing, not the hearing, the public budget forum is actually on Thursday, November 19th. And it's separate from a council meeting. We only have two council meetings in November because of the election and Thanksgiving. And there are two Mondays in a row, and so we're having a separate night that we're doing the budget forum. That will be the 19th at 6.30. And then I also just want to point out, and this is consistent with where Andy will need to go on the budget guidelines. And that is that we do not even have a council meeting scheduled for November 30th at this time. There might be a reason to schedule it right now. Our meetings in December are December 7th, which is when we're going to do State of the Town, but also have a regular meeting as well, and then also December 21st. But I would agree with Andy that the budget guidelines might take a little more time to develop. And then one other thing, and that is it turns out that the way the charter is written, BCG, budget coordinating group, is essentially equal to the group that assembles for the financial indicators. And because you need to have quote representation from the town council, the school committee, and the Jones Library. So the reality is we call that meeting for the financial indicators as the BCG meeting. The BCG meeting that you've projected here in February, God forbid that we have to have it, we only had it this year because we had to completely relook at the guidelines once COVID hit. And so I'm not clear that there would be another BCG meeting until we get a sense of just how difficult it will be to project guidelines early on and then have to change them or augment them the way we did. Andy, the rest is all that you want to say about all of that too. Yeah, as far as the BCG is concerned, I think that the reason that it gets placed logically where Sean has it right now is just a hold for nothing else, is that in traditional years when the governor releases his proposed budget at the end of January, it's the first indication that we have that there may be a variation in a significant budget item which is state aid. And this is going to be a precarious year for what we are going to receive for the state. I think we have to recognize the uncertainty. And for that reason it is probably worth holding a date for BCG because if there is something that is very different from the financial indicators meeting and the first projections, we have to have room to talk about it. And so that's why I think it is worth having a BCG meeting. And it might be as early in February as we can think is reasonable to have it, but it's good to have it as a hold on to the schedule. I just wanted to explain that in previous period, the year before when things were quote normal, we never had a second BCG meeting. We just had the financial indicators meeting. I think that's right. Sean or Sonia can comment on this or anybody else who wants to, but it really depends upon how we're looking on that particular indicator and whether that's going to require further discussion that needs to involve schools and library in addition. And that's why I think that we hold that. Great. Anything else, Lynn? Nope. Kathy, you had your hand up. Yeah. Lynn already hit on one of them on November 9th. I guess the suggestion is also it's financial indicators report slash BCG meeting just so people understand it's got schools and library there too. My question is on when you get down to the capital side and you're doing your projections, you had said during JC, the joint capital planning committee meeting in September, Sean, that you might be trying a way of saying, well, we're at 5% this year for capital because we had to cut way back on capital. Maybe we can go to 6% or 7%. You were going to have a few different markers. So if we come out, I don't know how you're going to handle it when you come out to guideline, when the budget guidelines and then how that's going to feed into JCPC, but it feels like somewhere in the guidelines, since that's our flexibility if we are short on revenues that we don't want to slash operating budgets. If we have to do that again, you might want to have in an unusual way a couple different capital scenarios coming out of guidelines. And then have JCPC, maybe by February that will be settled down enough that we have more certainty. But the same thing is that people should understand with the revenue projections being far less certain than they've been in the past. That is our place that we're, I shouldn't use the word flexible, but that's where we were flexible this past year. So just trying to think of a couple scenarios right from the beginning, both so all residents understand that we're trying to do that, but we also have JCPC starting the meeting, understanding that we're not going to start with one number and have it completely change a month later, which is what happened last year, but potentially we're starting with two targets. Yeah, I mean, so I think some of it, I think those are good points. Some of it just depends on what guidelines are issued by the town council and sort of where, like you said, where revenues are at when we get to the point of developing the capital improvement program. Because when we present the capital improvement program to JCPC to consider, we can either include a couple options if there's still a lot of unknown at that point, or we can go with what we think is the best, the most accurate estimate of what'll be available for capital. I think it'll depend when we get to the spring and we see what we know about revenues, what the state's budget looks like, but no, that may be an option for the for the capital improvement program. And I just thought when the council as a whole, or when finance is first looking at guidelines, and then it goes to the council for discussion of the forum, the more people understand that we may not be out of that uncertainty yet, the better. And that this is where this is where if we have to, we can be flexible. So whether we peg it at our best guess and say, but it is our best guess. And, you know, at the national level, sometimes the congressional budget office does a best guess, a low and a high, you know, like, you know, sort of it could come in five, you know, or something, some people are, it's always just one number. It's not like people work with two numbers more than once, but just, it feels like this is going to be that kind of year to me. And, you know, maybe the spring springs with sunshine again, and without virus, you know, sort of a series of withouts. But otherwise, we're going to continue in this world where we don't know what local receipts are, we don't know how well the state can continue to draw in its rainy day fund so it doesn't hit localities. So I just think we've got a shifting sand underneath. Yeah, we're still in the same place we are, you know, in the spring that we were last year. Last year, we did best, you know, we did best case a worst case scenario projections as well. I remember one of the first meetings I attended, we were looking at sort of a best and worst case scenario. So no, yeah, that's a good point where we're, that's definitely something we'll be considering based on what the outlook looks like at the time. Yeah, thank you. Anything else, Kathy? No, that was it. Dorothy? Two parts. The first one is, although it's hard for me to read this on my computer, the color coding is really a good idea. It's very helpful. And also, I don't know how to print an Excel chart because it comes out just one page. But I think that this set of documents right here should be on the town website, but maybe not in the place you would normally put it, or at least in an additional place. Some place that's very easy for somebody who does not go, I mean, the general public, who's not used to going into SharePoint or other points. And with some kind of like type, the budget year or some such thing. Because I think a lot of people who don't really get into the nitty gritty too much might want to have some idea of the process and how the different boards come in. And there are a lot of people involved in the town who are on all these boards too. So that's point one, because I think this is a very helpful document. And then my second one, building on what Kathy said, but maybe making it, stating it more specifically. Last night at town council, a date was given, which I don't remember what it was, as to when we the town would be asked, are we in a position to accept the library money for the new building? And I wanted to know where we would be in our budget process when we have to, about time we'd have to make that decision. And then coupled with that is the school thing is not yet happening. I mean, is there a time or a date when we might have to make a similar statement about going forward with the school proposal? Want me to try to go after either of those, Andy? Yes. As far as your suggestion about the budget calendar and posting, we have actually, SharePoint is for counselors only, but there's a budget page under, when you go to the website under government, there's budget, and having the calendar on the budget page in the fairly, makes it a fairly prominent place if it comes up there fairly quickly. So Sean can work with us on that. Yeah, we'll set up the FY 22 budget page after this meeting and get the calendar up. So it will be there. So back to the library question, I'll turn it over to Lynn. So let me backtrack and just say that when, as we, as we approached June, et cetera, of this past year of FY 20, in other words, just this year, several of the library statewide that were coming up on the list, including Amherst, were very straightforward with the Mass Board of Library commissioners and said, we're not sure that this would be the year for us to be able to get the funding for a new addition. And so with all of that, and not just Amherst, but going down the list, the Mass Board of Library commissioners decided to do was in fact use the $20 million that they got this year to backfund, if not backfund, but to provide funding to those library projects that had already voted and gotten started using their town money. Right. I believe four of them. And so that's what they used their money for, which took the pressure off this past year. However, sometime around April, May or so, we'll start hearing what the pin is for the coming year. And that will indicate whether or not, because we are number two in the queue, but with the idea that we would actually be coming up possibly as early as FY 21, we'll be coming, well, is it's whether or not, whether or not they're going to go forward the way they originally were planning to do. At that point, the town will not know officially, quote, officially being the budget until July 1. And we have a certain number of months in which we have to either accept the grant and then sign on the battle line or not accept the grant. In addition to that, there are both state and federal efforts going on to identify additional library money. In fact, at the state level, another 115 million has already been identified, quote, in a bond bill. Now bond bills can sit there for years and never get funded. So I just want to be clear that that doesn't mean a damn thing. But the idea is that if the bond bill did get funded, then the goal would be to go back to library commissioners and have them fund 75% of the eligible money needed for the library renovation and addition. It gets extremely complicated and convoluted, but the bottom line is because they decided not to fund Amherst for FY 21, the earliest it would happen would be FY 22. And again, that would be capital money, and it would be over a period of years, not in the general revenue budget, but capital. Right. But would we know what our financial health was at that time? So that was the goal, actually, by trying to have it put off a year would be, yes, the goal would be that we would know much more about our financial health. Okay. Then the schools, actually, it's almost a two-year process to get to the point that you have to do the next decision point on the schools. And that's the decision point at which you say, yes, we're going to go ahead. And we have completed our curriculum plan. And Kathy, you're on that. I guess it's getting ready to meet or going to as met for its first meeting. And it takes a while to do the curriculum plan and to get ready to go to the next phase. So that's off for almost another year or so. So the town would make a commitment, if they do make a commitment, to the library before we have the chance to make a commitment to the school. Is that right? That is correct, although the hope would be we would have an estimate of the school, begin to be able to estimate what the school is. Okay. Out there in the float of all of that is still the issue of DPW and FIRE. And the idea would be that we would get back to, and this really goes back to Sean, the note I've had for my conversations with Paul, and that is getting back to the model that we were looking at before. We're trying, what we're also trying to do is come in with, you know, kind of, there is a possibility that at some point, finance committee and the council, you know, working with the manager and their financial people are just going to say, this is how much you have versus the sky's the limit. Which other towns, by the way, have done. Right. Thank you. You're most welcome. Okay. Anything else? Kathy, did you have something else your hand? Yeah, I just wanted to build on what Lynn said and Dorothy asked. We'll have a best guess date for the school as well as a range of estimates for the school. At the point, we're having to look at the library because that decision has to come first. So I think we have to look at them jointly, because we probably will not have enough internal funds. And this is one Sean is going to be able to tell us to do both out of just our cash flow. So even though we're making a decision on one, it has a direct implication for the other. So, you know, it's, it's, it's, we're going to have to have a context as we look at that. And it is a year off from now. And when I asked Sean on best guess on when, you know, I'm trying to which fiscal year, FY 24, FY 25, it's in that world. So it's not going to come in in FY 22 or 23. But maybe, you know, and our first meeting hasn't happened yet. We're about to have the first one at the end of October. The call, you know, so it's, but it's in the same, you know, it's not 20 years from now. You know, it's in, if we're talking about it in a, in a five year span, they're probably both drawing on what we're able to do plus the savings fund we've built up in reserves and that interplay. So I don't think there's going to be any way around trying to think of them together. And as Lynn says, then put two more in the pot. But those two more may not have to be in that five year period. It may, but it may be some big expenses for them. We don't know yet on those. But at least those two are kind of tied together because of the number of years that we'll have, we have to make a decision and an up or down to draw on resources. I think that's a reasonable and important point. And I appreciate you bringing it up. I'm going to just make my concluding observations about sort of the fall part of the process and then look if they know further questions. What I'm going to do is see if there's anyone from the public who wants to do public comment, then move to the capital funding needs and plan. Not, not the capital funding needs and plan. The question of the capital inventory and a brief discussion of water sewer rates. I don't think that we're really going to get much into capital funding needs and plan with the time that's allotted today. And I don't, I was put on as a placeholder. But if there's any member of the public who would like to make public comment on anything that has come up so far, they certainly should raise their hand and I'd be glad to recognize them because we do have a policy that any matters that are within the jurisdiction of the committee can come as public comment. At this point, I didn't see anybody raising their hand. So I've lost my participant list for the moment. So there is no one who has. So I think that we can can go on and what I was just doing the generally comment about the end of the calendar process is when we get to the financial indicators meeting, I hope that there's going to be some time that's going to be built in from discussion amongst the three boards that are present because there's a lot of issues that are going to be proposed possibly certainly we're going to have information that we're going to have to digest about them. And there are a couple of key questions, one that Kathy's already alluded to and that and that is the question of capital and what assumption that we're going to make about the percentage for capital as we define it in the current policy. And that, you know, this year we cut our capital back by half and postponed it if we're going to have a reasonable five-year plan that's just going to take care of ongoing capital needs. We need to start knowing what we're doing moving forward and recognizing the consequence of any such decision again. And the other is question of use of reserves to supplement either immediate capital needs or supporting budget operating budgets. And that discussion is going to be informed by what we hear at the financial indicators meeting and is going to then come forward further through the public through the forum and get back to this committee. So, but I hope that we have discussion amongst the boards that night that will begin that discussion that can then follow through that process. By the time it gets back to this committee to develop a recommendation to the council for budget guidelines, if there's going to be a lot of information on the table and I don't know that we can do it in one meeting, I think it's going to take at least several meetings to provide to produce that agreement on that recommendation we're making to the council. And we're going to have and I think that the council is going to need to have time to digest the issues at that point. And some a little bit anxious about the schedule that's been put forward for those dates for the reasons it described. So, I will leave it at that and see if there's anything else that people want to talk about regarding the schedule right now. And if not, we can go to the at least the two remaining items that we wanted to talk about. And I think that I was going to do the capital funding needs because it sort of fits in in some ways, the inventory question with a process that we're underway. And so that probably makes the most sense to do that first. And then I'm going to have a few minutes at the end to have Kathy and Bernie explain any answer questions about what they're thinking was on the water rate structure. So, Sean, did you want to start us off on what you thought about with this? Sure. Andy, did I hear you correctly that you want to combine those two agenda items, the capital inventory with the capital planning one? I think so, because I don't think that we're going to get into a real deep discussion about the second part, the capital planning. Okay. I'll go through the inventory first. I did have a couple comments related to the capital funding plan and looking forward that I do want to put in there before we're done. But I'll just briefly go through this because you all have it. So, I wrote a brief memo about what type of information we currently have on buildings, vehicles, and equipment. And there was an attachment that also gave you sort of what we have at this point has actual list of buildings, vehicles, and equipment and the information that we're updating. I did, we were originally having department heads update that information. But I asked them to hold off once it was determined that we were going to get additional feedback from the finance committee about specific items. I asked them to hold until we know exactly what type of information we're going to have to, we're going to pull together for you all. And then the only piece that I just wanted to highlight are some of the things that you may want to consider as you have your discussion looking forward is to, you know, if we do a sort of a basic inventory for FY22, but a more robust inventory beyond that. And then so some of those things are just again, going back to the usefulness of whatever is asked for and how that specific criteria or piece of data would be used to inform capital planning in the future. How available is the data? Is it something that we can readily get by, you know, going to read a mileage or, you know, looking up, you know, what type of fuel something burns, or is the data more difficult to obtain? And if it is more difficult to obtain, is there any cost to collecting that data? I can imagine some types of inventory categories where the information might be really useful, but we may not have the expertise to actually compile that information. And so we'd want to know if there's a cost to gather that information. Typically, we would want something that's easy to replicate year after year. So we can have a consistent inventory as we move forward and have a set date where we update it every year and we don't have issues doing that. And then independence of data and is the what's the category that's being considered? Is it free of potential bias? You know, when I think about that, I'm thinking sometimes things around useful life, you know, the useful life that the manufacturer may suggest for a particular item may or may not be free of potential bias if they want you to replace that every so many years. So there's other things along those lines, but those are just a few thoughts I had on the longer term discussion around inventory. And then I think this is the lists, which again, you have this is the inventory list or the building and infrastructure list. This list was compiled from a facilities report that was done four or five years ago. And so we're looking to update this. So some of the building conditions will certainly change. So that's why I just want to be clear that this was this data is going back several years. But it does have some useful information around square footage. The priority that was set on that type of building and how important that building is to the town's operations when the last renovation is and obviously like the current condition of the building. So those those are all things we can do currently that that are hopefully useful to you and then on the vehicle side, the department that the vehicle belongs to the year it was purchased, the make and model where it's stored the mileage and I talked to Kathy would I agree it would be great to have multiple years of mileage is in here. We may not be able to do that the first year because we want it to be sort of a consistent maybe one year span. But after this first year, we may just keep, you know, keep multiple years of mileage is in here so you can see how much of a particular vehicle is used over the course of the fiscal year, the condition of the vehicle and then the purchase price of that vehicle. And so some of these have been updated or up to date as of July, but we still have some gaps in information that we're waiting for. And that is it. Okay, I have one comment that I'm going to turn to because there's a long list of people who are asking questions. I'll save everything else. It's my understanding on the mileage issue that TPW is a registered inspection station for state inspections so that count on vehicles can be inspected by our own staff. And since the inspection program itself records mileage each year when inspections are done, it might be worth at least checking with TPW as to whether they maintain records that year for year through the inspection process. Yeah, that would be helpful. It wouldn't be the same point in time, I don't think. So we wouldn't, it would, we'd have a bunch of different time. The inspections on an annual basis probably when the stickers are due. Yeah, I know, but I'm saying that every vehicle sticker is going to be due a little bit differently timing. So if we did that, I don't know if that would work for all the vehicles or it would just, we want to have one point in time where we could grab the mileage. It would be different times throughout the year based on when they needed the inspection. Right, that would be one, one of your usage. Let me turn on the other members of the committee though going again in order Dorothy. Just a simple note on the schedule of meetings where you're not sure if you might have to have an additional meeting, I appreciate having a meeting date with a question mark in my calendar so that whether you have the meeting or not, I haven't given that time away. So it's clear that both you and Lynn are not sure exactly how many meetings you might need for something. So I'm just suggesting or hoping that you'll put in the tentative or possible meetings if needed. Lynn, you were next anyway. Let's go back to the list and the memo and under buildings, I think it would also be useful to have a column that says major repairs. And so let me just give you an example and that would be for instance the police station getting a new roof is a major repair and also whether or not at any point we put solar on top of something and I realized that's down the road but I would like to make sure we see, you know, we provide that option. Those are my two on the buildings. The second however on the vehicles, I should like Andy's suggestion. It just, in other words we have an annual mileage, it just doesn't always key to July 1st. If the purpose of the vehicle is not obvious from its name like for example plow, could you also behind the model and the make and the model also put a parentheses or whatever the purpose is. And then another one is if there is any energy efficiency, what is the type of vehicle? I mean is it for example electric hybrid diesel and then that last column, I would call that purchase price not value because we know that no vehicle retains its purchase price value. So purchase price would be what we bought it for when we bought it. Those were my suggestions on the actual inventory. That's it. Thank you Pat. Thank you. I was wondering if it would be possible to add into the vehicles and equipment fuel consumption particularly if we end up getting any kind of hybrid vehicles. It would be I think a reasonable comparison to make between that and a standard vehicle. Pat can you clarify when you say fuel consumption do you mean miles per gallon? Yeah so like what the what the sort of list miles per gallon is for that vehicle? Yeah and over time whether that changes, I mean your vehicle can be listed as getting 40 miles a gallon but what does it actually get? Right yeah I was thinking we don't I think we track fillups by Sonia you may know the answer to this. You know there are some vehicles that fill up at a pump in town and we track by department. I don't know if it tracks I don't know if we have every single vehicle though that attracts sort of actual consumption. What Sonia? I don't believe we track by vehicle just by department. Okay I think we track by some vehicles but not for all the vehicles in town. I think for like school buses it tracks some of the big big ones but okay but no that's noted. Just something to think about yeah thank you. Anything else Pat? If not then Kathy. Just on Pat's you know I actually think to the extent there was a dealer MPG if we had that and it was easy you know your thing easy to get and the source it wouldn't be a bad because we'd hope over time we'd see that the vehicles were getting or get or at least supposed to be getting more as we're buying new ones but I was going to ask can you go to the just the page that shows the actual buildings the old building inventory because I had a suggestion yeah that's one so Lynn as I understood Lynn it was to add you know a column that would say you know major repairs or solar potential I if it's major repair or something else but things like the Hitchcock Center which is closed and as far as I know we have no plans to use it you know so I'm looking for some kind of comment column that would say building empty plan to sell don't know what we're going to do with it decision soon you know so it could be a free form column and it would only there aren't that many I don't think the east street school we moved over to be in the housing trust now but I think we had one other so it's it's signaling signaling that we have an empty building sitting on a piece of land you know and so that was my only comment so it's whether the town has a potential plan for it I just you know what we would do with it but I think seeing some of that would be useful you know they've been talked about if we ever moved the pre-k out of Crocker where could we put it and if we already own a piece of land with the building is the building in such bad condition you want to knock it down to rebuild it or could it be renovated and so that was my comment on condition so this old school up here that's rented out that's a town property right by up here I'm pointing out my window because I live in North Amherst but the caddy corner from me which has the Amherst Family Center the WIC program in it that used to be survival center it's being rented out right now so that that I think it's a useful piece of information but only for a few buildings so maybe rather than adding a column to this really long list there's another sheet you know buildings slated for alternative use potential disposition it's just like a separate one so that I'm not making an ever wider set of columns as a way of and then you can put a star next to the places that see you know see spreadsheet two or something on it so I really don't know how many of those we have because every once in a while when I look at this let's say oh I didn't know we had that you know and at that address and yeah it's also the school building that I think is now vacant that's across from the Munson library right right exactly I was going to say that one but I can't remember what the name is so I was looking at this tiny print to try to find it but it's the same thing we've got a value on it who knows whether that value is anywhere real other than you could at least sell the piece of land for that amount of money yeah happy street school yeah thank you okay anything else if not bob hegner can you hear me yes okay great yeah so um I I agree with the comments to this so far under the buildings I the questions are the information I would like to have would be do we really need to keep this or is it really surplus which is kind of what Kathy was getting to and also the uses what can we use it for what what are the appropriate uses for this facility or for this building um and some of them are going to be obvious if it's like a tool shed or something but for you know things like the school buildings could they be used for offices could they be used for you know other other things so I think that should be part of that narrative column um with vehicles and equipment I think again I think we should have some information on whether do we really need to replace this once it's you know once its lifespan is over are we going to need to replace it or not I mean some things we may need some things we may not need in the future also while the purchase price is you know it's informative what really matters is how long does it last and what's it going to cost to replace it right yeah the purchase price is something that occurred in the past and what we this should be forward looking so if we can get something on that where we had something like a you know the expected lifespan and at the end of that lifespan if we paid $50,000 for it we estimate it'll be $75,000 to replace it something like that it doesn't have to be precise but it would you know just be helpful I think to inform things and the the other thing on the not so much the vehicles but the equipment is and I didn't look at this list really carefully but there should be some sort of de minimis amount value that we want to track in other words we don't want to track every single shovel and rake that we have but you know if there are things that you know and it looks like we probably have something like that in this but it would just be important to to kind of lay out some sort of de minimis value so we're not spending a lot of time and energy tracking things that really aren't worth very much those are my comments thanks yeah I'm not sure if you have any comments you know hours today so at least for now you know our de minimis is is it worth ensuring or not because this list is compiled based on our insurance list that's sort of the clean right now the easiest way to get a full comprehensive list of all of our vehicles with updated information you know that sort of holds true for buildings as well okay that's all I'm just going to go back okay um so I was looking I went back and looked at the section of the charter that started this whole thing off about the capital inventory and the key sentence that we were back to which started off this discussion in the referral to the committee from the council was the sentence the town council shall establish the requirements for the inventory such as age condition maintenance and repair history remaining useful life and other features the town council may deem appropriate and I think that paul's suggestion when I talked with him about it was we should start with the things that are specifically listed in the charter before the words and other features as the council may deem appropriate to make sure we have those covered and then add to the list from there and so going back again age condition maintenance and repair history and remaining useful life I think are very important terms they are built into the charter itself and I think that what it is all about is informing the five-year capital plan which is actually if you're looking at the charter itself in the very next section that follows that sentence and I'm not sure that the terms of maintenance repair history and remaining useful life in condition are really set out for buildings which are the key I think the most expensive part of this so without getting into a bunch of specifics what I would be looking for is ways that inform the finance committee and JCPC about those issues as listed in the charter and we may need the help of Jeremiah LaPlante to help us to do that but otherwise how do we know what we need to set aside for capital budget expenditures in coming years so I think that was my comment on it Dorothy of your hand up so I'm looking at the list of cars and I know Kathy has brought this up in the past once you mentioned that they were insured I began to feel differently about some of the old ones and some people just can't spare to get rid of an old car or truck because it has always come in handy and useful and they kind of love it and I'm just wondering if a really serious culling of this list needs to be done with some help because it's a very long list there's a lot of vehicles here even before 2000 and most are more than 10 years old well at least a high percentage short am I right this list was last updated in 2015 or is the vehicle list is more current the vehicle list is more current and to Dorothy's comments not all of them you know depending on the age you know the insurance you know whether we have collision and things like that you know varies but we when we meet with department heads to review capital we can certainly go through their vehicle list with them this year and and you know pick their brain on the number of vehicles how they're used do they have any you know I'm sure you know I know for this on the schools for example there are spares like for buses for example but they're usually for good reason like this past year when we had to get a new bus the spares were being used pretty pretty often so but we can ask those questions when we do our meetings with department heads okay great thank you yeah I want to go back to Andy's statement about useful life and just say that you know let me use two examples of buildings in town until town hall was renovated over 20 years ago we probably would have said it had passed its useful life but as a renovated building it's actually serving us extremely well on the other hand central fire station has long past its useful life and yet we don't have an alternative at this point so I think the issue of useful life I I actually regret that it stated that way in the charter because there it seems to me that some buildings um actually through renovation may have some very serious extension on their life other buildings and now you're going to hear my bias like two school buildings that we have I wish they would disappear somehow so there's just it's an exist it's it's a in me in my mind useful life is almost subjective yeah I just quickly I agree with Lynn that's one of the reasons why I put that criteria at the end of the memo about you know sort of free of bias you know the useful life depending on what you're talking about and who you're asking could be very different so I think as long as you're rating the condition of the building that gives you some sense of its capabilities and useful life um but um I you know for there's three buildings right now that the town doesn't even use except for storage one and Kathy mentioned them earlier um you know are they do they really have a useful life it's not clear yeah I will I will mention Kathy that southeast school has been discussed as a way as a building that could be used for swing space if they get to the point that we're renovating deep we're tearing down DPW and building a fire station and yet we would have to do improvements to the building to even use it as swing space that humans could be in that's why I thought this was a comment column on a few buildings not on every single one of them um and I guess on useful life I'm not I too when you said that Andy I thought oh I don't want to try to do that and even maintenance and repair history seems to me like an incredible amount of work to put into an easy to read but Lynn's column that says um it doesn't need any major repairs unless what the major repairs are is informative um if we've stuck nine hundred thousand dollars into something or eight hundred thousand dollars of repairs I don't know what that means um other than we spent it so someone had to write the charter sentence when they wrote it but they didn't use Sean's screen of easy to get unbiased easy to update so I do think those were good um if we want to maintain this we have to be able to use the information especially if it's hard harder to get um if it's easy to get it's just another column so but maybe the question is more in uh not the past but the future piece uh and that is remaining useful life because it's really about if we're going to continue to use the building is that a reasonable plan and what do we need to invest to do it right right and that's probably would have been the more useful way to say it instead of focusing on repair history but anyway Sean oh and just on the repair and and maintenance um so right now we don't keep that data by vehicle I mean there's there's individual records and invoices that we could pull but there's not sort of a single source that has all that information available that could easily be pulled together so what I was thinking for that was every department has a vehicle maintenance budget and we were going to kind of give you that information about you know we it's already been used in the past on buildings and building maintenance costs we were going to create something in a similar format for vehicle maintenance expense and costs by department so that at least you would have some sense by department of how much uh you know how much has been spent on fire fire vehicles in total on vehicle maintenance and how much has been spent on school vehicle maintenance um so at least you would have that level of detail and Sean I think that's useful for vehicles I was talking about building repairs for buildings and I was talking about in the future I was talking about major repairs we've done and I gave the example of the completion roof yeah in my mind is a major repair so um how are we going to proceed so Sean do you have something you can work with too yeah why don't I try to summarize what I heard and send it to you and see if if that you know if it I wrote down most of what I think I heard from people's suggestions and and I'll summarize that send it to you and we can talk about is that what we're you know what we're thinking for next year or is this what we're thinking for the longer term um and I know you're we still need um I don't know if we receive feedback yet from the the acronym that's escaping me on sustainability that other committee yeah yeah ECAC sorry um if we receive feedback from them on what they wanted to see in a future inventory or not yeah I think when we get ECAC's comments assuming we get ECAC's comments then we probably obviously what fits into the question of the capital inventory and what's really an ECAC request and whether they should be separated okay yeah so I'll send you a summary of all of the different things that I heard um most of it seemed you know reasonable I didn't hear anything that was sort of made me gasp so um it's just a matter of how quickly we can get that information for our existing vehicles and and what might take a little more work to get it catch up on things um Andy can I speak a little bit to the other capital piece that we talked about yes I was just about to ask that perfect timing yeah so I'll stop sharing my screen so one of the things we are planning to do with the capital improvement program this year is fold in the four major building projects and include that payment cost as part of that um capital improvement program um so that we would circuit a more realistic view of what money we have available for these capital projects what money we would be left over for other capital projects um how we might use reserves to supplement um so I know that was one of the discussions and it's a very weighty conversation um we are planning to include all that in the capital improvement program this year and going forward to have it really think about all of the capital in town um in the past we've sort of ignored that for a little while because there was so much uncertainty um but we think this year is a year we should start including that and that might help some of the discussions move forward a little bit um so that's one thing we are we're going to include those and it'll include the most up-to-date information um you know the library project has changed a little bit in terms of its timing so we'll we'll update it based on whatever the most accurate information is at the time um so that's on the capital improvement program and the other piece was just an update for for this group um we had an ambulance this is more of sort of a general capital update that I think could fit under this category on the agenda um we had an ambulance breakdown and so we've been working with the fire department to talk about how to replace that ambulance um it was one of the capital items that was noted earlier in the year we talked about what type of projects could pop up this year and so it has popped up um and so just enough why I we're working with the fire department and and Sonia and we'll be bringing more information to you in the future um about plans to reduce that ambulance and that's it yeah I just want to clarify something that we spent a lot of time on in the very first year of the council and that is that the major capital projects remain the if you will they remain first of all with the council but they absolutely remain within the finance committee the other capital improvements are to JCPC so even though you're meshing the two which I think is very wise I still want to make sure you keep in our minds that division yeah I agree um Pat you have your hand up we keep talking about four major capital projects etc but the centennial plant is a major capital project I know that um you know that it's what effect enterprise and funds have on that but we need quite a bit of what is it 11 million dollars and I don't ever hear it talked about as part of what we're planning um and I would like to make sure that we find a way to address it included and not pretend that it isn't there thank you go ahead and dance right um point because ambulance funds are often used to when we have better revenues are often used to buy new ambulances so I mean it's it's a very even though it's in the different category of how it's going to get paid for it's still a capital expenditure I think it's a very good point Pat um yeah let me say a couple things to close it out and then we can actually move to quickly to Bernie and Kathy for a minute because we're getting real close with that segue of me mentioning the centennial plant gets us there the uh there was a comment uh a report given to us about ambulance needs and one of the things that we did not talk about when we were talking about the budget was the status of the ambulance fund and I'm assuming that resources for the ambulance fund are declining because of the reports that we've had about ambulance runs for the past months being actually decreased and the fact that Hadley is no longer part of our ambulance service which which was number of runs um so I think that we had we're in a position where we might not even be able to replace equipment with within the fund but I think that is the subject that we need to know more about is an ongoing basis Sean yeah so so we are looking at that fund now for the replacement but we'll again we'll bring more information when we review that a little more closely we did for FY 21 as you noted because of the receipts coming in lower we did that is adjusted in the FY 21 budget we reduced how much support there is from the ambulance fund like quite a bit so yeah I did recall that um and as far as the centennial plant comment and this gets us to our transition point um that's really out of the enterprise fund not out of the operating fund and so that the borrowing which I think has authorized but not taken place will be then a charge on the enterprise fund and have to be paid back through enterprise fund revenues and it's not a general fund question which therefore I can use as my subway to see if either Kathy or Bernie would like to say something about what they presented to us uh Bernie do you want me to lead off he he said sure silently with his body as well as his mouth um we you all have a memo in front of you and Andy given the late time of the day when we said it was just going to be a two-hour meeting I might want to just introduce this and then say next time we can have a fuller discussion or we'll see whether it's only a few minutes so Bernie and I talked about one possible change in the way we do water rates now and asking DPW and Guilford to come up with what ifs we did something like this to give us a sense of what what impact it would not making a decision whether or not to do it and the one we flagged was including right now if as everyone probably remembers we have a very simple water rate structure you you have a rate that varies by the amount of water you use um and it doesn't matter whether you're a big user or a little user there's a rate so if you use thousands of cubic feet you pay for thousands of cubic feet if you never take a shower you don't pay very much so you can in addition to that rate do a quarterly charge that's not related to use and one of the goals of that one of the reasons one might do that is it helps stabilize the rates that are charged you would still have a rate charge for the amount you use but with higher or lower use or the example would be UMass leaves town really early and water use goes down you don't have to increase water rates on everyone else to cover fixed costs so you can stabilize rates by having this you can depending on how you set it cover part of your fixed costs they don't vary with how much you use so it takes some of the burden off the variable rate most towns that have this have a lower rate for water use than we do because the fixed cost takes on some of it you can again this is you can you don't have to set that rate in a way that a small percentage every year goes into reserves so that knowing that you're going to have big big replacement costs or repair costs at some point you can build up your reserves deliberately um through a fix and then the last and it's not last but least is if you set this by the meter size of the water it will charge a very large user it will mean they pay more it's the fixed rate might be the same but it's by meter size so they'll pay more so they're covering more of the fixed costs then and part of the reason we have as much water supply as we have is it's supplying very large users so that's a rationale for it so we thought look at that one change so leave still have a variable rate pick a couple different levels and gilford would guide what those would be and come back to us and say what does that do what does that do to the small business owner and the homeowner in terms of their rates and how much you know the if it varies by meter size if in a homeowner would have a smaller much smaller fixed charge than would a very large user because we have small meters so that's the concept that we put out and depending on what the analysis showed we could decide to do that but we wouldn't be deciding for next year it might be for the year after so you any change we would make would be far in advance so people knew it was coming and you would if we wanted to do it we'd go out I assume the town would go out was for the official you know the official consultant kind of structuring of the rate so wouldn't be DPW putting together a rough estimate for us so we brought this memo to you because I was really intrigued when I saw Hadley and a few other towns had done that and that their variable cost the one the homeowner saw is quite a bit lower than Amherst because the fixed charge is picking up a piece of the cost so I'll just stop there that's it's in I'm kind of repeating what was in the memo yeah it's a pretty it's actually the tiered a tiered fixed rate tied to meter size is pretty pretty standard approach and I think it's been fairly effective in the towns in the towns that use it in my experience it's uh it does smooth out the revenue you're you're gonna you're gonna collect a portion of your or you may be able to cover all of your fixed cost but you'll collect a good portion of your fixed cost and this is something you'll have to tell us um yeah um and at the same time you could drop that that that rate for the per gallon rate for the water I should just um let folks know that because I said a question to Kathy and Bernie that I did not send to the rest of the committee so I want to put it out there in the record the one question I had is whether large apartment complexes which have a lot of low income residents might be affected by this if ultimate utility cost as a whole increases for those complexes and the rents that are charged to have incorporate a portion of the water use that are increasing the water use for a large user which is an apartment complex with a lot of low income residents will it have a negative effect on the people who live in those complexes and um I want to go into the whole political question that falls behind that concern but uh because I think it's fairly obvious but that was the one thing that I raised but one of our responses is in the in this kind of what if looking at it you could say this building tell me what it's going to do to this building so this apartment complex because because it lowers the rate the use rate with the individual units it may not increase the cost of water in in that unit so if there were a hundred apartments it might well not because the fixed rate is covering part of it and the variable rate so and it doesn't have to be passed down but we could we could ask Guilford to tell us for this building what does it do to the total cost of water in a typical year um so we could you know earmark you know a building um for to understand that impact yeah I mean there's so many variable factors in here and I don't think we can or need to get into it all today because whether people are metered separately and then pay separately well I would probably mean that they're on a small meter and that would take care of it but if it's done building wide and then divided up that it's built into the rent um then it's it makes the collection of small users a big user and and as I said I think we could it's that is something that is we could collect that information and know an answer to it I think you're going to want to look at that as I said back to my response back to Andy I'm really reluctant to get into like means testing for a town service a gallon of water you don't know what the water usage presents itself as a percentage of the overall operating budget of the apartment and the size of the apartment means that any increase is going to get you know when I first apartment I first place I lived here in town we had four four apartments the next place I lived here in town we had a 250 um so you you really don't know I think the best thing to do would be to model it um landlords will have different approaches might actually encourage landlords to make some improvements in their property to drop their you make them more efficient in the way water gets used you you don't know until you model it well and then you it's going to be it's going to depend on so much on who's operating the building and what percentage of their operating costs are reflected in water use so I'm going to drop my part of this and go back to the last couple people hands up then get to scheduling future meetings so that we can conclude Dorothy I just want to say that I really do like the plan very much um fixed rate for fixed costs which really helps uh even out our budget uh but uh usage is still in there which is very important and what Bernie was saying about landlords when they tightened up metering in New York City and the environs water use really did go down a lot of landlords had just been you know not paying attention to it um and when it cost them more money they took care of it and reduced their use and reduced their bills so I really do like the plan um I agree that Andy that's a concern but you know we could make what adjustments are needed but I think it's a great plan um Sean you your hand up yeah no I think this is a good um direction uh directional piece for Guilford to look at um I still think he might need some more information to really dive into different models um you know I think if he was here I don't want to speak for him but he might say again what are the what's the goal of the models he's trying to to simulate is it to keep overall revenues the same but shift more the cost to heavy users is it to decrease consumption or um you know I don't you know it may not be intuitive but I would think if the if the rate per water consumed was lower wouldn't that discourage conservation of water as opposed to the way we have it now where they pay more for every you know all their consumption they pay a higher rate if we make the rate for consumption lower and have a higher fixed fee does that actually help conserve again I I don't know the answer to that it just to me if you had a lower unit rate I would think you'd be less likely to conserve than unless you were going to try to get your meter reduced to be a smaller meter than than maybe you would but I think he might still need and this could happen offline but I think he still might need some direction on sort of what are the goals that he's trying to produce with his models easy easy way to do this would be to um let's keep it revenue neutral let's you know what what would be the the tiered rate for meter connections for fixed costs um and then what impact would that have on the water rate and produce the same revenue that we were anticipating now that's a good start and then you can you can play with that the next point to this is a little number of communities done must our friends next door and Hanley certainly did this while I was the manager there we came up with two sets of you we came up with tiered rates as well as the meter rates which really put the squeeze on the big users um at the time um uh Home Depot decided they were going to drill well rather than tie in the town water because the the cost and Hanley's goal was to conserve water we need to know what what the goal is here as well I mean we approached this the idea that this is going to be another way to raise revenue um and help stabilize the the funding of the water and sewer system because those meter rates are going to collect a considerable amount of money up front more money up front not a considerable more money up front and also help the home owner by tiering the the rate to the meter so if Gifford could do something to revenue neutral it says okay this is what I'm expecting for um uh revenue under this current system and here's what it would look like under some variations of uh tied to meters that would be helpful to us as a start what we thought we might do if you know this is presuming the committee likes this enough is that you could tell Bernie and I or just Bernie meet with gilford you know work work out you know what's possible again with the data he's got already you know we're not trying to send create a giant work project or consulting project here um and have him ask those questions and we would just make a series of decisions along the way could this way or that way to then get something back on a schedule that made sense to him you know so we didn't have a have to have it in a week or have to have it in a month but to start a conversation on a take a look at this and have him have control of what he simulated and as Bernie said we thought revenue neutral and not do it with the most recent year because we didn't have the revenue we thought we had so it would probably be the last full year of of of water flow that we had um to say what would it have looked like in that world um and then raise the caveats that you just raised Sean you know if we lower lower the use rate does it encourage does it stop people from conserving you know putting in a better toilet in their house or worrying about leaks um so shower one place where this will have an impact and I don't know does the town if you have a sprinkler system does the town require you to have a separate meter for sprinklers no um yeah um I'll be real quick with that as I want to see if we can move along see if Pat has anything that she wanted to ask because her hand has been up and the we did try a separate metering system for agricultural users but it required that they actually have two separate meters and um is I think that the last time I asked Guilford that he said that none of the agricultural users had installed two separate meters so that because the question but it wasn't about usage it was about getting them off of the sewer building piece um Pat did you have anything that you wanted to add I I kept putting my hand up and down because I don't like wasting people's time but Andy made an important point that got dismissed when I was first involved with the folks who established the mobile market I went there initially to discuss community gardens at South Point and I discovered that every unit is monitored for water usage and that a lot of decisions were being made already around conservation but I also learned that any cost any increases in the cost of water will directly impact the tenant's rent so to say no that's not really going to happen is is kind of naive and we don't have multiple big users like Home Depot now I'm not even I'm on I'm interested in this idea so I'm not dismissing it out of hand but I think you need to come up with some better a better strategy than telling me that Home Depot pays more than a homeowner ooh we don't have very many Home Depots so I'm not going to be at the University we have Amherst College yeah but they're not as big as Home Depot and then Lowe's and you know Hadley's in a very different situation than we are that's right and in the case of South Point if folks have individual meters then and we're able to shift some of the costs to larger users then their overall cost for water would likely go down the owners are tracking the unit usage it is not the tenant who's tracking it and it doesn't change and they don't pay for the water the owner does well maybe we'll use one of those if we're going to do a model of building well yeah you got to prove to me you got to be a little bit more specific you know I'll fight with you and we'll and I'll learn from you and that'll be a good thing okay what I was saying is take set we should take South Point Ness go for it you just tell us what South Point looks like I mean we can be very specific not a imagine something I think we can stop right now yeah I think about where we're at is that was my understanding that Paul sent or was going to send your memo to Guilford and probably did already and maybe think to do is to have either Sean or Sonia's the two of them determined as the best person find out where Guilford is in his ability to meet with the two of you and then they can signal it it's time to set up a meeting with Guilford does that make sense yes okay is that a face on yeah yeah okay so let me just come to the last point I had sent you in one of my most recent memos sort of a compilation of what I had heard from people who chose to respond and it looked like Tuesday and Thursday afternoons for the best time for setting up future meetings and since there was also strong feeling expressed in our last meeting to not do the two as we are today Tuesday after council meetings in case the council meetings go beyond 10 o'clock which did not last night thank you Lynn but the that was the request to come in so I had put in that it seemed like the best date if we want to have time to produce a report would be the Thursday following a council meeting in the second best would probably be the next Tuesday prior so but that was then posing Tuesday the week that is in between so let me just ask the first question how would people feel about Thursday of council meeting weeks as opposed to Tuesday Thursday at the moment TSO meets in the evening everything meets generally there's like a big pile up of meetings on Thursday nights so because I know that I'm missing meetings I want to see so we're actually going to be looking to maybe change the TSO so that we can get to some of the the meetings and hearings and stuff but and I'm tied up teaching in the morning so what time were you thinking two o'clock maybe or yeah I mean you would because of your schedule I had that's why I said afternoons right so I mean I could do it I'd probably prefer Tuesday but it's possible it's possible I actually prefer Tuesday but and I don't mind having it right after council meeting mm-hmm I prefer Tuesday as well and they Andy I believe that CRC is moving to the non-council Tuesdays right right right right I think they are I think I heard that from Andy so we stick with where we are Tuesday after council meetings yeah I also don't mind starting it too yeah that was good okay so that said anything else that needs to be raised anything on the anticipated business that wasn't on the agenda do we have a next meeting date or are we just 20th yes I think so well we're gonna at least hold that and then we'll see if we have an agenda at this point on these items our real heavy schedule is going to come after starting coming after the indicators meeting so October 20th yeah but right now yeah let's uh hold October 20th at two o'clock at two o'clock okay anything else if not I'll declare the meeting adjourned okay thank you bye everybody bye bye thank you thank you Andy