 This program is brought to you by Cable Franchise V's and generous donations from viewers like you. So, I'm called to this committee meeting of the town council 2020 and welcome everybody here. Pursuant to Governor Baker's March 12 2020 order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law general law chapter 38 section 18. This meeting of the finance committee should be safe finance up there is being conducted by a remote participation. And in order to satisfy rules of remote participation, I'm going to quickly go through the members of the committee who are present just so that they confirm as they call their names and they respond. They hear me and I can hear them. So, one move here. Here. Okay. I'm here. Dorothy Pam. Yeah. Yeah. Here. Then Bob Hegner. Here. And Mary Lou Tom. Here. Okay, so. Sharon Pavanelli is not present. We have five members. All five members who are council members of the committee are present which constitutes a quorum and confirm that everybody can be heard. I just want to see moment here just for the moment on your screen is the agenda for today's meeting. Just want to explain two things. One is for any members of the public are watching the meeting. We're going to be talking about budgets and you can find information about budgets and the town website. And one of them is just when you get to the open page. Look under government for budget and you should see a list of budget documents, including the FY 21 proposed budget. The town manager and I believe that it either has or links to the library and school budgets. So with that note, the other thing that I wanted to just to look to is the order in which we're going to take the agenda that's for you for the moment. And it is basically what's on the screen except for number two is going down and becoming after library budget. So it'll be elementary school budget. Then going back to the presentation from last night and general questions about the budget that's specific to departments but overview for the town budget. We will be in a series of meetings over the next week and a half. Thursday and then next week. For a couple of days in the day in the following day, having friends committees every Tuesday and Thursday in which we will be taking segments of the budget and asking questions about segments of the budget. So, if there are any questions about this. We know otherwise, why don't we go ahead and introduce superintendent Morris and invite the superintendent to make whatever introductory comments that he or Doug slaughter have to introduce the budget to us. Great. Thank you very much and thanks to finance committee for having me and thanks for your flexibility on my timing. We found out this morning we have this meeting and it's about 35 minutes away from from now so I appreciate your flexibility so I could be present to briefly chat with you and then certainly answer any questions that any committee member has before I turn over Dr slaughter fias and things he wants to share again I'll keep it brief so there's more dialogue possible because of my timeline but the thing I want to note is we came in with a budget in March that was considered by the school committee that was significantly higher than what the budget that's being presented today. And that was as we know because of the financial implications of coven. One of the challenges the schools face as well as all town departments as we have the financial challenges so the reduction from our March budget to the budget that's here now is a significantly different number in the hundreds of thousands of dollars less. And I think the other challenge we had is we don't know exactly what falls looking like as you know we're having school committee meetings pretty much every week where we're gathering more information. And the one thing we know is that we're going to need lots of staffing because we're going to be in some models in person and perhaps some models online, at least for some students. And that's going to require us to have the full complement of staffing so we really approached this budget reduction. That we had to make those near half a million dollars will hire as our call as how do we maintain our staffing levels that we have the widest range of offerings for our students. And it's incredibly unusual time we know how critical, in particular elementary schools and being in person for elementary schools are for students and families. So we had to make some different decisions that we would make in a typical school year one thing you'll notice is that we pulled from our school choice reserve fund so we get $5,000 plus a special ed increment for any school choice student that's come in we've built up a healthy balance and we've never touched that even in other years where we've had to make reductions. This is not any other year we've had to make reductions so you will see that we're pulling that fund in other words where we'll be using more school choice funds and we'll take in next year, and we think we've done that a way where we can phase that out over the next couple years but this is an extraordinary circumstance. And we felt like we needed to maintain our staffing levels to provide the best education for our students in this in this climate. I would really want to thank the town for continuing to work with us on this. There's just all sorts of nuance both at the region and at the elementary and how they either work well together or don't work well together depending on the moment and so I really want to thank Paul and Sonya and everyone on the town side for kind of understanding some of the nuances of having a multi district consortium that get to share or get to share sounds maybe too optimistic but are forced to share Dr. Slaughter and myself for some of this work. And I'll turn it over Dr. Slaughter if he has other any other introductory comments but again I think we're going to try to be brief so that it can be much more interactive before I have to depart so we figured brevity on presentation and more dialogue better than the other way around. But I'll turn it over Dr slaughter. Anything else to add to that I mean I do think you know we we thought we were in the house on days before COVID hit we thought we had a pretty nice budget year coming up but then obviously things have changed in a significant way and I think we'll be revisiting our budget the thing I would suggest is that it's likely given how the planning between now and the start of school even during the school year. We'll make a significant impact on our budget and our choices we make and it will impact what and how we have our our classes distributed throughout that that budget so we'll probably come back to talk to you about that hopefully. You know from a funding standpoint will have some resources available to us. In addition to what we've already been made aware of that will allow us to meet the needs of the students the way we'd like to but it's it's going to be a pretty open question for a while and so we'll have to sit with some discomfort and probably revisit these budgets quite a bit during the year in in an atypical way. Yeah, if I could add to that briefly and then I really will stop talking so we can have dialogue I think some of this is on the staff side but some of that's also on the op some of this is on the operational side so for instance. One of the things that we're working on is, we know in terms of increasing ventilation that's going to increase our heating and cooling costs and our age that costs. So we're trying to figure out how do we factor in that in a covert world. You know, and it's a painful one because we try to use the ash rain measures and try to balance ventilation and cost is ash rain, which is the code encourages to do so that's not going to really be we can't follow that code this year. It's not in the best interest of the health of our students and and staff. Another variable we don't know the answer to yet is transportation. We have no information from the state on how many students can be in a bus. That'll have huge implications for cost for us, because right now different states are looking at this really differently in the kind of the ranges are are huge about that and if we're able to get 12 kids on a bus versus 24 kids on a bus. That'll have implications but we usually get 57 kids on a bus at the elementary level. So all of these are factors that are unknown costs right now. So we're trying to do the best we can to understand where the cost centers are. One of the reasons I have to go in a bid is that the state has indicated they're opening up additional financial resources but not for staffing so we're trying to find out what it's for because that was a surprise in the state guidance document that came out. On Thursday and bunch of people like me and doctors are like, well, how is this use what are the strings attack and we had no information so they are responsive. Sometimes they didn't give us too much time to get ready for a meeting but you know what it was but they are responsive and all of this is very much in flux. As the state board meeting there was a board of education meeting at the state level this morning and I think a lot of opinions expressed and the thing that we keep on hearing from the state is we have to be nimble. And that felt better three weeks ago that it feels right now and it's probably going to feel worse three weeks from now when we still have to be nimble but I think that's actually accurate. And that is as where our planning goes as we get more guidance from the state, and frankly as the numbers across our region, if they stay where they are or they change we're going to have to change our plans and that's why with the school committee we've been doing really important they've been wonderful they really important public work of engaging the community we, you know people are getting survey fatigue so we hear that and we still want their opinions. So that will continue over the summer months. With that I'll stop and open up for any dialogue that folks would like to have. Well thank you. Thanks for the introduction. I think one thing that I wanted to do before I call in the first person to ask questions is to just acknowledge that Doug and Mary Lou and I had a prior service together on the old finance committee and work lived through the 2008 to 2010 period. And it's as tough as that was and it was pretty bad. I think this year in my experience is just been incredibly more difficult and I really appreciate how everybody in financial and administrative positions has worked with us as a council to make this work. And I know it's not been easy and so we thank you for trying to make sure that we all work together to make it work. So with that, I was going to see Mary Lou, you've given some thought to it. Did you have two or three introductory questions you wanted to start with. I thought maybe Mike was going to just give a broad overview of the budget and I think those will answer the questions that I have mostly looking at the, you know, just some of the differences or what looks like substantial differences in the numbers on the two pages that we received earlier. Other than that, and they're explainable obviously, but I think if you're not familiar with it, it would be helpful. But other than an overview and then looking at those two documents we received from you, I think we're fine. And if the chair would like, I'd be happy to go over a document that describes some of the differences between the March budget and where we are today. I just was trying to balance time of me talking versus time of dialogue and if I got that wrong, I'm happy to detour. Hold it for a minute and let's come back and not only asked if they're, because I have about four different hands up for members of the committee and see what their questions are and then come back to the point that Mary Lou is raising, which is I think really in the additions and deletions pages where you show the changes. And I think you do in a very clear fashion and appreciate that. Kathy, could you give me your hand up. So when we get to it later, it's not a comparison of the earlier one to the new one, it's just what is on the present list. When we get back to those questions. Okay. I just have a few that play to you what you've already laid out is a lot of uncertainty. So one thing we heard, I think it was last night from Paul is that we're likely we're expecting to get a health insurance bonus because we've had such slow uses that I'm not seeing that yet in your budget, correct. Would that be correct. It sounded like Paul you were saying that we might get as much as one month fruit. That's three, because we, we earned it but so that that would play into a decrease in expense and what you're projecting correct would that be. Yes. Yes, it's not in the budget that was voted by the school committee because they voted the budget well before Paul received this information but that is welcome good news that we have not had enough of over the last few months and I think when we think about the additional expenses and where the funding is going to come from, I think that very well if it plays out into fruition, really support us with some of those unanticipated expenses that we know are going to happen absolutely. And I'm asking that because I did some very quick math and you're a little bit over what we had set as an absolute flat budget and and that would bring you I think right in line with the flat budget without without going back in at all. Oh, I'm sorry I didn't actually like to respond to that if I could, if the chair would allow that. I would actually argue that we're slightly below a flat budget because our original budget was above 2.5% because of the way the town manages charter and choice costs. We had over 2.5% because we had a reduction in those costs. And so we actually took a larger decrease than other town departments because we had more funds that were slated to come in that weren't related to that. Other years we've had an increase in charter costs our increases have been at 1.9% when the other departments were getting 2.5 which surely makes sense I understand the accounting mechanism. I would respectfully offer a different opinion that we were. We did not receive as much a reduction or we were above level services because that's about money already paid that's about charter and choice students that we already are known quantity and it's how the district and town exchange funds, which is consistent with DOR. So I just want to offer a respectfully different perspective on that. It just, it just shows up it's not a lot of money but it just shows up is not exactly the same as flat dollars. So then on where, where uncertainty is on terms of your projected revenues you're counting on the UMass allocation to you do you actually have that or is that you know expected on like July 1 as in tomorrow. So that was one of the questions because it's $170,000 and it's clearly it's a big help in the budget if you get that. Yep, so I can I can speak to this in the town manager, if he chooses to can, I'm happy to have him jump in so that money goes to the town and then to the schools. So that's exactly to the schools because that's the relationship is between the town and UMass and because there's some uncertainty, as you noted in the future and our fiscal year improved because of our conservative. We made a lot of conservative decisions basically after March 13 or starting on March 13, where we did not need to rely on the money the money was supposed to start this fiscal year. We were assured from UMass that this funds for this fiscal year were good. So, instead of accepting the funds this year, we are going to accept the funds that come to the town in this fiscal year for FY 21, because of that uncertainty and because we felt like we were able to tweak by this year without needing those funds in the current fiscal year so I think you're right to say the future of those funds is. It's not realistic, but it's not certain, but we received a very clear email that the funds for FY 20 were certain. So it'll go through the town and then be filtered to us for FY 21. So that actually was related to a related question that you had some savings this year that you were not counting on so that you could put off that. And you know as we all know you're not likely to have it next year so this coming year is going to be the tough one. Then the other is you talked about spending down money that you had in the school choice reserve fund. You put in, you budgeted 217,000 for contingencies in the budget we're looking at. I'm just wondering what the total amount of reserve funds it's a similar question to what I asked about the regional school budget so how much you have sitting out whether you call them. END funds or special needs funds or that potential safety net for you. Yeah, so we don't, unlike the region we don't have END so excess and deficiency is only the only school districts that have END are regions. We're part of the municipal so much like the library or the fire the police. We don't maintain an END fund. You know operates through the town as opposed to the region which is a sort of like its own non for profit or corporation. I'm looking at Sean because I just want to make sure I rely on him do it but Sean answered this question many years in my times with Sean, and he just happens to be on my screen can't get away from me so I think to the larger question of reserves, you know the choice fund has been built up over years again we wanted to build it up for a rainy day and it's certainly raining and maybe raining for a while more as you know. But we have built up a special ed stabilization fund over the last few years I believe at the end of this year will have $150,000 in that but Dr. Slaughter can correct me if I'm wrong. There's very specific uses that was the creation of that fund was allowable based on changes in the mass mass. Let's use this modernization municipal. I'm going to get the act wrong active a few years ago and that could only be used for unanticipated special education costs right it's not like a true reserve fund that can be used because you're low. But those are really the funds that contingency we build in every year and that generally covers a teacher and two para educators, and that is focused on we do get every year students who were not expecting and sometimes those students have. We typically class size and eating another section sometimes it's about special education needs and, and we found that to be a reasonable estimate over the past few years. And so, I also do want to note that we did receive the mass funds for this year that we're going to use for next year that that's a confirmed number to your prior question or for confirmed receipt to your prior question. Sorry to skip around a little bit. Okay, no that was very helpful. So that the contingency. So what we're seeing plus the reserve fund you're not sitting on another million dollars there that you're going to be able to draw on. And then the last, so I can turn it over to other people with questions the you took out only one small line but you had a $3,000 line for planning for the sixth grade moving. Do you have the funds if you need to somewhere in the next 12 months actually make that decision and plan for whether or not they move. Because you have to plan for the building, you know, it's linked to how many kids have to be where is that process still going to be on whatever timeline you had thought it was going to be on. Yes and no. So, I mean, I think on the finances we do have title to funds couldn't cover that was covering for additional staff time, not administrative or professional staff time. We do have other ways we can try to accommodate that to the timeline question we were planning on doing a number of forms this spring on that topic that clearly didn't happen. So, do I think we can reasonably hit a timeline that we need for the building project yes but are we on the same timeline we were thinking in the winter. Quite honestly, no, it didn't. We still haven't quite found the sweet spot where people would pay attention to a sixth grade question and not our kids going back to school and if so on what days. So we plan to reengage that in the fall when there's maybe a little more. Other variables are more known and we can we can capture public attention the challenge right now as I mentioned earlier is people are feeling like they're getting a lot of surveys on other topics and we want to do it at a time where people are accessible and able to talk about this. We also don't know what this is going to do for enrollments I mean I in the next month. We're going to have to perform enrollment or provide enrollment information for the MSBA process for the state. And I don't mean about whether kids are going to return to school in the fall or whether some kids will stay home. What we fully anticipate is the, you know, migration immigration between other towns and other places that's those patterns are going to shift because of it's not about again schools being safe or families wanting to do distance learning. It's that we've already had families who have said I'm doubling up or I'm taking another family member and vice versa they're moving because either employment's gone away or they need to be with other family members. So it's a very difficult time to plan for enrollments will have a better sense of that in the fall, you know whether it's in person or virtual enrollments. But what we are noticing is our folks who are involved in registration are seeing a lot of changes. And I think it's going to behoove us to wait till that clears out as much as it'll clear out by fall to us to be able to give accurate or more accurate information the community of exactly what this will look like what our projections of enrollment will be because that is huge implications of where they fit in the building. Thank you because my last question was is how certain are you about enrollment and you just answered it without being asked. Thank you. I'm going to turn it over. I see other hands so Dorothy Pam please. Okay. I have a couple of questions but a quick follow up. Enrollment is changing and shifting. Is it shifting up or down at this moment. Yes. So it's a little hard to know what the yield will be. We are getting, you know, seemingly an even number of families to say either I'm moving or I might move as I'm coming or I'm coming or a family members coming and living with me. I think that uncertainty will extend beyond the fall, but at least we'll get a better one school actually starts and people have to be even if it's on a screen like this or if it's in person will have a better sense of where that is. But right now the trends vary by the week. Right. So I have the first of my two questions. When you talked about more staff. My husband was going on yet last night about what you need is more staff and what would you be using college students. And I think I read about this somewhere in some article. And so that's question one will you how are you going to reach out to get some more of that staff to work with the kids. And the other one is. I know you have to wait on the state for money and information about the buses. But truthfully, why would you the article about desk spacing suggested that the state state saying oh it can be three feet if you like that you saying no no no we're not going to follow that we're going to follow other more sensible advice. So you're not going to be follow what they say on the bus if you don't think it's good. Right. So like, have you made some judgment what you think might be safe on the buses. Yes, those are my questions. Thank you so in terms of college students I did have a conversation last week with UMass on the School of Education. I think there's a couple of complications with that that makes it hard to predict one is they don't know how many of their students will be on site. Right, I think that you all talked about that last night is my understanding or Lisa was mentioned. An additional piece is what's our comfort level with having UMass students and buildings and that's something or not UMass I don't want to state that that's not fair. What's our what's our comfort level with having college students come in our buildings when we're likely to have a no visitor policy. And I'll be completely transparent. It's something I'm struggling with because on one hand, for all the points you mentioned having additional folks that we train, even if they're trained to be educators could be a huge advantage. On the other hand, it's adding people into our space. And so we are, and by we I mean superintendents across the state are really trying to think about what looks like that the state has given us flexibility where they can do their work. So we're probably up and doing some of the virtual and that might give us some flexibility that way. But we are actively having conversations with institutions of higher education UMass is just on my mind because it was the end of last week Friday afternoon that we chatted. I think in the bus we are looking for some state guidance even if we don't agree with it. You know we're seeing such variation and what states are recommending. So in my opinion, the one place CDC was a little vague because they were like if you're at step two and there are level two in their process, you can have 12 students if you're at level three there's there's no. There's not an explicit number it's not mentioned and so it seems like there has to be something between 12 and 57. I mean, one would presume and so we're we are looking forward to having that information to help guide us to your point if we're not comfortable with it by we I mean my school committee myself we're not going to follow it. But I think it is helpful to have guide because it's one area there's a one or two others but it's the most acute area. I think CDC didn't truly answer the question for us. And I think they answered the question on spacing I fully support the school committee opinion but the bus didn't seem like it had kind of multiple options to consider given the status of your community and certainly there won't be 57 kids in a bus no matter what the state tells us that I can guarantee right now, I don't speak for the school committee but I wouldn't put 57 kids in a bus. There's something between 12 and that you know probably, we did a survey of families about 30, we had about half of our students represented in the responses, about 35% of families said they would provide their own transportation, a decent additional chunk over 20% said they likely could. So what we want to do is get the state information get our routes get what our model is and then really ascertain from families. Are they willing to drive their kids if they have an empty seat are they willing to carpool it to pick up a student who's in the same class who's going to be in the same cohort group. And so we need to play that out a little bit but I we expect the desi guidance coming in the next two weeks so it won't be too long. Thank you. Thank you. I'm going to build a little on Dorothy's question about staffing because you talked about the need for increased staffing and my question was, would that include hiring additional paraprofessionals or educators. I didn't think about interns. How will you be addressing that and how is that reflected in the budget, or is it not reflected in the budget. It's not quite reflected budget because it we have to see what our model is right, the more flexible our model is in terms of in school how many days in school especially if it's a lot and then allowing for distance learning. That's going to require more staffing so we do have that contingency which was referenced before. We received the good news from Sean and Paula and health insurance so we were aware of some of that again this conference call I have that I have to hop off in a couple minutes for hopefully will. Well, I'm not allowed to use it for staffing that's the only thing I know it may be able to do some offsets that allow us to flex some funds towards staffing. So I think that's a good point to Dr slow to point earlier we may have to come back and say if the community wants X. This is what it's going to cost and we can't meet it then we may have to go to why but you know I'm hoping to avoid that dynamic conversation from the school committee and for your all sake. But I think right now. So next week for instance at school committee will be presenting space and where students can fit at six feet. And where they can't you know where can we do densify and our buildings that are existing. Some of our buildings are much easier to do densify they have a lot of space. I think some of you know some of the enrollments of our schools used to be much much higher than they are now other schools that's not the case and some schools have interior classrooms. I'm getting the secondary but I'll speak it just more generally about our schools that we can't use next year. Other schools don't so that we're going to have literally a map for each school these are spaces we could use this is what it could look like. But until we get more clear on the staffing and the model then then we'll have the next set of decisions to make which is the staffing I mean there's four areas we're talking about that aren't explicitly teaching and learning. So we're talking about space we're talking about facilities maintenance and cleaning we're talking about transportation and we're talking about staffing. So those are the four operational kind of buckets that we're doing and we're trying to take them tackle them one at a time, because it, you know, even next week on space, if you watch it will probably be an hour long conversation at least on space. We can't do all four at once and we're trying to be very deliberate and build both the committee staff and the public consciousness of all those variables, and they all interact with each other. Like transportation is independent of those ones it's actually part and parcel so we're trying to be very deliberate and not rush in our decision making in our process and try to be very public about it. Thank you very much. Thank you. We have time for another question Mike I understand the pressure of getting to another meeting. Are you hearing our feeling that you may have some teachers who say, I don't think this is a safe environment for me to come back into, and therefore their plan to either quit or retire. So, let me speak more generally about what we're doing so we did survey staff week or two ago I think was last week actually about people who have health conditions that would not allow them to return. And we have legal guidance of how to manage that situation, which is not atypical from some of the disability that you have to make reasonable accommodations for. And so actually this week our human resources staff is reaching out to all of those individuals. So that's one sort of category of staff that we need to be conscious of. We did offer early retirement to staff members this spring, because we knew that some people might have that opinion and we we flexed a little bit of our finances to be able to do that because it actually makes it made FY 21. A little bit better for us that some people did accept those earlier retirement incentives. I think, you know, the other ones are more complex conversation that we're certainly aware of. And we're trying to both accommodate students and staff and families and that is a synergy of those is hopefully where we land but that's probably a more rosy picture than anyone's actually anticipating in any school in America, heading into fall 2021. So what I think we can say confident what I can say confidently is, we're going to follow the best medical advice there is in terms of CDC guidance. We're not going to go short shrift on, you know, that right when we talk about increasing operational costs, some of that as I mentioned before is about making sure our ventilation is as best we can if room doesn't have a window. Kids aren't going to be in it and staff aren't going to be in it. Right, I mean we're just been really clear it might be an office for someone just to put their stuff but not multiple adults. So that's forcing other decisions but we're not going to short change the health and safety of anyone in our organization students or staff to, to make kids or staff be in buildings more. We're trying to follow the strictest guidance we have from the medical community and from disease experts and seeing what's possible and that's really where we are and so I think some people will or won't feel like, you know, things are safe we surveyed families we had actually a remarkably high response rate represent this last week at school committee. We had about 88% 8788% either likely or definitely planning to send their kids to school next year statewide the numbers are much lower. And my many reasons for that maybe the lower rates that we had in in our communities could be that we've been really clear along that we're going to be safety is the number one piece and we're putting that front and front and center. But we had a really positive response rate to that. And so we're trying to balance all those interests and the fact that we know the vast majority of students are much better served in in person school they are distance learning we can do distance learning better we'll be talking about that next week at school committee as well. We did emergency distance learning, we didn't do virtual education. That's the nature in next year, whatever version we're in will be able to do virtual education. But, you know, I think we're, I'm very empathetic, I think we talked about the school committee level that there are subsets of our population that are more reliant and in person education students with more intensive special needs English language learners, especially beginners, where distance learning is not necessarily a model that promotes their educational attainment. And so we you may see the school committee, you know, set some different priorities of in person versus virtual for different either age schools, age fans, disability status and learning status. That'll be the conversation over the next couple weeks. So, one quick thing. Right. Just talking about staffing in general, you know, one of the other complicating factors for us in the coming years is, we're going to do as has already been the case, but we'll continue to do is that if anyone is feeling ill to encourage them to stay home. People will stay home. But then when you think about getting a substitute bringing in outside folks to do that will probably be a difficult thing to do and so how we accomplish substitute teaching and staffing of that will be a complication as well, and could potentially be, you know, it will alter our experience, you know, structure is as well. But as far as just sort of piggybacking on the idea of, you know, sort of complications of staffing and arrangement of staffing that's another piece that plays in to that conversation as well. Thank you. So I have two more questions and again my guide, if you have to go just probably I'm probably four minutes away from needing to get off the call. So then, let me use the quick what I think is the quick one and that is, are you spending some resources to help faculty become better at distance learning so that if we have to do this again. They're better prepared. Yeah, so yes is the short answer but let me expand on a little bit to say that we had working groups this spring it's all on our we have a fall 2020 website it's a link right if you go to our website and click on fall 2020. And that's its own tab. And so we have guiding principles and one of the two of the groups one at elementary one at secondary was focused on distance learning guiding principles. We learned a lot we'll be talking about this on Tuesday at our joint school committee meeting. And I think one of the neat things is we interviewed or we surveyed middle school high school kids faculty staff and then families, and there's a lot of common thoughts about what worked well We're also a Google meet which is our platform is going over significant upgrades already has a sound quality has gotten it was always good but it's now best in the field. They're adding in things like breakout groups which zoom has doesn't have some of the respectfully safety challenges that zoom has experienced in 12 education. So we are investing some resources there but more generally we're investing time and one of the things you'll see I've already referenced it is you know we'd like to build schedules next year that build in regular time for professional development for staff. So even if we are in school, not maintaining some the typical schedule because we know there's going to be ongoing training and work that happens and it can't just be done Oh, we'll get a get extra day before the school year and do it. One of the things we learned this year is that need for ongoing routine collaboration and that's if they're looking for silver linings one of the silver linings is we've recognized that virtual learning is dependent on collaboration in ways that teachers and this isn't our teacher teachers in general have not been pushed to do historically. And I think everybody's there, which is a good thing and it's then how do we implement that and develop plans to do it so starting I didn't want to give a binary answer because I think given a little more context was was hopefully helpful. I'm going to ask one quick question and I know that you have to go and I know. Other questions that Dr slaughter can answer then special education students I've heard some concern that this year was particularly challenging to meet the needs of a lot of our students and are there staffing decisions that have to be made to address that need if it exists and what are the financial implications of it. Yeah, so one thing I can just say very quickly is that this summer typically the students who qualify for special ed programming over the summer is only students who show significant regression over summer months. Students of special needs who show that, which is a pretty relatively small subset of the general population of special needs students. This summer we offered special ed service granted their, their primarily virtual to every student with special needs. And so we recognize that it was a hard experience we recognize that we've gotten better at it and we wanted to support them before the fall. So that's my quick first answer I think the second one is that we've had a mixed it's been a mixed bag some students of special needs have actually done quite well on virtual learning to sort of dependent what the special need was. Other students it was a great struggle as you noted some of it depended on siblings and the ability to support in a whole large number of variables. So, you know, one of the things I like because we talked about things I didn't like about the desi guidance was really a focus on prioritizing students of special needs for getting more in person support in person schooling next year whatever that looks like and there's a firm commitment to that. The staffing implications we're still working out Dr Brady or soon service record emailed me right for this call saying, we need to chat about how do we, how do we be flexible and I think what I'm hoping I find out of this conference call in addition to the financial piece about space and facilities is the flexibility around licensure and roles. They've sort of indicated that we need to be flexible and we need some support from the state. So that we can put our staff in the right places to support the diverse needs of students because some are going to be in person some may choose to be at home and we need to support them all and, and there may be some implications on staffing for that. So, I know you have to go to your, I don't know if Doug can stay for just a couple minutes because Mary Lou when they have some questions that Doug can at least either respond to or note for you for later but thank you very much. Thank you for being here. Thank you for your flexibility get me in early I appreciate it have a great rest of your day. Thank you. Hi Mike. So, maybe Lou, did you have something that you can either ask Doug or through Doug. Right. It's out of the classroom but it, it's significant I think the food services, the school system took over last year, and, and hopefully it's very successful. The question I ask is that is you're asking for $25,000 for, oh, that's an expense account for food services next year. Or is that what you spent over the budget, but so it would seem to me it's probably going to be, we don't know what the number will be because of the COVID and where you can serve food and how it's covered and if it has to be done in the classroom. Do you have any kind of information along that line that you could tell us. So I can say this. Yeah, the short answers food service will be decidedly different next year than this year. But I will say that it looks as though there's going to be some some ongoing extension of some supports. So, literally, all this yesterday I haven't followed up on the details of it but there's currently some supports and some programs that we're running through this spring that we're going to continue, you know, be able to continue to leverage and that will give us some access to some funding so currently what we're doing is we're delivering meals out into the, into the community, and every meal we serve is reimbursed as if it were a free lunch at school. So it's a pretty significant amount of support in that way that that kind of support and that flexibility is is going to continue through the coming school year. But operationally I think we're still, you know, some of it will depend upon what happens in any given building relative to where the kids sit and how they'll move in the building as to how we'll bring food to them and deliver food to them. So I think it's a real open question. Some aspects of that that might be less expensive there's some that might be more expensive what are you know what and how our labor costs going to going to change relative to that. So, it's a lot of planning that's still to be done at this point we've not modified our budget really yet because it's just too early. Hopefully it will be not wildly different but there is some some hopeful support from the from the federal level around some of their food service programs that that I think is going to help us out a little bit in that regard. Good. And one last simple question. Why is the stipend for book meeting members being shifted to the town. Mr. Mangano may want to answer that question. You know, I think that the it it it sort of separates the schools from paying the people that direct the schools I think is is it's a sort of cleaner chain of command as it were relative to the to the to the payment. So separating the payment and where that's coming from from the authority. So the school committee has authority over the schools and yet then we're turning around and paying them so it's it just sort of separates that out. I don't know if you're going to want to add something else. Paul has a response also. So the the salaries that the school committee gets paid is controlled by the town council is only by vote of the town council so since they don't control what that number is. I felt we felt it was important for that to be on the town side of the ledger. It's not that much money but the school committee doesn't can't control whether that number goes up or down it's only the town council that can control that. Thank you both for your answers. Lynn, did you have anything. Yeah, I actually, when to follow on questions when ones follow on when it's kind of a broad thought about how we think about this. The question is whether or not how much are we spending and are we spending some time helping parents understand how to structure the learning environment at home. And I asked this because I had the pleasure of attending in virtually a class of Kathleen Perkins from third grade and down and crackle farm and she is amazing good attendance of students still coming to her class. You know, I mean, the varied levels of where students were sitting, what they were doing while they were also in class was interesting and challenging to her as a teacher, and to her assistance as well. And I just have to say I truly admire any teacher and all teachers that have been teaching in this kind of an environment, but I do wonder whether or not the school is doing things to help parents think about how to structure that learning environment when students have to be home. I'll say this about that. I believe, you know, and, and, and Superintendent Morris mentioned this a little bit earlier and talking about the difference between sort of emergency distance learning and virtual education. I think that shifting to a different model being a bit able to prepare for the coming year will alter the way in which we think about and deliver those those services and so I think they'll be at a minimum, you know, some of it's going to be dependent on the child themselves and so he spoke to that, you know, relative to some of the kids with special needs and that sort of thing. I think, you know, age is a huge factor. Some kids that are old, you know, kids that are older are much more able to do it. I think also, you know, we learned a tremendous amount about things that work and don't work in that kind of environment. And so it is a, it is a pretty significant piece. And so I think that's, that's part of that professional development piece. And, and part of that is, as far as professional bonus, how do the teachers engage both students and, and their families and, and getting a greater understanding I think they got a lot of understanding this but greater understanding of, of people's, you know, home situations and sort of how to accommodate that well, and to support them in what ways they need to but also, you know, how do you structure or, or, you know, frame your expectations for those environments that are that are functional for everyone and so I think that that's all part and parcel of the process that will be going through and learning from what we learned this spring and what we did this spring and what it was like and then also trying to prepare for the coming year. Let's try to leverage that. I mean, you know, there's some real opportunity in some ways with virtual education. And Dr. Moore spoke to this relative to, to the nature of the collaboration people had to be in the presence they had to have to have these conversations that are functional at any level but I think that that was, you know, we're now poised to, to leverage that to do it better and, and try to continue to refine our process that way. So, you have one other thing and that is this, going back to how you've talked about this year and the upcoming, really uncertainty. I mean, it's amazing that you can even put out a proposed budget. You know, in fact, and you've, you've all implied that you probably will be back for additional conversations at some point. And I think we have to be prepared for that. And I'm hoping that in the presentation of those of those, you know, of it here is a situation. It's now different than when we first talked with you. You can provide us with the trade offs of what it will mean if you do this versus this, because, you know, there is not a bottomless pit, and we all value education, and want to make sure that we maintain whatever we can. At some point, there may have to be some trade offs. And when we look at future conversations that we may have this year, hopefully not next, but we might. It would be useful to understand what we're trading off by doing Model A or Model B. I absolutely think that's going to be a critical part of the conversation because I think, you know, we're operating in a very nebulous time because we don't have a sense of what the state is going to provide and sort of what level of support they're able to provide. For the federal level, they've given no indication either as far as any additional supports. You know, we haven't gotten any concrete news relative to an additional level of support that might come from the federal level either and so those will both, you know, make themselves, if those become clear, when they become clear because they'll ultimately become clear, we'll sort of set the frame of what resources are available, and then we'll start to evaluate and, you know, reassess priorities and talk about those kind of tradeoffs and what we can do within the resources available and there's going to be some hard decisions to be made. And because on the municipal side, sitting on, you know, Mr. Seinfeld mentioned my previous experience with the fine spend, I certainly appreciate, you know, the needs and the necessity of things the municipal government does. You know, at least the fire department, DBW, all of those need to be able to do their jobs and they're operating in a different environment as well. And so those have additional demands in some respects and constraints from financial disphysical by virtue of the public health crisis. So certainly be keeping that in mind and thinking of that and understanding that there are and will be, I think, in the next year or two significant financial limitations and we're going to have to find, you know, we'll definitely have to determine from our most important priorities for some of the requirements, you know, by law, I mean some of the requirements we have that drive some of our budget are driven by requirements of law and so we'll be meeting those as is needed as well. Thank you so much for everything. We really do want to get on to the share and sharing. Dorothy's had her hand up. So did you have one last quick question? Unmood, please. Yes. Okay. I want to stress the importance of being in person by whatever means. I've had emergency online courses to college students and most of them were in their beds with their sheets pulled up to their chins. It was obviously they were very traumatized by the whole thing. And I was not able to supervise in person my own grandchildren who spent the day alone except for parents coming home at lunch, managing themselves. And I saw my grandson who's very bright start to fall behind. I understand about special needs kids, but I will tell you, the very bright can fall off too. So I, I, I think there's one thing you haven't talked about and that is using other buildings in addition to the school buildings that are local to where groups of children live where the children can walk. I'm talking about really bold fashion time but we could do it. There are buildings in town. So there'd be more smaller cells that would in some ways be safer. And I think it's connected to housing areas and the children could, could walk or even a teacher could come and walk them in like a train, you know, to the classroom. Because I think it's so important that they be in a classroom having socialization at distance and being with a real teacher, because I saw a lot of fall off. No doubt. I mean, superintendent has spoken to this at certainly school committee meetings that the nature of the distance learning is, is not well serving a lot of the kids, even regardless of whether they have a special need or not. It has not done well for some kids and has not been able to do well for them. And I think, you know, his personal opinion would be to, to the extent possible we'll get all the kids physically into the buildings as much as we can and absolutely to that point. I think on the question of other locations, you know, some of the concern that you run into with that it's not that we don't have some spaces that are around town. I mean, there are some, you know, the Southeast Street School is one that's near Rocker Farm. The East Street School is is a location across the street from Fort River School. You know, the difficulties in other physical locations that the superintendent has mentioned is you often from a public health standpoint, just a general health standpoint, you know, need a nurse or someone of a health care provider standpoint that can be either in that location or close by and that's one piece and then also there's administrative person that needs to be there until you start to end up with the staffing issue where you start to add these overheads to that to those locations that become prohibitive in some way. But, but by that same token, depending on how things play out, those, you know, those metrics change those those the economics of those things change. And so, you know, I think that that as he said, you know, the idea of being nimble is going to be critical because I think circumstances will change that may drive us to, you know, some things that don't seem reasonable or or I that you know appropriate at this point, but maybe five months from now. So I think we're, we're definitely going to keep that in mind. I do think the superintendent's definitely the opinion, especially as the younger you go that, you know, in person education is much more effective. There's just some things you can't do it's it's it's difficult, you know, the virtual has its has its place and it has its options and I think there are ways we could, you know, implement it better but I think, you know, the in person education is is a far better tool. There's a ton of things kids learn at school that aren't, you know, that are about being in social settings. That aren't specifically tested on MCAS or something like that that are also important things to learn and navigate and, you know, are part and parcel of that so we want to have those experiences for kids as well. Thank you. Thank you very much. Doug, thanks for being with us again. Thank Dr. Morris on our behalf. We really appreciated time that both of you have spent with us and explaining a very important piece of our budget. I hope that Sharon is still with us I see her, the picture of what appears to be your office and she is. So Sharon, thank you very much and I appreciate your patience. And so I want to turn the subject now to the library budget. And as we did just a few minutes ago. I just started out with a brief overview presentation and some some initial thoughts and then turned it back to questions so I wanted to welcome you and ask you if you have anything that you'd like to introduce. Yeah, thank you so much for having me I was wondering if I could, would you allow me to share my screen, just so I can go over pieces of the budget packet. I believe that that is possible to go ahead. Okay. Yes, we can. Okay. What I wanted to do I hope you've had a chance to look at the budget packet I'm not going to go through line by line and page by page. I would like to skip right on down to the appendix before ending up on the summary page. So I'm going to start here, and I'm going to make it bigger so people can see it. So one of the questions that I get very often from town counselors as well as residents is how exactly is the library's budget crafted and how do all the pieces fit together so I wanted. I created pages eight nine of the appendix so that you all can see exactly how much money was spent from exactly which bucket of money on exactly which spending category. And so we, we've always used the summary format on page five for voting purposes because it's clear and concise, but in order to fit all the information under one page, a lot of the numbers have to be consolidated so you know when things are consolidated it tends to open up questions and so I just wanted to take a couple of minutes to walk you through what's here. And that's why 19 the actuals and at the top of the page that's all our different buckets of money that we have along the left hand side is all the different expense categories that we that we use. And in the middle and bright orange the bold letters these are the categories that we use in the summary document so so you can see how they match up. And over here on the right hand side of the screen highlighted in peach, these numbers are the totals that you'll see that correspond on the summary page. So, starting with the buckets 75% of the library's total operating budget comes from the municipal appropriation. And you can see here that the appropriation is used for staff salaries, benefits, and the rent that we pay for the Munson Memorial Library. The town appropriation doesn't fund doesn't fund books. It doesn't fund the majority of our operations it doesn't fund our CW Mars account or maintenance or utilities or program. So the next over is the endowment and the state aid bucket so our endowment that's I think that's really where the biggest question comes in because when when you see that the endowment is worth $8 million. That's just such an enormous amount of money and so how can the library ever say it doesn't have enough money. So, the endowment does. It was it was 14% of our, our budget in FY 19, and the state aid the amount that we spend in state aid was 3% of our budget. So this is where you're going to see where the town's appropriation kind of falls short it doesn't cover all of our staff salaries so in FY 19, almost $88,000 was spent in state aid and $7,000 from the endowment on personnel. This is the way it's been for a very long time. It's not due to an increase in staff if anything our staffing levels are decreasing over time. So also under the endowment you're going to see that a portion of it is used for buying materials, but for the most part the endowment is used for all of our unsexy expenses I call them so it's maintenance for the Jones and the North Amherst Library. It's the utilities for the Jones and the North Amherst Library. It's insurance for the Jones and North Amherst Library are annual audit we We have to conduct our own audit separate from the town so we have to pay almost $12,000 for that software licenses supplies and our CW Mars assessment. So those are all the things that come that are paid for through the endowment. Next I want to talk about our fundraising buckets so down below what I've done is I've highlighted in yellow so these are are the buckets of money that that we get through the kindness of strangers. And so what we've got are the restricted gifts are Sammy's grants any grants that we apply for monies that the friends raise and the Woodbury account which is also overseen by the friends donations to special collections and then monies left over from the building expansion and renovation project back in 1993. Those were donated monies as well we don't have a lot of money left over there. So all the fundraising money goes towards you'll you'll see materials, the majority of it, and then down below it goes towards programming and special collections here. The there are some donations that have gone towards our grounds and those those donations were given the restricted to our gardens upkeep of the garden so that's where those expenses are. And so that leaves our fees and loss books category here and our sale of goods category here. That's that equals less than 1% those two columns equal less than 1% of our operating budget, and that money is used for materials and a little bit of operations. So that was FY 19. Now I'm just going to briefly go over page nine, which is FY 21. So I'm going to bring it down to the bottom here just showing the percentages of the total operating budget. So you're going to see the municipal appropriation column, which is 77 of our 77% of our FY 21 budget and it is being level funded from the FY 20 budget. The down and draw is going to make up 13.3% of our budget. The trustees have approved a 4.5% draw rate, which is 0.1% less than FY 20 the one that we're in now state aid is 3.3% all of our fundraising lines equal 5.6% of our total operating budget, and then the fees and loss books equal less than half less than one half of a percent basically because of COVID. So, so that's kind of how all the puzzle pieces fit together. Now I want to bring you back up to the summary page, which is, you know, the traditional document that we've used over time for voting purposes. Now, before COVID happened Mike talked a little bit about this as well. This column in green, the trustees were ready to approve this budget request. Those were the good old days and so instead this red column, this is what we are presenting you with today. It is a 0.6% decrease from FY 20. Quickly under expenses. It's a 1% decrease in salaries 3% decrease to benefits 2% decrease to materials. What else have we got we've got a 13% increase to repairs, and that's just because our building and systems are old utilities there's an 18% increased utilities again our systems are just old. We've been able to increase programming by 100% and that's again due to fundraising and a 50% increase in special collections and under revenue sources down below this is showing the level funding the 0% increase of the town appropriation. A 0.9% increase to the endowment draw, even though the the rate is decreasing from 4.6% to 4.5 and FY 21. We took the state aid figure off of the the cherry sheet and so we're looking at a 4% cotton stay made and and of course that may go down. A 16% decrease to gifts and sammies and grants and again that's do that's due to COVID. You know when the buildings are closed and people can't get into them to enjoy services. It's really hard to ask for people to donate money. We are looking at a 9% increase in friends gifts gifts and as I say that so our friends are still soliciting donations and we still appreciate those donations. A 28% decrease in fees and lost books and again that's because of COVID because the buildings are closed we can't people aren't using our meeting rooms so the rental. Have gone down and and things like that people aren't paying for photocopies and prints print shops from the computers. Level funded B and R and a 58% decrease in sale of merchandise again because we're not in the building. It's hard to sell t shirts when we're not there. And so that's really that's the bulk of it. My the last thing that I wanted to say as well so how why am I not a nervous wreck. It's not entirely because of staffing and timing is everything and we have just lucked out. So our receptionist retired in the fall of 2019, and we have not filled the position. There is money in the FY 21 budget for that position it's a full time, fully benefited position, but if there are mid year cuts then I just will not fill that position. The first library branch head. She retired in March and we can't afford to hire a new one for for FY 21. And then there's another person in another full time position that will be retiring at the end of August, and we cannot afford to fill that position. And this budget maintains to unfilled positions from a couple of years ago, and really the only way the only reason we're able to continue to maintain services with this many fewer full time positions is because of our reduced staffing levels right now, because we're not in the building we're providing fewer, we're providing our services but in fewer hours and what I mean is so we're working six days a week instead of seven days a week, and we're not working Tuesday and Thursday nights. So, that's how that's how we're able to hold it all together for now, but we'll be reevaluating, you know, on a month by month basis at this point who knows what's going to happen. But that's, that's everything in a nutshell that I wanted to chat with you guys about. Thank you for the overview. When I see you have your hand up to a question. Yeah, I was interested to see your rate of draw on your endowment. It's been the last couple of years, and wondered if you've been able to maintain the principal with that, and was that largely able to be done because the market actually was generous and you had done well on investments. And if Bob were here, he would be able to answer more articulately. So I did, I was expecting this question and so as of May 31, the endowment's value was $7,959,331. So that is down so the highest point this fiscal year we were at 8.3 million, but the lowest point in this fiscal year was 7.1 million so we're doing very well. And so the draw rate we were able to lessen it. So I applied for a Massachusetts cares grant, and that was for $10,000 I will be able to use that for canopy. That was the big reason why last year, FY 20, we the trustees approved going from 4.5 to 4.6% was for canopy. And with this grant, I'll be able to fund canopy through that way instead of increasing the endowment draw. I also was very curious. But in this year's match for that you're using state money. So, could you explain that. Wait, so you were cut off for a little in the beginning of your question. I just got a notice that my internet was unstable. So in your report under on page four on the expense side. Okay, I need to open my screen more. You have revenue sources, and then you have the FY 20 amount to spend on materials, and the FY 20 amount to spend the FY 21 amount. And this is to deal with also your state aid where you must have a certain amount of money to be able to get the state aid. So there are several state aid regulations that public libraries have to abide by in order to be eligible to receive state aid and to be certified. And so one of them is the municipal appropriation requirement, which means the town needs to appropriate 2.5% more than the average of the past three years appropriation so that's that's one piece of the puzzle. One piece of the puzzle is our materials expenditure requirement, and that formula is 13% of the town's appropriation in any given fiscal year, less the benefits costs, you have to spend that on materials. So the reason why from FY 20 to FY 21, the materials expenditure is going down. It's because our benefits line is going up. It's just the way the math works out. So we have to spend on health insurance the less we have to spend on materials and vice versa. I think the thing that was confusing for me is in dealing with match under grants and contracts you can't use certain kinds of money to match money. And you're using state aid for materials but you're allowed to do that so I understand that now. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Just on the pull on the endowment I'll just start there and then I had other questions but it's the recommended amount was 4% and you've been above that now for multiple years. And so the question is the other questions I'm going to have this how sustainable is your budget. It's going forward. You know the endowments not down by a huge amount but if you're, it's also not up from last year so if you're pulling 4% out of it and it's not up by 4% you will start to see it go down. Just on that piece then when I looked at your gifts, Sammy's plus friends, not counting this year but just going from FY 18 to 19 then 19 actual versus what you would expect it to get or 20. You weren't getting as much as you had targeted to get in terms of increases so I don't, I can understand why COVID would hit you hard on the fundraising but just I've wondered whether trying to do two kinds of fundraising campaigns one for a new and one to support an operating budget, whether you're going to the same people and they'll write a check for one but not for another do you have any sense of that on fundraising because it, it, when I'm adding the two together it's, you know, you came in with actual I wonder where you thought you were going to be with budget by quite a bit in last year and then this year will have a different so so those pieces fill the hole left by money not from us. So I'll just give me my last question on this is going to be. Save a lot of money when you shut down. So do you have a buffer off of last year's budget that we can't quite see, you know, of FY 20 that will help you as you look in this year. And what about places like North Amherst library or the branch libraries if are you going to. What's going are you replacing that person with a less expensive or will there be fewer hours in the branch library you know how are you going to be balancing this. They're both shut right now so I can see you're balancing it but are you saving money, because people aren't working is that last piece, particularly the branch libraries. Okay, that is a lot of questions. Yeah, I can go back over. Thanks for writing them down there. They're awesome questions so first, I'm going to go to the fundraising piece so we lost $20,000 last year because we didn't have Sammy's 2020 it will be held in hopefully in spring of 2021. So we lost over $100,000 due to coven between fundraising and Sammy's and building meeting room fees and you know sale of merchandise and things like that. The friends were expecting their goal for FY 20 was $140,000, but they raised 110,000 and they still have one more mailing to go. They're actually doing really well if you had told me back in February and March they that they would be this successful I would have said no way in heck. So they've been awesome so will that continue to go beautifully I think so. Okay, that's the, that's the fundraising piece. Another question was the endowment so I was really glad that you asked that question. So, if you look at page page was page three where the endowment is the endowment trends and the, and the Woodbury trends. I'm going back a few years. So, leading up to the recession of 0809 the library. Our endowment was passively managed and and then, and then the recession hit and so the trustees decided to switch to active management and that's when that $1.5 million loss, you know, became real. So, from 0809 to through FY 15, it was actively managed but then an FY 16 we switched back to passive management and, and we've been doing better because of it. We're spending less money on on the management itself, and, and we're staying the course. So, the reason that I say that it had to do with, so I don't have in front of me, what our returns have been over the year versus what our draw has been and are we dipping into the principle. The answer is no we're not dipping into the principle. So if you go to the summary on page five you'll actually see. So, historically the trustees gosh long before I ever came around and never any, any of you were ever around the trustees were taking, you know, between six and 7% drops, and it's this set of trustees that came in and and really started to pay better attention, and slowly over three years dropped it down to a 4% draw, which is really where they want to be. And so you'll see FY 16 FY 17 FY 18 it was at the 4%. We went up to five in FY 19. Gosh, why did we go up to five. There was a good reason. We had to spend our reserves. Oh yes, that's exactly what it was. So the way we were able to drop down to 4% was by spending all of our reserves, which made sense. It makes complete sense because it wasn't making any money for us. We didn't have an account. We'd rather let it sit with Vanguard, but because we spent our reserves when FY 19 came we ended up having to take the higher draw. And again, here we are coming right back down. So yes, this is absolutely the way to go and and will be successful in the long run. So that's the endowment question. Then I wrote down question number $3 savings. Oh, that meant you were asking if we save money because of COVID. Absolutely. Not through personnel. Our personnel have been say, have been paid and have been working throughout. And now, right now what we're doing, you mentioned the branches, which is great. So the Jones library is where all the returns are happening because I need a lot of space for that. It's just the sheer magnitude of it. And the items are being quarantined. So that all the returns have to happen at the Jones. And then the checkout is actually started the end of last week. So that's also happening at the Jones. I want to do that at the two branches, but I can't yet I need at least two staff members to be in the building in order to offer that service, because it's very complicated. It's not as simple as just one person standing there bringing out a book to a person that there's a lot involved. And so, until I can have two people in those small buildings at the same time, I can't. So in the meantime, the North Amherst library is where our reference services are being provided out of so that is in use. And then the South Amherst library, we are working on setting up that's where homebound delivery will be managed from. So the books will be, we will the Jones will deliver books to the months in library and that's where the homebound volunteers will come and pick them up and deliver it to people. So that's the branches and then regarding the North Amherst library director branch head position. So without a North Amherst library open to the public. It's just fine not having a branch head. Our ultimate goal eventually is for one one branch library to oversee both branches and to spend money doing administrative work and advocacy that kind of a thing, and to be able to use other staff members for the actual circulation duties that kind of a thing, you know, I want to pay. I want to pay this much for administrative and planning and policy and I want to pay this much for circulation duties, if that makes sense. So we're, we're working on this overarching picture for providing the library even separate from COVID because COVID will go away eventually. So I think those are all the answers to all the questions. Yes, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm looking to see if there are other questions. I don't see any hands at the moment. This is the one question that I was thinking I would ask to everybody but I never got around to asking it to the superintendent because we were so busy with him. You're looking ahead for FY 22. What are your greatest trepidations and what steps are you taking to sort of learn and prepare. Oh, it's through personnel, you know, over the over the past 10 years that I've been here. We have slowly been cutting more and more and more. And so we're to the point where I, you know, I, there isn't another box of paper clips I can cut from the budget so after, if I need to save more money than, than the receptionist position, then, then I'll have to dig deeper. And I have not started playing with, with real numbers certainly the staff have gotten together, even in the past few years about, well, how would we cut and, and, you know, how do we best serve all three communities, you know, the two branches and the Jones community because all three locations are important. So how, you know, how is best to deal with that. The cuts will have to be through staffing, which would affect open hours, that kind of thing. So I don't have an answer yet. I'm kind of hoping and praying that it won't go beyond the receptionist position. Well, kind of on the manager to perform some magic for us. He's he's ready. Anything else that anyone from the committee has. I have, it's what I meant to ask that I was trying to figure out how to ask it but as with the bit with Jones being closed or with the North Amherst being closed. Has it given you an opportunity to go back inside the building when no one's using it. And so custodial staff can do some deep cleaning, or you can go into rooms that had boxes and sort through them and say we don't really need to keep these magazines because they're old, you know, sort of, you know, I know I'm just thinking the way I did it in our house is one of the things that I went through every file cabinet in the house and I went through old stuff and it gave me a chance to clean stuff out that I hadn't had this elemental space or time. So has it have you had that opportunity to sort of say, let's think of how the internal parts of our buildings are and can we empty out some offices or empty out some space, partially thinking about when you're reopening. And doing that all along, you know, for the past 10 years through the budget process, we don't have any extra magazines laying around the magazines that we have. The back issues are not available digitally so that's the only reason we have them once they're available online that we just get rid of the hard copies so we've already done all that separate from COVID, but certainly our building maintenance throughout these past several months have been cleaning the building and now that staff have been back what month and a half now at this point. You know it's being sanitized, disinfected every day, several hours per day for the staff so yeah. Anybody else doing additional questions? Pad, you have your hand up for a moment and then I see you down there. Yeah, I was going to ask about digital archiving of materials and stuff but she sort of answered, Sharon sort of answered that, although I would like to know if there are any employees dedicated to doing that to open space in the library. Yeah, are there any, are you asking are there staff who are digitizing? Yes, doing the digital archiving that would allow you to get rid of magazine copies etc. Well, so we go through vendors for our magazine databases so it's other companies that are taking care of digitizing and so once they're offered that's when we throw away our collection. But as far as our Special Collections Archive goes then yes we do have staff who are in charge of digitizing those and we do, we're working on a CPA grant right now. Oh good, good. And that's in collaboration with the town's IT department and the historic society. If you were able to digitalize the historic materials, what impact could that have on the amount of money to you want to use to preserve those materials? So there's a difference between digitizing and preserving documents you need to do both. Yeah, just because you digitize something doesn't mean then you can throw away the original archivists across the world would just roll over in their graves if we did that. And the problem with digitizing also is that the formats technology changes at the speed of light so, you know, right, so that it's another reason why you have to keep the original. All right, thank you. Sure. Anything else saying, seeing no other hands up. So I want to thank you Sharon for having spent the time with us this afternoon it's been very helpful at such a presentation is really good and I want to thank you for working actively with us and with the hall and the finance staff in town. This as I said, the superintendent has been an extraordinary year and it's really taken all of us to work together as a team to make it happen and I've really been impressed by everyone across Amherst about how well we work as a team. Made as a horrible situation, at least something a little bit better because of the way we work together. So thank you. If you guys have not seen. Sean, as a pickle in a zoom meeting, you don't know what you're missing by you guys. Thank you. Sean, I won't ask you to explain that I will just turn it right over to Paul. And I thought that your presentation last night was really good. I had some comments from some other people who are not counselors but observed and said that they really appreciated the clarity of the presentation that you know Sean made. And how it created a really understandable piece for looking at our budget. I'm going to start with one question and turn it over to the members of the committee to see if they have questions. I think that my, you know, as people know, as you know, I always think in long term multiple years in not in single years. But the presentation is really been was great. It was focused on 21. But I was wondering if there's any elements of what you did for 21 that you were doing to help you and help us prepare for 22 and beyond. Yeah, so thank you and I just want to preface our comments by saying that in this meeting. I've worked in I've seen a lot of towns I worked in other towns and to see the extraordinary relationship between the schools to town and the library is unusual. And I think that goes back for many, many years from establishing the budget coordinating group and the cooperation and the expectation established by the leadership of the town that we will work together. And we are fighting all the time and it's the energy goes in the wrong direction that our energy goes in the right direction. So, you know, we were actually just Sonya and Sean and I were talking about that same thing this morning that you just raised in terms of where we're headed. And, you know, our plan right now is you saw the assumptions that have built into the plan. I expect that there will be some modest recovery in FY 21. And with the hope and that we will be going back to somewhat some kind of normalcy in FY 22 but understanding that that is there's a high likelihood that that might not happen and what do we do then. What are the recurring sources of revenue that we would continue to look at. And we're taking action along some of those lines, you know, Sean and Sonia are looking at different, you know, expanding some of our revenue sources. We have tried to maintain some tools at our disposal that we can utilize. And in addition to the reserves that we're not touching at this moment in time that those are the reserves that we will touch. Or we would, you know, at this point, that's how the council has lined up that if state aid doesn't come through, it will, it says we will look at reserves. That's just one tool for us. We have also expanded your tools that we'd be looking at as well. So, you know, I think looking forward. We're we're somewhat optimistic and we're we're focused on our ability to maintain the services that the town has has come to build has built and has come to expect. The next set of decisions will be much harder and involve bigger swaths of the of the budget in our operations. Sean, do you want to have like that? Yeah, I'll just add, build upon what I said a little bit last night is that we're doing a lot of scenario planning. We've kind of built the tool so that we can put in different variables to, you know, just model what different realities might look like next year, and then develop strategies, you know, no matter what happens next year we can have some strategies ready to go. So we're doing a lot of that modeling and communication will be important between all of us to stay ahead of this. And I just want to add that our expectation is that early fall, we don't anticipate what the state does matters a lot. What the federal government says we can do with their with the cares money matters a lot. We will have real answers to that till the September, October. And I think that's when we're going to be really having this kind of this kind of conversation again in a pretty serious way about where are we in FY 21 and where we was what's FY 22 looking like. That's the way I was thinking about it. In addition to the question of that we were prepared and still are prepared to look at reserves if the state aid does not come through at the amount that we are now assuming. We also made some very difficult decisions about capital. And that the experience in this town was we got to having a joint capital planning committee because we realized we had no way of keeping up with capital and it was having long term consequences and we don't want to get into that hole yet again. And so the question is ultimately going to be that how, what is it going to have to be our target for capital next year regardless and that it's a discussion that I think we would like to have earlier rather than later so that we can start thinking about it. We really haven't deliberated about this as a committee, but it has come up. I'm going to turn to my colleagues on the committee because I think I see three people and I'm just going to go from bottom to top. Is that is I look at the list and Bob Hegner. Do you have something you wanted to ask or say. Thank you. Oh, I wanted to ask sort of two questions. The first is the reduction of the capital projects. How does that ripple through the demands on the town employees in other words, if they're not engaged in monitoring or permitting or things of these capital projects. I'm sort of gets freed up for other things and and and is that a significant amount of time or not not a significant amount of time. So when you mean capital projects you're talking about not the major capital projects but the other the sort of day to day things. Day to day, you know, right. And then the other part of it is what impact could that have on the potential for overtime or reducing the potential for overtime. So on most of the projects over time is not a not a factor because they usually are managed by salary employees. Most of the time intensive capital projects are either contracted out. On roads, we always have a town employee engineers, a lower level engineer who's monitoring the road work and that type of thing. And that we are continuing to invest in roads and sidewalks. So that's something that is ongoing. So, and almost all the other projects we tend to have a sort of owner project manager somebody who we contract for specifically for that we don't have sort of built in people. So this is, we do have a facilities manager who's overseeing some improvements that we're doing right now to their buildings we have a backlog of capital funds that Sonya has been sort of saying, you know, pushing everybody to clean that up. We want to get rid of all the capital funds and not letting people move forward so this is a year for looking back at capital funds that have been allocated for projects, utilizing that money. And it's actually an opportunity to take care of those things. Okay, thank you. Funny on my screen I'm not next but anyway, a couple things. Sean you mentioned the tool, and I'm a that is a tool for operating budgets that's similar to the capital tool. So if you're going to ask me to make it public, I don't know if I can do that right. I'm not going to make ask you to make it public. Yeah, it's more or less an Excel spreadsheet that you know we just set up that allows us to plug in different variables. It's essentially the same thing that's in the, in the budget document, but you know that goes out five years and we can plug in different assumptions and see, see what it looks like. Now, I, it's a complicated thing I build such a thing and being able to plug and play with various assumptions and particularly in this point in time. I do want to go to the larger capital projects for a moment, because we just asked and are about and have are now have available to us. And look from the library for what it will cost to repair the building. And in the repair. It, it hits a certain level and therefore we have to make it accessible which we should anyway. Are we going to get to that point with some of our other buildings like the DPW and fire. Because there's a point at time where we keep stretching these out, you know, unfortunately fires when I know a little too well, and we've now stretched that from 2006 for 14 years. And, you know, we know that there's issues like not having potable water on the first floor and stuff like that. So, are we in fact going to be forced to have to look at some minimal. major repairs I mean I know last year at some point didn't we have to buy a new air conditioning system for the police station or something and just issues that we keep putting off and is one of the reasons that our buildings in fact now are in such bad shape. Yeah, I'll chime in quickly. I think it's safe to say the longer we go without replacing the buildings the more those costs are going to grow. So we have heard about some potential projects on the radar that if we don't. If the buildings aren't replaced in the next three to five years or so that we would have to start considering just like the schools in the library have the same thing. So I think you're right to say that the longer we go, the more likely we're going to see costs and larger costs pop up for these buildings. I just wonder at some point if we're going to have to get a more firm handle on what some of that looks like as we go forward. Done for the moment. I think we're building on the same theme here. I look out the year that has seemed to me the year after next to FY 22 is the one where huge question marks, particularly on capital because we just put everything in a column called delayed and really going back and looking at that but one of the assumptions that's always been in every year is that we're increasing our base property tax by two and a half percent were allowed to do that. And I hesitate to even say this out loud but what if we can't afford if we can't go up by quite that much you know if we we hit the water rates are going up and sewer rates are going up if we hit the the year after next to the year after that one where those collide with some of the big investments on either water or sewer. And we haven't recovered locally, you know, in terms of the, the part of the town that doesn't work for the libraries and the schools where we're maintaining their salaries but the local businesses don't come back. So in, in, in thinking of some worst case things I just urging you plug in some of those numbers on the latest with UMass that the UMass students who come out back and live on campus, they can't leave campus. And so my husband's first thing is, can they order in can they order delivery so you know will the pizza places in town and will point away so you know the places where the kids used to frequent them a lot if they're not allowed to go there, but they're going to all be blue wall and on on campus dining which means this huge row won't be benefiting so just trying to think through that and then on Lynn's point about the delayed with capital I know where we talked about trying to reconvene the DCC as soon as possible in September ish because, you know, if we have to live with another year 5% rather than 10% or 8% rather than 10% trying to really look hard at every one of those delayed columns and all the delayed columns for things that weren't even on the list that the the DPW roof is about to collapse on somebody's head. And DPW roof wasn't on the list Lynn, you know last time I looked you know some of these buildings because we keep thinking we're going to fix the whole building. You know it's two separate ways of thinking and then meanwhile we've protected the operating budget and what I just heard from schools is by all sorts of some of its serendipity some savings in this year because they had to close down so they had some money that they didn't use this year that they can use for next year. That's not going to be true for 22 so if we are staffing in different ways and all this. I'm going on and on the levels of uncertainty but I think it's a complicated set of the worst case and alternative and what Lynn asked or one of us I think Andy asked if the schools have to come back to us. Say well we could do this or we could do that and talk about consequences of going down one road versus another. It's a different, it's certainly not a way we had to be thinking in the last several years. So your budget Paul in this nice thick book doesn't have lots of bad news stories going throughout it, you know so we were able to because of what you all did early on. So it's just trying to think that way and think of how can we and the finance committee or the council be helpful. I've explained a few times now on water and sewer on the. A few people paid attention to the five year increase and said whoa, you know this year is a big one but then over five years and what's that about. But we're going to start to get those people paying attention because it'll be hitting their pocketbooks. So I'll just stop there and it is about this complexity of what and how soon will we know which things so you said you won't know state and cares until sort of maybe September, you'll have a better handle on it so maybe that means that in September there's going to be some flurry of relook at each of the pieces because we have to come up with typically guidelines in November for the following year so by October we have to have a firmer hold on all of this. So I just want to jump I think what from my experience coming in from the outside the strength of the town has been that they select board the finance committee and the financial officers of the town have always been engaged in a pretty robust dialogue and people trust that this setting now virtual is is but people are reviewing pretty deeply what the options are for the town and that has given the town a good foundation. I think that that is your engagement, Kathy and everybody on this committee is really important to build confidence amongst the town's people that you're representing their interests that you're, you're as engaged on the budget as the town staff are that it's not just town staff doing things, and that it's this conversation. It's a rigorous conversation that you that we want you to bring to this that's helpful to us as well. Kathy, were you done. I am because we're about to over on Thursday what we'll hit each of the departments because the other kinds of questions I have drilled deeper into this large area this large area, and this large area. So we'll have that opportunity as we go. Beyond the top line. And just one other thing, Andy, we have we have answers to all the questions that the council raised last night if you want us to go through the questions that were raised by counselors today we're happy to do that. Okay. Thank you. Just second Dorothy. Did you have a question. I have a comment that follows on Kathy's, and that is, I see an extremely uncertain time that's going to go on quite a while, I have no doubts that Amherst will prevail during this. But I'm thinking that all of the work we did on the four capital projects is not not for not. It was kind of called a thought experiment thinking about what we could do what we want to do what we might do. And I think we need to focus on one thing, which is the schools because we just don't know. And what's going to be needed, how much is going to be needed. And we can't be a town without our school so that's my my thought is let's just do that and see that out. And when we get somewhere do something else which means yes we'll have to spend money on repairs of buildings which we're hoping to replace. Just have to accept that that that's how we live we can't let the buildings fall into too much more disarray. We have to be do our do our best on it but just focus on in terms of new buildings or whatever, whatever we're going to do for the schools. I think that's going to change a little bit in terms of social distancing. Yeah, a minor thing that you probably already thought of but in terms of the DPW, whether we repair renovate or replace. I think included in a document with that information should be information about renting space for the DP view and had probably already thought of that but I wanted to bring it up. So, Paul, you said you had some work that you've done on follow up to what we talked about last night as a council. Yeah, I think Sonia and Sean came up with went through all every question the counselor asked and if you want to just go through those, Sean. Yeah, do you think it's better if I just answer them or share my screen. I think just say what the question was and then give your answer. Okay. So the first question that was asked was about including a table in the budget, the budget document itself that outlines the budget additions and reductions. That's something we can definitely do for future budget documents it's a little late for this budget document, but we'll definitely do that. And one thing I just wanted to know is that we are doing a comprehensive review of our budget document itself over the course of the next six months. We're going to seek input from counselors on things that maybe they would like to see in future budget documents and obviously this this table of additions and reductions would be one of them. But we'll be reaching out to you for other ideas of things that maybe you thought would be nice to have in the budget document that we can provide. So that's the first question. The second question is, why was there a difference between the FTE reduction on page nine Roman numeral nine of the budget book and the 3.0 FTE reductions that we showed in the in the PowerPoint. So the PowerPoint showed changes that we're proposing for next year. The staffing table that's on page nine compared what our staffing looks like next year to baseline FY 20 staffing or the original FY 20 staffing plan. So the difference is that there were a couple positions that were added during FY 20 after that original staffing budget was finalized. There were a couple of positions added mid year about one and a half FTE that were added mid year and so that those one and a half positions are netting out against the 3.0 reductions that were proposing. So that's why if you look at the staffing trends table, it'll only show a reduction of 1.5 but in terms of actually new reductions for next year, the total is 3.0 provide detail on marijuana revenues. So that again is something that we can certainly include as an appendix or incorporate into future budget documents. Right now there is information on that in the quarterly reports, which can be found on the town website and under accounting if you go to government and departments, and then click on finance and then go to accounting. I'll send these responses out which will have a link to the report. But in the third quarter report for 2020 which is the most recent one it breaks down what our marijuana revenues look like this year. The fourth question was why are sewer fund revenues decreasing at a faster rate than water fund revenues and the question also included, aren't those two revenues linked together. And so the answer is they are linked together. There are a couple changes that were in the works before COVID even arrived. And one of those was updating our model for budgeting. So in the past we had always assumed that 95% of water consumption would be sewer consumption. So why it's a percentage is because there are several water accounts in town that don't have a sewer associated with it so it could be a septic house or building that has a septic system so there's no sewer account attached to it. Over time we've determined that that 95% rates has is actually not it slowly become inaccurate over time and so this year the plan was to drop that down to 85% which was more realistic. So one of the factors impacting revenues in the sewer is dropping from 95% to 85% in terms of the projected number of water accounts that are also sewer so that affected the sewer consumption and as a result the revenues in sewer. If you look if you think if you look at the charts that we showed when we discussed enterprise funds at the finance committee, you'll see on that front chart for sewer. There's a percentage and you'll see that it goes from 95% to 85% for FY 21. So there was a question about when we will know what what the surplus looks like for FY 20 and what can be done with those funds. So we really won't have an exact number until end of July mid August, when everything is sort of closed out and we've balanced everything. The surplus that we do have from FY 20 will fall to free cash. And so if the council did want to somehow allocate these funds, it would do so by voting to use the free cash. And again, there's some, some changes that I've looked into that Sonya mentioned related to COVID but typically, you can't vote to allocate free cash until it's certified which is usually in October. So there's a question about can we provide more trend information and again that's something we definitely can do it'll have to be in the future budget document, but when we reach out to you for input. That's something that we'd like to hear about what types of information you'd like more trend trend data on. There was a question this one's so the most complicated one but it was the thing that Dr Morris referenced earlier, and that's why is the elementary school showing an increase when the guidance was for level funding. But the easiest way to explain it is to give a little bit of context. When I first started at the schools charter and choice tuition or in the school budget at that couple years after I had started back in the early 2011 2012 are the town's auditors asked us to not do that and not have the schools pay directly because it was something that showed up on the town's cherry sheet. So we took it out of the school budget. And at that point what we decided was moving forward, if there was a change in charter and choice tuition from one year to the next. That change would be, we would we reflect that change in the elementary schools budget. So if charter costs went up for choice tuition costs went up, the elementary school budget would go down because normally in the past the elementary schools would go up. And on the flip side if charter and choice costs went down, then the elementary school budget would go up. So it's not really a budget increase or decrease from a like a funding provided standpoint it's really a cost that used to be in the budget. And so for FY 21, which is this has started to actually be a little bit different charter and choice costs actually went down. The elementary school was slated to get a little bit above the original two and a half percent guidance that was given out. But when we said no to the two and a half percent guidance that we're going to do level funding, we still kept that adjustment in for choice and charter. And so that did increase it a little bit above level funding. Again, which we don't feel is actually coming in above guidance we that's some accounting mechanism that's been in place for at least the last five or six years. The adjustment that I'll just know is the schools did ask us if they could come in over their guidance at the elementary level but under guidance at the regional level. And so that the net effect of the schools in total would have been a zero percent or actually go even less than that. And so that's what they did they came in a little bit higher than guidance at the elementary level, but they came in below guidance at the region level. So setting aside the adjustment for charter and choice they actually came in under guidance. And so again this is illustrated a little bit better in the document that I have here so you can kind of see what I mean by the by the adjustments for choice and charter. And then the last question I think was about Hickory Ridge and free cash that was allocated. So we're still looking into that one to confirm where it is in the process but there is the potential that if you know the council wanted to and if the freak if the free cash that was already allocated for Hickory Ridge if they wanted to change the decision that could potentially go back. So just as an update so Hickory Ridge is still in a purchase and sale agreement. There are the town and is still doing due diligence on the property. We're not going to buy a property that we're not comfortable purchasing. I think the funds came out of stabilization funds actually. So if the town does not want to consummate that that agreement those funds would stay in stabilization. Sean as you were describing the whole thing with the change in how much the dollars were treated for charter. I sort of had this recollection of might have been you and Cameron and Sandy cooler with some money to get in front of town meeting to explain how the dollars were moving around differently. Sandy and Kay did a skit on the floor of town meeting where they moved around a little bit or something like that to show to illustrate it and you know Sonya and I could certainly do something like that for the if you would if you would like that. This where you wear the. I can't be your question. Yeah, I'm I'm the person who asked about Hickory Ridge last night just you know because it was on my mind of remembering the size of the money we took out of stabilization so part of it was the none longer than I think we originally thought and it was contingent on the seller getting into the smart program at a level that they were comfortable with it. And as I became familiar, looking at the land on how little of it was sale off of all if they just were trying to sell it to be developed because of low lands flood lands where species. I wasn't sure that they could get a better offer than the town so it's it's partly I don't know how long we allow something to sit before we decide we're just not going to tie the knots on it. If it if the timing of that came at the point where we got really bad news from the state or other places so we were saying how much are we otherwise pulling down on stabilization so it was just trying to think of where there where is their money that is similar to what Sonya showed us on we've allocated money but it hasn't been spent yet with capital projects that people can draw on this was one that I said okay that's a big chunk of money so I wasn't. I was partly questioning the project but I always had thought of selling off some of those pieces of land to develop to be developed as a way of recouping the town land. But it's also partly do you leave it on the books for two years for three years you know how long do we tie up money. So it's that's more of a comment on that rather than a pushing for a sooner rather than later decision but just keeping it on the radar screen. So it doesn't so that option of terms of selling off pieces of the land once we take ownership is still an option available to the town. It doesn't we're not putting this into conservation or anything like that it's it's stabilization funds so it's you will you will own the land. And the money isn't it's allocated but it's not tied up it's not like it's and we've got enough and reserve said it's if we if we get to the situation situation where we were like that's our last money. We're much worse shaped than we ever thought. Um, yeah, so I do want to ask Sean and actually Paul is some asking would you please make sure that those those answers to those questions are made available to the full council. Sure. The people that asked them aren't on the finance committee. Okay, thanks that was it. So is there anything else that we want to talk about sort of on the broad overview of the budget, which is what today is about as has been pointed out. Specific sections relating to departments that are on the chart for later consideration we were not going to address today. We were holding that until next time. So I just want to see if there's anything else people wanted to ask in the broader set of questions. Uh, Dorothy. You mentioned last night changing. I'm down to do community services, which is very soon. You mentioned that for some reason that maybe as town staff. You were thinking of changing that date. I would appreciate knowing if the date's going to be changed just in terms of me getting ready. So we talked with the chair about that we are moving community services off of July 2nd and moving it to July 9th. Great. And one of the reasons for that is that we expect public safety to be drawing a lot of questions. But also want to note that the police department is having a special meeting with the town council on Monday, July 6th, where they're going to go in really great detail about their operations. So, um, so, and there's a fair amount of time scheduled for their presentation and questions and answers from the council on July 6th. So I think it might be, you know, if we want to focus on the budget on to on Thursday for public safety mean fire police dispatch. That's where the finance community, because I think the full council will be engaged on July 6th. And I think the presentation. Lynn is working to give us a list of questions that the council has already identified. We'll try to address those in advance and then answer whatever questions we fail to address. Okay. Yeah. Lynn. Two things. First of all, we need to do public comment. And second of all, I want to also mention that on the 6th, we have time for public comment as well. Yes. No, I'm well aware of the need to do public comment. So I was going to try and close out this section of the meeting and then go to public comment to see if there's any request for public comment. And then go back to that final agenda item about our process and the kinds of questions that we're asking sort of focusing in the direction of what do we envision as the expectations of the council for what we present to them and make sure that we are getting the kinds of information that we need to provide that. So that that's where we have to go. I'll look just one last chance to see if there are any questions of Paul or Sean and Sonia about the overall budget. I'm going to put on the shared screen to get back to the item so we can do see if there's any request for public comment and then go forward from there. Okay, so I'm going to take now the opportunity to see if there's any requests on behalf of anybody has for public comment. So I'm going to ask Lynn to let me know if anybody asks for recognition. The reason that I put this up here is that you'll see under general public comment. The public comments on the address within the jurisdiction of the finance committee are welcome residents are welcome to express their views for one to three minutes. And that I'll just proceed from there. If you think that you should be. I do not see any people having their hand raised at this point. Okay, so then we do have one. Tony. Why don't you go ahead and recognize Tony and if you can bring her into the room do so if not, let's make sure she can offer her comments. Hi, can you hear me. Yes, I can hear you. Yeah, I just wanted to mention that the Crocker farm study is finishing up and I know Ben Harrington reached out to Lynn and Allison about scheduling a presentation. I wanted it to be on your radar and that there is a cost there and it's part of the overall elementary school solution. And it's something to be considered as you listen to the Jones library accessibility report and the costs on that. So we're thinking overall across the town how you can afford the major capital projects that Crocker farm is a piece of the puzzle and it's not cheap. So I just wanted to get that on your radar. In case we don't get to present our work in the next few weeks and you're moving forward with decision making on the other projects in the meantime. Thank you. I appreciate the comment. It's helpful when you had. In fact, I have a phone call at five o'clock with the chair of the school committee to see if we can settle on a date for a joint presentation like that. Thank you. If you have something. I was going to just if we had anything coming up. So, Lynn just answered it. Thank you. So then what we wanted to do at least to spend a few minutes on our own process. What we wanted to make sure is that we have the information that we envision that the council needs and I had a little bit of discussion with Mary Lou about this because Mary Lou and I have the experience of preparing finance committee reports for town meeting. Council is not town meeting the council gets the full budget which members of town meeting didn't get. And most of the members of the council spend some time looking at the entire budget. So I think that what we need to make sure is that we have some vision of what it is that we are envisioning is going into our final report. And make sure that we either ask the questions when we have department heads for future meetings. And if we're identifying information that we missed regarding schools and libraries that we have the opportunity right now because they were the first presenters to go back and just send them an email and ask them the questions. But I think we also have been trying to be very respectful of our department heads and to adhere to an agreement that we made at a council retreat that we try and understand the limitations of the time of our department heads and make sure that we're using a process that the town manager is comfortable with and aware of so that as we make any request that he is at least aware of our concerns and interests and is able to see that we're getting information in a manner that's most respectful to the people that he supervises. So that was kind of in an overview, but I was envisioning that last piece of the conversation to be about, and I didn't know if anyone at this point has given thought to what you feel are the absolutes that are going to need to be covered in a common way through each section of the finance committee report to the council. Yes, Paul. So today was a perfect day because you saw two ways of you receiving information you had Sharon Sherry for the library budget make a presentation, then answer questions and then you had Mike Morris come in and just answer questions without making a presentation and I think that's sort of that guidance from the committee how you would like us if you would like a mini presentation from council from from department heads or if you just say, come in we've got a list of questions for you are ready ready what read what you produced that kind of guidance would be very helpful to us. In terms of feedback to you Paul, if we can get the materials in advance, whether they you know in the school schools took some doing, because they didn't have nice pictures so we just had to quickly look at some columns and decipher them. When I went to look at the largest elementary school budget that have been presented in March. I have to think about, I told Sean this once I don't like charts with y axes that vary or the starting point so exaggerate differences so I don't need pictures. So, I found going right away into questions, extremely useful. As long as I got the material to focus. I also thought, going back to last year. We had some people who started out with what they anticipated to be the biggest dilemmas going forward. You know on challenges, you know, that we're going to affect the town. And I thought that kind of a high level focusing focusing us. I'm not necessarily look on page such and such and see these numbers was was a useful piece. You know, and I know one question I'm going to have that just occurred to me. As I was thinking about these water and sewer rates is, we have a plant that's been closed completely because it's been offline. Our operating costs going to go up when that plant comes back online so it's things that don't occur to me because I'm not looking at a line. And it's if department heads can focus us that way. You know, this is where we are now but in a couple years you're going to see this or that. So that's, that's a personal thing. Because then we have more time that each of us can build off of it, but others may prefer the presentation style so I'll stop. I would really appreciate if the council decided what format it wanted. I was kind of thrown by whose presentation because when they came to the finance committee in the past. I kind of highlighted what what was in that big document and it is it's a wonderful document there is a lot of information in it. I went online and you know it's the format that's been developed over time. So, and then when we wrote up the finance committee report, we took information from there really didn't require that the school department although Sean proofed everything I wrote to make sure the information was accurate. Otherwise you could take that information put it in a report. I don't know what this council wants and before we venture out I think we need to hear from you what it is you want and the format that you wanted in, and really what's most useful as it comes to a recommendation. That's a good point that you just raised and it was what I was trying to say a little bit earlier in my comment. So much last night's meeting, what was fairly obvious is that there were a certain number of members of the council would already received the big budget book and had looked through it and sort of refined questions that they presented, which Sean and Sonia were already in this meeting, which was real different from the days of the having a town meeting with a town meeting never looked at the big budget book, and the purpose of the finance committee booklet was to sort of reduce that information into a piece that was readable and understandable to a town meeting members who were much larger in number and had much less time to process it and didn't have quite the volume of information so we're kind of in a position where we're still trying to feel our way through and work this through as a group to figure out the right balance. Last year I felt we really didn't do much of beyond the broad overview, and I wanted to see if we wanted to do a better job of addressing questions around specific areas of operation which had not been done before, and how we would want to handle that. This is a topic that I asked Athena to put on to the agenda for each of the next meetings, so that it's not a single discussion but was going to be repeated and the only difference in the agendas that she posted for the next three meetings was which departments were going to be there. So, that's kind of where we are, Lynn. I'm not looking for another meeting but I think we have to have one, and that is the following. We get all done with all four of these presentations but we really don't have a meeting where we come back and review or say how we feel one way or another, and whether we think there should be some changes. And my sense is, based on the council and having now been part of it for a year and seven months, that the council really relies on the committee structure. And this is not to reflect on any individual counselor, but there are people, frankly, are much more comfortable with budgets and who are not comfortable with budgets. But they rely on the finance committee as people spend time being comfortable with the budget. And if there's anybody wants to make any kind of suggestions about reduction or things to think about as we move forward into this certain year, then what we're having, what we have right now, at least in my mind, is a lack of time to kind of circle back and reflect that way. And I don't know if that means a long meeting on the last meeting we have or whether it means an additional meeting. But, you know, pretty, I mean, we're jammed. We did all of this last year over three weeks. And I just don't feel we have that time. Well, let me go back to sharing screen for a second if I can get to the on your screen is revised. Here's where we were with, but with community services still in the wrong place. But just see we have a fairly tight timeline because you know, we, we have to lie after the public hearing, we have one meeting the following day to go to final report or both recommendations and try and see if we can review a final reports and we really have to start working on the report fairly early. I don't know where we can fit in an additional meeting, given the tightness of the time, we really don't have more time than we did last year. It's just a matter of we have. So we have what we have. And I guess we do it on the 14th. But it means that when we wrap up on the ninth, which we've now thrown another group into that besides general government. We basically someone and unfortunately Andy it's usually you has to go from the ninth to having a draft by the 14th. Which is going to be difficult if we're going to say anything really substantial. I'm going to take this down again so I can't see people can't see the hands are up. The timing is extraordinarily tight and we want to make sure that we have the information that we need from departments and so we can't really wait too long to have it. So what we really have been getting at is that we're looking to see what are the particular challenges that each department is feeling for this year has the What's the thinking as they move forward. What can be done during FY 21 to help prepare for FY 22 those are the kinds of things that we would some ways asking the library in schools. So that's sort of the broad overview questions because the detailed questions by and large come out of the budget book and questions asked about what's already in the budget book. But see where people are at. Kathy and then Mary Lynn. Maybe for what for what is for what Lynn is recommending where when we're looking at calendar and say okay where was it where's there's another day. It looks pretty hard. Maybe we could be disciplined for each of the times we meet to preserve a half an hour at the end where we try to come to a group. These are the main things we heard or these are the things that would be worth reporting out in a report so we can do some highlights. So we can go through each of those days that would both have help with the first draft with the draft of this. And then on the ninth. If we scheduled, if people were willing to schedule that to be a three hour meeting rather than a one hour, a two hour meeting to have a thorough discussion that way. We could have a draft report to get a draft report back on the 14 that at least has had initial thoughts from all of us. So it would be summarized at the end of each meeting, you know, have us go around and then on the ninth, add an add an hour to that meeting which is the last of the focus meetings, so that Andy has more to work with and I usually shares a draft with me and I do my best to add things that are missing or expand on it. So that might be a way of getting that kind of input toward a report that has not too much detail but high level kinds of things to focus the larger Council on I'm going to recognize two other people who may speak and just comment on that. There's two ways to go about it one is to do it at the end of each meeting the other is to say to use for example today, you were taking over on libraries and they lose doing schools to have you sort of summarize what you thought you heard before we meet on Thursday and have that be part of the segment of the meeting on Thursday, where you kind of make your presentation dots that's just an alternative. Mary Lou. Well, I, in the past, when you did this last year, how large a document is this? Is it a few pages? Is it similar to the Finance Committee report to town meeting? And one of the things I think would be helpful not maybe not this year, but if the entire Council had the complete full budget, do they? I know they have the managers, which was wonderful. It's superb. And the schools is also do they get you get the school budget in its entirety? Because if you did, then you can make the report to the Council short because they should be able to and they should be able to refer to those documents based on your your recommendations. But this year, I'm not sure if they didn't get the school report. There's a lot of information in there that they don't have. A good question. It certainly did on the regional schools because we had a separate hearing that was focusing solely on regional schools and Superintendent presented at that meeting. So that was before them. And I think we heard their force and fairly high level questions from one of the counselors last night about issues in the regional budget. And specifically, what if the chapter 78 to the region ended up being less than had been projected in the budget. Last year we got for elementary, we got a very thick report from the schools. Similar to what was the March report, it was much larger, Mary Lou financed it. And then the town manager posted it and posted it. And the regional along with the town budget. So we could make sure we have that document as part of the packet for finance, and then point people to it. You know, so we got one that went into enrollment trends we talked about choice in choice out charter had a section. It's more similar to what you saw two years ago, but that's what we saw last year. And this was just, I think we were getting people who have done budgets twice, you know, had to redo a whole budget that they had just done, but there is that larger document. So there's no reason not to make that part of the finance packet and also part of a background packet for the entire council. Just point out we don't necessarily need to even wait because I think that Sean could take the library budget, which we definitely have and I think we have the school budgets and put them out to the council outside of the meeting just saying that the finance committee requested that this be made available as the equivalent to the town manager's budget or supplement to the town manager's budget. And you don't really need to even wait to do that if there's agreement on the committee that's, that's something we would recommend. Dorothy. So again, this is on process. I have a small section, community services. That I will read it very carefully. I will make a list of questions. Am I allowed to speak to any of the people who run any of these agencies, or do I give a list of written questions to Paul? Because just to look at the paper without talking to people isn't that much to me but, or do I just come to finance committee meeting and the staff people are at that finance committee meeting and then I ask my questions amongst those of other members. Then do I write a written report which he was suggested a few minutes ago that you would then bring it beginning of the next meeting but now there will be no meeting after my doing it. So I'm really asking more minutiae questions from what Mary Lou's asking. What is the process that you want me to follow and I will do it. Yes, Sean. I think in terms of questions. If you get questions to Paul or myself, we will forward them to the appropriate department heads and then they can come prepared to address those questions. And then in addition, you can also ask obviously follow up questions or other questions when they come in when they're there. But if there are any questions, especially if they're in depth questions that you want to throw a response. If you can get them to us ahead of time, Paul and I can make sure that they get them. I was wondering about do I do some written notes on this or does Andy do it from the transcripts. Do you expect something written from the counselors. That's something we're trying to work out, but I was wondering if we wanted to have each of the members of the committee take a little bit more responsibility for the sections that they're becoming familiar with. I think it's a model of the old finance committee. It didn't do it last year because it was all new to us. I'm trying to see if we can develop a process that is right as we kind of evolve into our second year and set a pattern for how this is to go for future years. Mary Lou, you. I think your suggestion is a good one that we take responsibility. But we also had as you recall on the finance committee kind of a little format so that we aren't all over the place. And then in addition to the chair reviewing that with someone in town hall, I think three people read the drafts and and made sure that they all kind of flow together. So I think it's a good, a good plan. It worked. And it certainly doesn't put the whole burden on the chair, although in the end person is responsible because they have to pull it all together. Yes, Sean. You may, you got, I'm not familiar with the exact detail of how the finance committee recommendations have worked in the past. One idea you might want to consider is a component of the report at least just aligning with what our budget guidelines were, and how well the budget document based on the presentations. And when you hear from different departments, how well the overall budget aligns with what was in the budget guidelines. I think that would be one approach you could take to say, you know, here's what we asked the time manager to do. And that they're talking with departments and asking questions, you know, he said he did this this and this or didn't do this or that. That might be one piece of your recommendation that you could incorporate. And I think that would be something that would make sense going forward. No, that's, thank you. So why don't we do this. I'll make a suggestion and see how people feel about it. And that is that between now and Thursday just by email that Mary Lou Kathy and I for prior experiences chair of the old finance committee. Kathy and I is the chair vice chair currently come up with a quick outline as Mary Lou is suggesting of how we might frame the discussion of each department. We can present this for Thursday for the equivalent follow up discussion. And then we'll use that because that also involves Kathy and Mary Lou who are the coincidentally the kind of the lead people in library and schools to see also how that would work against information that they feel re-obtained in today's meeting. Yeah, you're looking at them providing information from today's meeting. I'm presenting on Thursday. Are you saying that I would be using this format and if so I need to, I need to see it. I think we're talking about a post meeting Pat so I got it. Yeah. So if that's workable process and I'll work with Kathy and Mary Lou immediately to see if we can it'll just be an outline. It's not going to be more than that. But something to present back for Thursday. And all So, you know, I was looking at your report that you did last year. Are you looking at something different than what you did last year for the finance committee report or something similar to that, which is about an eight page report. I don't think it's going to be much longer than last year. I think that what we did last year was the sections on departments were not very routine and they were not written in a team concept as we've talked about. So really talking about trying to strengthen that section of the report. But I will pull a report back out and send it around to the committee again so that people don't need to look for it. Thank you. So anything else and if not, then I think we I have nothing else that I can think of that we need to cover is anything else under unanticipated business that anyone else from the committee wishes to raise. And if not, then I'm going to thank you all it's been a long meeting that I think a very good productive meeting and consider ourselves adjourned. I just want to wish happy New Year to Sonya. It's it's the end of the fiscal year today. She'll probably go out and get sloppy drunk and New Year's starts tomorrow. Yes, so yeah. Okay, so we're adjourned at five after five. Thank you. Thank you.