 Recording. Oh, one last thing. Could you bring Amy in from the. I've been trying. She has to push a button to accept my invitation to come in as a panelist. So I've sent that prompt now three times. She's on the phone right now. She may to be a little late. Okay. She missed the show. So I'm going to call the finance committee meeting. Okay. So I'm going to call the finance committee meeting. I'm going to call the finance committee meeting. May 19th to order at 1pm. And I want to note that. This meeting is being held. By zoom as we are. A lot of to continue to do because of recent legislative changes. Members of the public have access to the meeting while I zoom. The meeting. Is being recorded. And. So with that, let me just go through the members of the committee. To make sure everybody can. Here and be heard. Start with. I'm a devil and got here. Present. Lynn Griesmer. Present. I'm here and I think that Alicia. Is not here. Do you want to check on. I've already sent her a text. And others from the council who are present. I think we do not yet. To the forum for the council. But I see Jennifer. You can hear, I assume. Dorothy. Can you. Can you acknowledge. Dorothy. Yes. Okay. I can hear you. I have to. There's no one else from the council who's not on the committee. Who's present. So we can proceed. And there was a request that we begin. With. The. Council order F. Y. 2410. To establish the water and sewer rates to be effective. July 1, 2023. This was in the packet for the prior meeting and it's been in packet for previous meetings. We had. Information and presentation on water rates. And. I don't think that anything has changed. And we had the presentation about. The enterprise funds. With enterprise funds budgeted at our last meeting and that. It was the same information that coincided. So. I just want to see if there are any other questions about the water sewer rate proposal. If not. Then I'll make a motion. Andy. This is maybe a question for Athena. Is Athena still here? No. So I can pull the order up if anybody wants to see it. I am noticing one little typo in the, in the order. And it's related to the date of the memo, which I don't think is super important, but it's probably worth. Updating that. Do you want to share it real quick so you guys can see what I'm talking about? Sure. Since you may. Yeah, so it says effective July 1st. That's all correct. As recommended by the town manager and his memorandum to the town council dated May 2nd, 2023. I think I've got the memo here. This was the memo. So I think it should have said dated. April 28th, 2023. Again, a minor. Change, but. For accuracy sake. So. So. I'm going to treat it as amended and make a motion. That the finance committee. Recommend. To the town council approval of council order. 2410 in order. Setting the water and sewer rates. Be effective July 1, 2023. As amended. Is there a second. Second. So is there any further questions or discussion regarding the motion? It's on the floor. Since there's nothing. The vote is by members of the finance committee. Of course, this is. Other counselors will have the opportunity to consider this. Our next meeting. So because this is a recommendation. Being made for the 1st June meeting, which is our next meeting. So let me just go through. Yes, for vote. Anna. Hi. Lynn. Please note that Alicia has joined us. Okay. Let me pause for a moment. Alicia. Hi. Can you hear me? Yes, I can. Thank you. Okay. So the motion on the floor. Has to do with water and sewer rates, which we discussed in previous meetings. But couldn't take up at the last meeting because it hadn't been placed on the agenda. It is on the agenda for this meeting. So the motion, and there was one slight amendment to the order. Just before you got on, you may have not heard it. Therefore. There was a. Just to date. Mistake as far as the date of. Memorandum that was referenced in it. So. Your, the motion was that the. Finance committee. Approve and recommend to the council adoption of. Council order 2410. Order setting the water and sewer rates to be effective July. One 2023 as amended. The amendment is the correction of the date. So we've just started. Voting on that. Just. Sorry to bring you up to date. So. Two votes started in the cycle. And Anna and Lynn said, yes. So Bob. I support. Okay, Matt. Support. Bernie. Support. Kathy. Yes. I mean, yes. And. Alicia. Yes. Okay. So. Motion is. Five to zero. For council members voting and. Support from three resident members. And with that. So. I'm going back to Sean who's managing the order in which we're taking up sections of the budget. General fund. I believe. Is first. Yes. Yep. So the. The first department today is the town council. So there were some questions. Sent in by. Bernie and by Kathy around that. So I'll just read them and then Lynn or someone made Paul, you want to hop in. Let's see. So the first question, Lynn. This is nice. I get to ask you questions. This is like a role reversal. It's nice. Yep. So the. The first department today is the town council. So there were some questions sent in by. The first department today is the town council. It's nice. Are there ways for the town council to be more? And remember, I am not asking these questions. So however you perceive these questions, not me. Are there ways for the town council to be more efficient in terms of use of staff time. Based on, you know, the department heads and how much time they spend on council related activities. And I think that's something that others have discussed. And GOL is actually looking at rules of procedure. It specifically relates to how fast do we refer somebody? Something a bylaw, for example, a zoning bylaw out for actual. Review versus send it first to a committee to look at. There's other ways to look at and then come back to the council. After it's been. It's been done. It's been done. It's been done. It's been done. And there are other cases modified. An example of that is. Where we are doing that is the. Street lighting bylaw, which was referred to TSO. And it still has not come back to the council, but it has never gone out for any kind of zoning review. And not clear that it will, but. The example that I think people are more concerned about was the fact that we immediately referred. To C. R. C. And to G. I mean, and to the planning board. Without having a much more in-depth conversation at the committee level, which might have changed some of what was there, whether it's still would have prevented. Staff time is unclear. And I do note staff time. The council uses is not budgeted in. The town council's budget. It's not budgeted in the department budgets, but it is something that I'm more than willing to discuss with the town manager as to how much we track it. And I also invite people to submit as. Andy has. Language for our rules of procedure. That would change some of that process. Sorry about my voice, but it's my allergies. So Kathy, you may want to say more. That's, I think there's ways to account for it. And I think there's ways to reduce it. And some of it is by agreeing to priorities and agreeing to process. Thank you. I don't. So if people have follow-up questions or any additional questions, just raise your hand and Andy or I will call on you. The only thing that I was going to add is that. I've been thinking about. Raising essentially the same issue. When we talked with. Conservation and development sections. Regarding the effect. The amount of time that is being. Required because of some of the. Work that the council's done. Just to get a sense from them on the same question. I actually, I actually want to note that I need to call the town council to order. I'm not going to do that. But for the record, it should actually show probably about one 10. And I just need to make sure that I believe we've already called on everybody. So. And then Dorothy has her hand up. Yes. I did call him Dorothy. Dorothy, go ahead. On this topic. We did the water and sewer. We had an organized process. We would discuss an area and then we would vote on it. I'm finding the. Duplex triplex and the big zoning thing to be so unwieldy. That it's not even clear what's happening. No votes have been taken. It's huge. And it's going to be voted up or down. I think that it's really. Not a good way to go and using the water and sewer rates. And it's not going to be a good way to go. But I think that it's important to remember. That we wanted. The town to cover. The cost of replacing pipes at this point. It did not win in terms of the vote. And so we were able to see what we passed on. What ended up happening was part of that was done. And it seemed to be. You know, neat and rational and one could follow it. Okay. Whereas right now, I don't think anyone can follow what's happening. And it's taking tremendous amount of time. And I think we have to say, Hey, we should. They have suggested that it could be referred to the. Planning staff, which I think is a good suggestion. Because right now it's just like, you know, I was just needing some bread. You know, if you have too big a piece of dough, it just sags all over the place. You can't get control of it. You can't shape it. You can't make a loaf. And I think the process we've been doing on the zoning is really wasteful of everybody's time. And will not result with what we want. So I think it's a good suggestion. Which is an understanding of yes, we're for this, but we're not for that. You know, whereas we were able to do that with the water and sewer. So that's my, my thoughts on that. And. Dorothy, just to. Further that. If it had been referred just. To CRC to do a review. And then come back to the council with whatever the revision was. I would assume that a lot of the discussion. Would have taken place at. In that case, it would have been CRC. Unless at some point TSO had to get involved. And that the bylaw that was brought then back to the council for referral for hearing would have had a lot more. Opportunity for input before we used up the hearing process. That's, that's what I think many of us have felt. In this particular one, myself included. We can't hear you, Dorothy. Yeah. There's a complication in that the planning board has also been. Right. It's just been a very unwieldy structure that goes around and round. And discussions are had and it seems to be this understanding on something, but no votes are taken anywhere. Andy, can I. Make a. You know, at the risk of maybe overstepping. I don't know if we want to have this discussion. At this meeting, only because we have like seven departments that are coming up. And this is a, I think Lynn, you mentioned this as a. Discussion. Yeah. It is not that it's not a good discussion to have. I just see the hands lining up and I'm worried we're going to. Go over time quickly. Awesome. Thank you for bringing that up because I was thinking similarly. I was going to say the same thing. Sean did and clarify that the process. TSO didn't formally vote. Formally vote on every aspect. We did kind of a straw poll in my recollection, but same, same comment that Sean had. Thanks. Kathy. I'm totally ready to move on. And my, my question, it kind of runs through the others as well. I have a sense of. We have a very short staff at the critical town, town staff level in finance and, and other departments. So trying to think of, as we get to the other, I just, you'll see my questions where I worry about where. I want to make sure we use scarce resources. Well, it would be the best way to say this. Yeah. So I, let me just respond to that from a council. From a council perspective. And that is. That, you know, as we become a more mature council and gotten to know people in town hall. I think sometimes we've forgotten. That we are in fact, supposed to go through Paul to access town for research or anything else. And one of the things that we need to do with all of our. Town staff are going to have to get involved in whether they have their bandwidth to take it on. That's the larger points. So as we go through the others as well. Yeah. Yeah. So I think the last question is sort of along those lines or some comments about us do the questions for today. Should there be a longer discussion at the outset of creating goals regarding budget constraints. And what is the need to make difficult choices or trade-offs? Absolutely. I mean, I can expand on that. I think we're seeing it now when we get to the 23rd and we have to start. Making any kind of recommendations to a change what the town manager has recommended the sharp and harsh words. People are going to have to hear is. Yes, you'd like to increase that or get rid of that, but at the cost of what? And. You know, it is what it is. We only have so much money. So these are all questions around how can the council frankly behave better. And I think that there's one other element that I will. Bring up at appropriate times. I don't want to discuss. Now is that as we propose things. That we recognize the staff time required. To implement it past. And. That. We take some responsibility for considering. What the cost is both in staff time. And in the ability to. To proceed. Just. So. Bernie and then I want to get back. Yeah, just. You're going to hear it from me later as well. It's been something I've. I've mentioned, I think repeatedly that we're too thin. And I think Lynn's point about. Staff behavior that you really need to go through channels, even though you might know somebody in some department. Is one that. That's a good one. I mean, there's the formal table of organization and then there's the way things really work. And at some point they should kind of line up. So thanks. Thank you, Bernie. Sean back to you. So that's it for sort of submit written council questions. Again, there were some additional comments that I'll send out when we send out the updated question document, but any final questions for town council's budget. And I just mentioned that I worked with Athena directly. On this budget. And with Paul. And we had two reviews with Sean and. Paul and. Holly and. Athena and myself. And. I even said to Athena, I said, do you want to request. Any additional help and. We've pretty much agreed no, but I do want to note that she is going to have an intern this fall, which is really nice. Dorothy has her hand up. Athena also has her hand up now. Athena. Just wanted to note that the intern isn't coming out of the council budget. So I just wanted to make sure that we have the extra help. I'd like to sort of leave on the back burner because. I do need extra help, frankly, but I recognize that it's just not going to be possible in this budget. Right. Thank you. Dorothy. Anything else on this? We need to move on. This is probably the wrong place, but I just want to make sure that we're not going to miss it again. I think we have to move on to the next slide. So we have a meeting. Of revolving fund for babysitting costs for people at committees. And that can include council members. And then I remember I was told that there was something in the works. To increase the council pay. And I remember being told it was only going to cover the part of the year, but. If this is a council budget, shouldn't there be something in this one. I don't know. I don't know. I haven't. Discussed at the council level yet. So. And I wanted to, by the time the town manager submitted his budget proposal. I think Andy noted in the. If that is approved before July 1, it would be, it would be half a year that we would have to. Figure it out. The child care money is in the budget. It's just not in this council budget. Okay. And that can be done without the council vote, because it's actually a practice we've had in the past. Okay. The other two questions about pay and. A counselor pay. And. Insure and ability to. Have insurance health insurance. Are still on the, in the finance committee. And. We'll get the teacher and other contracts settled, but if not, we will take it up in June. Okay. Just want to make sure that my, my keeping my mouth shut. Doesn't mean oh, we missed it again. That's that's on time. It's not been dropped. Okay. Great. Thank you. Thank you. So back to Shawn. Let's move to town manager budget. All right. So heading to the town manager budget. Again, we've just been doing questions and answers. So Paul, are you ready? Okay. And Brianna and Angela are here too. Okay. So this is sort of a technical question. Your number of staff have decreased. You went from four staff members to three. Has the workload intensified or have there been opportunities to streamline? The workload continues to intensify the. As you recall, when we created the office of diversity, equity, inclusion. We took the half time position from the town manager's budget that had been shared half time with HR and half time with town manager and move that as the assistant director of DEI. We took the economic development director position and made that the DEI director position. And that was in an effort to minimize increasing staff. And I know we talk about increasing staff, but that's something we've been really holding back on as much as possible because that's the major cost center for us as we move as an organization that those expenses once included into budget don't let up. We are short staffed in the town manager's office. We are experiencing more and more frequently where we don't have someone on the floor on the mezzanine level to answer the phone, greet people. Today we had to lock the office just because there wasn't anybody on the floor. So we're experiencing that kind of lack of coverage sometimes. But typically someone's here. So we try to manage it as best we can. So the town manager had a 25% increase in operating expenses. How much of this is attributable to CPOs, stipends for CPOs and the childcare pilot. Okay. So the when we create the, the charter requires us to have a CPO position when we, when I looked at that, when the charter passed, we had three super talented people who were really phenomenal employees that I asked them each to take on a piece of it. And they all willingly did. They were never truly compensated for this. And if we were to move to a different model, we don't have anything budgeted. So $15,000 of that. That would equate to about $5,000 for each CPO at this, the way we have it set up now is what we have budgeted in the increase. The other $5,000 is for the childcare pilot. And so the childcare pilot, the rest of the question was raised. It's for all elected officials. That would include the board of library commissioners. Somebody call them. The school committee and the Amherst town council. And this is, we have it sort of set up the way it would be with the, if the council approves this the way we did, the way town meeting used to do it. So if you had childcare expenses, you would submit those expenses to the manager's office and we'd reimburse you for those expenses. Yeah, I don't want it to go unnoticed that many times other. The CPOs and also particularly Angela do what I would think of is council work. So that it's really, we really appreciate that. It should be recognized. For instance, Angela is often the one trying to pull together a meeting that includes the town manager and other people. So it's saying that we only have a portion of Athena first of his faults and saying that we don't have any other assistance is also false. So I want to take the opportunity to thank them for that. And also to acknowledge it toward everyone else. Thank you. The other piece of the question is why childcare and not family care because number of people may have family members who need to have some level of assistance while they're absent. No, we would expand. You're right. I'm burning on that. That was just an oversight of my part when I wrote it. It should have included, you know, elderly or disabled family member care as well. And then there's nothing in the budget that would allow us to pay for cloning Athena. I think that needs to be remedied. Maybe you may ask and assist with that. Thank you. Thanks. So the next question. It's a longer question, but in short, Paul, it's about the number of department heads that you oversee. And your plan to maybe address that. Yeah, so this was brought up in my performance review by the council as a concern. We are doing a compensation and classification study right now for department heads and with the information that that firm collects. I am anticipating putting some reorganization work in this summer working with our department heads and maybe submitting something to the in the fall to the council. That's the goal. And I think the span of control is pretty broad. I think that the current reports are too many. And trying to streamline that in a slightly more hierarchical fashion would be helpful for the town. This, this again is one of my. GRIP's pet piece, whatever. Welcome that. Not planning Paul. In the meantime, please don't get hit by a bus. Okay. Go to the next one. So Paul to new working groups have been proposed. of the school fiscal sustainability working group and then the economic task force. Are there any funds in the operating budget to meet these help support these activities and what are the prospects for an economic development coordinator in the future? Yeah, so the, for the internal working group, that's a, well, that won't start quite that yet because I guess director for the school department has been named the acting superintendent. So he and Sean are the key figures in that group. It's actually going to streamline decision-making. So it's kind of a lot easier. So again, the mission on this is to be completed by the end of the calendar year. So hopefully we'll see how that works out but Doug is a key part of that as is Mike quite honestly. So there's a little bit of a monkey wrench in that one. So, but it's something that has to be done in terms of the economic development task force. I'm anticipating that we'll have some funding allocated for this to help support the economic development work. The task force itself won't have a budget but it'll involve people from the university, the colleges, the business community and others who would be involved in looking at this. We don't have a funded position. And most likely this would probably fall to Dave Zomek or someone in his team to help support. That is one more. Yeah, there's a couple more, sorry. Or yeah, one more about the Comcast contract which is up for negotiations. Those are funding in the law budget account to accommodate these negotiations and will KP law assist or will be necessary to hire outside council? Right now we're planning on using KP law. They do have someone who does cable contracts on staff in the end of this in 2024, I think is when we start the, oh, what's it called? Assertainment process, yeah. So it's a lead up to the contract negotiations. And so it's a pretty lengthy project. Antti was pretty intimate with it last time. So there's actually two things that have to be negotiated. One is the license agreement with Comcast. And then once that is completed, there's the companion agreement with whoever is going to be providing the services for peg services, you know, and that right now is Amherst media. And that is it for town manager questions. Any other town manager questions? Anybody in the committee? Kathy? I don't have another question, but this is my section of the finance of our budget review to write up. So Sean, as you're getting answers, but also you're getting the questions, if you can just compile the questions for me, because some of these aren't questions I sent in just so I can capture the information we've collected. Yeah, I have all the questions and I'll send them out. I sent an updated, I sent a version last week and there will be another updated version with the new questions that have gone out. I don't have, most of them I have written responses for if we have them at enough time, but I don't have written responses for all if they were just answered at the meeting. And I'm not even asking, because I can always search the Zoom, I just need to know what the question is. Yeah, yeah, I'll send those out, for sure. Any other town manager questions? Okay, then okay to move to the next section, Andy. Go for it. So the next section is my section or finance section and we have, so finance has really three key department heads who handle all the day to day work and really are the ones that help give finance such a good reputation. And that's Jennifer LaFountaine, who's our treasure collector. Kim Yu, who's our principal assessor and Holly Drake, who's on vacation this week, but most of you know Holly Drake, she's our comptroller. So they will help answer some of the questions that have been raised if applicable. Kim or Jen, either of you wanna say anything, you don't have to, but if there's anything you wanted to say, now's a good time. Okay. All right, so the first question is staffing adequate, is staffing adequate, I think is the first question and I'll, Jen or Kim, if you wanna go first, you can, otherwise I'll jump in. I think we just finally got back up to full staff. So we are, I think we're in pretty good shape for right now. We're in a little transition with training, but other than that, I think we're in good shape. Probably the same for you, Kamri. Yes, I was just gonna say, we have someone retiring momentarily and have filled that spot already as well as the other part-time position that we have. So I think we're in pretty good shape other than just getting up and running and training. Yeah, I think I can speak for accounting a little bit. Generally, I think the staffing is adequate when we're at full strength and everyone has been trained and knows their position well, where we've gone through a lot of transition, mostly due to retirements as you all know, but even before selling out, we had a chain of retirements. And so we're, I think we're near in the end of that period of transition. We've got one more position to fill in the office. That's sort of a critical position that we have to provide training for. And then we still have a few people that are in their first year or two in their position that were, so a lot of our efforts in this coming year around training and support for those individuals. But again, when we're fully staffed and when everyone feels comfortable in their role, staffing I think is adequate. And I do really have to recognize there is a whole new team in the finance department for the most part. Over a hundred years' worth of experience walked out the door in the last two months and for retirements. And so it's really good that they've been pretty diligent about recruiting really good people but it's the training and getting people up to speed and losing all that institutional knowledge just gotta take some time. Kathy. Yeah, I asked one I put in specific, Sean is we have just one procurement officer and if we're going along a kind of a steady state I could see one doing it but if we hit a lot of road contracts coming out then we're also doing centennial plant and then I don't know as we start to do the school a year from now where we're actually got you know so I'm just and the person's relatively new. So it's a question of relative new but also just one sense that you'll be able to manage that as what I see a crunch. Yeah, no, it's a great question. So Simone Christopher she's our procurement officer and she is incredibly organized. She's been a real asset in that role from an organization standpoint. And I think you've hit the nail on the head, Kathy. There's parts of the year where one person is fine and she can help out and back up other departments. And then there's times where it's kind of straight out and that's just the nature of how we do procurement especially with a five year capital plan where all the funds become available on July 1st. You know, there's sort of a crunch in the late summer fall to get all those projects awarded. I will say again, given her organization a lot of the times the crunch isn't necessarily with procurement it's the crunches with when we have lots of funds the specifications that have to be created for projects are really the time consuming piece. You know, roads may seem straightforward but they have to be designed and all the details have to be worked out. Again, I would say that the specification development piece is the most time consuming part of a procurement. And often that is not more often than not that's not Simone doing that. That's the department doing it. So I think that's the area we would look at to try to push things through and what we've been talking about we allocated some funds for Capital Projects Manager from ARPA. We have not been able to find someone to fill that role. And so one thing we're looking to do as sort of an alternate that actually I think might work better is look to get an architect or an owner project manager on contracts essentially to handle multiple projects to be available for departments to contact for some of these medium, small and medium-sized projects to help them develop the specifications more rapidly and be able to push more through. So we're gonna be looking to do that hopefully the next month or two. And then the other piece is for some of these big projects like you noted we can rely on our OPMs and architects for those projects to handle a lot of the procurement. So for example with the MSBA and I say what the MSBA is it's such a prescribed process that we don't actually have a lot to do with it. We have to update and get all the information in but their documents are so standardized that there's not a lot for us to do. So your question's a good one that I think there is a lot of procurement going on and there's different ways we can help ease through the process faster. Thank you. The next question that we sort of addressed you talked about turnover and the ability to attract and keep highly qualified experienced staff. I think the good news we've been able to attract and retain staff which has been nice. We do have as Paul mentioned several new staff but we've been really happy. We were nervous when we went out to hire because it's been such a tight job market but we've been really satisfied with the people that we've brought in and our ability to kind of incorporate them as part of the team. And we do have a because finance, accounting, collectors and the assessors we all kind of work in one big office. It's really critical that everyone works well together and gets along and can back each other up and feel supportive. And I think everybody on the team can do that. Kim or Jen, I don't know if you feel differently, hopefully not, but it seems like everyone's meshing well. They're going to say I'm the one that's kind of thrown everything off. Good. Kim, Jen, anything you want to add to that? Okay. Jen, I'm going to let you start with this one. There's a question about ambulance billing collection rates and just how they're sort of historically, we generally have really high collection rates but ambulance billing is one of those that just historically is low. When we did it in-house, it was low. We contracted it out, it's still low. It's just sort of the nature of the beast but do you want to speak to that a little bit? I think it's kind of a tricky thing to attract because there's so many different variables that go in as far as certain insurances cover a certain amount and then there's a copay for the patient or in the instance of Medicare or Medicaid there's large write-offs that happen on the different charges. So I think we're going through a ground ambulance support review that's nationwide in hopes to increase the Medicare rates. So that way everybody's seeing a little more money coming in on those bills at some point once it's going to take, I think three to five years to get that done nationwide. And then the other piece of it is we have a very transient population in terms of you mass students come in and our college students come in and then they leave and it's not always simple to track down over due bill. When you show collection rate, then you're saying if you bill for $500 and you only get 300, you're showing that in the rate so that that's part of what goes into this computation. I just thought it was literally we didn't collect anything on 30% of the bills but it's computed. I didn't know what the accounting system was. That was my question, you know, on we have a 70% collection rate in 2022. Right. Okay, thank you. Yeah, and we use Comstar. So again, we used to do it in-house. We thought contracted out may boost up the rate but it actually stayed about the same or did it get better or worse when we went outside with it? I don't, it may have got better a little bit but I don't think it's improved enough to be impressed with. Okay. Bernie? Just curious if any of the insurance companies have attempted the old trick of paying the policy owner rather than the Ambulance Department, our Ambulance Department. There's one question. The other question is, does it look like we might ever get to the point where we'd have to take some people to Small Claims Court to collect an amulet phase when there's no insurance, no primary payer other than the person who's transported? That's a good question. We haven't, we have, right now we use a collection agency. So any bills that are over a certain point, we've been moving on to Greg Hill as our collection agency, they just got bought out. So we have to do some research with the new company but we're actively trying to recoup as much as we can with that. And the answer about paying the patient, I have seen that over the time I've been here where example Blue Cross will send the full check to the patient and not send it to us. And then we have to work with them to get it back. So the blues are still doing that. Okay. Unfortunately, thank you. The good news is overall the Ambulance Fund has been doing, you know, it obviously dropped off a little bit during the pandemic, but we have seen it rebound and this one has rebounded pretty quickly, especially because we increased rates right before, right before the pandemic. So there's room to improve, but it is doing pretty well. And then the last question here is about parking permits and is the new system pricing work as expected? Yielding more money and the answer is yes. So the third quarter report will come out, it's almost done, so we should be able to get out to the next week or so. So you'll see the sort of year-over-year comparison but the town center permits definitely brought in quite a bit more money this year and Jen actually is working on the notice for next year which phases in the next piece of the permit system pricing updates, which it goes up another chunk next year. It was a three year plan that we worked out to phase in the new pricing. First year was the biggest chunk. So the biggest step up is already complete, but there'll be another step up for FY24. Bob? Yeah, if there aren't any other questions. I just had a question. The federal debt ceiling negotiations may result in a clawback of COVID, unspent COVID funds. We have a sense of how much we might be at risk for. I know this is all up in the air right now, but I think we ought to be cognizant of the possibility that these funds might be clawed back. Yeah, so it's a good question. So there's a couple of things. If the debt ceiling negotiations depend on how they go, if there's some sort of shutdown, that could impact the town and the schools, particularly through grants, there are certain types of grants that are subject to annual appropriations that the money might stop flowing for those grants. And so that's one concern. The other piece I was at a conference on Wednesday about the possible clawbacks, and Andy, you actually know this person. Well, Jackie Lamander-Bird, who's the legislative analyst for MMA, actually asked her that very question, Bob, if MMA had been hearing anything. Her response was that what they've been hearing is that the federal level, they've been looking more at trying to claw back. They originally started with some of the COVID relief funds, but recently they've been turning more towards the Inflation Reduction Act, which is also not good for us, because Kathy knows, because some of the, you know, we're also hoping to get some funding back from the Inflation Reduction Act related to the school project. So if any clawbacks or changes in the law happen there, that would also not be good for us. But if there were with the ARPA funds and ESSER funds, I don't know about for ESSER, because the schools would have to answer that. But with ARPA, we've got about $4 million that we've obligated. We have about 7 million left that hasn't been technically obligated. Now we have plans for those funds and we'll be coming to you all to share a plan. But what I'll say, Paul and I, I'll still work on this, but there may be a mechanism to get it all obligated quickly that we might share with you that would not, it would essentially give the council maybe more control over those funds, but it would get it obligated so it's no longer ARPA money. So that we could say it's all taken, essentially. It's gonna bring up to really do a lot of communication and communication around that, because some people may feel like it's not what it was meant for, but at the risk of losing the funds, I think we wanna do what we can to make sure we don't lose any of those funds. So we'll communicate that and explain what that would give more details. But essentially with ARPA, every community was allowed to take a sort of a flat $10 million revenue loss if they wanted to. Originally before all this conversation started around claw and back, we were gonna use some revenue loss, but we were gonna try to dedicate as much for projects as possible. But given the talk around this, we may wanna do this revenue loss piece, which again, doesn't lose the money. It just, it takes a different form that the council would then have to appropriate. So nothing set in stone there. Paul and I, again, we'll be back to talk with you all about that that's one option we're considering, but it's for that very reason that you noted, Bob, which is we don't wanna, we're concerned about that as well. Yeah, okay, thanks. Any other questions on finance? I think that's all the ones that were submitted. There's some other questions about benefits and utilities that I'll weigh in on when we get to those sections, but. All right, so our next department is human resources. Melissa, do you want Kay brought in the room as well or she's on the phone? Yeah, Kay, hi everyone. Kay does have the link. I think she's on the phone right now, but she'll be joining us. Okay, great. So I don't know if everyone's met Melissa. Melissa's our new human resources director. She's doing a great job. She's managing the office through a transition right now and holding down the floor. And so I think I sent these questions to you, but I'll just read them off, Melissa, and then you can address them. Sure, absolutely. So the first question is, you know, has there been a high staff turnover rate? And I don't know if it wasn't clear if this is specific to just the human resources department, but or the town more broadly, I would say probably the town more broadly would cover both. And what's the current status in terms of what you're seeing in staff turnover? I would say that there's been a turnover rate consistent with what we see in all industries right now. It's more than what we've seen in the past. We see a couple come and a couple go, I'd say a month. And I think that's consistent with all industries. So, you know, in HR, that just means a little bit of an uptick in our usual work. So we've been doing a lot of onboarding, a lot of recruitment and stuff like that. And I'm sorry, what was the second piece of that? No, I think that addressed the current status of staff turnover. And I think we're going to be seeing this for a little bit. I don't think it's going to stop anytime soon. Bob? I have a kind of related question, which is what new staff are we looking for in the future? I mean, one of the thoughts is we might have to increase Cress, you know, the staffing for Cress. So what are some of the things that you're looking at in terms of additional staff being on what we have now, you know, irrespective of the turnover that we might have to budget for into the future? Are you speaking about new positions or replacements? New positions. Well, I think we have had a lot of requests from departments for new positions across the board and includes water, sewer, you know, every department literally has come in, including Cress. But, you know, I think we just don't have the capacity to take on new positions. And so that's sort of where we're stuck right now. And we are still, we've added, you know, we've added the 10 positions in the Cress department. We've added the four positions in the fire department, you know, but Sean, would you say pretty much every department has asked for additional staffing? Well, finance hasn't asked for additional staffing. I haven't asked for additional staffing. I just said that, but to your point, many, there were many requests, sustainability, public works, you know, technology, we see a potential need around cybersecurity. So there are a lot of requests for new positions that are very valuable new positions that would be helpful. But to Paul's point, we're, you know, we're taxing as much as we can or we're looking for all the revenues we can. And so unless there's some sort of change that results in more revenue, adding more staff is a struggle, especially right now given inflation because, you know, we get so much new money every year. And the first thing we have to do is cover insurances and, you know, the outcome of collective bargaining agreements and so on. And then when we look at what's left over to potentially do new things, that number has been shrinking the last few years. Lynn? Yeah, I don't want to sound like a broken record, but from, I've been very clear that before we make any commitment to increasing crests, we need to see the evaluations. And I think that we need to have a priority as we look at the budget for the coming year to understand what some of these unmet needs are in other departments as well. You know, we just don't have an unlimited budget and everybody wants something. Ronnie? Yeah, there also seems to be a prevailing belief that any money for crests will come out of the police department. In real life, when you've had community response departments operating, there's been some relief of the workload on the police, but nothing that would be of such significance that you could reduce police budget by 50%, which is a number that's been kicked around and frankly, in my humble opinion, it's pulled out of the air. So we're going to have to be very careful of going on, going forward. And folks are also going to have to take into account the fact that some of these positions that aren't necessarily public facing are pretty important. We can't expect to sustain our public services, our public safety, our public health unless there's adequate support behind that. That means folks in the back office because there's lots of work that has to go on to keep those town employees who are in the field. End of sermon. Thank you. Kathy. Yeah, this is jumping forward a little bit to another department when we get to town facilities, but I just don't know whether it's come up at the Melissa level. When we have a brand new school that's all electric with geothermal and solar, we have a school with much more sophisticated HVAC system than anything we've got now. And as we do similar kinds of changes in the town hall and town building, so I'm trying to think forward, will there be a need for a high level facility person with a technical expertise that works across school, town, library so that each of those doesn't have to have the capacity. And I saw this in Springfield, they have, well, it's a much bigger urban area, but just trying to think about that is Jeremiah and then Rupert, what they will be facing. And in one case, it's not till 2026, but we're gonna be getting it in some of these others. So it's just something to be thinking about, not so much a new staff, but trying to think about where that kind of staff person is and then it's a shared resource. So we don't tend to budget that way with these departments. You're in a department rather than working, the big departments, the big ones, not Sean's finance where everyone works together. So that's just looking forward kind of question. Yeah, I mean, just the likelihood of the town finding a person who can do that, it'd be great if we could. My guess is it's gonna be very difficult to find somebody with those types of expertise that could work solely for the town. But to your point, we will definitely need maintenance. If we can't, we will need maintenance contracts. We will need things in place that have professionals that do that type of work. But again, just knowing that the schools where we employed a number of specialists like plumbers and electricians and carpenters, it's the private sector, especially for those types of positions is much more advantageous. And so it's difficult to find people like that to work for the municipal side. Thanks. So the next question, Melissa, is about, just given an update on the market wage study. Excuse me. Yes, we've gotten pretty far. We've had our initial employee meeting with our consultant who is WHR, backtracking and RFP went out in January and they were awarded the bid. That's coming out of our capital requests, FY23 capital request budget of $40,000 and the contract amount was $25,000. So anyhow, GOVHR has met with us. They've given all of the employees the lowdown about what we're doing, how we're doing it. The employees were given a job analysis questionnaire to answer questions about the work that they do in the positions. They were then given to supervisors to review and they've all been submitted now. Interviews with employees one-on-one with the consultant will begin on Monday. There are five people working with all of our non-union members to complete those next week. Also our surveys, our salary surveys have gone out to our 21 comparable communities and we hope that they will answer. I know that at least three of them have sent me a copy of what they submitted. It's going right to a survey engine so I haven't seen who's answered yet. But I think it's progressing pretty well and I think we'll have some initial recommendations by the beginning of or early part of FY24. Thank you. Lynn? Just a question on the salary comps. Are you taking into consideration when you look for comparable towns, what the cost of living is in that area of the state? And to be honest with you, with housing prices so high and amourst, we start looking a little bit like at least a Middle Eastern, Mid Eastern, not Middle Eastern, Mid Eastern Massachusetts that might be a far reaching bedroom community for Boston. But I just wanted to make sure that we do at least consider that issue of some places are just more expensive to live. We are. We are considering location, cost of living, average salary. We are even thinking about looking at, well, we have asked a few communities with universities, state colleges to also answer. But we have them prioritized with most comparable, which what we think is most comparable and then others. But yeah, we have looked at a lot of factors, including that cost of living. In reality, when you, the university basically pays similar across the state. So it doesn't take into consideration where you live in the state. Just, that's just an aside and a caution. Thank you. And then the last question is about collaborating with diversity, equity and inclusion and how that work has been going. Yeah, I've enjoyed collaborating with that office. We actually were able to do two trainings together at our first professional day events and we'll continue to collaborate in that way. And I've worked very closely with them and we'll continue to work with them on the hiring process, recruitment and how to make it better, show it up, how to increase our pool of diverse candidates. And I've been working with the assistant director on that pretty closely. And so yeah, I'm enjoying that partnership and it's, I think it's fruitful. And we'll have the same question for Pamela in a few minutes. Any other questions for human resources? Yeah, I just want to thank Melissa publicly. She came in at a difficult time, has endured some staff turnover, some pretty intense labor negotiations that's been going on and just ramped up this week again. So just sort of powered through everything. So just really thank you, Melissa. Appreciate that, thank you. Andy. Yeah, this is more a question for you than to Melissa, which is why I was ready to lay in. As I was looking through this budget and then thinking about the other budgets, I realized that what we've been doing by listing under personnel services for each department, the salaries, but leaving the benefits into one general fund under general services, that we don't always reflect the full cost of the department because we're leaving such a large part of compensation into a separate reporting mechanism. And so it probably affects different departments differently because of a department where the salaries are relatively lower than the percentage that's going to be in the benefits side of compensation is going to be higher. But for future budgets, not for this budget, but for future budgets, I wonder if that top section in each budget where we talk about personnel services, operating expenses, not creating capital, whether we should be looking at what we can do to make sure that we're really looking at the full cost of each department. So why don't we put that. Yeah, no, and that was a question that was submitted. So I can address that one now. So we could take a look at how to include that. It used to be included. What I'll say is the spreadsheet or the budget as it is now, if you add up all the different department pages, it adds up to our total budget as you expected to. And in reality, and from an accounting perspective, we don't track health insurance by department. We have a health insurance account and I think that's how it was at the schools as well. We don't, we would have lots of nightmarish accounting situations if we were to track it by every department. So we just have one account for active health insurance another account for retiree health insurance and so on. We do have spreadsheets where we could translate that to department benefit costs, if need be. And we could put it on those budget pages. But again, I would almost put it as like a pro forma, like below the line type thing, because we're still gonna have an employee benefit section where you're gonna wanna see what is the overall cost of health insurance and how is it changing? It can sometimes, when you break it into granular by department, you can sometimes lose the full picture of our employee benefit costs because one person decides they're not gonna get benefits that year and it looks like health insurance is going down or somebody decides they're gonna take health insurance and it's gonna go up and it looks like it's a really big increase. And sometimes, we try to not talk about individual health insurance decisions of employees. We're not really supposed to tie any decisions to somebody's right to choose health insurance. And we have some small departments where it becomes pretty clear, pretty obvious when you see a big jump in health insurance. So that's why I moved away from it. And I think ultimately the most important thing is that global number and what we see happening there because it smooths out sort of the ins and outs. But to your point, we could do something to try to provide a little more context around that. And I've been in communities that have done it both ways, Andy, as you know. And what happens is that it's harder to analyze a department budget when you include that because just as Sean said, someone suddenly starts taking a family health plan. It just catapults that budget up. If it's a small department, you go like, why is this budget suddenly going up? It's not true. You're not able to compare it to the prior years. And the thing that the council or the budget makers usually care about most about is what does health insurance cost us as a question? If we want to get into what do departments cost as a true sort of enterprise function, we can do that. But in terms of the decision-making process for this council and appropriating a budget, I think this is a cleaner way to do it because you can really compare year to year operations of a budget, of a department. Okay, well, thank you. And as I said, I really didn't think that this was one that I wanted to go into today because I think we're talking about next year budget presentation question, which is- It was a question actually that was submitted by probably Kathy, so it was, you guys were thinking alike. Kathy. Yeah, so, and when I actually, I think I asked it last year in the year, I may have asked it every year, but maybe the first time I saw the budget book. So I wasn't thinking down to the fine grain. I was thinking more at the total school budget when we show just the wage part. We haven't showed the personnel part. So if we had the fringes, if we had health and pension, people would see this as, we are a people organization and that's what's driving our budgets. So, and so Sean, I wasn't, you know, down to the two-person department or the five-person department doesn't make any sense to me for all the reasons you've just said, including pensions are somewhat more relative, related to the level of the wages. So just thinking of some way of not having it, the first time I opened the budget book, I said, where's the health, where's health insurance? I went into it to have to search for it and pensions, but it might be sort of a simple table someplace that you show it in those initial things where you're not redoing your whole. Yeah, no, we could definitely do that. We could put it in the staffing section, there's a staffing summary. We do a little bit of that during the financial indicators presentation. There's a chart that looks at sort of benefit costs, personnel, salary and benefit costs. But I don't know if we do anything where we roll in the schools as well, which we could do because their budgets allow for that. So we could do something like, you know, our overall budget is $90 million and of that, you know, 60 or whatever is pension health insurance and salaries. So yeah, we could do that for next year. Yeah, and I just think it's important because it's, particularly since health insurance is one of the bugaboos, it's always, it has been always going up faster to be a share of everything, but you wanna know where's the money going. So it's a way of saying add another 15% or another whatever ours is, you know, for the town. Because it's also one of the things that attracts people to work at the town of Amherst. I mean, it's a good thing that we have the benefits that we do. So I'll stop, I just some simple way, not down to the, you know, small, where one family plan versus one individual plan will skew it one way or the other. Bob? Yeah, I was just going to add, it would be helpful to see this summary over time, you know, in the five year projections because it's really important to know where all these expenses are going, especially since they are probably a majority of what we spend our money on. Yeah, we have all that historical data where we could show a five year, you know, up through the forward budgeting for the following year. I'm sure you do. I just think it would be very helpful because for example, when I was looking at, you know, the employee benefits, there was no pension there. I had to go look at the assessment for pension, which is fine. Yeah, that's just a structural decision that town had made a while back where we weren't gonna charge pension costs to the operating budgets. And so, yeah, it's just a structure. But it's not all in one place. Yeah, it's not all in one place. It would be helpful if it were all in one place just so people could see it. I think that's the only request for new information for next year so far. So I'm gonna just make sure I write that down. Any other questions for human resources? I had one other, and there may not be a simple answer to this, but for the employee benefits, you know, writ large, what percentage of the cost is borne by the town versus the employee? Do you want me to take that? Melissa, do you want to go ahead? Yes, Sean, if you could speak to that. So for health insurance, for, and Kay here, correct me if I get this backwards, but for HMOs, it's 75-25 split, and for PPOs, it's an 80-20 split. And the unique thing, not unique thing, but one of the, again, benefits of working for Amherst is that we maintain that split into retirement. Many communities, when you retire, they drop to a lower allocation, but Amherst maintains that. So again, that's just something to note. Thank you. Is that retaining of that something that's negotiated in contracts? That's a good question. I don't think it's in, I don't believe it's in the collective bargain agreements explicitly, but it's not. So, but we do have people move to Medicare when they are of age, right? Yeah, as soon as somebody, we try to move people to Medicare as soon as they're eligible and we actually, one of the programs that we implemented, I think this past year, with the help of Maya, was the sort of, even if they missed the original opportunity to go into Medicare, we moved them over and we're paying the penalty, but it's financially more advantageous for us to pay the penalty and get them into Medicare than the alternative. And so that saved us quite a bit of money this past year. And we're also paying a share, either a share or all of the Part B premium, which is a big benefit. Yeah, we have generous retiree benefits, which is one of the, again, it's one of the hard things when we're recruiting, I think fewer and fewer people nowadays look to the retiree benefits as part of the compensation package, but it really is on the municipal side, one of the, and particularly in Amherst, it's one of the, it's a huge component of their compensation that we offer and trying to help them understand that is a challenge that Melissa has. What is, how many must you be with the town to be vested? I think Kay had risen, raised her hand. She may answer all these questions. Kay? You have to have 10 years of service to be vested with retirement system. And unfortunately they don't, we have no vesting requirement with the town itself and be eligible to retire with benefits. It's the vesting with the retirement system. So occasionally, and they used to see it a lot in the schools when they were doing the school lunch folks that would come from another community and not have retirement benefits for health insurance and they would come to Amherst to do a couple of years and then retire from Amherst because if you accept a provision of the law for health insurance for retirees, the mandate is that you must pay at least 50% once you've accepted that section of the law. Historically Amherst has treated their retirees the same as active employees and you've, and people pay the same when they retire as they do as an active employee. And we did answer the question about Medicare. We reimburse part of the Medicare Part B premium. We're required by state law. If we enroll people in Medicare Part A, we have to pay the Part A premium if they don't have it for free and we have to pay any penalties associated with enrollment into Medicare. So if there are any penalties on either A or B, we're on the hook for that. But as Sean said, it does save us considerable money in our healthcare costs. So it's probably well worth it. Bernie? Yeah, the classic trade-off for public employees is that you get better retirement benefits at the end rather than a higher salary through the year and I would strongly encourage the town to continue the retirement benefits. You also have to keep in mind that if you have Social Security, you've earned Social Security and you then retire on a state pension, you get hit with what's called a WEP, a windfall elimination provision which can cost you two thirds of your Social Security benefits. So that's another reason to help people out by giving them better health insurance and retirement. And I'll just quickly add that retiree health insurance costs are one of our rising cost areas. They have been for a while. People living longer is probably the major reason why which is a good thing. But it is an area that's going up and then in addition with the cost of health insurance rising so rapidly. The silver lining is that our Medicare costs haven't actually risen that much. We've had our premium increases for Medicare plans have been relatively low pretty much flat for several years which has been helpful. But this is exactly why we contribute to our OPEB trust fund and why we continue to make contributions or OPEB trust funds up over $10 million. We've got a ways to go but that's why we continue to make those contributions so that at some point we can, that fund will be able to generate some returns and actually help alleviate some of the pressure on the operating budget from health insurance from retiree health insurance. All right, any final questions on human resources? Thank you so much, Melissa. Thanks. Thanks. Thank you all. Good to see you. So Pamela Young is up next. Hi Pam, how are you? Hello everyone. So we had a couple of questions Pamela that I will relay. So the first one is how will the two person or how is the two person department working from the staff perspective? How often you're teaming with other departments like HR, police, Crest, working with community participation officers and lastly, working with community partners like UMass or Amherst College. So the office is working very well with all of the internal departments, particularly as you heard with HR, but also with Crest, we've done a couple of events together. One of the objectives of the office is to work with every department on their DEI initiatives and I guess early winter, we did send out a DEI survey and assessment to try to start to get a read on what those initiatives will be as we're beginning to go around and do training with each of the departments, we'll also have an opportunity to talk to them about their DEI initiatives. We have worked, made contacts with both Amherst College, Amherst College and UMass. I think the strongest connection has been with Amherst College which has provided funding for a number of the cultural events that the office has supported. Thank you and I'll give a staff perspective. I've been a couple of Pamela's trainings and events so far. I think the two things that I would describe them as is accessible. They do a really great job of providing different ways to engage with the work and interactive. They're not, you know, sit back and listen to a one hour or go through a one hour PowerPoint. You know, you're engaged and you're talking with people and working through pretty tough topics but in a way that doesn't maybe feel as tough, you know, they do a good job of sort of disarming people, I think. So I would say from a staff perspective, I've heard nothing but good things about the DEI's role so far. Yeah. Thank you. Just to add to that, I mean, what I appreciate is that Pamela has a real strategy and a strategic vision for how to engage people and it's a ladder of engagement that she opens the door and starts to engage people and it broadens and then the word gets around and says, oh, that was actually fun and more people show up the next one. So she's got this sort of plan going forward which I really appreciate it. Thank you. And myself and a couple other counselors were one of the early ones at the Survival Center and I just, I loved it. I went away having met people I'd never met in our community and hearing, you know, people's real experiences in life. So I, and Pamela's manner does just invite people to engage, so thank you. So thank you. So on that note, I'll say that we're generally trying to host a staff-only workshop opportunity on a monthly basis. I think the staff have really appreciated the ability to learn amongst there and with their peers. They feel that's a safe environment for them and then we're trying to engage the community in events that are open to the public and so tomorrow we will actually host another community event on allyship at the Bang Center from 9.30 to 11. All right, the next question or the last question that will open up for any other committee questions is around the DEI director's role in forming and supervising the law enforcement oversight and community safety, sorry, law enforcement oversight board and the community safety committees. And is there advocacy for providing stipends for members of these two committees? Is that kind of played in this budget which I can speak to and how there's a lack of stipends for other volunteer committees, but specifically with DEI's role with those two committees. Can you give an update, Pam? Sure, so the, an RFP went out about four weeks ago for the law enforcement oversight board. It just closed on Monday of this week. So we'll have an opportunity to review the submissions and hopefully we'll be able to select someone to do that work so that law enforcement oversight committee is not in existence yet. We do anticipate that DEI will work very closely with the consultant if one is hired in the establishment of that committee. And then once it's established, we'll work obviously collaboratively with that board. But the creation of the board is envisioned as one that would be independent. So would DEI would not be overseeing the law enforcement oversight board. It would be a separate entity. And I think I missed a section part. And then working with the community safety group as well. Yeah, so we've worked very closely with Cress currently. We've provided some workshops for them on restorative justice practices. Earl and I have attended some events together. That working relationship is excellent. In addition, DEI and Cress are hoping to share an AmeriCorps intern in the fall. And that intern would work exclusively on youth empowerment programming. So we have an excellent working relationship with Cress. And then related to stipends. So right now there is a stipend for the CSSJC. It's been coming out of Paul's budget. So it's something that Paul thought was important and therefore funded it. There's no formal budget for committee stipends other than the council and school committee. So if there, whatever comes out of stipends for committees, that would be something we would look to include in a future budget once that's determined. And I'll just add that we do have a model to review from the city of Burlington or from Vermont that we're gonna be taking a look at for a way in which to provide the stipends for those committees. So are there any other questions for Pamela? I'll say the, just as an update, and again, you'll get a broader update. We are funding the consultant position that Pamela described through ARPA. We had a community engagement bucket that we didn't end up spending all of the funding on ambassadors in that program. And so knowing that that work had a start soon, that was something that's being funded through ARPA. And it's a one-time cost. So we thought of the criteria of what we were trying to do with ARPA. Any, all right, no other questions? All right. Pamela, you can go home. All right, have a good afternoon. Thank you, Pamela. All right, thanks. Matt, do you have a question before Pamela leaves? No, not for Pam. Thank you, Pamela. All right, there. Thank you, Pamela. Bye. Sean, I was just wondering about the timing of your ARPA presentation. Will that happen during, when y'all think about doing that? I think June is what we were sort of, May is a busy month with all these meetings, but I think June is when we're ready to come back. And that meeting will be a couple of things. It'll be sharing information on the programs that have been funded and how those programs are doing and then laying out a plan and discussing some of the things that Bob raised earlier, some contingency planning, that type of thing. Anything to talk with Lynn about, there's a couple of meetings in June that just choose whatever, we can do it whenever it's best, depending on the agendas of the council. Right. Well, and whenever you're ready. Yeah. So there's nothing in there that will affect this FY24 that we're looking at now. So the way our, so ARPA, the town manager can direct it, the council has accepted and authorized spending, but Paul has taken the approach of working collaboratively with the council in terms of updating what is going to be spent on and getting feedback. And so the first round of ARPA originally was about $9 million, was sort of the total value of the first round that we worked with the council on. When we come back, some of those things were super successful and we've put more money and we want to put more money into them. Some of them didn't pan out the way we were hoping and we didn't spend the money and so that money will be part of the next step conversation. And so there are ways that the ARPA money will help FY24, but it's not a funding source for the budget in that way. And what we're really trying to do again is stay away from anything that would increase the town's dependency on ARPA in terms of an operating dependency. We're trying to get off of that with regards to the firefighter and EMTs. Right. Okay, thanks. Okay, I think the next department is... Let me pull on, let me pull on these switches. IT or is it election? Let's see. Oh, no, it's Sue. So Sue is here, town clerk. So what that? Thank you for joining. So we had a few questions. Hi, everyone. Hi, Sue. All right, so Sue, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna kind of facilitate and read you the question and then you can just go ahead. So we've seen, and I know you sent some of these to me but if you could just repeat them. So there's been a decline in passport and passport photos. Can you explain why there's been that decline? And then there was a question about this to public. No, we provide these services but your answer is gonna be, we don't provide these services. Right, pretty much so exactly. So when COVID hit, we got out of the program because the town hall closed. So obviously we can't accept passport applications if we're not here. We have not gotten back into the program at this point and passport applications and passport photos kind of went hand in hand when people would come in to apply for a passport. They'd say, oh, and do you take pictures? So just to keep in mind, if we were to advertise that we do photos, I just want to caution our camera. I looked up, we purchased it in August of 2007. It's quite old. It takes kind of a crappy picture. So I would say that if we were to get back into this we would have to purchase a new system for taking photos. And so that's that part of it. So that would explain why we're not taking any money in because we're not doing them. And I think that answered all of it. So wasn't there a logistical challenge as well with having to separate the photos from the applications? No, actually the logistical challenge was in the fact that as a town clerk or an assistant town clerk we are federally restricted from accepting a passport application because we can issue a birth certificate and there might be fraud. Yeah, we had to divide and conquer in our office. So we had one person that could accept passports and that was it. So that created a logistical nightmare, so to speak because if they're on vacation, how do you keep notifying the public that, oh, we're doing them on these days, not on these days and oh, they're not in this day, they're out that, you know. So I mean, we worked best through it while we were doing it but when COVID hit and it stopped we just, we haven't picked it up since. Yep, thank you. All right, the next question is, not sure exactly what this is. So there's been an increase in notarizations. Do you think that's due to the loss of other entities providing notarization services in the area and do we charge a fee for notarization? Yes, we charge $5 per notarization. We did see a huge increase. I think it went from like 90 something to, what was it, 1200, something like that. It was huge. So one of the reasons is definitely the Hastings closed because we know they had a notary on staff. Yeah, Kathy's shaking her head, nodding her head and they actually were charging $15 a notarization way back when and we were still at five. And so, and we also hear from clients when they come in and they say, yeah, we went to the bank first but there's nobody on staff today or what have you, they were busy. So I would like to increase that fee to $10. I think it's warranted. I'm hoping it will lower the traffic at the counter because we spent an awful lot of time at the counter doing notarizations. And it takes away from the work that we actually have to do. So, but at the same time, increasing it to 10 from five, it's doubling it. And I think we're gonna still be ahead of the game in the end. Yeah, and this is one of the few fee increases that have been requested other than ones that are planned. And I think Paul, you've already given the green light on this one in particular, so. Yeah, yeah. Kathy? Yeah, I just wanna say, Sue, it's an incredible welcoming public benefit that you're doing. So I realize it's a burden on you, but when the bank says, you can go across the street and the town hall does it, people go, really? The town hall provides that service. I mean, it's just a nice there. And as you said, Hastings doesn't do it. The bank says, you know, go somewhere else. So, you know, the number, the number of the increase is enormous. But I think getting known for the fact that we do things for people is a good thing. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, what's interesting lately is that we've been getting a lot of walk-ins for real estate closings and we absolutely cannot do real estate closings by law. So we've had to turn a few people away. I don't know why all of a sudden there's the rise in real estate closings, but, you know, we're happy to do them. It's just, you know, when you're standing with my management assistants at the counter for four hours out of seven and a half hours with just notifications, you know? It's like, okay. So, that's on. Okay. And the last question is a very smooth transition to the new districts, polling and, you know, we use the new machines. Were there any issues from your perspective from the last election? None. Well, I shouldn't say none. I would say 1%. There's the most common comment we were hearing was the voter didn't see the green check mark that said that their ballot was cast before they walked out of the polling place. And, you know, they were told by the person standing at the ballot box, you know, when you see that green check mark, your ballot's been counted. And either they looked away the second that check mark appeared and missed it. Yeah, so there was a little bit of, well, wait a minute, how do I know? So I think a little bit more training for the poll workers to make sure that the voter is watching that machine as they're putting the ballot in and not looking away. That's the only thing I can think of. But other than that, it was extremely smooth. The tabulators look very much like the old tabulator. So it's not a, there wasn't a huge learning curve. We had no problems whatsoever. It was great. Dorothy? A question that has been raised recently is about with the district changing, particularly of old district three joining becoming for a, and they're for sitting counselors in the new district this moment. Will the word incumbent be after all four of them? So I've already been asked that and I've reached out to the Secretary of State's office I'm waiting for any answer because I wanted a definitive answer on that. I've never prepared a ballot post redistricting. So I'm not sure. So I wanna make sure we get this right. Yeah, I'll let the counselor that reached out to me know so that they can pass it on. Well, if we don't like what the Secretary of State says what some of them get the word incumbent and others don't, there will be some objections. Okay, either everybody gets it or nobody gets it. Well, we have to follow the law. It's gonna be interesting what the answer is. Okay, thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. Andy? Yeah, it's just curious with the elections then particularly since we just had one we are getting more people you noted on doing mail-in ballots. And whether the time and the cost to process the mail-in ballots is being recouped in any way or for purely town elections is that totally on the town budget. And then the second part of that goes is have we been getting enough people who are doing mail-in and early voting that we ought to be reconsidering the number of polling locations? So your first question, Andy, is the mail-in balloting is it being recovered by the town, the cost? Is that what you asked? Yes, and is it a large expense in time and other expense and are we getting any recovery on it? So we do get recovery for state elections, we get reimbursed, it's a non-funded mandate. So for the fall elections, we were reimbursed 18,000 but we don't get reimbursed for town costs on mail-in balloting. So this past election we had the quantity of ballots was really good. I forget what it was, I think 1500 but we were able to do it in-house without extra help. We were right at the limit of what we could handle but that was the limit. So there wasn't any additional expense to process them is what I'm saying. That's not the case for state elections. We get into the 8,000, 6,000 range where we don't have enough time to do them when we have to hire election workers. But again, we get reimbursed for that. And then your second question, I'm not quite sure I understood. I'm just curious because I don't know what kind of difficulty you're having right now in finding election workers. You hear these national stories that is becoming more difficult. I don't know what your local experience is but is there a point at which so many people are voting by mail and voting early that there's decline in the polling place that might cause you to recommend that we as a economic measure look at reducing the number of polling locations? Well, that's interesting. I have never calculated that, but that is a thought. See the thing is, is that it's different for town elections than state elections. So I think we would always, yeah, Lynn's nodding her head and we would always have the quantity of people coming out the numbers on state elections where we would need the polls to be in the numbers that they are now. Whereas we don't necessarily need that for town elections. I mean, we obviously can't reduce the number of precincts but if we were to combine a couple of precincts in a couple of locations where we could reduce staff, election worker staff, that would reduce some of the costs. Yeah, I can do an analysis on that and see what the breaking point is. That's very interesting. Yeah, but instead about the elections that have the larger turnout, it's definitely something to be considered. But I'll let go to Lynn and Bob who have their heads up. National elections are even bigger than state. Yeah, I'm combining them. I just wanna caution how fast we move into something like this. I think it's good to look at the research but Kathy can chime in on this. When we looked at potentially having everybody go to the high school, we ran into a buzz saw and frankly, the research didn't support that. People identify with where they vote. And so we might be able to show that it could save some money but the education related to it needs to be really thought about and I could go on and say more but that's all. Yeah, maybe I'm a little radical thinking here but I would be interested in looking at just entirely mail-in ballots for all elections. I think that when I look at the turnout for local elections, it concerns me that people aren't really paying attention to local elections. And maybe we wouldn't get people returning their ballots. I don't know. And maybe this isn't the time to be thinking about it but I'm somebody who really thinks that it would be great if we got 70, 80% voter turnout for every election. And when I see some of these numbers here, 13%, that's not really representative of the residents of the town. So anyway, if we had just vote by mail understand that you'd have to hire election workers but we have to basically have all this infrastructure around the voting locations. So maybe in the long run it's cheaper. I don't know. Can I speak to that? Sure. Yeah, so we have to follow state law. It comes down to what state law tells us we need to do. I love that idea. I think maybe we'll move towards that someday but we don't have the liberty to make our own rules. Yeah. And the rules require that we provide a polling place. I'll also just say, and again I looked at Kathy on this but in the various times that we went out for to inform people about the school project and then my subsequent conversations with constituents and so forth. There's a real trend among older people of wanting to deliver their ballot personally either go to the poll or drop it off downtown or go in for early voting. And frankly, that's our consistent vote population is older people. So this may just not be something that's arrived yet. And since it's not allowed by state law then I think we're not there. Kathy? Yeah, I was just gonna say what Sue might be able to tell us is 1,500 people asked for mail ballots. Do we know how many actually return them? So you got that opportunity when you said how many people live in your household would you like a ballot by mail? Our own experience, not this time because we voted in person early but we requested a mail ballot and it never arrived. And the seriously bizarre thing was six months, four months later my husband's ballot arrived to someone who lived on another street who happened to know us. So there was some major glitch in the system because they had our address correct but it never got to us. So we had to sign an affidavit that we weren't gonna vote twice because we just never received it. So I don't know what that was Bob but it was that first time we could do it. So I just think what Lynn and I encountered and people said, I requested my mail ballot but I have a different address now because I moved yesterday but I know where my polling place is and the comfort level was I'm gonna go somewhere to try to vote to make sure they could vote because their address changed two months ago within Amherst. And these were older people who moved from a home into a different place. So anyway. I understand that's always an issue. People move two weeks before election time. I recognize that but other states do this have done it for years. And I think it would be instructive if we wanted to pursue this it'd be instructive to look at other states and see how they implemented it in the early years. Andy, maybe one more question on this and then I'll just look at the time I wanna make sure we solve two full departments and then a few little ones at the end but Bernie, you had your hand up. I'll let it go. I'm looking at the clock here and the lower corner of the screen and we are running. Okay, and if there's anything anyone really wants to just email it to us and we'll get a response and get it back to you. All right, so I think with that thank you, Sue for coming and talking to the committee. And again, if anybody has any other questions for Sue email them in and we'll get them addressed. Yeah, absolutely. Bye everyone. Bye Sue. Bye. So Sean, you are up next. Sean is our Information Technology Director. You know, kind of keeps the lifeblood of the town humming along. And so I think we have a few questions for you, Sean. Let me just pull up my list. Yeah, so Sean, what is the plan to install Wi-Fi in the parks and recreation areas? Will this be phased and which ones have it now? Yeah, I'll start with the last part of the question. None of them have it now but the good news is it's relatively easy to do. So after we complete the downtown Wi-Fi now that we have fiber to a lot of our recreation areas we'll be able to do Wi-Fi, I would expect this summer. We'll be able to do War Memorial Park, Mill River, sorry, War Memorial Pool, Mill River Pool, Groff Park and then when the bathroom goes in at Kendrick Park Guilford's gonna put a spot there and conduit and we'll be able to do Wi-Fi at the new playground at Kendrick Park. Yeah, Sean has been sneaky under the radar good at getting grants and so we have a grant to help with the downtown Wi-Fi. We have a grant to extend the fiber optic network up to the top of, I always get the wrong president, Matt Lincoln. Lincoln, yep. And then also Sean is utilizing some ARPA funds that were part of that first round to expand the network to some of the recreation areas. Yeah, it works out well because the grants are for Wi-Fi and fiber and they rely on each other. So it makes it easy to spend the money. Dorothy? Okay, Sean mentioned the bathroom with Kendrick Park. Now, when we were talking about this it seems like two years ago, Kathy had some research that the bathroom would cost a million dollars. I'm really excited about the thought of a bathroom at Kendrick Park. Are there any details that can be shared at this time? So Paul, do you want to take this one? So DPW is handling this. We haven't gone out to bid, I don't think for it. But we're looking at what they call the Portland Lou type. That's a prefab thing that the space is already outfitted to allow for the installation of it. Like when they built Kendrick Park they had envisioned having a bathroom there. So that's all set, ready to go. It's just a matter of getting it out to bid. There's a lot of things on DPW's plates right now but this is one of those. It's not a million dollars, so. Now, we allocated as either 200 or maybe 255, 250 from the American Rescue Plan Act for this. So yeah, it's a priority that DPW is working on. So is this a self-clean one I'm curious about? Or does it? We'll have to clean it. They're not, very few of them really actually work the self-cleaning ones. I suspected that. Okay, so this is a perfect use of ARPA funds. So thank you very much. And we haven't settled on the Portland Lou. Some of us have different sections. I'm sorry, we have to go out to bid. Some people really like the aesthetics of the Portland Lou and others do not, so. Yeah, that's good. Do you have fast Wi-Fi while you're using it though? So. All right, next question. Can I assume this means maybe free internet? Can we provide or access to the network? Can we provide to low-income housing or public housing, Wi-Fi or internet access? Yeah, we can. It gets a little more complicated. So Wi-Fi is easy to do anywhere. We have something to mount the equipment to, especially if it's something we own and we have fiber going to there or a way of getting a wireless link to there. So downtown's easy. The recreation areas are easy. Doing outdoor areas are much easier. Once you start talking about providing Wi-Fi inside of buildings and inside of buildings that the town doesn't own, it gets a lot more complicated. So if we had specific places we were interested in, we absolutely could look into it. But just putting something outside of a building won't necessarily penetrate the building that well. We ran into this. We had an antenna on the rooftop of the bank center providing Wi-Fi to... And Wayland. Yeah, and what we found is that everybody on the south side of the building got internet access. But once you went across the hallway to the north side of the building, we weren't providing internet access on that side. So it came... People were upset about that. So again, it gets tricky. It's something we'd be happy to look into and get a price on what would be involved, but it can get complicated. Kathy. Sean, if we don't have an internal budget for... With the places we don't... As you said, we have places we own is a little bit easier. Do you know whether CPAC money could be used and call it an upgrade of places we funded in the past that are affordable units? So I'm just thinking that the Comcast rates have gone up a lot and it's for... So it's just a question on whether there is some access to a support system if we can get the technical part right. But money is the object. Do we know whether Community Preservation Act money could be used that way? So it may not be a question that needs to be answered now. But I was going to say, you're creating utility at this point in time because you can't just provide the signal. You also have to support the signal when people have complaints, if people become dependent on it, you really have to have utility and staffing to support it. Because it is a utility now for folks and it's something you can't live without. And we discovered that during COVID. So if we want to go down that road, we really need to develop a pretty robust proposal for how to provide that, if we're going to do that for private properties. Yeah, I do think it's a bigger issue. There was a group here talking about that. There was a group in Northampton talking about it. So... And to your question on CPA, I would have to look into that closer. I don't know if... Like in an existing facility, I don't know if just buying Wi-Fi or the access would be allowable. And I don't... It doesn't seem like it would be, but we can double check. Dorothy? I personally think that finding some way to do this thing, which is clearly much more complicated than we were thinking, would be one of the best social justice projects that we could do in the town. Before COVID, there were a number of events held around town with the community outreach officers. And I went to a number of them. And one of them outside the big apartments on East Hadley Road, people kept coming up and saying the same thing. We don't have internet. And I thought, wow, the town is putting all this effort in making all kinds of ways to communicate with people. And yet huge segments of people can't communicate with the town since we're doing everything on internet. And I remember a student who was in my grandson's class in grammar school lived a little bit further north. And she and her mother had to go sit in a car in a parking lot outside some public building at night in order for her to do her homework before they get the signal. So I just think this would be the best social justice thing we could do is to make sure that everybody had access and their children had access to the internet. Yeah. Again, to Paul's point, it's a large project, but it's something I think, Sean, you said when the I-Net was being put up, that it was being structured in a way for possible down the road. I will say just in terms of students, I know the library and the schools, they do have hot spot devices that they loan out that have internet access. And I don't know if there's any restrictions on where they have internet access, but for the reason you described, that they loan those out. But it doesn't address the larger issue that you described. And then the last question, and Breanna, you may want to weigh in on this one. The website, are there any issues with the website and have you received any public feedback? Happy to have you on that. Hi, everybody, and Breanna, Senate Communications Director. So we have not had major issues. The thing that's constantly ongoing is working with departments to make sure that their content is up to date and accurate. We have almost 2,000 web pages, give or take. And last fiscal year, we had about 1.5 million visits to our official website. So it just shows that over time, the traffic has gotten considerable. Big increases, a lot of that can be contributed to a combination of COVID, moving more services online for digital delivery, and through our kind of solid communication strategy that constantly funnels people back to our site from our other marketing and outreach on social media and otherwise. So regarding feedback, we have a feedback button that is on every single one of our 2,000-plus web pages right at the bottom, website feedback. We, in the last 90 days, got seven submittals. Most often they are not broad-based, but reporting a broken link on a page or suggesting that something is missing from usually a department page. So we do have a mechanism for any time feedback from people who are on our site. And the other piece that we would be looking to do the next time we go into optimizing or updating the website, redesigning it, is working with creating a small group of potentially community members who could advise us on their user experiences and needs. That's something that didn't happen the last time because we were in the middle of COVID when we did the last update. So we'd be looking to do that the next time that we made enhancements. I'm happy to answer any other questions, but did that cover Matt? Actually, it's not a question. Brianna, I just want to thank you. You've been really great with some of the communications, press release, things that we've done. But, Andy, I do have to leave at three. I apologize. Very well. Thank you. Kathy? Mine is just a comment, Brianna. I think you've been amazing. And amazing. And your whole team with Sean, too, you're very responsive. So the building committee, the elementary school, as we morphed into multiple subcommittees, suddenly we've got a website, a place to put everything. And it was such a quick turnaround. And you work with different staff. And they said, Brianna showed me how to do this. So just thank and then updating our outside webpage. It was just you probably don't get padded on the back often enough, but you should. It's fantastic. Thank you, Councillor Shane. Any other questions for information technology? I will say one of our costs that has almost become like utilities, and Sean knows this, is our software costs. We become so dependent on software, and it's just hard to ever transition away from some of our softwares that we've sort of become bound to these annual increases, which seem like they just go up 5% a year regardless. I know Munis is the one I use. It's an expensive one. Our whole accounting system is Munis. And we asked our rep this just on Wednesday, like why does it go up 5% every year? Like you're not adding new features, that kind of stuff. It's just, but it is just one of those steady consistent cost drivers that we see every year. And it's a pretty large budget overall for software when you look at all the different departments. It all comes out of Sean's IT budget. So it's all managed in one place. And we look at it, and that's one of the areas, one of the first things we do with the budget every year is we review the software lists for sort of creep. It's easy for there to be creep with software. And sometimes this comes from maybe council requests or public requests or various entities wanting to see different types of information. And there's almost always a software that can do it, but it comes down to, is it worth it? And do we want to pay the annual fee? Everything is software as a service nowadays. So if you don't pay the annual fee, you don't get the access to the software. So we do review that every year. All right. Thank you, Sean. Okay. Thank you. Have a great day, everybody. Thank you, Brianna. All right. So next up is Jeremiah, who's in the council of the backup room there behind the council. Is that where you are? Looks like he's in a cathedral. Yes. Yes. I am in the back room of the found meeting room. So I've got a few questions. So Jeremiah is our facilities manager. Really is in charge of the day-to-day with everything, with our facilities and does a good job keeping things running. So the first question, Jeremiah. Poorly written. Yeah. No, I was obviously trying. I think this is so related to the capital facility funds, sort of the bucket for maintenance or not maintenance, but sort of the smaller capital type improvements. How has that been working to have sort of one pool to address multiple types of projects? I think it's been working very well to have that one sort of big bucket to take care of. What it's allowed me to do is when I'm approaching maybe one capital project and in doing so, I see that there could be other work that's done or we might be able to do other work cheaper because say the walls are open that I take care of at that same time. So we have these projects that have come and we see them on our larger 10-year capital plan, but I can piggyback off of those with that funding. It's also helped for some increases and unfortunately, like Sean has mentioned, we're seeing a lot of increases in costs for buildings. So projects, some projects that were $10,000 or $15,000, five years ago are $60,000 now. So try to account for them as best as possible. Thank you. Can you speak a little bit to how you coordinate with facility staff at the schools, like Rupert and how you coordinate with sustainability director Stephanie Ciccarello? Yeah. So as far as working with Stephanie, our deaths are right next to one another. So we are collaborating and communicating almost daily when we're with each other. And we come together. I'll have questions for her. She has questions for me. And so I think right there, we have a good rapport and that sort of close relationship. As far as the schools, there is a number of facilities items that do overlap. And when we do have that overlap, I'm reaching out to Ben. I'm reaching out to Rupert. And then we have those collaborative and sort of collective conversations and try to figure out how best approach it. I would say one of the particulars that we tend to collaborate a lot with is elections. That's where we really come together. But has there been other collaboration beyond that? Just regular facilities? Absolutely. And then that's a relationship that will continue to grow and continue to foster. Thank you. Okay. So go ahead, Kathy. Sean, when I sent these in, somehow my hands typed a whole section on the page 111 on some of the utility bills. Yeah, I was going to go to those next. So I was just going to let you know it's in the wrong place. It was. Yeah, I figured it out. But thank you. All right. We're going to go to that section now, Kathy. So utility use on the facility department page, there's a chart that shows the trend in electricity use. And it kind of goes down and then comes back up. Jeremiah, feel free to weigh in, but from where I serve my end of it, when we look at bills, it seems like it sort of trends with the pandemic, which makes sense intuitively to us. It drops off for FY 20 and FY 21, and then comes back up for FY 22. And one, I'll give you one sort of specific example. The Musanti Health Center wasn't operating very much at all during the pandemic, and now they're back in full force. And we've seen electricity go up at the bank center. We've also seen the water. There's a question about water use going up. And we think specifically the water is a big one there as well. And then we, and again, we collect, that's one of the reasons why we collect an annual rent payment to offset that. Yeah, the electricity is a tough one. I mean, we're always making or taking measures to reduce our usage with lighting projects and such. But we're taking those measures, but we also have electrical infrastructure that's also starting to age. So as equipment gets older, as motors get older, the demand for electricity, their usage is going to increase. And it's very small. Amounts, but it almost just keeps the scales and balance in a way of that upward, slight upward trend, unless very large changes are made. We're still, we should see that upward trend. What I'd like to try to do is stabilize it so we don't have these huge spikes. One of the big spikes like Sean had mentioned is water. Water was, that was a, that was a big one. Yeah, that went from, it probably increased two to 300%, I would say. And so that one was a little bit of an alarm and say, what is causing this? And really it was a good service. We're all of those dental services and the health services that are in that new Santee space is the driver. And that's a good thing to have that. Jeremy, can you list off a few of the locations where you're currently either planning or actively working on HVAC project that will increase efficiency? Yeah, so two right now at the Amherst Police Department. One is to replace an aged cooling system and that's for their telecommunication rooms. That is just about ready to go out to bed. Another is we just contracted with a mechanical engineer, some designers to help us with the chiller replacement over at APD and that chiller hopefully will be a heat pump chiller. So that will provide heating on all those swing seasons and when it's a little bit mild outside but also the cooling so that we're burning much, much less fossil fuels. We also had the UMass students do an assessment of the Town Hall Building and I got to sit through their presentation on Tuesday of this week and hear what they proposed for the Town Hall to electrify our heating system here and get off of fossil fuels. So I would say those three are probably the ones that are closest in my sites and the next one would be the Munson Memorial Library. Jeremiah, in terms of our electricity consumption, as we move systems off of natural gas or heating oil and onto fully electric systems, do you expect our electricity consumption to rise or will these new systems be so much more efficient even with their electricity use that we won't notice an impact? Yes, absolutely they are going to rise. So some of these have some type of electrical resistors in them that might be generating heat. Stuff like that will drive up that electrical usage. We'll be saving money on fossil fuel sites so either on gas or the home heating fuels, number two oil, we're eliminating that piece so really those kind of funds would transfer over to electric. Yeah, I think that's an important point that the caution that when we do this, we might not necessarily see the savings, it will just transition to a different bucket because electricity prices have gone up as you all know as fast as anything has gone up and our electricity in this area is driven by natural gas so or produced largely with natural gas. So it's not going to necessarily be a cost saver as we do this, but obviously it's consistent with the town's goals. But we'll get we'll get we will get there though. I mean with all of the work that's being done and all of the assessments that we're doing with solar and solar projects, no solar arrays, that's how we offset the increases in electric. Kathy? That was going to be my question on we've got solar on the landfill and to the extent we can be offsetting it and it wasn't clear to me the other day, Sean, when we were with the elementary school building on sustainability, but I think our new building may generate a surplus with the panels that you know they're not doing it just a very narrow. So if we can capture it in other buildings where we generate more renewable that we actually use you know so what when we start to look at other buildings we should be thinking that way if we have buildings and parking lots that it's a pooled resource. Kathy are you offering to explain to this group what a teddy is? No there's a whole new state building code that completely affects our building and it changes the names of everything so it's it's got a new acronym but it will increase the cost of the envelope of the building and I think this is coming in for private buildings as well it's not just it's not just public buildings so the first reaction to this Jeremiah just so you know was a gasp of the energy model because we could not achieve their task targets so they they had to change the code because you know yeah so it's it's it's not a small change it's a big change yeah. Kathy to your point though on solar so we have few if any behind the meter solar systems where you really get the benefit of solar again we have like the landfill is great but it's a an off-taker you know type arrangement where you know we send the money back to the grid and then we get a credit which is not as financially advantageous as if we actually have the solar mounted on a building and feeding the electricity directly so I think that's the area we've got to look to expand in the future and we had that study done of municipal facilities so we've got the data but I think that's our next step is to look at more of the behind the meter type systems that's actually powering the building. Lynn? And the irony is that the highest production is going to be when school is not in session because the summer over the summer yeah yeah the schools were the best the schools were the um the big uh from a return on investment those were the the high school and middle school were the best locations that's where my my electric bill goes to zero in the summer. Well then but the school because we're going to own them rather than having to do it through a third party we'll be accumulating that whatever we call it behind but we you know the way our house works you know we can pass those credits on I think you can transfer those types of credits and those might be a little more advantageous than to building this being more used that maybe your conditionings on in the summer or something right um I think that I don't know there's might be a couple other questions here um we talked about water uh do we offset electric use costs with landfill solar fields production and again we do um but it's um it's not a direct offset it's uh we get a penny penny savings per kilowatt hour essentially is what we get on the electricity billing side um again there were other financial benefits that we discussed during the enterprise fund piece of it but in terms of the electric electric cost it's a penny savings per kilowatt hour which is about $30,000 a year or so um and is there a table with costs for items on page 11 electric gas oil water sewer um Kathy do you know yeah well so on page 11 it showed the kilowatt hours and the gallons but I didn't know whether we had something that said these kilowatt hours translate to this amount of dollars um just like a total budget for electricity yeah yeah we could we could provide that yeah we can and I know you did it in JCPC but I would just you know that um so it bounces around but meanwhile the price for those has been going up so just so yeah that's that's a huge one of the areas that we've seen grown grow tremendously in this past year especially as the rates went up over the winter um and we're hoping to actually potentially lock in rates now to bring it back down um because rates are actually they've sort of dropped back off a little bit um since the winter and then if Musanti is a major source of water went from 31,000 cubic feet to 95 so Jeremiah you already said it tripled but um do we charge Musanti for the water use does that become a bill or part of their rent I don't believe they pay for it separately it's um it's one of the things they pay rent for but is the rent adjusted to reflect the fact that there's an annual you know our water rates are going up and if you're a home you and you you tripled your water use you would see it in a bill yeah so their rate you know the history was you know they had sort of a lower rate as they were kind of getting started and then it's escalated up to be more in line with sort of market rates in the area um and it does have an annual increase of two and a half or three percent that it goes up every year um and that's a license agreement so we can adjust it um annually as needed okay thanks all right I think that's it for facilities any other facility questions oh I there's one more actually um and Jeremiah you talked about this a little bit is there a facilities management plan in place yeah so all life safety equipment or systems have contracted services just to ensure that they meet regulatory standard uh beyond that I've developed uh uh and continue to develop uh facilities preventive maintenance programs this is done through like policies and procedures uh checklists uh checklists that it includes supplies tools and all of these items like that so so uh staff can look at them they'll come up in my tasks so I I use our outlook in the the software that that uh IT provides um and we get those we get those uh tasks that those reminders those come up we uh couple that with a checklist and then we take care of those particular preventive maintenance items so we do thank you any final questions for facilities good all right you're off the hook Jeremiah thank you thank you thanks yeah all right so we have a few more um sections but they're not really department so I'll just run through them quickly so um we have the employee benefits section which we touched on um a little bit so we break out all our health insurance benefits life insurance that kind of thing the other thing that's in that section is um is our contingency for the outcome of collective bargaining bargaining um and right now there is some money in there because we have a few unsettled we have some unsettled contracts so just note that there isn't always money in there for that but when we have a year like this where we're between contracts um we do budget that money there all right then there was a question health insurance projected increase by eight percent in FY 24 um but let me just go to yeah it was just that was mine when I looked at the yeah why it's only one and a half percent increase the total only went up by a certain amount but the projection was a lot more I just and then I thought well maybe it's because there was a shift in the composition of the contracts but when I looked at the contracts it didn't look you know like is there more family contracts and I didn't see it so I just it it was just purely I didn't understand the math yeah so so the eight percent that's only for active health insurance so that's one thing it's not all health insurances so like I was saying for retiree um those increases have been much less and uh it's a little bit uh uh the timing is a little bit different for retiree health insurance versus active so active out goes by a fiscal year our retiree because it's Medicare goes by a calendar year but we know for the calendar year 2023 through December we know our Medicare rates and so we only really have to project an increase for half the year each year so but those Medicare rates have been very advantageous and then I'm just I think I know the answer to the other piece I didn't get to this before the meeting I think the other reason why it didn't go up as much is because we aren't budgeting as much of a contingency because we have some of our contracts settled for next year but let me just confirm that real quick you know it's if it's just a math issue I just didn't understand how it why it's not going up eight percent or or I was perfectly happy with 1.5 percent I mean it didn't have a quibble with it the other thing we do is we do adjust our um health insurance enrollment each year so I think it could be sometimes if there's fewer plans it helps alleviate some of that right it's kind of a techy question Sean so we don't need to take everyone's time all right those are my favorite questions um yeah the big I think one of the I think the our content budgetary control again which is used for the outcome negotiations is about half as much as it was in FY 23 and and we have about half as many open contracts so um so that's the why that went down which offset some of the health insurance increase okay um we talked about can we show uh benefits sort of uh by department or by operating budget but all in one place and yeah we'll we'll get something together for that before next year um yeah and there's another question about health insurance being separate from pensions and again that's just a structural decision that was made a while ago it's helpful to operating budgets because they don't have to absorb the I think I'm assuming one of the reasons why it was done is because pensions had a pretty large annual increase and I'm trying to help the operating budget does not have to absorb that each year but um and there were a few more let's see yeah I think you answered most is that all of them okay yeah no and it's just it's the same good thing that bob said you know that wears pensions and then you leaf through and you can find pensions someplace and wears health insurance and go these are pretty big numbers and if if we've been looking at to you know we've been looking at the whole school budget without them there's a big piece missing right and when you do get you know when we look at state reports for per people spending and things like that all that does get rolled in to that number so um the per people spending numbers for the schools we give them a pension number every year that reflects their their share so that number is an all-in number so the only other thing I'll just say just so you guys can say you just reviewed every department the other couple areas were general services so general services is the section of our budget that manages our legal services our audit fees our OPEB actuarial fees and then it does um it also is where we pay some of our like across the board like copier printer type things that help all departments and then the last one I think it's the last one is the arms scroll through our budget oh the other assessments in OPEB so again that's where state assessments where we we show our state assessments where OPEB contributions are that section it's page 204 is where it starts that's where you can see the the pension number our OPEB contribution number and then on any of our state assessments I think that's and then there is a debt and interest section as well the section before that we show you what we're budgeting for debt payments for the upcoming year from the general fund I think that's it any questions on any of those sections yes I had one and that is we used to have the legal services in a separate section altogether which then gave the ability to track annually whether there were shifts and how big the shifts were in that particular item when you and are there any trends in that that are now hidden from us because it's lumped in with the larger that's saying that they're hidden from us but they're not reported to us yeah well not hidden but I'm just looking at so there's a couple different areas where legal services show up so human resources they show up it's largely to support collective bargaining and so we expect the this year and until negotiations are settled that we'll see a little bit higher costs in those areas and again that'll be when when we have ongoing negotiations they'll go up a little bit and when we have settled contracts they'll come back down and then the more general legal line let me just take a look at the spreadsheet here yeah so I think maybe they've you know they went up in FY 22 we had some different legal issues going on in FY 22 some of which you probably all remember related to the library project and there's been other things that's been used for so I think the best way at it to address you know your question is you know we can probably give a Paul can do some sort of annual update or something that describes or the trend over time I know that's always a question is sort of use of legal services so the good news is you know at least my experience it's not I haven't had experience with many different places but relative to the schools is that the town has a pretty preferential rate with KP law the rate's been much lower than what I've seen in other places and you know they don't we have this retainer agreement where you know they don't kind of nickel and dime you for everything you send to them which is nice as well yeah I think about it because when we had a conversation earlier in the day about the council being conscious of things that they are doing and asking for and recognizing that the financial consequences and this is another area that can have that over flow and I because we don't show it it doesn't make our counselors as conscious of it yeah that's that's why it might be good to have an annual so just for your information so in FY 20 we spent 54,000 and FY 21 we spent 67,000 our budget has been about 100 110,000 for those years so those years were low years but in FY 22 it went up to 158 so FY 22 again was a high year and then we'll see this in the 23 I can give an update on this in the third quarter report where it's out for this year okay so there seems to have been a failure in our planning mechanism because I guess we don't have C&D today yeah no I don't know why they got out of today must I must fund miscommunication they they were planned for Tuesday because I didn't think that we would have time to get to them today I've been on the consolidated planning calendar that way today for a long time and it just got missed between all of us that there was this disconnect the important thing is the theme is not here and we made we need to make sure that the posting is correct yeah I emailed Athena before this meeting because I yeah I'm sorry it was most of my I must not have been comparing my version to your version because I was always planning on C&D going next Tuesday or this coming Tuesday so I think it was just my error not updating you on that but Dave and his group they're they're planning on Tuesday and I let Athena know so she's updated the posting so she has the posting correct for Tuesday I'll check and see if she's made the update but I emailed her before the meeting it's done as soon as you get off because I can check it right now just see if it's been updated yet but yeah so Tuesday will be planning conservation which will include sustainability and inspections and then we'll also have fire EMS and public health you've looked at the action one of us needs to look at the actual posting because there's we're talking about powers really before she would have to get that corrected if it's not posted hold on I'm just pulling it up right now yep she's updated it so it's public health fire EMS and conservation development good sorry to bore everybody with this detail except I had to in Bernie I think I know what you're going to ask but go ahead I'm not going to ask anything I need to my apologies to everyone I need to leave I've got another appointment coming up so yeah well we're about to adjourn the question that you had asked me in an email during the meeting I do think we need to straighten out too which is to make sure that we have because I had sent out way at the beginning the list of departments and make sure that everybody's got the right departments I'll just resend that yeah I haven't received any questions for conservation and development so I don't know who off hand was assigned there but oh thank thank you all we'll see you on I won't do it in an open meeting but I think there may have been some confusion okay so does anybody have anything else that they want to raise is unrecognized um an anticipated business because I otherwise I'm just going to come in on the next meetings a little bit and then adjourn and I'm going to try and see what we can do to get caught up on a bunch of minutes for Tuesday's meeting but make them go quick so that if I come up with any changes I'll send them in advance uh and was working with being a little bit on seeing if we can catch up with some more minutes and the report piece as you're going through your sections and I'll make this a part of the memo that I'm sending out on the reminder as to who's in what section uh to could straight the problem that may exist that to start thinking about what to say for the department that you were assigned to and then also if you think that there's an issue that's going to be a particular discussion item for the committee to flag it I think we'll all do that but uh it was one that certainly came up today and there's one that I've been working on when it came up a little bit today was when we got somebody again mentioned the whole thing with the police budget and crests and um you know that needs I think that will be one we'll have to spend some time on when we get into the summation meeting and the other one that I have been working on because I'm assigned to elementary schools is I've done some analysis and numbers on the question of the $84,000 that the school department asked for that's above what the amount allocated in the budget that was proposed by Paul and that's certainly going to be an issue that we will need to talk about as a separate issue. What we did last year and I think we'll get to again this year is and generally recognize that we're recognizing we're recommending all departments and but that we're identifying the ones we want to talk about separately so sort of handled as a trying to identify the ones that need separate discussion so that everything else gets encompassed in a single motion. Kathy? Yeah I see I'm just looking at your list I see that I saw May 19th and thought I was general government and it was Bernie so I've got conservation planning and inspections and I will get whatever questions I have I'll get them to you by Monday morning maybe over the weekend I know you've been holding your breath so I just saw May 19th and went for it but got them we'll do them. General government got double duty this year that's okay. No and I'll try to be a little bit more coherent than some of my general. Don't worry about it. It's like you had a couple other things on your plate Kathy. So with that said I don't think that there's anything else for today I want the minutes to know so I'll say it out lots so it gets picked up that I've been checking it several times to make sure that there's no one from the general public who's been here and I and I did not call for public comment not because I didn't think public comments important I absolutely do but there was no public to invite to make comment so that should be noted in the minutes when we get there and anything else if not I think we're adjourned. Bye everyone have a happy weekend. The council's adjourned too.