 And I want to like to, first of all, introduce myself, Charlie Foskett, Chair of the Finance Committee, permit me to confirm that all members and persons anticipated on the agenda are perfect and can hear me. I will be reciting the mandated protocol with respect to remote meetings. Please indicate. This meeting is being recorded. Your presence, Greg Gibbian. I'm here. Shane Blondell. Here. John Ellis. Carolyn White. Mary Margaret Frankelmont. Yes, I'm here. Arif Padaria. Arif. Here, here, sorry. Jonathan Wallach. Here. I'm here. Brian Beck. Here. Peter Howard. Shailene Pocrus. I'm here, yeah. Carol Harmer. Here. John Deist. Here. Alan Jones. Here. Andy LaCorte. Here. Bill Keller. Alan Tosti. Here. George Koser. Here. Christine Deschler. Here. Dean Carman. Here. David McKenna. Here. Thank you. John Ellis is here. John Ellis is here, okay. So let me get to the open meeting of the Arlington Finance Committee. Some people must have their microphone on. If you can mute yourselves, it would be helpful for everyone, I think. This is an open meeting consistent with Governor Baker's executive order of March 12th, 2020. In order to mitigate the transmission of the COVID virus, we've been advised and directed to suspend public gatherings. And as such, the governor's order suspends the requirement of the open meeting law to have all meetings in publicly accessible physical location. Further, all members of public bodies are allowed and encouraged to participate remotely. The order which you can find posted with agenda materials for this meeting allows public bodies to meet entirely remotely so long as reasonable public access is afforded so the public can follow along with the deliberations of the meeting. Ensuring public access does not insure public participation unless such participation is required by law. This meeting will feature public comment only in writing by email to edigginsattown.arlington.ma.us.com. Now, ma.us. For this meeting, the Finance Committee is convened by video conference on the Zoom app that's posted on the town's website, which also identifies how the public may join and comment. This meeting is being recorded, so please be aware that you should keep your computers and screens confidential if you have confidential information there. Anything that you broadcast might be recaptured by the recording. All the supporting materials that have been provided to members of this body are available on the town's website unless otherwise noted. The public is encouraged to follow along using the posted agenda unless the chair notes otherwise. The chair will introduce each speaker on the agenda and after they include their remarks, the chair will get down a line and list of members and checking to see if anyone wants to make comments and will hold all votes by roll call. So I would like to, Liz, I didn't call your name. Liz Diggins, you're here. Yeah. Thank you. We are anticipating, I believe we're anticipating two guests tonight, Dr. Boquillin and Dr. Girardi from Minuteman Vocational Technical School in a short period of time, shortly. I'm here, Mr. Chairman. Dr. Boquillin, are you alone? Lost your video or audio. Oh, I'm sorry. Let me try this. Oh, I knew it. I can hear you, Charlie. Yeah, I was asking Dr. Boquillin if you are the sole representative or is there anyone else with you from Minuteman? It appears to be me, sir. We're delighted that you're here. Thank you. I am too. Okay, the first order of business, I would like to note that please get your budgets completed and in as quickly as possible. Please note in the calendar when you're ready to present them. And secondly, let me know tonight when we get to old business or by email to myself and Liz, if you have any comments on the warrant documents that I sent out after we did the warrant review last week. So please feel free to note that if we missed anything or if something else should be added because we'll be following that document in future meetings. The next item on the agenda are the minutes of February 22nd for approval. Peter Howard? Peter? You're on mute, Peter. Sorry about that. There have been several corrections. People have made, I thank them very much and they're incorporated. I move the minutes to be approved as corrected. Do we have a second? Second. Thank you, David. So the minutes have been moved and the second did any further comments on the minutes. Grant Givian? Aye. Evelyn Dell? Aye. John Ellis? Aye. Thank you, Owen White. Mary Margaret Frankelman? Aye. Arif Badaria? Aye. Jonathan Wallach? Aye. Brian Beck? Aye. Peter Howard? Yes. Shailene Pocrus? Daryl Harmer? Aye. John Deist? Aye. Allen Jones? Aye. Annie LaCourt? Aye. Bill Keller? Aye. Peter, would you note that Bill Keller's here? Aye. I just did. Thank you. Allen Tossi? Aye. George Cozer? Aye. Christine Deschler? Yes. The Dean Corman? Yes. And David McKenna? Yes. Thank you. So the next item on the agenda is the Minuteman budget. Annie, would you like to make a few comments? I'm sorry, Peter, did you just? Excuse me. So they passed, right, unanimously? Yes, sorry. I swallowed my words on that one. No problem. Yeah, I'd just like to say a couple of things. Dr. Boquillen and I met this morning to review his presentation and where things are at with the budget. It's always, it's a pleasure working with Dr. Boquillen. And I believe that you will get the complete picture of where things are at with Minuteman at the moment and that the news is all pretty good, except with the exception of course of the effects of COVID, which are affecting everybody and depressing. I'd also like to note that Michael Ruderman, who is the, our school committee rep is also on the call and may wanna at least say hello. So I think with that, we're ready to proceed. Thank you, Annie. Hello, Michael. Welcome to the meeting. Dr. Boquillen. Yes, I am able to share. So I'm assuming you can see that, okay? Just shaking your head, yes. Yes, we can. And I'm gonna suggest to the committee that we let you go completely through your presentation and then we will, if you can take questions. Oh, absolutely. I appreciate it. It's good to see you even in little screens. Hope everyone's doing well. So our preliminary budget we've entitled this year preparing for reality and to get right to it, our overall operating budget is up a modest 2.4%. Our operating and capital debt is up about 450,000 and I'll explain where that is. The major increase in the assessment is due of course to the MSBA building project debt, which peaks in FY22, gets a little slightly higher in FY23 and then levels out and starts to go down. But we're hitting the peak of the debt service. Our assumptions we've made in revenue, you can see our estimated aid from the state, chapter 74, excuse me, chapter 78 is down. That's really a function of Belmont not being in the district any longer and their minimum local contribution is no longer noted in this line item. Regional transportation aid is down too because March when we were all went to a fully remote model, we no longer needed the buses and our contract with the bus company was such that we didn't have to pay. So the reimbursement for next year is based upon last year's expenses, which were lower. So that's lower as well. And now we get into our revenue from out of district students, tuition that we're collecting this year and this revenue assumption is called prior year tuition. And we have current year tuition, current year capital fee and prior year capital fee. So we've tried to make up our assumptions of revenue deficits with the tuition that we're collecting. And as that tuition revenue is probably going to go down over the next few years as our enrollment increases for member towns, there was an intentional discussion around utilizing it to keep assessments low. Some of the assumptions in the budget, we feel that some COVID is going to be with us. There'll be some form of hybrid learning and remote learning. Certainly safety and health measures are going to continue. We don't know whether, as I mentioned, the state aid is going to go up or down. I know there's good word coming from the federal government about another stimulus package, but we tend not to count on things until the check clears and it's in our account. As I mentioned, the final bonding for the MSBA project will be in this fiscal year. And student enrollment has grown beyond the capacity, the size of the school. I'll help talk more about that later, but we're looking at how do we increase the capacity of the school? It was designed for 628 students. We currently have 630. Next year we're anticipating close to 680, perhaps more. And just to focus in on admissions and enrollment for a moment, you can see by this slide, and the far right column is the current eighth graders who are applying to Minuteman. And this is as of this week. There is still a little bit more time left in the admissions enrollment cycle, but we have a total of 351 applicants. 261 are from our nine member towns. Out of district applications from eligible towns, an eligible town is considered a town that has no vocational education available to those students. We have about 48, 42 applicants from nine eligible towns. We still get applicants from Boston, Somerville, Cambridge, Waltham. And so we have a wait list. This past week we sent out offers of enrollment to 201 students, which is about the maximum, it is the maximum size we can have for freshman class. And there are 40 in district students currently on a waiting list and all of the out of district students are on a waiting list. So that's not happiness for me. I wanna be able to serve all of our member towns and the size of the school simply won't allow it at this point. So as I mentioned, the budget priorities, protecting health and safety, looking at how can we increase our enrollment capacity in the school that we have. If you look at the vocational shop sizes, we could easily accommodate 200 freshmen a year and 800 total enrollment. What we're limited by is classroom space. We're also starting our animal science vet assisting program this year. We'll be accepting only freshmen. They will operate out of a lab, a science lab. And then we have a building on campus that we're looking to use our students, our trade students to renovate into an animal science clinic, if you will, partnering with Blue Pearl and some other employers in the area. We're also expanding our logistics engineering program through a grant we received recently, $300,000 from the Capital Skills Grant Fund. We have space in the building for that. And our other budget priorities are our athletic fields getting finished this summer. And that hopefully in a COVID-free environment or a COVID-modified environment, we'll be able to ramp up our facilities, rental and revenues, because we've had none for more than a year. The big drivers in the FY22 operating budget, we're in year two of a three-year contract with our teachers. The cost of living increase in the upcoming year is 2.25%. In FY23, it calls for a 2% increase. We've had increased electrical and utility costs. I think it's a function of COVID partly because we've had fewer people in the building generating BTUs. And we've had to increase the air exchanges in accord with the recommendations from CDC, Department of Health, et cetera. We also are implementing maintenance contracts on the new systems that are in the building that have come online. Our property insurance has gone up because the value of this building is a little more than the value of the old building. And believe it or not, our health insurance is going down, but that's really a function of fewer staff in the building who had been laid off as a result of COVID in March, mostly paraprofessionals and support staff. And we will not be bringing them back in in FY22. Our transportation budget is down, mainly because we had, believe it or not, a competitive bidding process for our transportation contract, which was rebid last year, and the amount came in less than what we had budgeted for. So the full assessment counting all the debt for Arlington is 6.8 million. That's an increase of almost $700,000 over fiscal year FY21. And if we look at the components of the assessment, the minimum local contributions about 2.4, transportation, the operating assessment 2.1, then the debt and capital that's in the operating budget, and that's the ESCO lease that we're still paying, as well as a contribution to our capital stabilization fund, and you can see the largest hunk of this increases in the building project debt service, which in Arlington, you voted to exclude that. So I think Adam might have swallowed his tea when he got our assessment estimate. But here's another reason the assessments are going up in Arlington. We're up to about 170 Arlington students currently. And those of you that were involved, especially Charlie and Al, when we were redoing the regional agreement, we put in a four-year rolling average. And this is certainly moderating the increases that we're experiencing really in most communities, but essentially, especially in Arlington. We currently have close to 100 applicants from Arlington for next year's freshman class. Unfortunately, not all of them are going to get in and I can explain that a little bit more in detail if there's a question, but the tremendous amount of interest from our member communities. Special ed enrollment has been about the same percentage-wise, about 46 to 49%, and that's a large part of our budget, as you know. According to the Department of Ed and FY19, it was about 12.4% of our overall budget, which is the highest level of special ed expenditure compared to other vocational schools in the area. Capital budget, just to break it out a little bit. The Athletic Fields ESCO is up about $179,000. That's the payment on the Athletic Fields Lighting. Just a reminder, we were able to save over 4.2 million, I think, from the MSBA project to put towards the fields. In addition to that, we had 1.2 million from our Capital Stabilization Fund that we put towards that, and we also bid out the oftenness of lighting, and for this additional payment, we're able to borrow a little bit more to get lighting, which of course expands the hours available for rental revenues. The school building project, we're going to go on out for our final borrowing and then the Capital Stabilization Fund. We're continuing the fund. Just a reminder about that Capital Stabilization Fund, the school committee established it, I think, in FY15, because we had anticipated that the FF&E, the Furnitures, Fixtures, and Equipment Formula through the MSBA was going to be woefully inadequate for a high quality vocational technical school, so we started to set aside money. What we didn't anticipate, fortunately, we were very successful in getting capital skills grants. With this latest 300,000, we got over 1.5 million in equipment grants, which was quite a, we're grateful for that. So that Capital Stabilization, we're still gonna keep it going, still gonna fund it so that we maintain these facilities in the high as they are now and not let them get away from us. The Athletic Fields Project, the bid was awarded and approved back in January. Obviously not much has gone on with the weather we've had, but we anticipate completion by the early fall. And we are setting aside another 168,000 a year, hopefully through our revolving accounts that we're generating revenue from these fields. So that in 10, 12 years time when we have to replace these fields, we don't have to go back and assess the towns for that. We also were very pleased that finally we got our photovoltaic contract signed. You may recall we had some risk involved with this because the company we'd been working with pulled out at the last minute. So we had to go out to bid again, find another company. And the reason this is important is that it ensures because of our LEED certification that we will receive $2 million in reimbursement from the state. We had always planned on that 2 million and now this guarantees it for us. And also we're gonna be saving 25 to 35,000 a year in electrical utility costs. It's a roof mounted system versus a canopy system which we had previously thought was gonna happen. So we're happy this is actually getting done now. OPEB, our OPEB liability estimated around 32 million. We've been contributing a small amount, 50,000 a year for a few years. We're gonna increase that marginally to 60,000 this year or next year. The long-term discussion at the FinCom has been when the ESCO comes off the books that we'd utilize that amount of money or nearly all of it depending on the situation as we look at retiring that debt in FY 25. And we put that amount of money towards our, into our OPEB trust fund, a reserve fund. This just gives you an overview of what our reserve fund activity. We have had no real rental revenues. We currently have 350,000 in the OPEB trust. So that's that. So the overall budget, putting everything together is up substantially, I think 8.4%. Again, most of that is from the debt service. Operating budget up, I think a reasonable 2.4%. Arlington's assessment is six point, almost 6.8 million. That concludes my overview, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Dr. McQuillan. If anybody has any questions for Dr. McQuillan or for Mr. Ruderman or for Annie, please raise your hand. Peter Howard. Peter, did you raise your hand? Sorry, Dr. McQuillan, what's ESCO stand for? ESCO? Yes. I think it's energy service contract. We did a tax exempt municipal lease about 12 years ago to do some really health and safety energy upgrades into the old building, replacing the electrical switch gear, doing some modest amount of weatherization and replacing the oil fired boilers, which had pretty much run their useful life away. Mr. Foskett correctly characterized that as a lost asset a few years ago, which is a term I use frequently and I cite Mr. Foskett for that. George Kosher, thank you. I would like to ask a question that you raised in your presentation earlier about if a set of Arlington students who applied are not admitted, what your criteria are or what your process is for dealing with that situation? Well, any chapter 74 approved school district that has five or more programs must have an admissions policy. And our admissions policy has pretty much been the same. We have five criteria that all students who are applying to Minuteman are subject to. All five are balanced equally. That's grades, attendance, discipline, personal interview with every student and a recommendation from an adult, usually from the school that they're applying from. Now, what we've had to do as we've experienced greater interest than we have room for is we've had to invoke that piece of the admissions policy which talks about a slot allocation formula. So that slot allocation formula is primarily based upon the share that each town has in the operating expenditures of the district. So this coming year, the slot allocation for Arlington, the slots are, I think 75 or so slots are available. And if not other towns, if some other towns don't use their slots, then that would go to the next student on the list. But we've sent out, I think 70, 75 enrollment offers to Arlington students about a week ago. Thank you. Thank you. George, do you have any other questions? I have one other quick question, which is, are the field revenues expected to cover the $168,000 set aside for replacing the turf as well, or is that a separate item in the budget? Our expectation, and we had a study done and we had our own study reviewed by an independent consultant agreed that once all fields are up online and COVID is not a factor, those fields would conservatively generate between 300 and $400,000 a year. So that would offset some of the operational costs and allow us to set aside. And I think the mechanism is that some of the revolving funds would be deposited into the capital stabilization fund. So the answer is yes. Thank you. Thank you. So, Arif Padaria? Yes, thank you, Mr. Chairman. Quick question for you, sir, is which of these curricula are the most popular? The academic programs or the career and technical education, where do you find the maximum enrollment? That's part one of my question. And the second one is the new areas, these new academic programs that you've created and you're enrolling for, how did you come about selecting those? And how did you analyze the need for those? That's a great question. Thank you. So our most popular programs right now, I'm just going from memory, I can get the specific numbers for you later, but generally speaking, this past year anyway, web and programming design, health assisting, electrical trades, environmental technology, welding and metal fabrication. I'm sort of giving you in the top order down. We're all well-enrolled. As we're going forward, we're looking at the incoming class and there's a tremendous amount of interest in the animal science program, as well as the engineering programs. We have two new teachers, both from the field of engineering, both ladies who are really creating a lot of excitement and buzz among the students that are selecting their programs. So the way that we come about selecting programs is part of it is prescribed by chapter 74 law or regulations of the Department of Education, where you look at three factors. You look at job growth, living wage and student interest. At Minuteman, we look at six factors. So in addition to those three, we also look at do we have a strategic partner, an employer, sometimes a post-secondary institution in that particular field. The fifth indicator that we look at is there's some emerging technology coming from that occupational area that has an impact in our region, where students who are graduating from these things are going on to college and would have a reasonable chance of coming back to the state and working. And the sixth indicator that we use is are there other training programs like this in the region? In other words, we don't wanna oversupply the training in excess of the demand. So we look at labor market data. We also have over 200 employers on our advisory committees and those advisory committees meet a couple of times a year and give us direction about where things are trending in terms of occupational opportunity. So. Thank you. If I may ask a follow-up question, manufacturing certainly a huge momentum of manufacturing coming back to America as we've seen supply chains get disrupted with COVID and the continuation of that. How has advanced manufacturing and specifically perhaps new techniques and new mechanisms not so new, but certainly getting more mainstream like 3D printing? How has that been incorporated into your curriculum? Well, fully. We're just adding an additive manufacturing industry recognized credential for the 3D printing components of what we're doing. All of our advanced manufacturing equipment is four years old or newer. And if you've ever been to the school, which not many people have since COVID, but you'll see how we've designed the school so that metal fabrication, advanced manufacturing, robotics, automation, engineering are all contiguous to one another and their shops actually have access to one another. And then right across from the robotics lab is something that we call the toil lab, mirrored after our partners at Lincoln, MIT, Lincoln lab stands for Technology Office Innovation Lab. And across from that is our warehouse, which we just had equipped. So we're teaching traditional warehousing skills, logistics, engineering, but we're also adding a sort of an automated pick and pack system over there utilizing robotics. We're really, we're expanding into industry 4.0 credentialing through Festo Corporation out of Germany. My teachers are just finishing up their training in that. So there'll be about eight different industry recognized credentials that support students moving into the industry 4.0 environments. As a matter of fact, we had some community colleges coming to look at the work that we're doing in this space. And I'm pretty excited that it's finally starting to kind of all come together. And it's really due in large part to the new staff. They're coming directly from industry. They know what, well, it's hard to, they know what I'm talking about and I don't know what I'm talking about sometimes. No, thanks a lot. That's awesome. And I should just mention, I'm involved in 3D printing, happy to help and Festo, the owners of Festo are very dear friends of mine actually. Oh, really? They're good partners of ours. Yeah, absolutely. So thank you. Oh, I love them, yeah. They took me on a trip. You have to come and see the school. I should actually come down and see the school. Come on down. I'll give you a socially distant tour anytime and the warnings are good. Thank you, sir. No, seriously. Thank you. Thank you, Arif. First, Mr. Tosti had a question. Honolest. Ellen? Yes. Actually, I have got three questions. Ellen Jones. Oh, sorry. Oh, hi. Greetings, Dr. McQuillen. Yeah, I was gonna say, you should hit up a reef for some deals on a couple of 3D printers as companies right up the road from you. Just on the other side of Hanscom. So that's a good thing. But I was wondering if you could just make some remarks about how you've been dealing with remote learning with some of the hands-on trades. And beyond that, if there are aspects of remote learning that are working well for you, would there be a consideration to continue it into the future, maybe as a possible partial solution to the enrollment limitations? It's a fascinating question, actually. Well, let me answer the first part of that. Our hybrid model that began in September is really a 25% capacity in-person learning. So we have one grade in Minuteman and they're in their vocational technical training area all day, every day, all week, while the other three grades have been getting remote learning. And one of those other three grades, we're getting remote CTE learning, career and technical education learning. Starting on Monday, we're going up to 50% in-person learning. So one grade will be in their CTE and the other grade will be going through a regular academic day, not a regular day. We've changed the schedule quite a bit to kind of deal with that. So we're very fortunate, A, obviously in a brand new building in terms of ventilation and all that stuff. We also were able to provide each teacher with their own teaching space here. So all of the remote learning is happening from Minuteman. We worked with the teacher's union and had that all worked out. As we go into this new hybrid model with the 50% enrollment, there'll probably be a few teachers who'll have to make some additional accommodations for because of conditions and all that such. But we purchased, we had a pretty robust IT infrastructure in the new building, as you can imagine. However, we did purchase with some of the funds that we've perceived. Some, I don't know the exact technical term, but they're very high-def, high-tech cameras that actually follow the teacher around the classroom. So the teacher's not locked in in front of like we are. And we've gotten probably about a dozen of those into the shop areas. So the CTE teachers who are teaching remotely have actually been experiencing some, when the kids come back for in-person learning, my electrical teacher was just telling me yesterday that the freshmen are doing sophomore work. And he attributes it to all the related academic work that they've done remotely. And some of the modeling VR virtual reality stuff that we've been able to borrow, some of it we've had to purchase. So there have been some good things about it. Whether we're gonna, I don't, I can't give you a good example of what we might continue, but like any kind of challenge, we're gonna pick what has worked, what's improved learning and teaching, and we're gonna keep it. But that's a great question. I think some of the teachers have certainly become as a group much more skilled in all kinds of different technologies that they might not have gotten into without this situation. Yeah, I think the private sector is learning how to do more things out of the office. I think a lot of that is going to continue. And maybe there are things like web design that could be done, that can continue. And again, I'm thinking if that's a potential partial solution to the enrollment limitations you have. So thank you, what a reef. Sell these kids on four color 3D printing and they'll get addicted to it. So build your market. We got one. Come and see it. Thank you. We got a rise spot or two. John Ellis. John Ellis. Yep, thanks. Sorry, I didn't quite understand the answer about on the students that can't go to Minuteman. And maybe it's just, I don't understand the state requirements. The state requires the opportunity to apply to a vocational school, but not necessarily requires that a student goes to a vocational school. So what happens to those students? Is Arlington required to send them to a different bow tech school? They just get mixed into the general population at Arlington High School. Could you just explain those mechanics? They stay at Arlington High School. Yep. There's no requirement that Arlington send them anywhere else. John, does that answer your question? Thanks. Al Tossi. Yes, thank you. Good to see you again, Dr. Good to see you, sir. Okay, I've got three questions. One, the first one deals with revenue and specifically state aid. And you are the chapter 70 aid going down by about $108,000. And you've got the transportation reimbursement going down by about 200,000. But when I go on the Department of Ed and the Department of Revenue websites, they have chapter 70 aid going from a million, 977 in fiscal 21 to 2,025,000 in fiscal 22, which means instead of going down 108,000, it's actually going up by 47,000. Because your enrollment actually increased while the state across the school districts across the state have lost 30,000 students. So it would make sense that your chapter 70 goes up, not down. And on school transportation reimbursement, the websites have the number going from 659,000 in fiscal 21 to 650,000 or about an $8,600 drop instead of 200,000. When you sort of add that up, that's about a $350,000 difference. I was wondering if you could explain that please. Yeah, I'm not sure what date you looked at that. Was that today? Yes. Cause we had a difference of opinion with the Department of Ed around some of the numbers that they had published earlier because they had included Belmont and Belmont is no longer a member of the district. So I can check those numbers out, but and also there's no budget approved yet. So I'm not sure what those numbers the Department of Ed is basing their estimates on because we use the most conservative numbers that we got back in late November, early December. Well, these are all based on the governor's budget. And Belmont dropped out last June. So that should have made it into these numbers, but. Yeah, it should have, but it didn't. So we had to correct them initially. Yeah. Well, these are the numbers then, like I said, both DOR and DOE, I still call it DOE. You know, have on their websites. I'll check though. Thanks for all. I'll check that out. I'll ask Bob about it. Okay. Any, would you, would you follow up with Dr. Brokwilen, please? Before we vote on the budget and determine where we are with this difference that I was pointing out? I will do so. Thank you. Okay. The second question deals with the heating utility service maintenance of grounds and maintenance of buildings. All these numbers, the heating is going up 80, 89%. Utility services are going up 42%. Maintenance of grounds, 11%. I could understand that because the athletic fields are being finished and maintenance of buildings is going up almost 20%, I guess, related to contracts. I thought with a smaller, newer building that these costs would be coming down. Now you've mentioned a couple of reasons that you have fewer bodies in the building to do that and more ventilation from COVID. So I can understand part of that. But I was really hoping, so can we hope that next year or for the next year that these costs will start coming back down and we could see some savings? With all due respect, I hope so. But I hope is, these are what our bills are. We're pretty puzzled by it ourselves. We don't have a final certificate of occupancy here. We still have Gil Bain, our construction management firm. We meet every week. There's been several analyses of the original engineering formulas about what our energy costs would be because I fully expected them to be less than what they were in the other building. But we're not experiencing that for some reason. Yeah, I mean, the building's gotta be half the size and no swimming pool to heat. No, no, the old building was 305,000 square feet. The new building is 260,000 square feet. Okay, and my last question is more curiosity. What is the chapter 74 tuition these days for Minuteman? I have a slide on that. Well, as you know, we don't set the tuition. No, I know that. And the tuition has not been set for next year. Currently, the tuition is 18,400 for a non-membered district. On top of that, if the students on an IEP, there'd be an additional next year, $6,100. The capital fee, if they're coming from a community that has no vocational programs, I believe is around 7,500. And then on top of that, they would have to pay transportation. Okay, lots of transportation. And the other final is, I'm sort of looking at two towns. Belmont, looks like they're sending more students than they have in years. They are. So now do they just get lumped in with non-member towns or they get special consideration as a former member town? I'm very pleased to say in the most charitable way I can, they get no special consideration. Okay, and so have you heard from them since they've dropped out? Okay, now let's try to keep it to the budget, please. Just curious. Yes and no. And what are town used to be a major contributor? They're not anymore? No, they currently have about 60 students in the building. They had about 24 or five apply and it looks like none of them are gonna get in and they're gonna be spending. You know, this is the one year we've been hoping for in 15 years where it's cheaper to be a member than not a member, maybe 30 years. Okay, thank you. I'll do anything else. No, thank you. Any other questions? I have a couple of questions. Dr. Bacquan, anybody else on the committee have questions right now? No, okay. I'm sorry. How much cheaper is it to be a member as opposed to non-member? Well, if you look at, I have a slide on that actually, let me just share it. I'm gonna share it. Here is, can you see that? Yeah. If you're a non-member, what your tuition and fees would be, this is based on FY21 because we didn't have the, and we still don't have the approval from the Department of Ed on what our capital fee is. But if you're a non-member, estimated you'd be paying between 33 and $37,000 a student. If you looked at the per pupil assessment, which does not include capital, in Arlington, they'd be paying about, you'd be paying about $27,000 a student. Good, thank you. Sure. Thank you, Ed. So I had a couple of questions. I think you answered the first one. The building debt has, the final building debt has just been issued, but we haven't seen it in the budget yet, right? So the debt assessment for the new building is gonna be increasing for the next several years. No, we've included our final borrowing in this FY22 budget. It's an estimate. The debt service. The debt service is included in there. It will peak again, it will peak in FY22. It'll be about the same in FY23, maybe a little bit more depending on what we borrow the last few million dollars at. And then it'll start to gradually go down. I can give you a schedule if you'd like. Yeah, I'll get back to the schedule question in a second, that's a good idea. Arlington's, since 2019, the Arlington student population has, and I'm not talking about the average now, I'm talking about the per year data that you had in the budget book, went from, it increased by 51 students and the total increase in the number of new students looks to me to be about 118 students. Do you have an idea of how that's gonna carry going forward or what's gonna happen in that regard going forward? Well, I anticipate I'd have to look at the graduating class numbers from Arlington and what the slot availability is for next year, but it'll continue to go up in Arlington and in all of our member towns, I believe next year. This October one, I think will be probably the highest number of member town kids we've ever had, but the building's hitting its maximum capacity. So it's gonna level out over the next two or three fiscal years. Okay. Any data that you gather on that, if you could forward that to Annie, I'd appreciate it. That'd be helpful. What is the status of your current staff headcount versus the historical once we come out of COVID? First part of the question. And second, how is the student teacher ratio changed versus historical? Well, the student teacher ratio is going up slowly, more in line with what other vocational schools are and other vocational schools are somewhere between 11 and 13 because you remember, we carry a full academic staff and a full vocational technical staff. As I mentioned earlier, when COVID hit, we did have some layoffs, but it was all from paraprofessional staff. We've got about 140 professional staff. We're adding 1.5 next year, which is the new animal science teacher. We had planned for half a person last year, so it's a net 0.5 FTE gain and then a logistics engineering teacher. All other staffing is staying the same. And we're not rehiring some of the paraprofessionals and the support staff. Some of the support staff I'm talking, we had some retirement and maintenance and operations and we're not hiring that position back. So thank you for that. I just wanted to also ask if you have an audit report or a comprehensive financial report? The auditors are fit. They haven't presented FY20 audit to the school committee yet, I don't believe. Michael may know better because Michael Ruderman sits on the finance committee of Minuteman as well. We haven't seen the latest. We have not seen that yet, no. No. So could Michael even copy the finance committee when you get a chance? Any court would be helpful. And I just want two comments. One, I think your idea of using the ESCO debt for OPEB is great. That's very similar to what we do in Arlington with one of our retirement programs. As it dwindled away, we transferred the funding to OPEB. And secondly, I have to say that really nice work on your enrollment status. I was certainly a skeptic for a number of years and you proved me wrong, so I'm glad to admit it. It's a good work. I'm recording that, Charlie. It's being recorded, don't worry about it. The last question is, do you have a five-year plan? Five-year capital plan or a five-year plan? Business, just your forecast of where you're going with expenses as well as capital. We haven't reviewed it lately. With COVID, we sort of need to review it and see where we are with some of this stuff. We had a five-year plan, if you recall, that we updated every year because it was a requirement, really, of the MSBA to kind of project where your budget was gonna be in the new building. And to Al's point, the only thing that we're way off is our estimate of utilities. Our other estimates around operational costs are pretty close to what our projections were five years ago. But that is not, we don't have a current one. Okay. We do need to revisit it. You know, once, I think we're gonna be dealing with the after effects of COVID for a while, but in terms of the COVID slide, you know, and what our kids are gonna need for additional teaching and learning opportunities to make up for what they've lost. But, and I don't know what those are gonna cost. Okay. Any other questions for Dr. Boquillin or for Michael Ruderman or Annie? Hi, Charlie, I just make a comment. I thought that was, I thought it was an excellent presentation and I'm really delighted with the progress at the school. So thank you for your efforts. Thank you, John. Okay. Dr. Boquillin, thank you very much, Ed. Michael, thank you for joining us. And we will address the budget after, Annie, after you can reconcile some of those numbers. Okay. Got it. Thank you. Appreciate your coming. Good friend. Thank you. My pleasure, everyone. I'll see you soon, Arif. Thank you. Yes, absolutely. Thank you. Okay. The next item on the agenda is a discussion of the long range planning process in Arlington. And you received an email with some information from George Koser, who sent me an email on, I think it was Sunday on some work he had been doing, which I thought was really interesting and could provide some useful perspective for the committee. So George, do you want to take over the helm here and make your presentation? Yes. Thank you, Charlie. Let me share my screen. I'd like to go through the presentation. I won't be able to see you as I'm sharing. So please just unmute and ask questions about what's being presented while I go through that. We've scheduled about 20 minutes for the presentation, which I will try very hard to keep to. And then another 20 minutes or even a bit more, since I think we finished with Minuteman a little early, for discussion, which is really the point of all of this. So let me just start by May. I hope everyone can see that. So this is a very informal presentation. Its sole purpose is again, to facilitate discussion. There are no recommendations. I sound like a lawyer, which I apologize, maybe, because engineers don't make good lawyers. There's some options and impacts that are presented here, but they're not recommended necessarily. Some options may not be feasible, so maybe bad ideas. And as Charlie noted, I put this together on Sunday afternoon because I just didn't quite understand what the size and timing of this override, and maybe others was. So I just wanted to understand a little bit better. We're gonna start with some spreadsheets, for which I apologize, but I basically put numbers together to try to understand what was going on. And then there's some text afterwards, which really will just summarize the kinds of things that the spreadsheets are telling us. So this is very much about data and just trying to inform. The spreadsheets cover a lot of years, from 2005 through 2028. I basically wanted to get a span of several overrides, just to understand what happened in the past and why current times seem to be different. So we've had three in recent years. We've had some before that, but I don't think they're relevant. So we had one in 2005, 2011, and then of course 2019. Four, six million, 6.4 and five and a half million. We're of course looking at something noticeably larger than that for 2024 or so, and I just wanted to understand why. So we'll show three different cases for 2024. So the spreadsheets will show very summarized spending by school and town by year. Everything is rounded to the nearest million dollars. This is not precise financial stuff at all. A lot of things are lumped into other. So we'll show you the big budget items. The little ones are in other. Everything does that up to the total budget and the total revenues each year. We do show the override stabilization fund appropriations, money in, uses, money out, and the fund balance each year, just so we can see how that relates. I got these numbers from the fiscal five to 21 finance committee annual reports from the town website. One of them is missing. So I just kind of use the adjacent years to fill that one in. The 22 to 26 numbers are from the long range plan that our deputy town manager has presented and we have the latest update from a week ago. And since we're looking at an override, possibly in 2024, I needed a couple more years beyond 26 to really understand what the size of that override might be since, while it could just last two years, it seems overrides should be thought about usually for a little bit longer. So I made very simple extrapolations from what the deputy town managers long range plan was for those two out years. So again, speak up if there are questions please, but we'll just kind of proceed. So this is, I'm gonna just pop up the pieces of the spreadsheet relatively quickly first. And then I've got lots of little animations that are going to kind of fly in and fly out where we can focus in on what some of the things are that might be explanations, issues for what is going on going forward. So we, this is our total revenues, state aid. And by the way, state aid is not really quite increasing it to 1.5% per year. Again, this is very simplistic. Some of the state aid is various bond and other kinds of things under the old school SBAB program and things like that. So I did not sweat the details. Local receipts, which also don't increase all that fast, property tax, where we'll see some jumps, the override stabilization fund, which we'll just track, and then everything else heavily free cash. Expenses and appropriations, I distinguish between general and special education costs just a quick note that our special ed costs increased by 7% per year. If you're an engineer, you know that a 7% increase annually means a doubling every 10 years. So our special ed costs went from 10 to about 20 in our first 10 years. And they're doubling again to about 40 in the next 10 years. So the notion that our special education costs have been increasing at about 7% a year is indeed true for this 20-plus year span. The general school budget has basically tripled or will triple by the end of this period. The net town budget has less than doubled. Again, we know all these things. I've just put together a kind of long range continuing costs into online and insurance and capital. They're not all the same thing, but again, to keep it simple. Appropriations to the Override Stabilization Fund are in this line, and then everything else is lumped in other. That includes Minuteman. It actually includes a million dollars of school costs in a typical year that aren't attributed to either general or special warrant articles and all the other stuff. Last is again, just looking at a little bit of interpretation of these things. So property tax increase year to year. The highlighted years are override years. What the override amount was and what the percent increase was of the override and the override stabilization fund balance. So this is a base case with no override in 2024. So notice, I just grabbed these numbers again from the deputy town managers long range plan in the first three and then just projected out the last two. So without an exclusion or sorry, an override, we run these deficits, seven, 19 and 26 million in the three last years of the long range plan and they would of course continue to increase. So that would mean fairly substantial cuts, but again, this is just a base case. So what do we wanna emphasize? First, notice that our overrides have been about six million bucks, but notice that it was a 9% boost, then a 7% and then a 5% and our costs are very much a percentage gain. So our override percentages have been dropping. I'm neither criticizing nor praising. I'm just trying to understand and trying to give us a sense of what's going on. We will look at 2024 almost surely both the absolute amount and the percentage is bigger. But and then the other thing that we will look at really briefly is it's likely that we'll need something else in 2029 or maybe 2030. Some of what we choose to do, we as a town in 2024 will affect what 2029 looks like and it would be good to look a little bit at that. We'll have a little bit to say. The override stabilization fund balance, the green circle years of the years before we voted an override. So it was zero, didn't exist in 05. It was zero in 2011, exhausted before we voted an override. It was $21 million in 2019. So we've spent down or will have spent down all of that money in the next four years. So that adds a little bit, essentially to the effective pool of override funds that existed in 2020 because we got to spend down an additional $21 million over four or five years. So that increases the effective size of this override to some extent. We have a decision about if we ever wind up in a situation with a decent balance exactly how to deal with that. Again, we can talk about that if people want. So that's the next thing to outline. Our structural rate of change and expenses is different than the first part of this period. And we had two overrides, took a lot of work to pass but they lasted a long time. Our typical expense increases in the 3% range over that span of time. So that let us have these override amounts and have a fairly long life to each. The second half, our expense increase annually is running closer to 5% than 3%. Now there's some lower numbers here. We look at the very now, but that's because we have these deep cuts sitting here. And I just basically compared the bottom line total which if we added the cuts back in would be growing fairly substantially. So we've gone from something that's not that far above the 2.5% prop 2.5 levy limit. And yes, we understand that there are exclusions and growth and all that, but just using the 2.5 as a milestone of sorts. We've gone from a growth rate that's not too much above which means a not huge override not too often balances things. To a situation where in 2019, kicking in in 2020 and again in 2024, we're simply looking at a bigger structural deficit, one that looks kind of different than it did earlier on in recent history. Some minor things, but still to be pointed out as one looks at numbers. I've got an orange underlined under local receipts and net town budget. I'm gonna have a little bit of fun with statistical inference. So we've always heard and believed and I do too that our licenses, fees and whatever now cover the costs appropriately of administering them. Well, local receipts have gone from 8 million to roughly 10 million or 25% over time while net town budget, which is a pretty good indicator of overall town costs has gone from 25 to 37 or a 50% increase. For local receipts have only increased half the rate of kind of our cost index. It's possible that we're not raising our fees often enough or high enough. It's more subtle than that. A big chunk of local receipts is motor vehicle excise. That's only gone up by 25% surprisingly, even though the town is gentrified and there's a lot of very fancy cars, but they last longer. So it may be that NBE doesn't go up very fast over time, state aid isn't going up quite at the rate that our expenses are. All these are pointing us to a greater reliance on the thing that can go up, which is property tax. If we are able to increase local receipts and everything in this presentation is an if and a question mark and things to think about, even if we can get a million bucks a year extra out of this, which may or may not be possible, that can cut down the size of future overrides if that's an issue. We have a very slow growth in three fiscal years of our property tax revenues. In part, that's an artifact from a bunch of debt exclusions from the elementaries and I think the Gibbs reaching the end of their life. But and revenues, of course, property tax revenues go to exempt as well as non-exempt expenses. And nonetheless, we have a little bit of a lull here and that's kind of a one time thing, but it doesn't help really, really very much for things going forward in this next override. And just going to the obvious, because I put this last because I think we all know this, but the school budgets, general and special education are increasing from $44 million in 2006 total to almost $110 million in 2008. So that is a tripling while the town budget is going from 25 to 46, which is less than a doubling. So we clearly are being driven in our cost structure by an increased set of costs for the schools, which obviously we know, but we have to deal with. So I just wanted to point those sorts of things out. Let's go on to the next spreadsheet, which talks about a $25 million override in 2024 to cover currently projected expenses in the long-range plan from again, the town manager's office with me tacking on a couple of out years. So we're looking at 25 million. The deputy town manager just sent out a PDF at like six o'clock tonight, which the chairman shared with me. These numbers don't match Sandy's numbers exactly, but they're not that far off. His assumptions will be a little different than mine. His math is much more precise than mine in his spreadsheet. So for discussion purposes and trying to understand what our issues are, I believe that this is close enough, but there are some differences that I want to acknowledge. So by looking at, let me just back up one slide, but looking at this set of potential cuts or potential shortfalls, we basically need to boost our base revenues in the ballpark of 25 million bucks a year over the span of time to cover roughly a $25 million average gap. So we basically need that kind of boost. So hence the $25 million figure. It leaves us with a little bit of balance at the end. So I could have made it 24, but I just kept this simple. It's a relatively even numbers. So the property tax revenues jump by 29 million, roughly the typical $4 million per year increase from two and a half percent plus some growth plus the 25 million override. So the first couple of years, we can sock away $11 and $7 million by appropriating those monies because it's more than we will need the first two years for expenses. We appropriate those into the override stabilization fund. And then in the three out years, we use most of it. So that's all familiar terrain to everybody. So that's our override fund balance. And something that happens here, if we have a 20 to $25 million override, the deputy town manager's sheet only has a four year override as the longest time that it's covering. I think it was 18 or 19 million. So he would be in the 20, 21, maybe 22 million range for a five year override. So it's not very different. But if we leave our cost structure the same from 2024 to 2028 without going, I'm already clobbering with numbers, which for which I will pay a penance at some point for which I apologize. But 2028 is gonna look kind of the same. If the structural trends are the same, we're looking at a 20 something million dollar override in 2028. We may wish to think about with the 2028, 2029 really, number might be that we in some sense are sitting in motion if we make certain choices in 2024. So that's the point of the blue circle. Here's a $15 million override in 2024 rather than 25, it's an 11% boost. It's not vastly different in boost than say the 9%, which was only a $6 million override in 2006. So the notion is, is there a way to get to a number that may be more acceptable for a whole variety of criteria that we can discuss. So property tax revenues only jumped by $19 million, 10 million less than in the other scenario because it's $15 million plus an extra $4 million in our typical 2.5% growth. So how do we make such a thing balance because there's no magic here? Well, let me back up one because, so these are all, if we want to do this, what needs to happen? I'm not saying we do need to do this and I sure don't know if we want to do this, but if what are the kinds of things that we got to think about to make this possible? So one is, it's only a million bucks a year, put a billion bucks, knocks a million bucks off the override. Can we do something with local receipts? I don't know the answer to that. We may wish to put some focus on it. By the way, we're in 2022, fiscal 2022. We have a couple of years to try to set some structural changes in motion before a 2024 override to see if they're possible. That can affect our planning for the amount and possibly the timing of it. So it's a reason to talk about it now. So can we do a million or a million extra? I don't know, it's a possibility. Schools, but don't worry because it doesn't stop there. You know, those are big drivers. If we're going to change, we have to change our cost structure by 10 million a year if our override is going to be 15 million versus 25. We got to find in the ballpark of $10 million to change our cost structure by. There really isn't any other magic about that. I'd originally kind of tried to do a 12 or 13 million override that just seemed fantasy. 15 may also be fantasy, but I'm using 15. Maybe we make to 17 or 18. I don't know. So I only reduce our increase in special education spending by $1 million over this next five to seven years. It appears we have extraordinarily little flexibility. Flexibility we have to the extent we have any and this is fantasy is to perhaps see if the state is willing to do a special education cross circuit breaker or something. But we're not a poor town. So who knows if anything like that is possible, but I think the state is there. For general education, I don't need to tell you how gruesome these trade-offs are, but you know, that's where a lot of dollars are. The town budget doesn't go up by very much, but as we've already heard from Venet Man today and many other places, folks are working remotely, folks have restructured things. It would be extremely painful and controversial, but if we want to change the cost structure of town, we could try to flatten. It's already quite low, but we could try to flatten the cost structure on the town side through whatever means of automation, remote working, things of that sort. I don't know how possible it is. I don't know if we want to do it, but we've got to find things there. If we can reduce these, we can raise our revenues by a million, reduce school general costs, and this number of 67 million for general ed in 2028 was 71 million in the base case. So it's basically knocking off an increase of three quarters of a million per year over a set of years. Can we do that? Do we want to do that? I don't know. Special ed on a very small increase of the net town budget. My hypothesis here is $4 million, 46 down to 42. So we're finding ballpark four from the schools, four from the town, one from increased revenues, and one based on prayer and hope, and errors in my spreadsheet. So here's the override fund balance, just to make sure that it all looks, and here are the net expense changes required across or net meaning, can we increase a bit of revenues other than through an override? And can we reduce our costs? And again, all the question. Again, what we do in 2024 will have an impact in 2028 because our cost structure will be different in the town and our gaps will be different. Well, let me just go through these tech slides really quickly because I'm almost out of my 20 minutes. I'm really just gonna repeat almost just very quickly things that I've said as we've gone through the numbers. So percent increase of our overrides has increased over time. I use perhaps, I'm not being critical. This is a question I just don't know. The override stabilization fund was large, no big deal. It inflated the effect of that a little bit. And we added some services in the past. We more or less said, gee whiz, here's all the stuff that's gonna be cut if we don't pass this override. So this one was a little bit different. We may not be able to do that again. I don't know. Long-term expense, again, 3%-ish. In the beginning part of this period, 5%-ish driven very much by school enrollment and special education costs. But it's increased our gap over our 2.5% prop 2.5 limit again with exclusions and growth and all that. I'm trying to be pretty simple about all this. We all know that it's more complex. Local receipts, I mentioned. One thing I didn't mention before, ancient tree has no benefits, but I am in possession of ancient tree. So I look for benefits wherever I can find them. So when I was on the committee in the 90s, the town manager at the time gave us budgets that didn't balance. And we were handed budgets that were one, usually one to three million. I think it was a terrible year, it was five. And our role was to run around and try to balance it. It's a process change. Conditions were very different in the 1990s than they are now. But it puts some pressure on us to really find ways to find efficiencies and cuts and to think about what the priority of services was. Do we really need to provide these things? If so, how and all that kind of stuff. So I don't know. Again, something that's obvious, it helped us a lot in our first two overrides is we had a savior, GIC, our insurance, sure made a huge difference in stretching out our override from 2011. No savior around right now that I can tell. We can hope for one, but I'm afraid we are stuck planning in the absence of one. That's too bad. It's another reason it makes it harder right now. School expenses, we've talked about net town expenses, property, tax revenues, and again, some numbers. We just need to be realistic about them. And again, whatever the 2024 override is, there's a structural carryover that we'll go to the next one. Very quick summary of option one, lots of cuts. Override doesn't pass. Obviously we try it again for something smaller or different. Option two locks in our current cost structure kind of. And option three, I've talked about the possible. Everything's got a question mark here, components of is there a way to change our structure? I will end there and hope that people are happy to discuss for a little while. And thank you everybody. I wanna thank our chairman, Charlie, for spending a little bit of time with me the last two days. He corrected a couple of errors that I have made. So my acknowledgements and thanks to Charlie and all errors are my responsibility. So thank you. Thank you, George. Very interesting, very helpful. Annie, did you raise your hand? I did. So I read the slides before George made the presentation. So I thought a lot about this today and I have a couple of thoughts to share. One thing is that I wanna remind everybody that when we did a five and a half million dollar override in 2019, we did it specifically to raise. Some revenue so that we could increase school expenses. So the idea that somehow the schools have suddenly started to increase more is something that we knew about, we actually voted for it and so did the town. So that percent increases partly about that and it's also a lot about student growth. And we knew when we did that five and a half million dollar override that it was not the same as the previous two overrides because it was much smaller and it was intended to be also to increase, to add some expenses on the side. I don't think that the scenarios that George presented present the full range of possibilities. We should be looking at a three-year override and see what that does if we're worried about making a huge jump all at once. And I think that it's really, really important when we discuss override versus budget cuts that we discuss it in terms of the services we are willing to forego. That it's an easy discussion to have to just talk about the numbers. We look at the numbers and go, oh, well, we just need to get a couple of million dollars out of the budget. Those couple of million dollars are specific services that specific residents of Arlington are receiving and I personally cannot have a discussion about what we should or should not do unless I know what the list of cuts is because I don't know what I'm willing to give up and I'm not willing to just say, here, we'll give up a million dollars and you can give up whatever is on the list. And then I would also suggest that if we are going to involve ourselves in the discussion about what the next override ought to be, we should consider that the people who really get to make that decision are the boarders of Arlington and we need to put options in front of the boarders of Arlington. If we just wanna make a decision that we don't wanna raise our taxes, we could do that tomorrow. We could go to DPW and in this budget, say, institute a trash fee and take all the collection and disposal of our trash off of the budget. And then we delay an override probably for another year and a half, okay, and we decrease its amplitude. And there's all kinds of logical reasons to do that. So there's a whole set of scenarios here that we should be discussing and a whole set of scenarios that we should put in front of the citizens of the town to make this decision. So I would love to see what a three-year override looks like in Georgia's analysis, because I suspect that that is a $15 million override. And somewhere along the line, we have to admit that we are going to continue to do this. We are always going to be having overrides. There's a look back you could do where you could look at what would have happened if we had held an override in 2015 for $3 million. Where would we be today if we had done that? So I think if we had done that and we had done what we should have done, we'd just not change our cost structure that we developed after that, but to take that $3 million and put it in the stabilization fund that we might be talking about a $7 million override in 2024. So there's a lot of different ways that you can play with this, but I think the last thing we should be talking about is cutting services for the citizens of Arlington. My two cents. Thank you, Annie. Jos and Wallach. Yes, thank you, Charlie. And thank you, George, for pulling these numbers together. It really helps me to start wrapping my head around how this all works out and what this all means. And I have not thought about the implications clearly as much as Annie has. So really my question is just in terms of one of your projections, which is I'm wondering for your projections for general education beyond fiscal year 24, did you literally just take the growth rate from whatever 22 to 24 and apply that or did you actually make an assumption about enrollment growth and apply the enrollment growth factor? So the base base and the $25 million override case, those numbers are pulled from the long range plan that was prepared by the town manager's office. And then I just projected out rather simply for fiscal 27 and 28. For the scenario with the $15 million override where there are cost structure changes, my numbers are clearly examples. And they basically just illustrated it. I just picked an example where we're taking roughly $4 million in cost structure changes from the schools and 4 million from the town. But that's a, it's just an example. There was no analysis on which of those should be done if either it's simply showing the magnitude of what we're talking about if we want to affect the override amount by that magnitude. And do you know or does anyone know in the long range plan for 25 and 26, Charlie, do you know whether it includes an enrollment continuation of the enrollment growth factor? It does, I can't tell you what it is because it's been up in the air as a result of the drop in students with COVID. So there are some growth numbers in there. There's an expectation that in next October, we will at least be back to the prior numbers, but nobody's sure about that. That's why we have the additional funds, growth funds in the reserve fund. So there's a lot of things that aren't very clear right now. I guess my question is really, but there's an assumption that the per new pupil amount stays constant beyond 25. I think, I don't think, I'll tell you, we have to see what the school department comes back with. But the last demographic study that they did about, let me say three years ago, I can't remember the exact date, but somewhere around 25, 2025, the projected enrollment growth goes to zero. So there is a point at which that line that normally includes the additional funds for growth is not, shouldn't be there because the population is leveling off. I don't know if that demographic study is still applicable or not. Certainly the real question that's hanging over the town right now is will those 297 students that dropped from last October even come back? Okay. That's part of the uncertainty. Okay, thank you. John Ellis. Is that document something that's like live and you make more updates too? It is not. It's something I did last Sunday afternoon because I was confused. So the, I did a lot of calculations by hand versus having lovely Excel formulas across cells. So I did it just as an exercise for me. I shared it with the chairman out of curiosity and perhaps bad judgment in my part. So it's just a presentation for now. If we, since I'm on the IT subcommittee, which Annie and Alan are wonderfully chairing, we've been tasked by our chairman to try to come up with some analytics tools. I wasn't thinking of that in this respect at all, but if something like this is useful, we're not going to have it this year, I don't think, but it's one of the things that we as a group in the IT could try to come up with for future use. John, let me make a comment. I can just interrupt for one second. In the SharePoint environment, and somebody might be able to help me out of this, but I think it's in the manager's budget section, there is a spreadsheet, a live spreadsheet, that has a slightly earlier version of the five-year plan as developed by Sandy Pooler. And it's quite complicated, but you actually can get in there and manipulate the inputs and the outputs. Yeah, Charlie, it's in a folder FY22 long range planning. And I just put today's update into there also, but there is one spreadsheet from last week that as you say, if you want to play 1F games with growth factors and things like that, you can see all that impacts it. So it's up there on SharePoint. So you kind of get your hands on something that's live. And I spent some time today correlating George's work with that and it's, you know, as he said, I mean, the deputy town manager is updating this as we move along, but I think that George's work is basically to give everybody the idea of scope here. It's not to suggest that we cut the school program or, you know, charge for garbage, the trash collection. It's just people, we need to understand where we are. And between 2019 and the 2024, we will have burned through $50 million of increased tax collections above the 2.5% rate of increase. And if we continue to do that, then in another five years, it's going to be 60 million that we have to make up. And if that's what the town wants to do, that's what the town wants to do. But I think it's something that has to be discussed and understood. We just can't blindly go along thinking that everything is hunky dory when it may not be. So George, the reason I asked that question was because I liked your analysis about receipts relative to town spending. And I wondered if how much work it would be to do a similar number to show how commercial property taxes had changed as a percentage of the overall budget over the past 20 years. I know as a fiscal 19, we were at about 5% commercial property. I know that's three times less than the townwide average that the town manager compares us to. But I wondered how that number, just like your local receipts number had stayed static or increased or decreased over time because that would be a data point that would also be interesting to stakeholders in our LinkedIn. John, I think, if I remember right, I put something like that on the, it's on the SharePoint. And I think the commercial tax has actually gone down relatively, it used to be 6%, it's now 4% or something like that. I can get that for you. It's on the DOR website. Okay, that would be good to add on George's sheet there and then just break down the property tax. Very small percentage of our tax base. Yeah. And the local receipts, I know it's a lot automobile, but I also think it's a big portion of that is property taxes on telephone polls and things like that, which I suspect has been static. So I think if before we identify local receipts as a problem, it would be interesting to see further insight into what that's broken down to and why that has declined relative to others and whether there are levers there that are even adjustable or not. Agreed. And there's again, lots of components to local receipts. So I don't know if that's something that we would want to ask the town manager's office to look at or perhaps report to us on a periodic basis so that if indeed it looks like there are things that could be changed that we have a process that looks at them and tries to maintain or increase them as best we can, if that's what we decide to do. Do you want anything else? No, I'm just doing the math in my head though, but George mentioned $1 million a year from local receipts, but the numbers you just said, going from 4% to 6% of commercial property increases, two or $3 million a year. So that's another thing to be thinking about. Let me ask Shane, you've got your hand up. I do, thanks Charlie. So thanks George. It was really helpful as a lawyer of the group and not an engineer. So this is really helpful for me. I know going through the budget's last couple of meetings, I had, it was always in the back of my mind. So it's helpful to see that other people are thinking about it and wrestling with it. I just, to Annie's point, I agree that like we need to know what, for thinking about cutting budgets, that's cutting services and everything about increasing revenues. We need to be straight with the taxpayers and just making sure like we have a clear understanding because if we're going to be explaining sort of the ramifications of A or B or all of the above, like we need to be really well-informed. And I guess maybe a question for this group is maybe more for my education. Is there something somewhere that I can just get a better understanding of sort of how the levy is calculated? So I just, if there's something at DOR or I know DOR has a lot of official, but maybe if somebody could send me in the chat or something just want to get a better understanding of like how it works today, right? When we get a number and we get something from DOR, how the math already works today. So that might help me get a better foundation for tomorrow as we're thinking about what a cut means or what override means. So obviously you want to answer that question? Well, I was going to suggest, Charlie, that change. Just a minute, Annie, I'll have his hand up by the sheets. Now you're on mute. I think the one way that could give you a lot of information is the Finance Committee Handbook. And I think, Charlie, you put it up on the SharePoint today. It's 2017, but it has fairly detailed information on the tax rate, has sample recap sheets, which is really the bottom line when you look at the recap that sets the tax rate. But I would suggest, I thought everybody had it. If you don't, you could probably download it from our SharePoint, but the Finance Committee Handbook goes through that in a fair amount of detail on that. Thanks. That's an ATFC folder, Shane. I saw it, thank you. Any other comments, Shane? No, thanks very much. Peter Howard. Thank you, Charlie. I'd like to suggest that right now with COVID, there's not a good time to do this publicly, but there will come a good time, hopefully next year. And it would be good to be ready with something which is rather boiled down. I think it has to be a little simpler than what George had, and as Annie said, it's got to provide service choices. I just want to remind everybody that the manager has projected, I believe it's a three to 4% increase in the town budget every year for the next few years. And in the last couple of years, that's included adding personnel. The personnel have gone up a couple of people every year. And of course, that's a big chunk of our budget. And mostly they've gone up to respond to the demand for new services or the request for new services. That's just a, I guess that's just a collection of thoughts. Thank you, Peter. Brian, Becky, do you have your hand up? Yes. I think you can't look at any one item and to say this should be taken out, this should be saved. If you look at this in a broad picture, what you're really looking at is the town is growing out of control. And if it continues to grow this way, if we do a three year override, three years from now it's going to be exponentially larger. What, in my mind, what you need to do in addressing this is you have to look at all options. You need to, we need to increase the taxes through an override, but at the same time, we need to cut expenses somewhere. You just can't continue like this. And it doesn't matter where, but the numbers are huge. You're not going to, we're not going to save this by making up a million dollars in local receipts. That's just a drop in the bucket. That is part of the answer, but it's not the only answer. It's not the only thing we need to look at. We need to look at every single, I don't want to say lining, but every single department as it goes through and address it. I mean, the pain, there's going to be pain somewhere and needs to be felt across the board. Thank you, Brian. Annie, you had your hand up a minute ago. Yes. So I would like to suggest that part of the reason that we say to ourselves, oh, we just can't continue like this is because we live in a state with a property tax limitation. In states without property tax limitations, they just continue like this. In the state of Pennsylvania, my sister's house, which is larger than mine and worth much less pays the same taxes. In the state of Wisconsin, in the town I grew up in, the house that I grew up in, which is slightly smaller than my house and worth much less pays the same taxes that I pay. We are under taxed. And that's because we have a property tax limitation. Now that property tax limitation does a good thing for us because it forces us to concentrate our minds on what are the services that we actually need. But 2.5% is not enough. And we do not have the kind of land that Waltham has or Groton has so that we can't continually grow our tax base. And we don't have the kind of commercial tax base that Lexington does so we can't split our rate. We live within those limitations. And that means that if we want to continue the services we have, we need to continually increase our taxes by more than the 2.5%. So the discussion is about what services you wanna cut because whether you share the pain across the boards or you do a thousand cuts or whatever, somewhere in there, there's a service cut. You cannot ask the fire department to continue to meet minimum manning and meet coal raises for its staff without cutting services if you cut their budget. If you cut their budget, they're gonna cut people and we're gonna drop below minimum manning and we are not going to meet the national standard for responding to a fire. And sometime there might be a fire we don't get to in four minutes and somebody loses their house. Those are the kind of decisions that we're making and that's why the discussion has to be about the service mix. What can we live without? What do we wanna keep? What do we not wanna keep? I would suggest to you that we can necessarily come on. We said that before. Thank you very much, Al. Okay, I think this is a great discussion and George, I think you did a great job to a certain degree. Some of us on the long range planning committee have been not yelling, but trying to point out to people these types of issues and this puts it forth really well. And I think there's a lot of maybe action steps we could take, action steps sounds very broad, but things like local receipts and really looking a little bit more intently on the budget. But the big factor is gonna be next October 1st. What's gonna happen with school enrollment? Cause the driver of all this has been school enrollment. And if that does not next October 1st, if that doesn't grow 287 students, then that million dollars in the Finance Community Reserve Fund goes back into free cash and a million dollars gets taken out across the board. So that'll start driving the size of the override down a bit. But whatever happens, we still need to think about what steps we wanna take. And maybe one of them is to ask the manager and the selectman and the clerk to review local receipts and areas that they could possibly adjust. Thank you, Al. Dean, you had a comment? Yeah, so George, this is excellent work. I'm really happy that you did this. It's something I've been thinking about a lot lately and I haven't had the time to get to. And it's very relevant. And the reason I'm gonna highlight why I think it's relevant. So as you noted, school spending is the top driver of our expense increases. And that school spending is driven largely by enrollment. So all the demographic projections show that enrollment is going to level off around 25, 26 school year. So when that happens, we will end the growth factor. We will get to a more normalized growth rate. At the same time, it looks like special ed spending is not hitting, it's starting to abate, right? It's not, that 7% special ed is gonna be tough to keep up when you look at how it's been coming in. So that's gonna slow down. So those things are good things that are happening in our favor. And if we really dug into the model, I think we would find that school spending is gonna slow down on special ed and general ed. I think their impact on health insurance has been significant because when you add lots and lots of new teachers, that has an impact. But I can tell you, as we've been talking to the school department this year about their budget and the fact that their students are low, okay? They view the 22,000, oh, this is government speak, right? They have said that their budget has been cut in the current year. And their definition of cut was the budget last year was gonna give them a million more dollars. Okay, Dean, just to say. I know, but let me explain, but this is why it's relevant. It's relevant because it starts to give the discussion of how spending works. And are we, just like Annie said, we're maintaining services, but the dollar cost went down, which means, and so that's on the school side. And I think there's a lot of opportunity without cutting a second of services as our enrollment levels to level out that cost to a more normalized rate. If you do that, and it follows the other buckets, health insurance, pension and whatnot, you do slow down the spending in the budget considerably. Okay, thank you. We're sort of getting on in time here. So if there are no other new speakers or new comments, I'd like to sort of wrap this up. First of all, you look and see as many new speakers or comments now. Okay. First of all, I wanna thank George. Well, John Dice, I have a question I've been trying to, I don't know, maybe I didn't use the reactions thing correctly. But anyway, George, a question for you, if I may. Did I infer correctly that the local receipts had sort of decreased or weren't as increasing as much as they had been earlier? Well, they've increased by 25% roughly over the 20 plus year span that I looked at. So they're increasing more slowly than other revenue sources, which puts more pressure on those. And for the ones that we control, some of the license fees and other things, if the fees were covering costs in 2005 for the town, but now town costs typically have gone up by 50% over that period, but the local receipts have only gone up by 25%. This suggests possibly that we haven't raised some fees enough or licenses. I don't know that. This is a high-level analysis, just kind of looking at what we might want to examine next. Well, we could ask the manager to look at that and see if that's the case, it would seem to me. Thank you, John. But I do wanna get onto some budgets if we can do that. So as I started to say, George, thank you very much for this great work. I just wanted to make a couple of comments. And then, first of all, Annie is dead on with respect to the link here with services. But I also think that the implication of what Dean just said is also critical. And that is, there is the issue of efficiency. And I personally, I'm not convinced that the town is efficiently delivering the services. Or if it is gaining an efficiency, it's adding services that maybe we don't need, okay? And that's something that I think is part of this whole framework. And the reason I wanted this to be brought before the committee is because it is a looming problem. And a couple of things that we have to keep in mind. First of all, the finance committee, and I'm speaking from my own viewpoint here, but we all may have different opinions. We're not a policy-making body. We're not elected by the public, okay? So, but we have to testify the town meeting what the quality of the financial condition of the town's budget is, not the history, but the budget. And so we need to understand the ins and outs of all of these issues. I think that we have to educate or influence or inform our ideas and project them to both the board of selectmen and the school committee as well as the management of the town and the school department. I don't exactly know how we do that, but we need to have some consensus among ourselves as to what these things imply and then get that message out to the policymakers in the town. And one of the last idea I'd like you to leave you with here is on this subject, and we need to address it again, I think, is what is the role of the finance committee? Our role is not to say that we need to change the student teacher ratio from X to Y. That's not our role, but we do have to have, we have to be in a position to comment on the budgets and the financial requests that are presented in the town meeting. So I just want to leave you with those thoughts and thank George again for a really excellent presentation. So thank you, George. The next item, budget reviews, what time is it here? I think we, it's 9.22, okay, budgets, who's on tonight? I still think Bill Caller, yes. Yeah. I can go ahead with the assessor anytime you're ready, Charlie. We're ready, go. Okay. All right, take a deep breath. We need to see the budget. Somebody has to put it up. Yeah, I got it right here. One second. How am I doing? Not so good. Okay, hold on, page 50 for those using their hard copy. Hold on now. Very good. Okay. Okay. The second time is the charm. So we've been through a lot tonight and I'm happy to say that I think we can get to the assessor budget in about a nanosecond. I don't want to downplay the importance of this, but basically, if you take a look at it, the assessor budget for fiscal 2022 was a mirror of 2021 with some minor exceptions in the area of salaries. So just point that out briefly and then maybe we can move ahead and decide to put this up for a vote or for acceptance. So with regard to salaries and wages, again, not a big change, but everything you see there is basically steps. The other item that sticks out a little bit is the longevity, 31%, but we have an aging staff on the assessors and that means you got to pay people more money. And with that, if we want to look at the expense side, the assessor expense side, there is really nothing there that jumps out. I'll just say briefly that the four of us on the subcommittee, myself, Al Tosti, Brian and Arif are in agreement that this budget looks pretty clean. And I'd like to ask for a motion that we accept this budget of $345,085 as printed. So moved. Annie, you have a question? No? Oh, sorry, my mistake. Are there any questions on the assessor's budget? I have a question. Yes, Christine. Can someone explain what otherwise unclassified is? Yes. Those are all the expenses that aren't classified under any other line on the page. Any other questions? Gotcha. What are we paying for there? I don't know, Alan, Al Tosti, or Charlie, can you want to hone in there? I don't know what's in that budget line. Let me see. No, I think we discussed every budget line in our meeting with the assessor, but I think in all honesty, I'll take responsibility. I think we overbooked that one. But with your permission, I will go back to Paul Tierney and get an explanation. And maybe we can go forward and approve or accept the budget as printed. So John Ellis, you had a question? You may have answered this. What would overtime be? Like why would somebody need overtime in the assessor's office? Was this just something that appears or they never spend it or something? Yeah, so that did come up. And overtime basically means that there are periods of time when his office gets still used with excise tax and abatement issues, requests, and these come up from common time, pandemic or no pandemic. And so that's just a contingency for the need to spend more time in the office when they get a bigger workload. Okay, thank you. It looks like the actuals in 19 and 20 were zero, so they don't always use it. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. They don't always use it. And to take a page from our deputy town manager, he feels that there are many cases, I think the objective or the thinking is to put out a budget and they may take expenses against the budget of the department head may not, but it's there if they need it rather than try to whittle a number down and then put a budget whereby they feel they have to use it or lose it. So that's why you might see a budget amount, but not a history or a year to date use and an expense number. If I could add to that, two years that we're looking at were also COVID years. So probably a third to a half in fiscal 2019, the town hall was closed. So you don't have people coming across the counter asking a lot of questions about their assessment. And that's exactly when they closed is when people would get their assessments for 19. And then you have the same situation in fiscal 20. The town hall has been closed. And so there hasn't been as many people coming across to ask questions. There's not as much time perhaps need for overtime because they could actually spend it working rather than going to the counter. I think it's one explanation that we've seen in a lot of different places. The money just wasn't spent out of state travel in state travel is another reason that money doesn't get spent. Thank you, Will. The other thing is that we're looking at a fiscal year which begins in June and then runs July and then runs through next June. And the pandemic will be either ending or all but over. So that we have to think that there'll be a different scenario expense wise for this department, including things like in state travel and consulting and so forth. So any other questions? Bill, let me make a suggestion. Would you hold off on your motion to resolve the $1,200 otherwise unclassified question? Yes. And just come back with that question and we'll move it immediately. Absolutely. Thank you. Next budget. Can I ask one more question, please, Charlie? Hi, George. My hand raising got locked. I just looked at the last year's budget book and 2018 actuals for the assessors over time were zero also which was not a COVID year. If you're going back and asking, could I ask please that you see if they really need that? Because we could reduce it if it's really almost never used. Okay. Well, I think a good question to ask which I will ask is what is the expense if anything year to date? In other words, what if they spent in that category through December 31st of last year? And that may give us an indication as to how the budget for 2022 was formulated. Yes. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions? I have one question, Bill. Can you tell us what the balance and the revaluation warrant article is? No, I can't. No, we basically just spent our time, I think looking at the wine items on the budget itself, but I can't go back and inquire about that as well. Is there any money in the warrant article for the revaluation? I don't think there is one actually, so. Yeah. I don't know, but I can, but I think it would be good to find out what the status of the revaluation activity is and how it's being paid for. Okay. So Charlie, you and I can do a quick email exchange after the meeting. That'd be fine. Thank you. I know what I'm looking for. Okay, thank you. Do we have another budget? How about the planning budget? Right ahead. Okay. The planning budget was tabled at our last meeting. There was concerns and questions asked. So can I make a motion to take it off the table? Is there a second? Second. In the interest of time, we'll avoid a roll call if there are no objections. Bearing none. Go ahead ahead. Okay, I'm going to read Peter and I had a discussion and Peter also had emailed the request of discussions with Cindy Pula on the issues that were raised at the last meeting. So Peter, if you will, please. I talked to Sandy and asked them as requested. Am I coming through all right? Yes. Yes. Okay. Yes. Yes. You may ask them about all the general budget. He, first of all, he said that the manager tries to manage the department has to the bottom line. They don't, he doesn't force them to think about exactly what the expenses are. As they add up in the bottom line. And I, I extract them. I, the idea that perhaps the, as it sometimes happened in the past, but the expenses, the actual expenses are not particularly active. He wanted to point out that if we put pressure on the departments to make their budgets close to the actual, so that years, they will gradually, they will gradually find ways to spend the money so that those budgets are not, and that's not an efficient way to run a department. As some of us know that I've lived with that amount of a requirement. I also should know that these general government budgets are small from a dollar's point of view in this, in the, in the town budgets and in town money. And that's not an efficient way to run a department. As some of us know that I've lived with that amount of a requirement. of monies for overlooking, looking at overrides, taken all together, they're less than half a million dollars. And as somebody's already said, this is probably not a very good year to do this kind of thing because, because the pandemic makes everything different. In which we hope it will not be continued the same way. So again, I think again, it would not be good for us to spend a lot of time on this, on this question. So Peter, I think I'd like to jump in here for a second. At the last meeting, the reason we tabled this, the last budget was because Christine Deschler asked about a category of expenses. Perhaps somebody, I'm gonna have to open mics here if somebody can mute themselves because I think you're picking up echoes. So the question is, are we gonna find out what these expense items actually are supposed to be or not? And I think the answer is that the deputy town manager gave you is, in my view, rather unsatisfactory. This is a subject that I think while we're only dealing with the difference between $1,000 and $2,000, it does have to do, it does come to the nature of what the finance committee is supposed to be doing. So I think the appropriate step at this point is if you, did you move the budget already, David? Will somebody refresh my memory? Yeah, I'll move, we'll take it on a rough table. Okay, so then the appropriate step here I think is for the budget to be moved and however the subcommittee wants the value, then somebody wants to change it, make a substitute motion and the committee to make the decision. Is that reasonable? Whatever the will of the committee is, it's fine with me. What the understanding is, with an understanding, if we're gonna have this dilemma, you know, David, I'm gonna separately address the dilemma. I understand that completely, it's as a policy issue between the finance committee. All right. Charlie, I'd like to make the motion that we approve the budget as printed. There a second. Second. Thank you. Is there any further discussion? If I may, Charlie? Yes, Christine. I am not expecting that the manager will have a budget presented to us that will be so minutely accurate that it could bind anyone's hands. What I'm pointing out is not just the budget before us, but it appears to be a pattern throughout all of the budgets, given that all of the budget, most of the budgets, where the office supply category is significantly more than the actuals for 19 and 20. And if that money is not actually gonna be spent on office supplies, I would like the manager to tell us that. I agree with you, Christine. Peter and David have pursued that question. And we didn't get an answer. Okay. So the question is, or we've got an answer that was, I would gently call arm waving. So I don't think we can resolve that question tonight. There's only two things that we can do with respect to this budget, or three things we can do. We can table it again. We can vote it as recommended, or we can vote a substitute number. So it's been moved and seconded for as is. If anyone wants to make a recommendation reducing that number, that's the committee. Okay. So in that case, I'm gonna call for a vote on the planning department budget as presented. Grant Givian. No. Jane Blundell. Aye. John Ellis. Aye. Blundell White is not here. Mary Margaret Frankelman. Speaking as a secretary, I can't hear. Is that a no yes? No. Yes, yes. Arif Padaria. Yes. Jonathan Wallach. Aye. Brian Beck. Yes. Shit. It's not here. Darrell Harmer. Yes. John Deist. John. Yes. Allen Jones. Yes. Annie LaCorte. Yes. Bill Keller. Yes. George Crocer. Yes. Christine Deschler. No. Dean Corman. Yes. David McKenna. Yes. Did I miss anybody? I don't think so. I didn't get Allen Tosti. Who'd I miss? I didn't get Allen Tosti. Oh, you're right. I'd miss Allen Tosti now. Yes. Yes. And could you? Yeah. Who knows? Did Grant Givian, was that a no? No, he was a no and... John Ellis a no. No, Christine Deschler was a no. John Ellis was yes. Thank you. You're welcome. The budget is passed. Thank you, gentlemen. Is there another budget? Yes. I can do a controller and also a requirement. Let's start with the controller right ahead. Thank you, Arie. Sure. All right. Let me pop it up there. Give me one second, please. Can you see this one? Yes. Okay, great. So I'll tell you few points here. If you look at lines five, two, two, four and five, two, three, six, other supplies and other purchase services, those have now been properly classified into the buckets, telephone expenses and office supplies. I think I've mentioned this before, but it's worth repeating that Ida has been working hard at getting these better classified. And so she's trying to promote that across all the departments. And there is some stuff that is still not correct, obviously, as well noted. The other piece that I was, oh, your question about was training. And as a conferences of $15,000 is for conferences, various conferences and munis training that was put on hold for COVID and keeping it there. She mentioned that keeping it keeps it there. And if it doesn't get used, it basically gets returned. So as you can see in the 2020, only about $1,800 was used. The other question I had asked and that was from the 2020 was $27,525 for telephone expenses, which stuck out at me. It's an old issue, but I still wanted to get some resolution for it. And you guys all may recall, but it has to do with upgrading the old telephone systems to voice over IP. And what else can I tell you? So again, a lot of money, basically not spend due to COVID. Some of the other issues that have been mentioned, just let me mention it out there, just perhaps repetitive to what was mentioned just earlier around over time and so forth. So I wouldn't belabor the point unless there are specific questions. So let me stop there and ask if there are any questions. Can you go through the salaries with us, please? Yes. Move the page up. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, yeah, that's what I'm looking at in my book. Fair enough. You want me to make it bigger? Yeah, that's good, thank you. All right, here we go. There's a step increase and given to all department heads and this was a discussion I think we've had before and I left it alone. So that's the increase allowed by the town manager, the $2,000 here you can see my arrow part. Is there anything specific around this that is of concern? Did I see on the top sheet that it was a reduction in salaries? Yeah. How come the number three is that also reduced in the bottom sheet and just? It should be. Yeah, let's see here. So two, zero, three and here is the, let's just make sure, hold on. So that was two, zero, three, zero, four, three, right? So two, zero, three, which is here and this is the zero, four, three. Okay, thank you. Can you see what I'm seeing on the budget book and the news? We're dealing with that funny column business again. Okay, thank you. Okay, okay, any questions? Anyone? Oh, yes, go ahead, Alan Jones. You caught my attention with that $27,525 for telephone expenses. The 2020 approved budget was only 27, the expense budget was only $27,000 and it looks like the actual was way over the approved budget. I'm just wondering how that happened. Where did that money come from? I can answer that. Or is that capital budget? No, I believe that when the actual budgets come back into this spreadsheet, they oftentimes include expenditures that were appropriated in the prior year but encumbered and show up in the 2020. And that's a likely cause of that. Well, it wasn't in 2019 either. There was never a bump in the expense budget, anything like that. So I'm just wondering how that got paid for. And it had nothing to do with this year's budget but it's a curiosity, you know, I'm just wondering how was that paid for? So just make a footnote then, Arif, if you could just go back and check on that and let the community know where that came from. Absolutely. Well, any other questions on this budget? If I can ask one more, I'm looking at the last year's budget book and the telephone expenses for 2018 actual were $30,420, so we spent 30 grand in 2018 and 28 grand in 2020. So if you're asking about that, it would be good just to understand the total cost and whether we're completely implemented. Thank you. Absolutely, we'll do. Yes, I'll report that. Total cost for the VOIP system is what you're asking about, George. What those, with that line, 52, 15 means for 2018, 19, and 20. Got it. If I could. Go ahead. Mr. Chairman. Yes, David. I believe in that time period, there was a purchase of all brand new telephones and a new telephone system within the, I know within the town hall. Yes, but that was a capital expense that we allocated $500,000 for about eight years ago. Okay. Was in the capital account. Okay. Any other questions? Yeah, Charlie, I had my hand raised. Go right ahead. I lose that screen when the... That's okay. I have the same question that you had, Charlie. I don't, these numbers on the salary side don't seem to add up, I think. No, actually they do. I'll tell you what the problem is. Can you flip the salary up for a second? Yeah, we had this problem, that's good. We had this problem going through with the manager's budget. And the problem is that this column that says new pay, if I remember correctly, that includes the... It includes base step but not longevity. Yes, base and step but not longevity. So it's just a presentation issue, John. Right, but if you go back to the top page, longevity is separate, right? Yeah, it lumps it all together as a separate line. So the 336043 is the total of new pay. Right. And the 6337 is the total of longevity and 6,000 pillow over time. It's screwy and I'd like to change it, but that's the way it is. I've been fighting it for 15 years. Maybe I'm just not understanding, but... Oh, so what's shown here is new pay on the second page includes longevity? No. No, it doesn't. See, 336043, scroll down to salaries. That's new pay. That's the... Although it is... What I'm saying is that, and I haven't done the math, but if you look at the individual line items between the budget... I can't explain it. They dropped a line from the 2020 budget. There was an additional line for a mail stipend of $2,160. That would make it add up. Yeah, thank you. That's missing from the detail and it's in the detail in the 2021 budget. But it's not in... They just dropped the line and it does not add up. You're correct. By $2,160. Thank you. Any more questions on this budget? I wondered about software. I think that's all I would have. John, a little louder, please, John. I was wondering what the software expenses were. I don't see them here maybe they're in a different department's budget, but I would think the Comptroller would be using some kind of software and I don't know where that cost is. The software, you mean the Munis software? Is that her main program? That's the town's main program. That's an IT, yeah. Okay, so there's no other program that the Comptroller uses other than Munis? Nope. Well, Munis is a pretty comprehensive enterprise system. I meant, yeah, Munis is an ERP, yeah, exactly. Probably Office Suites and things. Yeah, but Munis is used by more than just the Comptroller. So that's why it's the IT budget. Does make sense. Thanks. Additional questions? You'll have to speak up because I can't see your hand raised. Okay, hearing none. Arif, a motion is in order. Okay, I'd like to recommend the budget as presented. Can you slide the screen up a little? For, yes, sir. Hang on. What three, let me make a little smaller. What three, 345,301. So the budget's moved and seconded for 345,301. Any further comments or questions? Therefore, go forward with a vote here. Grant Gibbian? Yes. Shane Blundell? Aye. John Ellis? Aye. Caroline Weiss, not here. Mary Margaret Frankelman? Yeah. Arif Padaria? Yes. Jonathan Wallach? Aye. Brian Beck? Yes. Peter Howard? Yes. Shailene Pocrus is not here. Darrell Harmer? Yes. John Deist? Yes. Alan Jones? Yes. Annie LaCorte? Yes. William Keller? Yes. Al Tosti? Yes. George Kosher? Yes. Christine Deschler? Yeah. Dean Karman? Yes. David McKenna? Yes. Thank you, David. So the vote is unanimous for the Comptroller's budget. Arif, do you have another budget? Yes, but I would like to, the retirement budget is going to take more than four minutes. And it is 9.56. And so I think it's going to take at least 10, 20 minutes maybe with a lot of discussion. So I would like to do it next time, please. All right. It says it is 9.56. Motion to adjourn. Motion to adjourn is in order. Okay. Second. Okay. Seconded. Any objections to adjourning? Charlie, I had a few questions for homework that I could probably go through in a few minutes if you want to go right ahead with those. Okay. What was on Article 13, which is June, Juneteenth I asked Sandy if there would be any costs and his answer was costs would be related to the changes in collective bargaining agreements. So yes, there will be a cost down the road, but not this year. If we celebrate Juneteenth in 2022, then that's probably in the budget we're discussing. So I think you need to follow up on that. Domestic partnerships, no additional costs. So it's probably not a Fincom article. Article 23 about email addresses for town meeting members. He's going to discuss that with IT. And the two additional salary lines and health and human services is going to help me write a footnote to explain that. Okay. So Juneteenth there might be a cost. So I think we should have a discussion on that. Good. Thank you very much. Any other things under one minute? Motion's been made to adjourn and seconded. Hearing no objections to meeting is adjourned. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, George. Thank you. Thank you.