 Welcome to the first meeting of the Finance Committee in 2020. I know you're expecting Al Tostin. I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I will try to. I know I don't look like him. I'm not as good looking. I probably am not as witty. But I will try to keep the same level of gravitas and decorum that he brings to the meeting. For those of you who are new, my name is Charlie Foskett, and I'm a vice chairman. And Al asked me to chair the meeting in his absence. So we have four new members, two of whom are here, George Koser and Shane Blundell. And we also have, George, of course, is a returning member. I don't know, George, how many years were you here? Probably 10, something like that, long time. And then Arif Padaria, who is not here, but he has also been on the committee for probably four or five years at least. And we're glad to see him back. So I thought the first order of business might be that, for the sake of the members who are new or semi-new, that we all introduce ourselves. And then we'll get on with the business at hand. So Adam, do you want to start? Everybody knows you. We'll start there. My name is Adam Chapterlane, and I serve as the town manager. I am Sandy Pooler, and I am the deputy town manager. I'm Pete Howard. I'm the recording secretary. I'm Dave McCann, I represent Precinct 21. I'm Christine Deschler, I'm the vice-chair. Emma Jones, Precinct 14, I'm the vice-chair. Darrell Harmer, Precinct 12. Shane Blundell, Precinct 2. Mary Margaret Franklin, Precinct 5. And George Koser from Precinct 15, but at large from Precinct 18. And as I said, I'm Charlie Foskett from Precinct 8 and a vice-chairman. So thank you, everyone. Just to, so first of all, George and Shane, welcome. We're glad to have you join the group. Look forward to your contributions. On the agenda tonight, the town manager and the deputy town manager will present budgets, which you should have all received your budget book. The, look at our five-year plan and they also have some requests for transfers from the reserve fund. And they may have some other subjects that they might wanna bring up. Following that, we'll have a brief discussion of the ethics law and then ask for budgets. And I'm sure everybody has had meetings with their respective departments already. We're just gonna be here until 11 o'clock working on the budget. So let me start, Adam, please. Absolutely, all right. Thank you, good evening, everybody. So I'll start, I'll talk very briefly about the FY21 budget. I'll talk a little bit about, for everyone's benefit and especially for the benefit of the new members, what this long-range plan is and then Sandy will walk through in great detail what you see on the plan, this long-range projection that's before you. So I think the primary thing that I wanna share about the FY21 budget is it's the second year of what has been intended to be a four-year plan that was supported by an override that was passed in June of 2019. So that was an override passed eight years after what it initially intended to be a three-year plan. An override had passed in 2011, thought to be lasted for three years. Next one was passed in 2019. And in putting that together, we, the town has for a long time used this long-range planning model, making conservative revenue assumptions and capping expenditure growth or at least discretionary expenditure growth at certain levels so that we can have a sense of where the budget will move from time to time. And that would be, and those are governed by commitments, ultimately voted on by the select board. So I think the important thing I wanna mention about the FY21 budget is that it maintains all of the commitments that the select board made in putting the override on the ballot in 2019. It keeps the, what we call, exercising fiscal discipline in place by keeping the school expenditure growths and town departmental expenditure growth within the limits that were set forth in the plan. Sandy will get into more details about what those limits are. It maintains the commitments to funding the school department in proportion to how many new students are coming in to the district. So using what we call an enrollment growth factor to provide new funding to the school department as they see new students coming in. It maintained commitments the board made to mobility improvements, funding mobility improvements across town, as well as funding improvements in senior transportation around town. This FY21 budget maintains those commitments. The budget itself doesn't take these actions, but the board and town meeting, as well as the finance committee, have taken actions to continue to maintain the board's commitment to minimizing the impact of the override and the high school debt exclusion on taxpayers, particularly seniors and those with income challenges. So those actions refer to senior tax work-off programs, tax exemptions, circuit breaker programs that, again, the board, finance committee and town meeting adopted last year. And then finally, the budget, the FY21 budget that's presented to the finance committee for consideration maintains the board's commitment to keep a 5% financial reserve for the duration of the four-year plan. And that's part of maintaining a commitment that we make to the rating agencies so that when we go out to borrow where in as best position as possible to maintain our AAA rating and get the lowest borrowing rates possible, which is always important, has become exceedingly important given the quantity of money we're borrowing for the high school project. So beyond that, to talk a little bit about this long-range plan, I believe this model, and Charlie or Annie or others can correct me if I'm wrong, dates back to about 2004. Maybe the discussion started before that, but in figuring out a way for the town to address its structural deficit, then as now, the town has trouble growing its revenue at a pace that matches up with its expenditures. I would say then the drivers were healthcare and pensions costs. Those are still drivers, but more than them are the costs of the growing school enrollment. Those have, I think that has flipped to a more primary driver of the town's structural deficit. But the town is five and a half square miles, almost entirely built out. We have limited new growth. The town exercises its ability to raise taxes by 2.5% a year each year, but with that limited new growth, revenue doesn't grow. Much beyond 2.5% to 3% a year in a good year. So people that came before me, I think again, Charlie and Annie and Alan and others included, came up with a plan to request operating overrides more than was needed in any one given fiscal year. Put the excess that is raised aside and provide a plan or a long-range financial plan that would allow for balanced budgets over the course of, I think the first one was five years, second was intended to be three years, and most recently it's intended to be four years. So the idea is to, again, conservatively estimate revenue, control expenditure growth where it can be controlled, ask for a certain amount of money, and then provide budgetary stability over a number of years so that both school and town operating departments can have stability, and residents can have some stability in the services that are being provided. So that's sort of the model that the town has used. To some degree has become a statewide model for how some municipalities try to manage their budgets. I was at the MMA annual meeting two weeks ago and the mayor of Northampton out in Western Mass came up to me and he said, I was thinking of Arlington the other day, we have an override on the ballot in March and we've used your long-range planning model and we just hope it passes. So I think it's a testament to the whole community that this has worked for going on 20 years so successfully to provide the stability of services and to some degree the stability of tax burden for residents. So with that, if it's okay to the chair, I'll have Sandy start to walk through each line of this long-range plan and probably we can stop periodically for questions or obviously ask questions. Maybe they won't have any questions so far. Go right in. All right, evening everybody. So I'm gonna start out by looking at this legal sized piece of paper, lots of colors on it. This is the long-range plan and there is a shorter and different version of it in the budget book that you have. One of the things about the long-range plan is that it changes as new information comes in and new budgets come out say from the state or whatever and I will explain all that in a minute. I also just wanna know before we get into the details that a couple of years ago I tried to give a simple explanation of each of the lines on the back of the page. So there's a written explanation there and I hope that will be useful to you. And finally before I get into the details I just wanna say that there will not be a quiz at the end of this. If you have questions, that's okay. Most people do the first time they go through this. So you are certainly welcome to reach out to me if at any time in the manager's office. And then within this room I know there is plenty of experience and understanding of the plan and are the people here could answer your questions very well too but anytime you wanna reach out to me I'd be glad to talk to you. So the plan as you can see starts in the upper left-hand corner with the current year FY 2020 recap and what recap means is that's a term for the document that we file with the state to get our tax rate certified for the current fiscal year. So the numbers for 2020 are now in terms of a budget set in place, they're not gonna change. That then becomes the basis for moving forward in FY 21 and 22 and 23 and so forth. First I wanna talk about revenue and then I'll talk about expenses. The first line of revenue is state aid. You see for FY 2021 we're projecting $24 million in state aid. And with that I'm gonna have you take a look at this sheet that says cherry sheets on it. There's cherry sheets assessments and cherry sheets receipts in the upper corner. Does everybody have? That's because they're sitting in a pile here. And for some reason, they're just single-sided. So I thought, all right, some of them are on two sides which is how it's supposed to print out. So this white piece of paper replicates what's called the cherry sheets. And the cherry sheets were so-called because years ago when the state came out with its numbers for local aid, they printed them on pink paper. So they became cherry sheets. Excuse me, Sandy. Yeah. Does this have two sides or one side? They were supposed to have two but it's apparent that not all of them printed out on two sides. So some people are gonna have to have two pieces of paper as I have here. Sorry about that. Well, they are, does everybody now have a copy of the receipts? Let me say, does anybody not have a copy of the receipts? Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah, there's one more. Sorry, let's. All right. Thank you, Charlie and Adam for helping pass those things out there. Within the cherry sheets, as I say, on the first side, the side called receipts, you see the major categories for our aid. And the most important of that, and the largest is the first thing called chapter 70. Chapter 70 is the state law under which the state provides education aid to its cities and towns for their school systems. In FY21, the governor's budget which came out at the end of January posted $15,983,000 in state aid for Arlington for chapter 70. Just as a side note, that is because that is a big increase, about a $2 million increase from what we got in FY20. And that is a large part because of something called the Student Opportunity Act that you may have read about. It passed in the fall, signed into law by the governor and redefined how education is funded in the state to more accurately represent what it costs cities and towns to provide an education which then serves as one of the key numbers that the state uses to figure out how much money it gives cities and towns. So in a very quick version of it, the state figures out how much it costs for education for kids in all the school districts across the state. And then it figures out how much each city and town has the capacity to fund education. Some have a high capacity or wealthy and lots of wealth in the property taxes. Others like cities like Lawrence or Lowell have much lower capacities. The key thing is that the gap between those two numbers is what the state is committed to fund. So the state changed a lot of the formulas for and calculations for how much it costs that they figured cost the educated child. The other lines here, there's some other things for tuition reimbursement if there are children who go to charter schools from Arlington and our town has to pay another school system for those children in charter schools there. The state somewhat reimburses us for that. The next line down is called unrestricted general government aid. And it is what sort of used to be thought of as lottery aid in the state. And in fact, it is largely funded by receipts from the lottery. There's a formula behind it that most people don't understand. I don't really understand it. But it's been a base number in place for years. And what Governor Romney has done over ever since he came into office is he has said that the amount of aid, the amount of income that the state's gonna have from year to year. However, pretty much that goes up. Did I say Romney? I meant bigger. You got Romney on your mind. For obvious reasons. Baker has said that however much state revenue goes up, he will increase unrestricted general government aid by that same percentage. So they made a forecast back in December that revenue for Massachusetts for FY21 would increase by 2.8%. And they then incorporated that into unrestricted general government aid here. There are other smaller accounts are getting reimbursed for the benefits that we provide to veterans. We get reimbursed 75% of what we spend for that. When we provide certain exemptions to low income, eligible, elderly and other people, we also get reimbursed for that. And then the library gets some money directly. All that money then adds up to the $24,756,821 that you see near the bottom of the page, which overall is about a 10% increase in our state aid. It's one of the larger increases in state aid we've had. It's certainly larger since I've been here, and one of the larger ones we've seen in a while. One of the big questions is how much is that gonna continue? I'll get into that in a second. But that is the money coming in. Let me just stop for a second and ask if there are any questions about that. Okay. The state give it, and the state take it away. If you look on the other side, there are a number of things for which we get assessed. And I'm not gonna go through all of these now. I certainly haven't answered questions if people have particular questions about them. I'll just point out two of the bigger ones. The biggest one is the assessment about a third of the way down the page of $3 million for the MBTA. We are assessed based on figures around ridership and other factors, and that by and far and away is the largest assessment that we have to pay back to the state. Near the bottom of the page is charter school sending tuition. So when, as I said before, a child goes to a charter school, that child is from Arlington and that charter school is either in Arlington or any place else, but specifically not going to Arlington Public Schools, we have to pay that charter school the average cost of educating that child. And so that is an assessment that runs through the state. In other words, if we don't send a check to the charter school, the state provides the money to the charter school. How is that suspicious? They do a calculation for each city and town for what the average cost of educating a child is. The same way they do calculation for calculating for aid purposes, what it costs to educate a child here. And that average amount is what we then have to send off to the charter. Well applied by some number of students. Yes. What number is used for that? I frankly don't know what the number is. It's something you can find out. I just don't have it to know. The one of the things I want to point out is that if you look in the manager's budget on page nine, there is a version of this that we put out as of January 15th when this book was published. And one of the things you'll notice is that at that time, we thought we were gonna get 23.1 million dollars in state aid. And after the governor's budget came out, we now know that he is recommending 24.7 million dollars. So we went from in the situation where we thought state aid was gonna increase by about $600,000 to where it is increased by 2.2 million dollars. So that is just a good example of how things can change very much depending on outside factors. The first and most important outside factor for state aid is the governor's budget because then we learn what he is willing to put on the table. The House budget and Senate budgets are gonna come out later in the process. And it has almost always been the case that the governor's budget is the floor for state aid. And depending on number factors, including whether it's an election year, the House and the Senate have certain incentives to increase that number. I don't, my back of the envelope guests, we're not gonna see a huge amount of increase because a lot of money went into chapter 70 this year because of that Student Opportunity Act that I mentioned before. The state has made a huge financial commitment and is on the hook over the next few years to continue funding that. So I don't think communities like Arlington are likely to see a lot of extra money. We are in the enviable position of having a number of factors work in our favor so that we are one of the biggest, we are the communities with one of the biggest bumps in chapter 78 around the state. And so no matter what else happens, I don't think we're gonna see a significant increase in that number this year. Annie? So I'm just comparing the two plans really quickly and of course my eyes go to the red numbers. It is true that that addition in state aid is most of what shaved $10 million off the deficit in 2024 or the other things coming. There are two big factors that that is by far in the way the largest is that state aid because we had certain assumptions each year in the plan. It's going up $600,000 and a couple of $100,000 a year after that. And now you have that base that came in this year and then it adds to the base in all those other years. The other thing without saying that the butler did it too soon is that our Minutemen assessment went down. So. John? That's a really sizable change in the state aid. Do you know what it was that caused that to happen out of the first change in? Yes, there were three factors that really contributed to this increase. One is that we are one of the, we are probably the fastest growing school district in the state. Over the last 10 years, the school population on a percentage basis has gone up in Arlington more than any other community that I've looked at. Excluding the little ones that on a percentage basis may have walked around. But we want the fastest growing, if not the fastest growing school district in the state. So the more students you have, the more state aid you get and those communities that are in the position of having expanding enrollments are the ones that tend to get more and have gotten in this last budget more of that state aid. There are many parts of the state where there's either flat enrollment or declining enrollment. And so we are in a unique position or at least a rare position because of enrollment. Second, the infusion of money from the Student Opportunity Act and the way the state has recalculated how much at foundation budget is, how much it is estimated to cost to educate a student in Arlington went up significantly. That is probably, by my reckoning, even more of a factor than the enrollment increase. But just that they are now more accurately looking at the cost of hiring teachers and supplying books and very significantly of providing health insurance to our employees. A lot of people criticize the state for years saying, when you're calculating how much it costs to provide education, you're really low balling the cost of health insurance. And the state has made an effort to get that, to a more correct number. It's a multi-year effort, so we've seen kind of the first cut of that in the new formula. They will continue to get that number up closer to the number that the GIC uses to charge for health insurance. The place where we get our health insurance at that state organization. So the goal is to get the numbers for all cities and towns around the state to a number that's closer to the GIC number. And then finally, the third reason is that the state has gone back and forth in the way that it counts poor students. And it does provide extra aid to students who are poor. Now, what does poor mean? Well, that's the big question. What does poor mean? For years, poor meant students who are eligible for free or reduced lunch. Then three years ago, the state decided to change that counting mechanism and say that they were gonna count people who were in poverty if they received state benefits. Food stamps or SNAP benefits or a variety. There's a whole set of other benefits that people would have to apply to the state to get those benefits. What you might traditionally prefer to do is maybe welfare benefits. The problem was that in a lot of communities around the state, there are very poor people who for a variety of reasons, including their immigration status, are reluctant to apply for those benefits. And so they get undercounted. And so what the state did in this last round, as they said, they're gonna calculate things both ways using the all free and reduced lunch system and using the more recent state benefits systems. And then whichever one got you more kids was the one they were gonna credit you with. So we went up over 100 kids in that count in terms of how they calculated things. So all those three factors flowed through to give us more state aid. I hope that's answering it because that's about as much as I can. Quite frankly, I find it very interesting because it's been our investment, I think, in this town that's drawn people to the town. This increased the school population that's meant more state aid. Yes. So it's one more positive indication to what we've done in this town. I think that's exactly right. There's a correlation there. All right, that was one of the more complicated lines on this very long spreadsheet. The rest of it is not gonna take as much time, but I just, I think it's one of the more important things to understand. I think it would be, John, would you supplement Sandy going with this proposal? The next line down is just some reimbursements for school construction aid under an old system the state had where we would, when we'd build a school, we would borrow a lot of money and the state's share of it would come back to us year after year. They have since changed that system so that when we build a school, they give us their share upfront as opposed to over time. So that number, this is actually the last year we're gonna get that amount. Local receipts represents, as you might guess, things we collect locally. Taxes and fees and fines. The biggest number in there are motor vehicle excise taxes. A little over $5 million of that $9 million comes from that. And then it's everything else like if you go to town hall and buy a map or if you get a parking ticket or if you, it used to be that if you had paid a library fine, it said the library stopped charging fines so that's not in there anymore. Building permits. The building permits, interest that we get on the money that the treasurer holds for the town and invests, that all comes under the local receipts. And that is by formula here. These numbers do not represent the exact amount that the town has collected in the past and is anticipated to collect in the future but it's a budget estimate. And by policy under the terms of the long range planning committee policies, that goes up $100,000 a year. In order to take into account the fact that we don't know for sure exactly how much we're gonna take in certain accounts from time to time, year to year. Some of them can be quite volatile like building permits and the slowdown in the economy, those things can go down. So we try to be a little bit conservative in there and if we get more in then we anticipate it that becomes free cash and that's a good thing for us. Next is free cash. Now I have another chart to show you. There's a chart that says free cash on it. For those of you who've never heard of free cash before I can tell you definitively that it's not free and it is not cash. It is, if you're an accountant in the private sector it is your operating surplus. It is the amount of money at the end of the year that we have appropriated to spend but for whatever reason didn't spend. So let's say the appropriated money for to hire 50 police officers but there were vacancies in the police department at the end of the year, let's say there were two vacancies throughout the year that money comes back and goes into free cash. The same time if we made a revenue estimate and we took in more than the revenue estimate said that becomes free cash. And those two things are added to however much stays in the free cash pot unspent from year to year. This chart shows what our free cash numbers have been over the last 10 years. See it's been steadily increasing because we've had pretty good luck with our conservative revenue estimates and with getting more state aid and more local receipts than we originally thought. And also in some cases more taxes. The important thing about this plan is every year we look at how much free cash we have at the end of the previous fiscal year. That number is calculated by the town accountant, the comptroller. She sends that to the state to be certified. Once we have a certified number, we take half of that amount of free cash and we use it as a revenue source for the coming year. So in FY21, the $5,901,388 in free cash is half of at the bottom of this page the $1,802,000 of free cash that was certified previously. It's also the same number, 11,802,000 that's at the top of this page. We then look and we see over the last 10 years what is our average amount of free cash been. That average number on this sheet is $7,678,000. Let's see, up in this corner here. We then take half of that each year and assume we're gonna use that as a revenue source going forward in future years. And then a year from this fall, this past fall, when we get our free cash certified again in the close of fiscal year 2020, we'll have a new number, take half of that true new number, recalculate the 10-year average, take half of that moving forward, and that's what free cash is. So it's an important number for us because it is a significant source of money. It's important for our understanding the dynamics of this plan is that we have to be conservative enough in our revenue estimates that we are generating new revenue surpluses to create new free cash every year. We basically start every year at zero in terms of newly created free cash and you have to create it again by either not spending all of your budget or bringing in more than you need to. So we do a lot of thinking about what are reasonable revenue estimates, how conservative we should be, how much we should match, how much we're willing to put in terms of free cash into the budget versus what our most recent experience has got. The next line is $200,000. It doesn't change at all, it's the same number every year. It's just what the assessors give us back from their overlay account that they have not used the amount of money that they have not had to give back in abatements and they have a surplus so they give that back to us every year and it's been a steady source, minor but steady source in the budget. And then the final number here, $137 million, is the biggest number, it's our property taxes and it represents in this number the fundamental formula for property taxes in Massachusetts which is that property taxes can go up every year by two and a half percent. So built into this number is an increase of two and a half percent every year. On top of that, we have new growth. The flip side of free cash is new growth. What new growth is is something that has never been taxed in the town before. So if a brand new building goes up and it had been on a vacant lot, that new building gets taxed for the very first time, that's new growth. Similarly, if you were to convert a two family house into two condos, there were never condos taxed that way. The difference between what was taxed as condos and taxed as a two family house gets counted as new growth. So anytime there's a new building or significant addition to somebody's home, if you did a mammoth renovation to your house and maybe added on a wing or really did it up in a big way, not just, I used to say granite countertops, but granite countertops are not enough. You really need to have that Spoker pit extension put on the back of the house so your house gets bigger or you add a second story, et cetera. If you really want to help the town out, that's what you'd be doing. New growth has fluctuated over the years and it is very much tied to the state of the economy and particularly interest rates because when the interest rates are low, people buy houses. It's easier for them to get mortgages and then it's easier for them to get home equity loans and so forth to continue to renovate their houses. And we've seen, you can see here in this pattern in, this is again over 10 years, in the early part of this starting in 2011 through 2014, new growth, new tax revenue, was about half a million dollars a year. Over the last six years, it's been over a million, it's averaged over a million or close to over a million or less these last years because the economy has been so strong and interest rates have been so low. There's nothing that says it won't go back to the battle days or to the norm, what is normal? In the plan, we always take the most recent number from the assessor and put that in and that is now in the FY21 plan. And then going forward, we make estimates of how much new growth we're gonna have and we estimate that for FY22 we're gonna have $650,000 worth of new growth and then $600,000 a year after that and $550,000 a year after that, going down in increments of $50,000 down to a low of $450,000. And then a year from now when the assessor gives us some new growth numbers again, we will up it and that has traditionally been another source of free cash for us in that it is higher than our original estimates. So in other words, we're bringing in more revenue than the thought we're gonna do and so on. All right, that is the revenue side so far, except for one important line. I'm gonna stop and ask it very questions. Okay, the next line is called the Override Stabilization Fund and what Adam said before, I mean, before I came to Arlington, I always thought of this line as being the Arlington plan of during, you know, the seven fat years you put money in and the seven lean years you take money out. This line, if you look in this book, our estimates before that we're gonna have to use $2 million, about $2 million from the Override Stabilization Fund to balance FY 21 budget. Because we had such a big increase in state aid and because we had some savings and some costs down below, we now are not gonna have to draw at all from the Override Stabilization Fund. And in fact, we were gonna put a whopping $7,814 into the fund if all goes according to this plan, which I can guarantee you it won't because other things will change. But that's where we sit today. You will see in future years, we need to draw down the fund pretty significantly, $6.6 million in FY 22, $11.3 million in FY 23, and then $8.2 million in FY 24. And the reason it isn't higher than $8.2 million is because there will only be $8.2 million left in the fund by that time. And so we will have broken open the piggy bank and taken everything up. All right, so we have all this money. How do we spend it? And how do we control our spending? There are formulas for the school budget, for the town budget, for the capital budget, and for everything else. Those four big elements. The school budget starts on the, I'm gonna ignore for a second this $600,000 number and go to the next line that says general education costs. General education costs are just what you would think. It is the cost of everything the school needs to spend money on except special education. So teacher salaries, administrator salaries, chalk if they still even use chalk, books, computers, all that stuff is in general education costs. And we say that that as a baseline goes up 3.5% a year. Added to that from the previous year is the amount of growth factor. So part of the, there's $50 million in FY22 is the $46 million plus $1.5 million of growth factor plus the $600,000 that's on top there in FY20. All that increased by 3.5%. So the addition of the growth factor and the $600,000 means that the overall general education baseline goes up by more than that, by 8.2% because it's the addition of all those factors. The next line down is special education costs. And this is just an assumption about what spend costs are from year to year and that that number goes up to 7% every year. And it just kind of goes into the future at 7%. And when we've looked at it, it's actually fairly close to that. Sometimes it's higher, sometimes it's lower, but it's an estimate. And then the last figure is growth factor. And that is a direct correlation between the number of new students entering the school system from year to year and what the state tells us is costs to educate those students. And we now then allocate to the school department 50% of that estimated cost. The reason it's 50% to not 100% is that there's certain fixed costs that aren't changing from year to year. If we get three more students, we don't have to hire a new superintendent or a new principal, et cetera, et cetera. We do factor in that we are gonna have to hire some more teachers and pay for their healthcare and so forth and now all that's factored in. But generally we know there's a split between fixed costs and variable costs when there's more students. At the bottom of the five-year plan, you see what the actual increase in student enrollment from year to year has been in FY 21. And then projected going forward based on long-term studies the school department does of enrollment going forward. And then each of those numbers, those 210 students in FY 20 led to an increase of $1.5 million in FY 20 budget for the schools. The 96 students led to an increase of 700,000 and so forth and so on. So that again is, I have to say as an outsider coming in here and seeing this system a few years ago when I first started working here is one of the brilliant things about this plan is that it tries to be very accurate in reflecting truly the needs of the school department and the changes in enrollment. And it means that there is buy-in among the key players in town, the school committee, the select board, the finance committee and ultimately town meeting to meet the school's needs. This last override go-around, the school committee said, well, we've got a few other needs. That's what these numbers at the top are. The 600,000 in FY 20 and 21 and going forward 800,000 in the next two years where they articulated a number of program deficiencies that they felt that they really needed to address and they've made part of the override plan and was put before the voters to say we need to do a better job and particularly with certain vulnerable populations and other things in the schools. So that, for these four years in this plan, that's added and then goes into the base and it's increased by an inflation rate every year. So overall, you can see the school budget is going up by 6.4% in 21, 7.1% in the next year, 6.73%. When up above, you see our revenue generally goes up between three and a half maybe a little bit more than 4% a year. But that is what a structural deficit is all about. When your largest department is growing by 2% or 3% more than your revenue is growing, you have a structural deficit and you need to go back to the voters from time to time for an override. Sandy, at the end, do you have a question? Well, I just want to be sure that I have this clear in my head, okay? The state increased their support of our education system by $2 million. Now we had a gap between what we think the state's obligation is and what we actually spent. We had previously determined we were going to fill some of that gap ourselves, okay? And so we got lucky that our fill of that gap, which we think was adequate. I mean, we had a long discussion about this last year about that year is smaller than what that increase in state aid is. So it takes some pressure off other departments. Am I intentional? I don't think it takes pressure off other departments. It takes pressure off the plan. So that... I guess that's what I meant. Yeah, so the deficit in FY24, if everything else stays as demonstrated on the plan, either goes down or doesn't go up. Right. I mean, well, I should take pressure off the taxpayer. That's exactly right. It certainly takes pressure off the property taxpayer. And we know they didn't increase our income taxes, so we're finding the money somewhere. But I just want to take a minute to pat us on the back for fiscal restraint here. And we didn't just take that whole $2 million and say, oh, look, we just had school budget. You know what I'm saying? And that's the beauty of how we do this in our intent because we're projecting forward and we know it's coming and we don't. That's... Yeah, I'm talking to the people watching that television. That is exactly right. I mean, reasonable estimates about cost increases and being sensitive to things like enrollment changes makes it so that we are really trying to meet the school department's needs. And so when more money comes in, we just don't throw it at them or at any other department. Same thing for the town. Their percentages increases for the townside, too. Is it fair to say that that extra money went into the stabilization fund? Yes. We're not in that position. Yes. So in here, we're gonna take $2 million out. We got more state aid. Now we don't have to take it out. So it meant the stabilization fund was $2 million to the better. I think it's also important to point out that this is a very positive situation where state aid's going up. But the beauty of this plan over the course of history has been that if state aid comes in a little bit lower than estimated, we don't reduce the school budget or reduce the town budget. We're able to keep the stability of what's been requested by the school and what's been requested by the town departments with stability, regardless of how the estimates might come in a little bit above a little bit lower. Correct. Because we have a ramp to plan. Exactly. We have always got a reduction that causes what we're going to do when those stabilization funds will be canceled out. Correct. I mean, the alternative, and I've worked in places that have used this other system, is you just wait until you see what state aid you're getting and then decide whether you have to start cutting budgets like crazy or not. And it's the lake of hair on fire plan. We've been there. Right. Yeah, and it's a terrible place to be. So the next line down is the Minuteman Operating Budget. As you know, we send students to Minuteman Technical Vocational High School. This number is an aggregate of two factors. One, the assessment we get from Minuteman on an enrollment basis for sending Arlington kids there. And a second part of it, which is the assessment that comes to us for the capital cost of building the new Minuteman High School. In the future, at the request of several people in town, I will try to break that out between how much is operating assessment and how much is capital, so you can see what those two things are. In this budget, by far and away, the biggest part of that increase is the capital increase because they just built the high school, they're just in the process of selling their bonds. So we have one more year of new bonds being sold. So we'll see probably another significant bump next year and then it will start to get back to a more normal course of assessments based on enrollment changes from year to year and not these big bumps from capital. Sandy, isn't it true that the capital increases are, that's exempt capital, so it's not affecting the bottom line on this budget, right? That's exactly right. The voters voted to do a debt exclusion override. So any assessment that comes in from Minuteman for the high school building goes straight out back to the taxpayers in terms of higher taxes. It gets included in that $137 million up at the top here for property taxes and it gets paid out through the assessment to Minuteman. But it is, as Charlie said, dollar in, dollar out in terms of the money that's available to spend on the school budget or the town budget or the capital budget or anything else. The town budget has four lines and as you all know, the most important one is the bottom line. So there's a town personal expenses of $29 million, town expenses at $11 million, enterprise fund, which is actually in this formula a negative number. It is the amount that recharge the water and sewer department and a few other things for the cost of getting services from staff who work and are paid by the general fund. So the water and sewer department needs to send out bills. It could go hire a private bill sending out a company and pay them whatever that would cost. But instead it hires the treasurer's office to do that. And it hires the manager's office at very reasonable rates to provide insight into its budget and the same thing for the comptroller and for other departments. So that is what we call an offset or an indirect cost that gets subtracted from those first two numbers to get us a bottom line number for the town budget of $38 million. And under this plan, just as we said, there's an inflation rate for the schools, there's an inflation rate for the town budget which is 3.25%. And for those of you who are paying very close attention, you will see in the out years the town budget bottom line goes up by 3.25%. This year, it looks like it's going up only 2.65%. And that is a little bit of a math trick or anomaly because in FY20, as part of the override, as part of the select board's commitment to the override, it said it wanted to spend an additional $200,000 in mobility improvements around the town. Fixing up sidewalks and ramps and other things to make it easier for people in general and particularly some of our elderly population to walk and get around. That was in the DPW budget in FY20. Those things are really capital items. So in 21, we moved that $200,000 out of the town budget bucket and into the capital budget bucket. So it looks like the town budget is going up less than it really is because the base for 20 was $200,000 higher. In point of fact, as we stand today, the town budget overall is going up at 3.21%, a little bit below our target. But, and then going forward, it will just go up by 3.25%. So that's the target that we try to hit each year as we put together a budget. And when departments have requests for increases in services or personnel or if when, for example, my grotto marker comes forward and says that our trash contract has built in an inflation escalator, that all has to be built into that 3.25%. And that's when we then have to make decisions with departments about yes, you can add or change or no, there are just too many other demands that are already built in. And, but we always stick to that 3.25%. The MW rate debt shift is something that the select board is considering maybe changing in the future. It's essentially a tax subsidy of our water and sewer rates. So Arlington is one of not even a handful of communities anymore that still does this that allows people to write off essentially some of their water and sewer bills on their property taxes. As you all know, because of the changes in federal tax law, there's caps now on how much you can write off. And so this write off really, for most people in Arlington, they never get to see it anymore because you're already at $10,000 of write off between your property taxes and your state income taxes and so forth. So we hope in the future to readjust that, increase the water and sewer rates proportionally to cover those. The next item is capital. I'm not gonna go into all the detail on that. You're gonna hear from the Capital Planning Committee in a couple of weeks about capital. But the important thing to know is that every year we try to make capital spending approximately 5% of the operating budget. And that number carries forward onto the plan. Pensions and insurance are simply bills that we get presented either by the Arlington Retirement Board or by the GIC. For the Retirement Board, we do have a very cooperative understanding with them that they will try to adjust their bill to us to be on average about 6% per year. And they will then adjust their investment strategies and so forth to try to keep that the same. So going forward, it is 6% a year in any one year, it might be a little bit higher or a little bit lower because of the number of people have actually retired or the number of people who as they say, age out of the retirement system. But that's that. The insurance is just health insurance and our property insurance, again, that is all based on how many people have enrolled. We have seen increasing health insurance enrollments recently and when we meet with the subcommittee on health insurance, when we get our final rates in March, we'll have a lot more to say about that to them and they need to you. State assessments is the state take it the way part. Overlay reserve is what the assessors have to set aside every year in case people file for abatements and we estimate that number at 600,000 in most years and then if there's a reval year, we bump that up to 800,000 because in reval years, people tend to be more motivated to file abatements. Reserve fund is 1% of the budget and it is what is available to you at the end of the year or to cover things like snow and ice deficits or tonight when we have certain other things that you'll hear about later to cover unforeseen emergencies. Court judgments and sims, that represents the last of the debt payments that we're making when the town bought the sims hospital. Those get paid off in a couple of years and then we just go down to $100,000 every year. As a reserve, we set aside in case we have at the end of the year a court judgment that our legal counsel says we really need to pay this off. There's no time to go back to call a new town meeting and so forth. We're allowed to, that's like a little safety valve. And then warrant articles, there are a number of different warrant articles. The biggest of which in this number is the amount that we put into OPEB, the fund that we've set up to fund health insurance for retirees, similar to the fund that's set up for pensions, for the pensions, we have a fund set up for their health insurance and then all the other little. And then finally, override stabilization fund in the good years. We were able to put money in there. FY20 was a very good year because of the override. We put 2,174,000 in there this year. It will be about break even. And then the numbers below, you can see how much is in free cash or estimated to be in free cash in the future. We have a stabilization, which is really our, oh boy, if things really go bad fund, stabilization fund that's fortunately we have not had to use, which the rating agencies look to as part of our reserves to see that we have the capacity to take a financial blow if the really bad thing went where to happen. The override stabilization fund, which is part of the plan. And then one other fund for insurance for our buildings, we essentially self-insure for property damage with high deductibles on our, we buy insurance but we have a very high deductible. And so if something bad were to happen and not be covered by insurance, we can go to this fund for a flood or fires on them like that. So that is a lot of explanation. I appreciate your patience and listening to all of it. And let me ask if there are any questions at this point. Next time we should bring some water bottles so that you can have a drink when you're, go ahead and have a long explanation. Thank you very much, Sandy. Thank you. Questions? John. The water and sewer, if I look at the town manager and the town attorney's budget, about 25% of their budget gets offset by the water and sewer. Does the town manager's office and the town attorney really spend 25% of their time on water and sewer issues and how often does that get reassessed? Each year we present to one of the subcommittees, sheet showing all the offsets and showing where those percentages come from. So some of those percentages were done, were calculated for us by an outside accounting firm that analyzed kind of the workflow and so forth of different departments. And we've used those same numbers for a few years. We haven't updated them in a few years anyway, not since I've been here. But I would say if you look at the numbers when we present them, and I think Grant, you're usually the one who has looked at those. Remember this conversation most at the very end, about 100% one. So we will, when we have the final health insurance rates and so forth, all that stuff gets calculated into those offsets and you'll see the percentage. I don't think that it is laid out even the manager's budget, what those amounts are, except on a dollar basis. It's 70% of the manager's budget. Okay. So you've got hundreds of time managers, salary details, 636, water and sewerage, so 167.5% of the labor cost is going to water and sewer. Yeah, I mean I think if you think about the fact that the water and sewer department would be the largest operating department in the general fund at $20 million, it would be nearly double the DPW operating budget as a standalone department. That it does serve to warrant a lot of time spent by both manager's office legal, comptroller and so on and so forth. I mean I think it's always a good idea for us to look at the numbers and see what's right. But I mean no one is checking a six minute clock for hours that are spent working on the water and sewer budget, but I mean I can certainly attest that we do spend a lot of time with the DPW administration working on it. So Adam, as I recall, every five or six years we've had, I don't know, interns or somebody come in under the guidance of our auditors and check those offsets, right? There was a full study then that was actually before I ever even worked here. But I do believe the auditors look at it on a periodic basis. It is a common thing for season towns to do this and therefore it is one of the things that our outside auditors are familiar with and do look at to make sure it's reasonable. John. And I had an unrelated question. Local receipts, it just goes up by 1% a year. Yes. $100,000 a year. And I had some entertaining conversations or at least they were entertaining for me, maybe not for you. Last spring about what I see is about 220 different line items from the general fund of these little fees from the Hens permit which is about $1,400 a year to marriage license to things like cafe, sidewalk cafe permits which in some years we collect $500 and some years we don't collect any money. We also discussed the trench fees and permits from the DPW, $50 for most of those fees which Mike Rothmacher mentioned hasn't been updated since 2009. There are a lot of fire department fees. So given that my understanding is from our conversation last spring that these fees haven't been updated for a decade and my cursory look at what other towns are charging seemed like we were lower on some of these fees. Is there an opportunity for the town to increase this? I mean, be on the order of tens of thousands or low hundreds of thousands, not millions but to increase the local receipts by looking at all these different 200 different fees that we're collecting. And actually in some cases not actually accounting in the right accounts? My general answer would be yes. My longer answer would be on the back of a large operating override and debt exclusion that immediately going to a comprehensive fee and permit and fee increase would be politically insensitive for not strategic thing to do. I will say time to time we do ask departments to take a look and I don't know that I agree that we're on the low end. I think we usually are the mid end of our comparable communities on most permit fees or license fees. But I think it's ultimately a point well taken that from time to time we should look and make sure we're not lagging too far behind just from a practical step. Excuse me, but as I recall it's not a question of whether we're charging comparable to other towns. I think by state law we can't charge more than the cost, right? So there's state case law that argues that you can't charge more than the cost of producing the license or permit, right? So, but that still could be the case that we set something at $20 when people are being paid a lot of bills. $20, 2009. Yeah, and we must not say we're $20, 2009. So that's it's, often there is room in that calculation. Oh, can you explain the sort of bounciness in the Warren article forecast? So we have up 112, down 190, up 50, down 50. Elections. One of the lines in the Warren article is how many elections we have each year and that number changes a lot. And so in the formula it takes, it says you're either gonna go up 50 or down 50 year to year. And so that is a big part of the bounciness. In fact, you can see the 50 going forward bouncing up and down. So it is elections. Elections, of course. Go ahead. Yeah, Sandy, maybe you already said this, but for property tax revenues, what are you assuming for your growth, the 10-year average or something? The long-range planning committees had a conversation about what to assume and they have said that they think it's reasonable to assume for next year $650,000. And then to decrease that by $50,000 each year for the years going forward. So that's what's built into the plan. I think one thing I would say about that is, let's say we were lowballing that too much. It's going to affect to some extent what the number in the out years is about how much of a deficit we have the next time we have an override. It's not really going to affect the current year spending that much. And as we get closer to that override year, we're going to switch from that estimated number to the actual number that the assessors give us. So we actually do catch up and as we get closer to those override years with a lot of these things, state aid is the same thing. To the extent that we have lowballed it a little bit, many years out, it kind of gets taken care of and in the wash as you get closer to actually having to think about an override. And on the other side of that equation, if you overestimate new growth when you go to set your tax rate in December, you could be in a very difficult situation if new growth isn't what you estimated and you could be in a budget cutting or appropriation seeking position to try to find the revenues to balance your tax rate at the end of the year. And from a planning point of view, if you're over-inflating it, you're going to give yourself potentially a far rosier picture in the out years than what could be real if you don't actually hit those estimates. George. If the MWA dead shift goes away, it's sort of a technical question. Does that free up space underneath the two and a half cap or other sorts of expenditures or it shouldn't, I understand, but how do we think about when that comes out is there a commitment to simply offset the shift or does it in fact give the possibility of increasing some of the expenditures without being to change? So there's actually, the town utilizes a statute that allows that debt shift to be raised outside of the limits of proposition two and a half. So if it's eliminated, it has no impact on that. And because you're asking that the select board, not to speak for them, but I understand their thought process is because of what Sandy said, it's likely no longer a federal tax benefit to residents. And there's going to be significant debt excluded or excluded debt rolling on to the tax rate from the high school next year that reducing the MWA debt shift in an amount equal to what's rolling on from the high school will allow for stability in people's tax bills. What bills will have to go up to make up the difference but tax bills will be more smooth with the elimination of that debt shift? That's a lot. Yeah, take a few showers. Well, any other questions? So I have one. First of all, I want to thank you very much for the presentation and you just sort of over a indirect segue into a subject that I think would be interesting to hear your comments on, which is the status of high school project. From a financial viewpoint. Sure. So, this could be another long conversation. Sorry, didn't mean to say that. Yeah, no, no, it's fine. So most of you have probably seen news about this. As any construction project does, but certainly large construction projects like this, we do rounds of cost estimation as we move through design. So when the project was on the ballot in June, we had a cost estimate that was based upon the schematic design that was the result of the feasibility study that the town did. So at that point, we knew what we knew and estimated that the project cost would be $290.8 million. And that's what the MSPA locked us in at the exclusion vote logs is in at. And that is the project budget that we must maintain. As the summer went on and design went on, we brought on the construction firm, Consigli. They start to work with the design team and they work towards what's called design development. So they start to refine the drawings for construction more and more thoroughly. And as they do that, they have more details to be able to go out and get further cost estimates. When they went out for those cost estimates, those design development cost estimates, they came in significantly higher than the budget that had been approved in the spring. So we were in a position where I think we were $24.7 million, I mean, a $24.7 million gap to close between what cost estimates were and what our construction budget actually was. So we had to get down to a construction budget of $235 million, $290s all in with architectural fees, engineering fees, soft costs, so on and so forth. So the MSPA requires that districts go through what's called the value engineering process no matter what budget situation you're in. So you need to work with your design team and your owner's project manager to look at where you can reduce cost in the project from materials choices or just different, different ways you can go by HVAC or electrical plumbing, whatever it might be. So we had to do that anyway, so fortunately we were preparing for that when we learned about this gap. So over the course of, which I guess would be late October, November and into December, the committee worked with the project team to get what ended up becoming a very exhausted list of value engineering options to bring the project back into line. There was some very small things we did, changing certain fakes and finishes that saved us $5,000, and there were very large things we did like reduce the number of proposed geothermal wells from 330 down to 130, which I think saved nearly $5 or $7 million as part of that 24-plus. Did you? Reducing the number of geothermal wells let's say about $6 million on the project budget. So the committee did vote, and some of these were not hard decisions to be honest. They're materials choices that maybe have the same durability and longevity, just not the same aesthetic quality or vice versa, whatever they might be, but not hard programmatic choices. And some of the choices were hard, making the decisions about the HVAC system and the geothermal wells was a challenging decision. There was sort of a choice between maintaining the turf fields or maintaining the connection to the Minuteman bikeway and the pedestrian ramp and stair that would have been on the east side of the building and ultimately the committee decided to stay, to keep the turf fields in versus the bikeway ramp and the stair on the ramp in the east side of the building. So ultimately the committee got the project back into budget at its last, at the end of, by the middle to end of December. We are putting some of the things that were cut on an alternates list so that when we actually do start to go out to bid, we'll be able to see whether or not we can still do some of these things. Some of them can't be alternates based on the timing or where they would need to be in the project or just what level of design would need to be performed to have them happen. So we're back on budget. I think a lot of concern in the community expressed about the geothermal wells, the Minuteman bikeway connector, less so the ramp on the east side, but still some concern expressed about that. I will say about the geothermal wells, we're still able to have it be an all electric building so that there'll be no, all heating and cooling will be electric and the cost, the operating cost differential or savings differential between the 330 wells and the 130 wells is not actually all that significant. The 130 wells will be able to heat and cool the two classroom wings. The auditorium in the gym will be able to be heated and cooled by what's called a VRF or a variable refrigerant flow system, which is, I start to stretch how expert I am in these things, but is nearly as efficient as what the geothermal system would have been. So we're not, we haven't actually lost track of being able to have this someday be a net zero building as the grid continues to green over the years. The Minuteman bikeway ramp, it's about six or $700,000. That would have been installed at the end of the project anyways. So whether it be through available project funds that may become available at the end of the project or through various grants that the state makes available for trails in town, I personally have a high degree of confidence that we'll still be able to make that bikeway connection before the project is done. There's more to be seen to make that the case, but I have a high degree of confidence that we'll be able to get that done. We're starting, you'll start to see construction very soon on the site. Construction fences are gonna go up by late February, early March. The first part of the work is a lot of utility relocation or enabling work to make sure that the site is ready for construction. The biggest part of that is a large storm drain that runs from Mass Ave across the green down the back of the property that the construction company needs to move that and get it out of the way of where the new building is going to be. There's also some gas line and electrical line work that needs to happen. So that'll start happening this spring. They'll then actually start drilling the geothermal wells later in the spring and into the summer. They're all gonna be located on what's currently the Pierce Practice Field and some of the Baseball Field. And then after that, probably later into the summer, I think July, they will start actually building the new building on the front of the site. So it'll start to turn on pretty fast there and to flip back the budget for a moment, we may still have hard decisions ahead, right? We have, but we're still only working from cost estimates. We haven't gone out to bid for the actual construction yet. As we start to go out for these bids, we'll get more and more clear pictures of where we stand, not to be pessimistic, but just learned today that the renovations that are gonna happen at the parmetric school so that it can house the monotony preschool temporarily where the high school's under construction came in about 40% over budget. So it's an elevator, so it's specialty work. Most of the cost of that project is installing an elevator in the parmetric school. But obviously seeing that didn't give me warm and fuzzies about how actual bidding would go as we start to move forward. So there's, I would say we've done a lot to maintain the integrity and programmatic integrity of the project, but there is still more to come in this sort of overheated construction work. Thank you, Ted. Yeah. Thank you very much. You're welcome. So the next item is the town manager and deputy town manager have a request for transfers. Do you want to elaborate those? Yeah, sure. So we have a request for two transfers before you tonight. One is in regards to a series of trainings and work that we're trying to do and continue follow up to the Lieutenant Padrini matter in town. I would imagine most of you have heard of the matter and the legitimate concern that's been raised in the community. In the end of 2019 at a select board meeting, I committed to taking a series of steps that can continue to try to respond to the concern in the community and heal within the community. The steps that I'm talking about tonight are we committed to doing a third party bias assessment of the Arlington Police Department, which has actually already been completed and the report is being finalized. That is being paid for out of drug forfeiture funds that are available to the police department. We committed to providing racial equity training to both the select board as well as town staff over the course of the next nine months. It'd be a multi-part training where we're actually normalizing racial equity within town departments and then looking at where we can start to break down institutional racism that exists within town departments. And then finally, we committed to holding a series of community meetings about specifically healing from the Padrini matter and then moving into more broadly how we maintain and rebuild trust between the community and the APD and we're looking to work with a third party facilitator to help us frame up those meetings and actually facilitate those meetings. So the racial equity training will take part over portions of this fiscal year and next fiscal year. So the human resources department's training budget can pay for some portion of the training in this fiscal year and actually the entirety of what will occur next fiscal year within the training budget, but there is a gap of what it can cover this year and what we need to pay, as well as there had been no previously budgeted money for the hiring of a professional facilitator to facilitate the community meetings. So taking all of those things into account and other expenditures that are coming out of the human resources training budget this year, we're asking for a transfer into that budget of $29,671.41 to cover these costs for the remainder of this fiscal year. Questions? Next item. So the next item is in regards to sending tuition at Norfolk County Agricational Vocational School. So from time to time, the way state law works, students are able to access vocational, technical, agricultural programming really anywhere in the state if it's not offered by the vocational district that their city or town is a member of. So we have a student in Arlington who wanted to pursue an agricultural education that Minuteman doesn't offer, so they're accessing it at Norfolk. And that means that we get a bill to pay for that. So as you can see in the memo, we built in language to the Minuteman appropriation that allows us to pay these costs, but normally at the time of town meeting, we don't know about these costs because we don't know the students going there yet. So we now have that bill, we want to pay it. This transfer would go actually into the Minuteman warrant article appropriation that allow us to pay the bill out of that appropriation. Any questions? Comments? So I guess I would anticipate that we accept any motions on either of these two transfers. Second. Second. Any further debate or discussion or questions? We have these gentlemen here. We might as well take advantage of. Okay. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed? Hearing no opposition, it's passed unanimously. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Oh, okay. There are two states in there. There are four states in there. Where? In the back? How many people are here? Peter? Okay. How many? 12. More than 12. In the minute on this 29,000. 15. Thank you very much. We appreciate your time. Excellent presentation. Thank you. This is, I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but this is the part where I'll toss you a notice. Is there anything about anything else happening in the entire town that you want to ask the town manager while it's sitting here? Yeah. Like your own. All right. All right. Yeah. Thank you everybody. Thank you. So, before we go on to the next item, Shelly? So, Shelly came in after we introduced everybody, but I'd like to welcome you to the committee. I'm not Al Tosti on behalf of Al Tosti and everyone else. Welcome to the finance committee. And also, when we were all introducing ourselves before, somebody in the back of the room was quiet, Liz. Liz Diggins, our executive secretary. Thank you very much, administrator. Are there any budgets prepared? Reviewed? Okay. We'll come back to that subject in a minute. So, everybody know what that is? I'm clean. I took my ethics training and I passed the test. So, what I would like to do is remind you, those of you who are new to the committee, and almost everybody else, perhaps, is due to have their ethics training and take the ethics certification exam. It's not really that tough on the internet. And if you go to mass.gov slash ethics, you'll have a range of choices. We know whether you're a municipality, whether you work in municipality, whether you're a volunteer or a staff member, and or if you work for the state or whatever, you just can see that we belong in a municipality and boards and commissions. And then, when you drill down into that, there is a video, which is, if you listen to the entire video, I will admit that it takes a while. However, very fortunately, they put the text for the video right next to the video. So, you can perhaps, in some segments, accelerate your way through by reading the text as opposed to listening to the video. And then, the actual, I don't know, I use the word test, but the qualification section is interactive and you can't get out until you answer the question correctly. So, you have a very high probability of getting through the entire examination and learning something. We're never getting out. We're never getting out. So, at the end, you press a button and they take you to a page where you print something like this out. I'd like to ask that you, if, Liz, do you have any idea how many people have done this or not? Do you? I haven't looked at the clock in a long time. Every two years, yes. I sent it to Al, actually, but I'll give you this copy even. So, I think probably everybody has to do it. And I would strongly encourage you to do it and send the copy to Liz and to Al. It really takes, you can do it in an hour. It's not that difficult. Okay. So, since there are no budgets, how many people will have budgets on Monday? There's a possibility that we'll have a copy. Any others? So, I think since we'll only have the possibility of a couple, it's probably appropriate not to have a meeting on Monday. So, everyone in agreement with that? But I would strongly urge that you take the opportunity to get a start on your budgets. Al is waiting for the budgets. So, I guess then, Liz, you can send an announcement out. One other thing is, you did receive by email two sets of documents. One, a six-month year-to-date expenditure report for the town, and you should have received another six-month expenditure report for the school department. And those will come out on a quarterly basis and take a look at it. You can get an idea of how the town is doing against the 2020 budget. You have to pay a little bit of attention to it because there's actual expenditures and encumbrances and committed funds that may not be actually spent. But you get an idea of where we stand against the fiscal 2020 budget. And when I looked at it, from my, perhaps not so, not a professional accountant, but it looked like the town was not in danger overrunning any of the budget categories, which is a good thing. Any other questions? Yes, John. So when will we meet next, if not Monday? Wednesday. That's the short part. You're gonna, pardon? I'll be doing the calendar. You're done. So next Wednesday is what's the date? It must be the 12th. Okay. Question. Yes. What do you know about the availability of the warrant? It's, I was talking to Sandy this morning. It's in the Selectman's office. Neither Sandy nor Adam have seen it yet. It's not, I mean, they're the, it just hasn't been completed. All the articles are there, but the staff is proofing it and so forth. So I suspect that it will be available Wednesday next week or at least a draft of it will be available Wednesday next week when we meet. Anything else? Motion to adjourn is in order. So moved. Second. We're adjourned. Thank you very much.