 the requirement of the Open Meeting Law to have all meetings in a publicly addressable physical location. Further, all members of the public bodies are allowed and encouraged to participate remotely. The order which you can find posted with the 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 is not ensure public participation unless such participation is required or a law. This meeting will feature public comment only in writing by email to tbradleyatown.arlington.ma.us.com. This meeting is convening by Zoom video app as posted on the town's website identifying how the public may join and comment. Please note that the meeting is recorded and that some attendees are participating by video conference. Accordingly, please be aware that other folks may be able to see you and take care not to share your screen share your computer. Anything that you broadcast may be captured by the meeting. Supporting materials that have been provided to members of this body are available on the town's website unless otherwise noted. The public's 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 conclude their remarks, the chair will go down the line of members inviting each to make any comments or questions or motions. Please hold until your name is called. Further, please remember to mute your phone or your computer when you are not speaking and please remember to speak clearly and in a way that helps generate accurate minutes. For any response, please wait until the chair yields the floor to you and states your name before speaking. If members wish to engage in colloquial with other members, please do so through the chair taking care to identify yourself. Finally, each vote taken in this meeting will be conducted by roll call votes. So at this point, I would like to take a roll attendance roll call over to Robster. And so I will please indicate that you're present by saying here or yes or something along those lines. Grant Givian. Here. Shane Blundell. Here. John Ellis. Here. I'm Makaya Healy. Here, it's great to see everyone. Brian Beck. Arif Padaria. Here. Sophie Migliazo. Here. Jonathan Wallace. Here. I'm here. Shailene Crawford Pocrus. Pocrus. Here. Darrell Harmer. I'm here. Annie LaCourth. I'm here. Alan Jones. Here. George Koser. William Keller. Al Tosti. Here. Wanda Nassemento. Here. Christine Dechler. Here. Dean Carmen. Here. And David McKenna. Here. So, excuse me, Tara Bradley. Here. So, all of the members are present and accounted for, except we have no representative from Precinct Seven, George Koser and William Keller, also Bill Keller or not at the meeting. So, I sent out, or I should say Tara sent out an agenda. But before we go into that, I would just, I know I sent a note out on this, but I would like to remind everyone that a dear friend, Brian Rarig, and a tremendous town meeting member and capital planning committee member and land trust member. And I couldn't spend enough time giving you the list of all the things that Brian has done for this town. And I'd like to just take a moment of silence, silence to remember him. Thank you. We have two sort of membership subjects to address. One is, I'd like to invite anyone else on the committee that would like to make comments about this, express special thanks to three members of the committee who recently retired. They may or may not be here tonight. They were certainly invited. And that's John Dice, Mary Margaret Frankelmont and Peter Hauffer. They are all very long-term members of the finance committee and have just provided so much hard, dedicated and diligent work and effort over the years. And certainly have been an inspiration to me and my working on the committee. And I just would like to personally thank them for the work that they've done. And I thought I heard Mary Margaret talking before. Yeah, I'm here. And is either Peter or John here? Okay, well, had we been meeting in person, no, we would have physically dragged Paul here, but this is virtual. So I, Mary Margaret, thank you for everything that you've done. Thank you. It's fantastic. So I don't want to say anything to the committee or if anybody would like to speak, I certainly will. Yes, I do have something to say. Well, please go right ahead. Okay, mostly I just want to talk about how much I appreciated being on this committee and how important it was and how happy I was that I got to work with such great people both on the committee, but also the people whose budgets I worked on. And I want to make sure that these people like Andrea, the librarian and Christine get noticed and all the great things that they have done. And I mean, Andrea is like the best librarian ever. She found ways to deal with getting library books and stuff to people up through the virus. She worked, was very clever and was definitely one of our best librarians. And then Christine O'Journal has been, she is the epitome of what a public health nurse is supposed to be. And she has done so much to provide information and options and get people vaccinated and get the right information to them. So I think kudos to her. And of course her crowning achievement, I think, is the Arlington Youth Counseling Center and making that a going concern. And then I wanted to talk about Joe at Rink and Rec for all the clever, thoughtful things he did to have outlets in places for the little kids to go and to keep people doing things in the summertime. So mostly that's what I wanted to talk about. And also soon, I may be a counsel on aging age and so I'll get to be the beneficiary of all she's done for the counsel on aging too. So mostly I just wanted to say thank you. It's been wonderful, I don't know, 20 years. My son was a little kid and now he's married. My daughter is often away. And they would always say, you have finance committee again? I had to teach my son how to dial. The police should something happen because both kids were kind of young when I went off to do finance committee. So they learned a lot, but I really appreciated this. It's been many years and many people and I think it just shows how good a town this is and how much people wanna work for the town to make it as a great place to live. And that's it. Thank you. Well, Mayor Margaret, thank you. Thank you. I think it's a great testimony to your character and typical of the contribution that you make that here at this evening here, you're spending your time thanking everyone else when we wanna thank you. So. All right, thank you. Did anyone else wanna make a comment? Yeah. Thank you. Okay. Well, thank you, Mayor Margaret. Okay. So moving on. So Annie, are you there? Yes, I am. So would you please assume your normal role if you see someone put their hand up and I haven't noticed it because I'm dealing with a relatively small screen on my computer. Would you just butt right in and announce it? I will definitely do that. Thank you. So first of all, I don't know. Many of you may not have met Tara Bradley yet. Liz Diggins, as you know, resigned last spring and Tara joined us some months ago. She's been doing a great job from my perspective and I think for those of us that have interacted with her, she's got some tremendous computer and information technology skills, very diligent, very helpful. And I just wanted to formally welcome her to the committee and wanna say something there, Tara. Hello, good evening. Sure, hi, everyone. Thanks for some of the interactions that we've had. I got to see a lot of your houses before I actually got to meet you in person. I've been living in Arlington for almost three years now. I'm really excited to be helping the committee and Charlie wanted to let you know that Al has his hand up or he had his hand up. Oh, he just put it down, nevermind. All right, nevermind, but thank you all, yeah. Thank you, Tara. So we have two new members on the committee. Wanda Nascimento from Precinct 18 and Sophie Biglicazzo from, well, I'll say she is the representative of the Adelaide representative of Precinct 8, but it turns out that she thought she was in Precinct 8. I thought she was in Precinct 8, but she's actually in Precinct 10. So she's the Adelaide representative from Precinct 8 for this year. So, stand a warm welcome to both Wanda and into Sophie. Wanda is a financial, I guess, let me say she has a lot of financial expertise. I don't know, Wanda, you wanna give a brief background of your professional and your history as a financial manager and the CFO? Sure, I'm currently the CFO at Bay State Community Services, which is a behavioral health focused non-profit based in Quincy, but it has 17 sites all over. And before that I worked at another public health organization in Boston as the director of finance and also I was a CFO at a charter school in Boston for a while. So it's always been public or non-profit focused, except when I first got out of college I actually worked for Raytheon. So that was a big switch. And I'm originally from Vermont and moved here right out of second year of college. I went to Bentley and I've been in Arlington for 20, 20 years I think, this year probably. And I have a son who graduated college, my daughter was a senior in high school. So until this I was taxi Uber driver, the volleyball and all that stuff. So now I'm thinking next year, what am I gonna do with my time? We hope to solve that problem. Yeah, nice to meet you all. Nice, thank you Wanda, that's very nice. And then Sophie, Sophie is a legal expert by background practice and training. Sophie, do you wanna say a couple of words? And also a town meeting member from some precinct. I am an attorney, although I haven't been practicing the past 10 years as I have young children. So I appreciate Mary Margaret's comment because we will be judging this altogether. I am a town meeting member for precinct eight at the moment and I will be running next in precinct 10 part of that switchover. So I've been on town meeting now for four years I believe and in Arlington verse six, I'm looking forward to adding what I can to the great work that you all do. Thank you. Thank you Sophie. We're all looking forward to working with our new members in, I think the way we've organized the committee assignments, the budget assignments, I think that both Sophie and Wanda will be working with people that have had some long experience with budgeting and town management. So there'll be a little bit of closeup guidance there. Anybody have any questions or comments that you wanted to make so far? Grant, did I see your hand go up a little while ago? Or are you just scratching your head or something? Okay. So as you may all recall last year, we organized these various working groups to focus on some of the, let's call it the internal needs of the finance committee. And as we start off this budget season, I'd like to ask the people that are involved in these various efforts to make a couple of comments on what's been going on recently and what they're looking forward to seeing happen in the year ahead. So, Annie, can we start out with you in the information technology effort? Sure. So we really had sort of three things we were trying to do as a committee, sort of near term, medium term and long term. And the near term, I believe we were successful at, which was getting us up and running electronically, consistently and sort of feels old hat now that we're using Microsoft SharePoint and Teams and Zoom and all the other tools that are available to us as just to manage meetings. We have been, I have been working with the, oh, what's the name of that committee, Charlie? I think? Remote participation. Oh, remote participation committee, just to understand how they are approaching recommendations to the town about the ability to continue to meet remotely or to meet in hybrid. And I believe they have a good plan for setting up spaces that will allow us some flexibility in the future, depending on the state legislatures, allowance for us to meet remotely without violating open meeting law. So I'll have some more updates on that as they progress from near term recommendations to longer term and to actual technical technological implementation. My committee is now focused on sort of what is the data that we wanna be able to track longitudinally and everybody on the committee has an assignment to talk to a few of you about, for the budgets that you review, what's the data that you wish you could look back and say, here's how these measures work the last five years and hope to project forward into the future. So those conversations will happen over this spring and we'll just see whether or not there's some data that we ought to be tracking for ourselves to inform our work and storing somewhere longitudinally. And I don't know, Alan or Daryl for Grant if you wanna add any thoughts to that but that's sort of the next phase. I'll cover it. I guess nobody wants, you did a great job, Annie does. No, I'm not making it. Great, thanks. So before we go to the next subject, let's see. Lillian, are you a member of the town or a member of the public or what you're, you're still on mute somehow, can't hear you. Okay, let me just, we can comment on that later but Tara, by the way, Tara is taking the minutes of the meeting. We assigned that task to her after Peter left. There was a strong consensus among a group of us that there weren't gonna be any volunteers to be recording the secretary. So we expanded Tara's executive secretary position to include taking minutes of the meeting. So, Tara, you should note that Sean Keen is here representing ACMI, thank you. Lillian commented that she's just visiting. Okay, and then Delta is a citizen of the town. So he's also an attendant. Thank you, Lillian. So, Arif, you're on the communication side, would you like to make some comments? Yes, and I would like to show my presentation. May I share that? How does somebody has to give me access or how does that work? One sec, yeah, sure, one second here. Let's see. All right, why don't you give it a try now, Arif? Works, yes, thank you. I can do it. Can you see this? Yes. Yes. Fantastic. So, all right, welcome to a new year. And the communications committee, the working group, unfortunately we lost M squared. So we need M squared is Mary Margaret. My fondness for her gave her that special name. But, and if you are willing to help, we would love to have you, but no pressure at all, Mary Margaret. Okay. Anytime. But we are, Alan, Mikae and me are the other members at this group. And I can send this around so you can have all the details here as well. And certainly your name here. So the two new members, we would love to have you participate, Wanda and Sophie. And I was gonna reach out to you in any case as you will see in the next slide. So let me get to the next slide. The major initiatives we are working on or we will be working on, one is recruiting. We are very happy. It's, we've got Wanda on board, precinct 18. Sophie precinct eight representative. And maybe we have a typo there. That's clear. Member at large, Tara welcome executive secretary. So welcome to all. We still have precinct seven open. My conversation with Charlie over the weekend mentioned, he mentioned to me that he's interviewing a prospective member that falls through then we'll ramp up our efforts. And Charlie, have you been able to close on that one yet? Or- Not yet, not yet. Fair enough. So what do we want to do? We've got some really good action items here. So let's act on it. In the sense that we've got new members. So let's do press releases for the new member announcements, Wanda, Sophie, Tara. And I will ask all three of them to write up a little press release of their own and submit it to us so that we can then do a once over. Maybe it'll help me with less heavy lifting on my end. But you know yourselves guys. So write a little bit and pump it up and we are excited to have you. So of course I will give you guidance and I'll reach out to you all directly as well. And then we also going, so these are just basically I've listed four different types of press releases that we plan on doing. This was in discussion with our leader here, Charlie. So appointing authority. We want to put out another press release which talks about the reappointments on the Arlington Finance Committee, the new ones, the reappointments and the changes, something titled to the extent of reappointing authority makes X number of reappointments, et cetera. All of this is to get us in the forefront, get the town to know about us because I don't think they do. And it's important that they do, especially with what's coming down the pike in terms of various increases and so forth. Another important component is that the FinCom Handbook has been developed by our very team here. Al Tosti, of course, is the leader of that and then others. So once it's ready, please let us know. We'd like to make a PR announcement and make it available for download so that people can have it, understand it, read it, and then perhaps we test it on it. The last part is a joke. But anyway, we should all certainly read it. Just if I can interrupt for one second. Harif, Al is the father and editor of the ATFC Handbook, but Christine and her group are actually developing the Arlington Finance Committee Handbook. There are two handbooks. Oh, sorry, apologies, Christine. You are the leader and we will put you in bold letters out there. So yes, please let me know when it's ready and we'll put it forward, download. I'll come to where it will be in any case. A lot of you guys are working on various reports and please alert us, please alert this group when these reports are available so that we can get that PR out there so that people are aware and can download them and we again, you know, get to acknowledge, they can get to acknowledge the work that we're doing. That brings me to the next topic, the town website. I do need to discuss this with Annie and her group in terms of our website. It's pretty incorrect, needs an update and all the rest. And we would love to have that. We thought about a couple of areas that we should add. One being new sections, one of them is news. In that subarea, we can place PR announcements in addition to of course, putting PR announcements to various other Arlington newsletters, Facebook, et cetera. Another one is reports, another subarea for us to place various reports and so forth. So I'll get together with Annie and her team and figure out how to best work on that one. Finally, yes, I mentioned this already. So Wanda, Sophie, join us if you'd like. Just a little pressure, not too much. But that's it, that's what I have. And thank you, Melissa. Any comments? Anybody have any questions for Arif? I don't have a question, but Arif, I think that probably either you and I or you and Alan Jones could put your heads together. The person we need to talk to about the website is Joan Roman. And I think we just need to go in with a concise set of requests and see what we can do about it. Very good, Alan is in the Venn diagram is an intersection with my group and your group. So Alan, it's all yours, buddy. Thank you, thanks for that. Okay, yeah, of course. Anybody has any questions and wants to reach out? We're all one big happy family, so let us know. Thank you. Thank you, Arif. So Al Tosti is leading an effort on what we call operations research. And this is sort of modeled after the report that Christine and Jonathan and Daryl did last year on the Arlington Police Department with the idea of doing a deep dive in different town activities in town focus group of departments to determine how they work, what the financing implications are, what's good about them, what's not so good about them, et cetera. And so Al, do you wanna give us a little update on the operations research effort, please? Sure. We've met several times. We focused, decided to focus on trash. And so we're putting together and are probably 80 to 90% there, one-page spreadsheet, which tries to bring in all the costs and revenues from one of the major town services, the disposal of trash. So people can see the cost of disposing of trash, the amounts that go up to the North and over center to be burned, the amounts tonnage that goes into recycling or the town sometimes likes to call it its diversion. And does this diversion or recycling, how much money it saves? So we've put together this working with Sandy, Peter Howard has been working with the recycling coordinator. And so we've gone through several iterations myself, Dave McKenna, Dean Carmen, and Brian, who is not here tonight. He's out in the middle of Arizona in the desert, but he'll be back. So anyway, it should be, we're having another meeting next week and I think it's next week. So hopefully that'll all be ready to be added to the finance committee report when it's ready, one page chart and maybe a page of text. I might assign that to Dean. He doesn't know that yet though. So don't tell him. So that's been our deep dive. There's a couple of other things that I'd like to mention. I'm also the liaison to the association of town finance committees. The statewide association's handbook was updated last spring and summer. I believe it's been sent to Sophie and to Wanda. So hopefully you have that already. There'll be a test in two weeks. So please have it memorized. And I've also reviewed the Arlington Handbook and that the people who did that did an excellent job. So I think the two will compliment each other. The Arlington Handbook, I think goes into the website. The statewide handbook only goes to THINCOM members. Not quite sure how we do it but it's for dues paying members. And I'd like to... And so everybody should have a copy of the new handbook. If you don't, please ask Tara about it so she can distribute it out. And one thing I was gonna mention this and Mary Margaret's still online. I just wanted to mention this to her but Mary Margaret, Peter Howard, and John Deist, they probably are on since the 80s. They're three of the longest serving finance committee members on the committee, probably with the exception of Charlie and myself. For many, many years throughout the 90s and into 2000s, the finance committee had a booth at Town Day and we had volunteers. So Dan Dunn provided the canopy to keep us out of the sun. Joe Connors provided the table which my wife and I picked up every Saturday morning and Mary Margaret provided everything else. We'd swing by her house and we'd pick up all the tables and knickknacks and had everything spread out. And then we had Peter was always there for one shift, Charlie was there, John Deist was there, Alan Jones was there. We'd always have a bunch of people so we have at least two people on three shifts. And Mary Margaret was always the one had everything equipped and already for us to go. So I wanna thank for all your work you've done over these last, God, 20, 30 years. And I've always appreciated that your efforts, you and John Deist, dealing with some of the most complex budgets really because you got involved with the enterprise funds. And they were always a little bit of a challenge, actually a big challenge on that. And I wish Peter was here to say all the good work he did on the minutes, that was a great job he did. So Mr. Chairman, there's just a couple of other things I wanted to mention, thank you. Thank you. Thank you, I'll have a question while you're speaking. Do you have any insight as to when the ATFC meeting is gonna be this year? Well, that's a constant issue. We did have the meeting in November. The ATFC for our new members is the Association of Town Finance Committees. It's the statewide group. It works in conjunction with the Mass Municipal Association. It has an annual meeting every October, November, usually an essential part of the state where we'd have any place from 100 to 150 members in attendance, obviously over the last two years that had to be virtual, so that was done. We've got another meeting scheduled in, I believe, excuse me, just a sec. I don't see, here it is. On April 30th, it's scheduled in Oxford, which is a middle part of the state, Worcester County. On April 30th in person. Now, whether that'll actually happen or not, I don't know. I am as long as I'm sure everybody else wants to get back to in-person meetings, but there will be meetings periodically, but that's what we've got scheduled so far. Whether it ends up to be an in-person meeting, I'm not sure. Thank you, Will. It's good information. So, John, you're our delegate to the Capital Planning Committee. Can you give us a little insight of what's going on there and what the outlook is? Certainly, thank you, Charlie. The Capital Planning Committee has been working diligently since September. I'm developing the capital budget for fiscal year 23 and the capital plan for fiscal years 24, 5, 6, and 7. That work is, the bulk of the work is done. The budget and the plan are fairly complete and now the Capital Planning Committee has turned its attention to working on its presentation to the Finance Committee, which I believe has been scheduled for March 7th, our hearings on March 7th. Tara, do I get that date right? It's correct, yes. Okay, great. And that's basically the news. You'll get the full details of the proposed budget and plan on March 7th. Thank you, Jonathan. Christine, on the Policy Committee, can you give us your brief view? By the way, I have looked at that Arlington Finance Committee handbook and I think it's fantastic, so. Oh, great. Sure, so we were tasked with, it's just a two-fold, a two-part endeavor, I think. We were tasked with compiling in one reference all of how we do business, all of our policies, procedures, important laws, statutes, regulations that we have to follow, things that we've just developed over the years or decades and how we go about the budget review process and preparing a report for town meeting. Really all of our historical knowledge, that was what our aim was to put it in one reference. And so we met, I would say, about maybe nine or 10 times since last March, I think. And what we did is we each took various sections and drafted them and then we would get together and we would exchange them and then we'd talk about them and then we would think better about what we did and we would improve it and then we would go off again and revise and write and come back again. And it took a bit of a work, a bit of a job. And recently we've got to the point where we think we're close to being final. I don't think what we have now is the final final product because we were thinking we needed more input from others. And one of the things that we wanted was Al Tosti's input because he's certainly, as he said, worked on the ATFC handbook. And this is supposed to be an adjunct, not a replacement for the ATFC handbook. And Al gave us great feedback and we incorporated his revisions and changes and questions and comments. And at this point we feel like we all want you to look at it and then get back to us with what is, what are we missing or what isn't clear? So we want your feedback. You can see a copy of it in our SharePoint file. And once we have all that, I think we'll get together again and really finalize it. And then we're gonna be working, then we're gonna quickly segue through our next job which is now that we have compiled what it is that we do, we wanna start thinking about what can we change? What should we change? What policies, what procedures have we been doing that could be improved upon? So once the handbook is finalized, we're gonna move on to that next task. Shane, Annie, Al, Jones, have I left anything else? Nope. I just like to emphasize that at this point it's a living document and we really encourage feedback, FAQs, anything that, there's so much oral history and oral tradition in the finance committee. We wouldn't want to try and record all of this. So especially the new and newish members, if there are things that, basically every time you ask a question, we'd like to answer it in this addendum to the finance committee handbook. So please feel free with feedback and recommendations and suggestions. One thing I can't remember, Christine or Al, do we include like as an appendix the sections in the town manager act and the bylaws on the finance committee verbatim? We don't, but that's a good point. We do reference them in the text, but I guess it would be a good idea to have as an appendix them. I think it's always good to actually, have the original texts there and it's not like it's that long. So I don't think we'll be a huge effort. Good suggestion. We'll do that. Okay, thank you, Christine. Any other comments or questions before Christine? So, Dean, you wanna bring us up to date on the budget reporting rationalization? It's a complex word, but the basic thing is the idea that we'd like to see the town give us accurate historical and comparative information in the budget book. Yeah, so there are a few things. Can I share my screen because I'll probably like cut the time to explain it down. You should be able to share. Awesome. Do you see my screen now? Yes. Super duper. Okay, so the first thing we did is it's a discussion with the town about what, I know it sounds silly, but what does actual mean or what is the period that we're measuring actuals? And it appeared that we came across a sort of a disconnect of what I think the finance committee, we always thought the columns were doing versus what they were doing. And in short, this column here, which is the second out year for actuals, prior to this year, it didn't, what the town did was they weren't putting so anything that carried forward. So like, let's say a fiscal 2021 doesn't have carry forwards in it because the year ended on June 30, they did the close and that was that. So any money that's carried forward on this budget hasn't been spent, can't show up here. We haven't had enough time, but they were then taking these numbers, the following year, putting here, which means any money from let's say the FY 2020 budget that was then spent in the carry forward year never showed up in this out column here. And so what they changed to this year is at the out column here, FY 2020 is all of the money that was spent within the budget 2020 period, plus any money that was carried forward into 2021 and spent in the carry forward period, which amazingly enough was what we, I think it's what we always thought was in there. I think there was, along the way I think there was a miscommunication and it kind of got cut to the way they were doing it. So that should be very helpful because one of the things that we've seen or I think it's been frustrating is when these numbers sort of jump all across the board, like you'd have a number, let's say in the first column, there would be 5,000, then the next column be 5,000, then the budget said 10,000. I was like, well, if you only spent 5,000 for two years, why do you need 10? The answer was, well, we carried forward money and you're not seeing the carry forward that we spent in our subsequent year. So that should cure that issue. The second one, and I think it's probably, hopefully it'll be helpful to everyone, is when I was talking to Sandy during the fall, we were talking about the budget process and some of the pain points that committee members have, some of the pain points that department heads have. And the big one I came up to is I sort of explained, the budget, our budget review at its core is a fluctuation analysis, right? Or trend analysis. We look at spending over several years and if we see a change, we ask a question about it. And sometimes we might miss it, sometimes we won't. I mean, there could be some follow-ups, but generally that's how it works, right? Like what's in this budget? What's in line at them? Why did it change from prior year? And I said it'd be very helpful if we had sort of clarity on big fluctuation. So we wouldn't have to keep going back and forth on it. And so on this page here, which is page 13 of the budget book, what Sandy endeavored to do was be very clear on some of the big changes, right? And it looks, it's actually pretty helpful. So for example, he says DPW, an increase of 275.37 due to a new three years, recycling solid waste hauling contract, right? So remember the number 275.37, you hit control-F, you type in solid waste, click forward for a couple of buttons, boom, look at that. You come to the solid waste budget. And when you come to the solid waste budget, you notice that the budget increased by 230.550, right there, and it increased by 249.87. And so it starts to give you that page 13, a pretty good lead as to what's going on in the budget. Now that doesn't mean we're not gonna ask questions of the department head, that doesn't mean we're not gonna do any further research, but it really kind of is a great jumping off point. Likewise, let me show you this here, right? So here they talk about all the money that they receive from ARPA Fundings and how there's some one-time positions. So I'll go right into the middle here. There's a community outreach coordinator under the Diversity Equity Inclusion Division. So again, I hit control-F, I write community outreach. Right now, so the amount here says 54216. I let it fly forward, I'm in the DEI division and there's 54216 over here. And that's pretty helpful, right? Because if when we go through the budget, you start to say, okay, well, as many of you have been on the committee for several years, no. This column on the far left is who held the position before, right? And then this column, there's an FY22 column that shows the amount of money last year. So the question I think normally would be asked by the committee is we have a vacant position, community outreach coordinator, it wasn't funded in FY22, it's now budget for 54216, what is it, right? And that just, it's just a very helpful way to sort of pick off some of those really easy sort of, I'm gonna call them low hanging questions that like everyone's gonna ask right away. And so hopefully when you start digging deep into the budget, if you haven't already, just spend some time on this page, budget book, page five, page 13 on the PDF and understand how they, you know, the big change is that they documented for us. So that's the, those are the first two things we talked about like for the past to get the book in front of you. The third thing that we're talking about in, and hopefully it will lead to some fruit in sort of stopping the madness of all the spreadsheets that we have is I started to talk to Ida Cody, you know, about the budget in the MUNA system. So as you can all guess, you know, one of the core functions of a municipal comptroller is to make sure that the departments don't overspend their budgets. One of the key tools they do, they use is when the budget is passed by town meeting, they put the physical budget, they put the budget actually into the MUNA system and then they could sort of show it, not sort of, but they show it declining balance, right? So if there's a department with a $100,000 budget, they learned $100,000 and then when the actual, let's say they spent $5,000 invoice because then shows a balance remaining of $95,000 and so on and so forth until the full budget is expended. So the question I have is, you know, it looks like MUNA says the capability to just put the budget in now, like before it's even passed, like this functionality to say, you know, budget submitted to the legislative body, any changes made, final budget passed. And by doing that, the question becomes if we have the budget in MUNAS, can we then do reporting on it that would alleviate the need to then have to generate many of the spreadsheets that we have, whether it's, you know, the spreadsheets that Sandy gives to us in our budget book, which are just separately keyed in to Excel, which then Alan Jones has to put into his work in Excel, and how can we really make this more efficient? And so I sent her an email, I did, you know, in mid-January, followed up with her again, and hopefully we'll get going on trying to understand if we, you know, essentially run it in parallel this season, what we could get out of it for the future that would alleviate all the spreadsheet crunching that goes on. So that's what I got. Thank you, Dean, very helpful. Any questions for Dean? I have one. Invariably town meeting, there's a couple of eagle eyes look at the prior year's finance committee report and the current year's finance committee report to see what the differences are. Is this new change, which appears to be useful gonna create erroneous questions at the town meeting? So I thought about that. And if I remember correctly, the finance committee book doesn't put actuals in. The finance committee book simply rolls budgets, budget year's back. And I have to be honest, it's interesting, we, I'm gonna blank, I'm blanking out. The way it got changed too for this year is the same way that Nancy Galkowski, I'm blanking out, I'm gonna say I'm blanking out. Yeah, Galkowski, yeah. It's the way she always delivered it to us. It just somewhere between Nancy and now it got switched that any carried over funds didn't go into that line item. And so we should be in good shape. Good, thank you. Okay, and then we had several meetings of the long range planning committee recently and in the manager's budget book is the latest version of the long range plan. And Christine and Al are on the long range planning committee along with me. Christine and Al, do you wanna make some comments on that or observations? I was wondering, Charlie, just again for people who aren't quite so familiar with it, maybe you could just say what the long range planning committee is, what the product is and how it relates to the budget revenue task force and the revenue task force. Okay, I have to add a few hours on to the agenda. Just a little bit, two minute first. So, okay, that's a good point. So you'll notice in the town manager's budget book there's a page that has a five year projection. And we moved into this five year planning mode around 2005 when we had an override, fairly substantial override. Charlie, I'll share my screen so we can see that when you're talking about it. Yeah, that's a good idea, thank you. So the basic problem that the town was facing prior to 2005 was that because of the difference, basically the town was spending more money than it was taking in under proposition two and a half with the limitation of a two and a half percent tax increase every year at two and a half percent plus new growth. And the result was there was sort of a fiscal crisis that occurred in connection with some of the union contracts especially in the school system where if people were gonna be terminated they had to be notified well in advance of the start of the next school year. And many times the governor's budget or the latest version of state aid wasn't final until probably July or August. They're supposed to be finished by June 30th and the legislature rarely does that. So we added to this mode of issuing pink slips to, I don't know, substantial number of teachers and then other people in the town based on incomplete financial information. So the plan was to in order to meet the deficit to ask the voters to pay a higher amount of money in taxes but to pay more than to just meet the deficit for the current fiscal year to try to meet it for three or four or five years out by having an excess in the tax increase and then putting that into a reserve fund. And that reserve fund is shown here. It's called the override stabilization fund on the bottom of the sheet. So when this number is positive, I mean, when the amount that has been voted in the override is greater than the deficit this override stabilization fund is increased. And then as the expenses start to catch up to the size of the revenue, money is taken out of this override stabilization fund to avoid a deficit. And consequently, you can go on an extended period of time before having an actual deficit. So you see in the first several years in this chart it's balanced at zero. And then in fiscal 25, we have a deficit and then fiscal 26 is a bigger deficit, et cetera. So eventually the town has to come up with either raising taxes to cover this deficit or reducing expenses by a significant amount. So that's what this long range planning group, the long range planning committee discusses the strategies of how to plan the long range budget the long range budget from a top down and a bottoms up viewpoint. And it includes the town manager, the superintendent of schools, representative of the finance committee, the capital planning committee, the board of select men, the assessor and the treasurer and comptroller. I think I might have hit them all but that's roughly the membership. And it usually meets three or four times a year. And then periodically this group plus other people like all the members of the finance committee and other people meet in a larger, well, in virtually it's not, it's a, these are virtual meetings but we used to meet in a larger environment at the town hall and meet with not only that all of these members but also with our legislative delegation to make sure that the receipts coming in from state aid met the expectations. And if they didn't, we would tell them that they didn't and what we expected to have happen or at least if it's not wasn't explicitly sort of telling them it was at least politely strongly requesting. I don't know if that's a good enough description but that's really what happens with the long range planning committee in this five year financial projection. So, so we said that. Well, let me just add that. So this is sort of the mile high view and looking forward, looking a little bit of history and looking forward and where we're living is to implement or is to make sure this is implemented for FY 2023. So even though there'll be some minor adjustments between now and when town meeting and both on the budgets by the time the finance committee report is done our budget should match this column of 50 FY 2023. And this will actually be included as an appendix in the finance committee report. So that's, those are the numbers that tie us to this five year plan. Christine. I'll just add a couple of the issues that were have been discussed at these long range planning committee meetings, one school funding and what to do with the decreased enrollment for new members. We've reached, we had an agreement that to address the, years ago, the booming student enrollment growth in Arlington and the finance committee and the school committee and the town manager. We had agreed on this formula to compensate the schools for enrollment beyond what was expected in return that if the number ever fell, there would be a decrease in that amount. I think no one thought COVID was gonna happen and that we would have a sharp decline in the student population. So that issue was debated, how to handle that. And the other issue was the offer money. And more recently, we realized we had a little bit more offer money coming to us and how to, how should we spend that? And the schools made a very coach and arguments that the offer money should go their way to deal with the COVID impact on the student population. And you can see in the long range plan, there was an agreement to put the 970,000 in the FY23 budget and 600,000 in 24 and 300,000 in 25. What I thought was important was that these are one-time payments and they're not, there's a concern that they would be added to the bottom line budget that would just increase over time. So this just want these funds to be baked into further increases that would skew things. So I personally am happy with how that has been resolved. That's all I have to say. I don't know Al, Joan, Del, Tosti. Well, you mentioned that this $10 million of ARPA funding up in the revenue section is something the government has sort of said with the ARPA funding, some portion of that can be used for replacement of lost revenue, which if you're getting a lot of meals tax and hotel tax are pretty severe, instead of deeply analyzing every city and town or state and country, they just said, here's a general rule. They basically told Arlington, we can realize $10 million of the ARPA money as lost revenue, which means we can use it for pretty much anything we want, which is why it's gone in there up with property taxes and such. Again, one-time money, but it's giving us a little bit of a pad on the eventual deficit. I think the initial assumption was $3 million and it was increased to $10 million. So that was news. And then the other thing we might want to look at quickly is how do we deal with this impending deficit? We're starting to look at scenarios of different possible overrides and we need something in fiscal 24, which means voting for it next April. This scenario is about a 6% increase in property taxes that would probably keep the deficit at bay for three years. 8% that would keep the deficit at bay for four years and about 10% keep the deficit at bay for about five years. I believe, I recall correctly, Charlie challenged the group to say, let's not do anything more than something, increasing the property taxes 10% and make that last five years before the next time we have to go back to the taxpayers. Charlie, if I misquoted you. No, that's pretty close. Yeah. So this last scenario seems to be, within a few dollars, seems to match the goal that we gave them, which would be a 10% increase in taxes, starting fiscal 24 and like going back for five years, like a last for five years, at least five years. And the town has done that before. So there's no reason why we can't do it again because if we wind up going for the three year override plan, we are gonna be essentially increasing taxes at a probably a eight or 9% per year basis, which is gonna, it doubles our taxes in a very short period of time within 10 years. And that's not something that's sustainable. I'd like to just add one thing, if you could flip back to that prior chart, Alan. Alan highlighted on that chart the 970,000, those three slugs of money. And also notice the line where it says special, sorry, where it says growth factor, that growth factor is the negative growth factor associated with the drop in the student population as was previously described, I think by Christine. And it's, while this plan has been mutually worked out between the town manager and the superintendent of schools and their staffs, I would hesitate to say that has been embraced by the school committee. So there may yet be strong discussions about how this plan is going to go forward. And that can have an effect on our budget discussions for this year as well. We'll see what happens as we move forward. And from my personal position, I think that the town budget can go down somewhat as well. The net town revenues are increasing about, I have a hard time seeing the small print, but I think it was around three to three and a quarter percent a year. And I'm quite certain that they can get along, well, it's 3.25, I think further out. They can actually and have gotten along at a lower percentage increase than that. And likewise, I think the school department can get along on a lower percentage than they were as well. But that's a day for us for another day's discussion. And by the way, speaking of the school department, I have invited our superintendent, Dr. Holman, to come and talk to the finance committee on the 9th, let's see. Tara, what day is that? Do you remember? I want to say it's the... It's the 7th. I wanted to say it was the 7th. I'd have to check. Yeah, okay. It's a week from this Wednesday. And I just want to emphasize that it's not meant to be a budget discussion, but this is our new superintendent. Many of you may not have met her. She's extremely competent and very articulate and has a very interesting view of the experiences during COVID and also the general situation around in public schools. And I think it would be good for her to meet with, talk to some of the people on the finance committee and it also would be a good experience for the finance committee to hear her views firsthand. So we'll have an opportunity to hear from her. And this is not to review the budgets. This is sort of a high level strategy discussion. Okay, thank you, Allen and Christine. And then finally, Tara, do you want to make any comments on the SharePoint system and the town email, which I know you've been wrestling with and I saw an email tonight at five o'clock that says that we're not supposed to use all the good work that you did or something to that effect. Charlie, before we move on, can I just say one thing about the- Yeah, go right ahead, Annie. Sorry. I think it's important to just step back a little bit and remember that historically, what makes the five-year plan work is the leadership's agreement about the parameters, that there is a leadership consensus about holding expenses to a certain level, even though there's money in the bank. And that often, particularly when we do an override, there's a set of agreements that are agreed to and advertised to the public in advance. And that's really part of what guides everybody in this decision-making process. And it's part of how we, I don't know, figure out what responsible spending is. I know we've talked all around it in this whole discussion that you guys had, but I think it's worth calling out that those parameters are really important, that once we've made that agreement, sold it to the public, asked an override, we all have to live within those agreements. I think you're absolutely right, Annie. And it reminds me, wasn't there a famous psychologist? I don't think it was Young, maybe Adler. That has this philosophy of delayed gratification, right? As part of a pure individual and can also be part of a mature social structure. And the five-year plan is all about delayed gratification. So you're saying it's like the marshmallow test? For adults. Charlie. Yes. It's Dean. Can I make one comment? Yeah, please. So during the long-range planning process, I don't go to the meetings because I review the school budget and they have all their budget, subcommittee meetings in public. So they talk about what they're gonna talk about it, long-range planning. So it seems kind of dishonest for me to then go. But I have to be honest, having seen sort of both sides of it, like listened quietly, sort of with my camera for long-range planning and gone to the school department. I do wanna say that I think the chair and vice chairs of our committee did an excellent job. Like they did a really good job and they took on the tough challenges and they sort of, they worked through it. And the big one I would say and point out is the school committee knows that a deal's a deal when it comes to enrollment growth. So what goes up and comes down gets adjusted. But the challenge in front of them was like, what type of cut or reduction in student growth do they agree to? And like, I'm fairly certain that no member of a school committee has ever gotten reelected after proposing cutting a budget, right? And so their position kind of ends up being like silence in a way. Even though they know what's inevitable, right? They're kind of silent on any reduction. And I thought that the chair and the vice chairs did a very good job of sort of steering the discussion to saying, okay, these are the mechanics. These are how the numbers work. It's going down. If it comes up, we'll do this. And they kind of got to that point where, or they got us to that point where we had consensus, we had agreement and the finance committee did in the end or its leadership in the end, what our job is, right? Our job sometimes is unelected or appointed people who present a budget to the full-time meeting is to facilitate those really hard discussions among elected members who really like, it's tough for them to get there, right? Cause that's not what you run for. And so like I said, I think having seen it from both sides, I think Charlie, Alan, Alan and Christine did an excellent job. Thank you, Dean. Thank you. Well, I think the manager and the superintendent also grabbed the bull by the horn, so to speak. So they did a good job as well. Okay, Tara, did you want to make any comments on where we are with this point from an operational viewpoint and email and so forth? Well, thank you to Alan Jones for all the work you put into that and anyone else who helped with the system. One note is just a reminder for anyone sending emails if you are sending an email and you're using your personal email just to make sure that you copy your town email address. And then another note is we had thought that we were going to be able to use a distribution list that's kind of housed within Microsoft, but it seems that we may not be able to do that until the town fully moves over to Microsoft and off of the Mailer Demon system. So that's just kind of the update there. And that's kind of it on that, unfortunately. All right, well, thank you, Tara. I saw your email today. I'm gonna try to catch up with you to discuss that a little bit more, the discussion that you had with Syed. And I'm not in agreement with his position, obviously, but we'll see what we can do about that. I'm not gonna admit this very frustrating. This is the first time I've worked on a Microsoft 365 system where I didn't have super admin powers. So having to go back to Tara and say, I'm sorry, I can't do that is very frustrating. Yeah. Okay, so we're, I think we don't have minutes for approval tonight, but we will have the last meeting's minutes for approval at the Wednesday night meeting. And so if we drop those off the agenda, we're just about five minutes behind where we plan to be. So last spring or maybe early summer, John Ellis wrote me an email suggesting that we could possibly increase our efficiency and knowledge in doing various departmental meetings by having a general budget review of the budgets before we go into our departmental meeting sessions, okay? And so I sent this thought out to you a couple of days ago with an email along with a sort of a policy or a little protocol statement developed by Christine and Arif and Annie on how we might approach this. And so I strongly encourage you to read that and think about it, but basically what the intention here is to get us all familiar with what's going on and not but not necessarily to abrogate any responsibilities to dig into the details of the budget, interview the department managers carefully and come back with detailed subject matter expertise in each of the departments to present to the finance committee. So with that preface, I'd like to try to start that whole period and that whole cycle. So, and what I would like to see here is that the senior person in each of these budget sections that's working on the, when I say senior, I mean persons that is most involved in the particular budgets, lead our discussion and brief review of the budget tonight without having yet spoken with the department managers. And then the finance committee, if anybody wants to bring up any questions or whatever or has comments to make about those budgets for that finance committee member, this is the time to do it. So maybe, Alan, I was noticing that you are really facile with the town manager's budget book and Adobe Acrobat. So maybe you could be the screen driver as we cycle through the various budgets. And I think what we'll wind up doing here is probably the budgets one to three are Dave McKenna and Sophie. So I think if you could get those budgets up there and David, if you could bring us through those budgets with a couple of words on each one and people can ask questions and if there are none, we'll just move on to the next set of budgets. How does that sound? And you don't have to worry about the screen because Alan Jones is going to manage it. Okay. So Alan, can you put up budget one? You're on mute. Go ahead, David. Okay, the first budget we have is our own budget, the finance committee and basically it's the salaries. Does anybody have any questions about that? Okay, hearing none, we can move on to the next budget. Again, one of the issues on the select board that I think everybody should know is included in a separate section in their budget in years past has been the cost of the town elections. That was under control of the Board of Selectment. This year, it has now been transferred over to the clerk's office, the entire budget. And it's in, let's say it's a work in progress as we speak. But that election budget, if you're looking for it, it's now in the budget we booked on page 60. But it comes under the clerk is one of the responsibilities of the clerk rather than the select board. Does anybody have any questions on that? Who made that decision? As far as I know, I find these things out by sometimes by accident. And apparently there has been a discussion for quite some time and it started back to the prior clerk as to why the election budget itself was under the Board of Selectment. And if you do the history on it, you find out that many years ago when the Board of Selectment, I think you just went silent on us, David. So, and as the history went on, the day just kept it there. But in the last recent years, it seemed, wait a minute, we have one section hiring the people that work in the polls, but on election day, the clerk is responsible for the election. So it became, and what added to the mix was actually early voting. Early voting is what caused the big change. And I guess we all know it is still in flux. Okay, so that's why we have it. That's why it's on page 60, but it comes under the clerk's responsibility just like the Board of Registrar does as well. Okay, that's budget two, right? Budget three. We have some questions, Charlie. Oh, I'm sorry. Makaya, Christine, so Makaya first. I think John Makaya and then Christine, maybe. John, sorry. Unfortunately, I can't see all of the boxes at the same time when I'm looking at the screen. John, go right ahead. The things I would be interested to know more about, Dave, are related to the salaries and particularly job descriptions. I think there's maybe gonna be some staff turnover. Some of the job titles are kind of, I don't know, dated clerk typists. And as the town integrates with more IT kinds of responsibilities for all of the staff, will these job descriptions change and will that have a budget implications? So I'm just interested in staffing and how those job descriptions might change and what the plans are around that. That would be something I would be interested to know. Are you asking both for the clerks as well as the select board? Yeah, yeah. Okay. The thing you have up right now, the select board. Okay. Presently in the select board, there are two people working in the office. There is one on a sick leave. That being the executive director. And what they're doing presently is because of the virus, only one person works in the office. They alternate day by day. That was an order put out by the select board themselves as they only wanted one of their staff working in the office. So like I was saying earlier, everything's in flux and a lot of it has to do with the virus. So... David, I think what, I'm not trying to put words in his mouth, but I think what John was saying is that, and maybe you can coordinate this a little bit with Makaya, but you have a board administrator, you have an office manager and you have an administrative assistant. What are the job descriptions? How do they differ? And then the principal clerk and typist, and you know, is that still an operating, you know, useful definition? We don't need to answer that tonight, but I think that's what he was trying to draw your attention. Well, actually that would come under the personnel. That's what I say. If you can coordinate that with Makaya, I'm sure she can sort through that. Yeah, if we could find out the job descriptions, but I could check with the board itself. They might have written job descriptions right there in their office. Yeah. So I will check on that. Makaya. Excellent, thank you. This is Makaya. I will be happy to follow up with the HR director about that as well. Just get it. But my question, you connected the issue about cost of the town elections with the fact that the budget got moved from select board to the clerk's office. So I'm curious about why you made that connection about cost. Is there a benefit to moving it to the clerk's office? Well, again, I was, excuse me, I was mentioning that some of this is in, it's a work in progress. The clerk is looking at the possibility of how many employees do they really need to have in an election based upon what type of election it is. That's one thing. The other thing is, it's the coordination of the election people that work. Presently we have 21 precents. We don't have 21 locations. So they wanna find out whether, if they can save some money by combining precents that has been discussed with the board of selectmen. That's still, I think, I think they decided to keep what they have now. However, there might be a possibility that they're gonna close a precent, not the precent, but just move the precent itself to a location where you'd have three precents located in one location. So that's, like I say, it's all in flux. As far as saving money, in my view, and I could be wrong, I don't think they're gonna save a lot of money under the present way they're doing it. And the unknown factor is early elections. It takes a lot of personnel to run the early elections. And it's up to the state how many days it's gonna run. Last time it was eight for the primary, 10 for the regular election. The time before that it was 14. So that's still in flux. So the money, the dollar value is also in flux as far as what you're gonna pay your workers. In number two, don't forget the state of Massachusetts their minimum wage, it went up again this year as of January 4th. First, the $14.25 is gonna go up next year to $15 an hour. So that's also in flux too. So do I have a direct answer to your question? No, but it is in flux. And I will be asking these questions to the town clerk when we meet with her. Thank you, David. Christine. The left board expenses advertising, I'm just curious as to why the bump in the advertising expense, that's all. Likewise, Christine, that's a question I wanted to ask us. When I looked at that budget, that got my attention real quick. I wanna know what the situation there is. So I'll be asking that question. Sophie. So I'll be working on these with David. So I don't really have a question as much as a comment for everyone since it came up with John's comments earlier. In looking at all of these that everybody's working on, I calculated that there are about nine including police and fire 25 vacancies in town in the personnel. So I'm really interested in everybody's budget. As far as included of figuring out sort of is this all COVID related? Are they actively seeking people for these 25 positions? Are the salaries appropriate? That are in the budget as far as minimum wage or everything, everybody's getting bumps and hay these days with inflation, et cetera. So are these really, their numbers are advertising to work across the board for all the vacancies in town? Great, I think that's something that we should be looking at a good point. Al Tosti. I just had two observations. One is if we're shifting a major responsibility away from the board of select ones office, we shouldn't perhaps need as much administrative help there because they're no longer hiring people. They're no longer supervising. So my guess is we might see an increase requested in the Cork's office to supervise all this. I'd like to make sure that there's an equivalent reduction in the select's office to compensate. So that's one observation. The second is, and we probably can't do this yet, we can save a ton of money if we want just a vote by mail. And just eliminate all the precincts with maybe the exception of the town hall, but that's for future discussion. Thank you. Thank you, Al. I can't see all the boxes here. Does anybody else have a question? If I could just comment on Al's comment. Go ahead, David. According to my knowledge, it's the state that determines by virtue of how many voters you have or how many citizens you have registered voters, how many precincts you're going to have. So if someone would want to put it down to, you could have one location, but in that location, you might have to have multiple precincts. So if one were to change that, you'd have to get the legislature to modify that, that law. Thanks for having me, David. Any other questions on the select board budget? I can't see any hands. That's his hand up. Oh, John? Sorry, yeah, am I unmuted? Okay, so I just wanted to say that sort of what I was hoping to do by this process that we're doing is to unearth questions that might come up when we actually discuss the budget rather than discuss the budgets twice. So I'm hoping that we can just kind of brainstorm, get the questions out to avoid the scenario where we're halfway through a budget and somebody has a really good question. And then we have to table discussion about that or we vote on it in 16 to zero, but we say, well, we're really concerned about this question. So as we go through these, Charlie, and I don't want to step on your toes, I'm just sort of phrasing what I had envisioned that, let's just throw it all the questions, let's not discuss it so that the people who are when they're talking to the budget heads can ask the good questions. And then when the time comes to really, you know, to chew on this stuff, we'll have that feedback. So that was my only comment. Thank you, John. So David, let's move on to budget three. Anybody have any questions or comments on the town managers budget? Charlie? Yes. This is Wanda. Wanda. I just want to follow on what John kind of said, because I went over this during the snowstorm, I read all the budgets and got very odd, but I made notes on all of them. And I wondered if there's a mechanism to just send in the questions that the people doing the investigation can take with them or not as well, because I don't want to monopolize all the time. If you have an easy way to do that, I suggest send it to the tower. She'll get the information out. So any questions on the town managers budget? That you want David and Sophie to focus on? All right. So moving on to the next step. So Alan, Tasti? I just noticed the big change in the other benefits. And that specifically deals with the town managers salary and the town manager salary is always a point of discussion or often a point of discussion. So I'd like to get a breakdown of exactly what's happening. I'm sure they can do that. Yep. Okay. The next budget is personnel in the reclass budget for? It's Charlie. Yes. It's Wanda again. Am I supposed to put up my hand or can I just? Well, there's a, yeah, there's also a little thing. If you look on the zoom under, under reaction. Oh, we can. Okay. I had a general question about when you're looking at the salary lines where it says book under FY2022 budget book and then FY2023 it says new pay. Like if I wanted to see how much, what percentage of person's salary went up? Am I comparing the budget book to the total at the end? Or I was a little confused. So like the director of human resources, it looks like maybe 5%. And then I had a question about the longevity steps. Most of the time they look like, you know, rounded off numbers 600, 500. But then sometimes there's very large numbers there. So I didn't know how that, maybe that's on the other document you mentioned about. So here's, I would see, see this. Let's just take Karen, Karen Boyer, the director of human resources. So last year, FY2022, she had, she had this 128906, okay? And that base pay stays the same this year, but she gets it a longevity increase of 6450. Now, she's in the M schedule, right? Am I, have I got that right? Yeah. Yeah, management. So in the M schedule, well, let me say in general, and somebody else, if somebody has better knowledge than I do in this, please feel free to speak up. But in general, there are two, there are three ways that person's salary can be increased. And that is there can be a cost of living increase or some sort of increase in the base based on a percentage, okay? Secondly, in a lot of job classifications, which you can find in the pay scale in the back of the manager's book and the schedule there, there are what's called steps. And based on how long you're in the position, your salary can increase by certain steps. And then the last is longevity. And that's another, that's more than, let's put it this way, in many of the union negotiations, in a specific union and specific job position, there are a certain number of steps. It could be five or six or seven, depending upon which case we're talking about. And those steps are pretty well-defined. But in addition to that, if somebody works for the town in Makaya, you may know this exactly, but for some of the years, like five years, 10 years, 15 years, they get a longevity increase, which is another increase. So you can have a situation where there's no change in the base, but there is a change due to moving through the steps. And then there could be another change, another increase associated with longevity. I don't know if that was clear enough. Jolly, if I could just add to that. With longevity, depending upon what classification you have, you can either have a percentage longevity. And what I mean by that is for every five years of service, your longevity can go from 1% for five, 2% to 10, 10, 3% for 15 years, all the way up to 30 years. And it can go all the way up to 6%. There are other people in the management, some of the management that have flat rate. It's a flat rate every year. And that flat rate never changes. Only the percentage change. On the school side, it's a flat rate. On the town side, they give you an example of the pace of fire by percentage. I think administration is by percentage. I think like public works is a flat rate, just to give you an example. Good, okay. Thank you. Okay, so we're in the human resources, Micaiah. General, I just wanted to note real quickly. One, Christian and I both had an idea. We have to explain this in the handbook. But the other thing while we're here, just wanted to point out before someone asked the offsets, this is sort of gray building of work that's done in this department that's being built to water and sewer, or some other thing, in this case, water and sewer. And it's not done on an individual level. It's done on a department level. Thank you. Micaiah, do you want to answer any, is there any questions from Micaiah on the human resources budget or the paying classification scale? Micaiah, did you want to add anything to this question about the rate of raises or the types of raises that people can get? I don't think I could do any better than what you and Dave did. That was perfect. I'll explain it more clearly when it's my time. When we get to your budget. Okay, thank you. Okay, the next budget is number, let's see, it would be five. And that's finances, five to nine. Al? Okay. So any questions for Al on the IT budget? You flip over to the expenses. I have my hand raised. Oh, go ahead, John. These are obvious questions, but I'll just say them. What the unit of software is, we're budgeting $100,000 more than we're spending. Network maintenance is doubling why. And then I'm unclear about what telephone expenses are in the scope of the IT budget. So you don't need to answer those now, but when we do get into that budget, I'm wondering about the last line, the units line, the doubling of the network maintenance and wondering what telephone expenses really actually means. Thanks. Thank you, John. I think in Jean's description earlier on of why people ask questions, one of them is, what is this? And I was hoping that when Ida was redoing some of the chart of accounts, maybe some of the descriptions will change. But thank you for those two questions. Any other questions for Al on the IT section? I've got a question, Charlie. Yes. So I see that we still have a line for informants maintenance, which implies that we have still not dug out from under our legacy software. And I'm wondering if we could make sure to ask for an update. Yeah, I'll follow up on that. That's good. Okay, I'm sorry, Annie. Which wine item are you looking at? I am looking at line item 52.94. Informants maintenance. And there's both a working out, getting rid of that old software. And whether or not there's any incoming cost on it's replacement, which I believe is another immunus module. And then whether or not that implies any changes in personnel, job descriptions, job responsibilities, anything like that. Allen Jones. My question, same question as last year, the transition to Microsoft 365, there were license fees and there's a lot of labor going to transition. So I'd like to hear something about the expenses involved in switching to 365. Okay, which wine item are you looking at? I don't know. I have no idea. I just know the town is transitioning to Microsoft 365 and I don't, I'm trying to find those expenses. So I guess that's my question. Where are they? Yeah. Wanda. I just wanted to add if it wasn't already stated, the software maintenance line. Three, is it five? Three, oh five. Yeah. Yeah, John mentioned that. John Ellis mentioned that. Okay. Anyone else have any questions on IT? Because I can't see all the boxes. Okay, let's go to the budget six, Comptroller, aha. Hard to complain about that budget going down. So I'm going to ask the obvious question. It's on a Comptroller budget. Pardon me, John? There was telephone, what is telephone expenses? Now it's, it went down to $27,000. That was shifted to IT some years ago. Okay, well, 2020 they spent $27,000 on it. So, yes. Yeah, but that was before which was changed to IT. Okay. Any other questions on the Comptroller's budget? Okay. Next budget. Oh, I had one. Sorry, go ahead. Just the out of state travel. I wondered is that conferences that we don't go to anymore or something? You can check on that out. Well, I'm sorry. What is the question? Out of state travel, 5210. Okay. But what's the question? Why do we need it? Where are they going? I wanna go out of state. I don't get to go anywhere. Next budget. Treasure collector. I have a question on this budget, Al. Okay. I think I would like to investigate why we have all these people. We have remote payment now and a better munis system and automatic. It's been highly automated for the last bunch of years. We spent a lot of money on it. Better cash management system, et cetera. And the employee count in that department never goes down. Good question. I remember there was a finance committee who was working with me on this budget years ago. And he was always screaming about how many people were in this department. And then he got elected treasurer and he stopped screaming. But it doesn't mean that we shouldn't be looking at the body count there. I think you might want to think about that terminology, Charlie. Sorry, personnel count. Yeah. Headcount. So that might encompass like the bill printing line, 5258. Well, what I'm really curious. Still print bills? Yeah. Well, that's part of it. Yeah. Also, a lot of people in the office that I think maybe doing things that should be automated. Maybe they are automated, people are still there. My question on this budget is also related to the bill printing. And I don't remember postage as being a separate budget, but it seems to be now. So, as we spoke about last year, I've been an Arlington taxpayer since 1999. I've gotten four tax bills a year and thrown every single one of them out, wasting the town, I don't know, a couple hundred dollars. And that's because I have a mortgage. Most property owners have a mortgage and our mortgage companies pay our tax bills for us. So it just goes right to the recycling. So I'm interested in learning more about the Phyllis's getting people to do online payments. I signed up for it, it works well. They don't send me a bill anymore. I had a bunch of conversations with her in the fall about promoting a little more. So I'm wondering when we could start to see some savings from both bill printing and sending out mailers that really are probably unnecessary for most people and how we can do better marketing to let taxpayers know they have this opportunity to get less mail. That would be my question for this budget. Okay. Any other questions on the treasurer's budget? Okay, wanna move on, Ellen, to, I don't know, postage. Any questions on postage? John Ellis just asked this question a minute ago on an aspect of it. Okay, let's move on. Next one is assessors. Okay. So Alan, I have a question on this budget, but it's actually not directly related to the budget, but there is a, there are a number of, I don't know if it's yearly, but there are nonetheless warrant articles that are passed from time to time with large sums of money in it associated with the physical inventory of real estate parcels. In the, I think this physical inventory is not necessarily taken all in one year and maybe spread out over several years, but it's always useful to find out how much there is leftover in that warrant article. That's one of the warrant articles that can carry funds forward. You know, I do have a question on this one too, if I can jump in. Go ahead, John. The assessor also does the business equipment assessment, is that right? Yes. So Verizon or whoever owns our polls has started to put kind of expensive equipment on the top polls. It looks like it might be for 5G, I'm not sure. I have one on Teal Street. And I'm wondering whether the assessor is capturing the cost of this new business equipment that is being added to the property and somebody's, it should be, it's taxable, I would think. So I just want to see if it's being tracked. Okay, any other questions on the assessor's budget? Okay, moving on, what's the next one? Just a minute. John, I'm trying to write all this down. What was the business equipment on the polls? Who was doing that? I assume it's the telephone company, Verizon, and it looks like 5G equipment. I could send you a picture. I don't know what it is, but they're putting expensive things on the top, the telephone polls and business equipment for something. Chris, we've got three cable companies in town, so I suppose it could be any of them. I'll send you a photo offline separately. Okay. Okay, the next budget I think is legal, and that's budget 10, David. Does anybody have any questions on the legal budget? Okay, let's move on. Town clerk, questions on the town clerk's budget. So I think one question I have is, what's happening to these people that are moved out of the select board budget and are now in the town clerk's budget? Okay. I definitely will ask that question with the town clerk. I know she's, it's another work in progress, Charlie. I know that, to what extent, I'm not sure. And why is the big jump in electronic voting equipment? I don't know. Yeah, I'm not asking for the answer, I'm just saying that's a question. Okay. Yeah, I really wanna scrutinize the town clerk's budget because there's been a lot of changes from last year to this year that I just need an explanation so I can explain it to you folks. That's why I keep on saying it's a work in progress. Yes, Christine. Charlie, I would like to report about what modernization efforts the town clerk has done since we last spoke to her last year, I think it was when we approved a request for over the $30,000 to a part of the consultants and we prodded her that we wanted her to be looking into modernizing that office. So I'd like to get a report on what's been done so far. Got that, David? Yes. Okay. Good. Thank you, Christine. Allen Jones. Regarding elections, I'd just like to ask what conversations they've had with the election modernization committee and I think it's coming out of that. Allen, I'll ask that question. I know one of the leaders of that group no longer lives in the town moved away. That person was also the assistant town moderator. Yeah, so I'll just leave that question for you to answer later. Yeah. You can ask them about it. Okay. Any other questions on the town clerk's budget? Okay, the next one is, sorry? Oh, nevermind, I'll talk to you later. Okay. The next budget is board of registrars. That's still the elections, right? No, but board of registrars is the budget they've always come under the clerk. It is a one full-time employee then that the board of registrars are appointed and there's three of them and they meet during the elections. They verify the elections. Okay. Any questions on the registrars? Technically the town clerk is the board of registrar. That's what I thought, yeah. But there is, she receives a stipend and the three board of registrars receive a stipend but they do have a full-time employee in that office. It used to be two, now it's one. Any other questions on that budget? Okay, so the next one is, are we on 13 parking? That's Al Tostin. I had a question. We should find out who is the parking clerk right now, Al. Okay. If it's a treasure or not. And my question was that I see at least three different people that I recognize is giving me parking tickets but there's only one staff member and if the people who are actually making parking tickets are not under this budget then why aren't they under this budget and what's their rationale for? They're in the police department's budget I think. Yeah, they're police department. Is that, okay. I guess this could be a conversation for later but it would seem to me that if they're parking expenses they should be in a parking budget but maybe there's differences. Take my hand down. Any other questions on parking? Okay. So 14 is again, David. Okay, planning and community development. Does anybody have any questions about that they wanna? I have one is why is the offset going up so much? Okay. I miss you. Yeah, and also I thought last year we had a couple of temporary positions in that department that we're gonna go away at some point. Am I misremembering that? I don't know if it was last year or the year before but you're right, Charlie. There was some positions that were supposed to be only part time and gone away. Yeah. I don't know if it was last year or the year before. We should check to try to reconcile that. And I received some communications from some citizens that in a recent board, a zoning board working group meeting that was apparently being led by the director of planning community development. People were asking about the cost of some housing increases in facilities or whatever and the impact on the educational budget. And apparently the director of planning and community development told them that this could not be discussed because it was illegal. I intend to pursue this with the town manager and town council but you might check on that as well. Was that with the zoning or was that with the redevelopment board? It was the ZBWG that I think it's called the Zoning Board Working Group or something to that effect. Okay, I'll check on it, I've never heard of that board. In any event, it's something I think, I mean, you know, we're pressuring people to try to control costs. Right. And if there are people in the town that are telling people that they can't discuss the cost of a town project, it's sort of counterintuitive to me. I'm only guessing, I don't know. I'll investigate for you. Thank you. Any other questions on the board? Yep, quick one for me. Yes. I wonder if the economic development coordinator position has maybe any good news that might lead to more revenue for the town and whether there have been any successes in this fiscal year that might increase assessments? Good question. Okay, any other questions on redevelopment board? Okay, the next one is 15, what is that? Oh, it's sort of the redevelopment board is the same group of people. So we can go, oh yeah, zoning board of appeals, Annie. Anybody got any questions about the zoning board of appeals? Big increase. I, isn't that, that's my budget. Is that your budget? Yeah, that's your budget, yeah. Yeah, I'm sorry, Annie, I was looking at your hand being raised. Oh, sorry. No, no, I didn't have my hand raised. Although there's only, this budget comes under the building inspector, why I don't know, but it does. And it's, there is, I looked at that and said, but there's a large increase. I have a suspicion, and I'm only guessing, that that's part-time position with the full-time position, but I'm not sure. It's another example of another work in progress, if you may, cause there's been a changing of the God up in the building inspector. You know, David, you should contact Christian Klein. I think he's the chairman. Sorry. Yes, but we- I actually spoke to Christian recently on another topic and he mentioned this, and he said they were very, it's related to all the work that is now almost, and this is my understanding, but everything that was related to the logger property or all the really large matters that the building board was dealing with, that was taking a lot of time. And so this was put in place to help with that. So I think we will definitely dig more, but it was based on that. It's based on the past year's worth of increased work because of the big projects in front of them. Charlie, we normally, I've never met with the zoning board people who I've met with and who Peter had met with previously was the building commissioner because they set the zoning board of appeals budget. And the last time Peter spoke to the chairman of the zoning, he didn't even know he had a budget. So, but it has to do with the salary of the note taker and the process and the process in the last couple of years has exploded and it's, I think it's now gonna be a full-time position. Okay, well, just dig into it and I think Christian Klein is the guy that's sort of behind this. Yes, he's, I believe he's the chairman of the zoning. I think so, yeah. But I always met with the building inspector on this budget issue because they were the ones that changed it from, they took a building inspector, part time of that duty responsibility is transferred over to the zoning for duties in the zoning. So it's like I say, Okay, well, just dig into it. When we get to discuss the budget, we can get into more detail. What's the next budget? Alan? Facilities, okay. I think that's, that's Christine, right? Christine under there. Yep, yep. Any questions on the facilities? I have one. How come we can't keep a facilities director? That's a very good question. I wonder if that's two directors ago. Oh God, it's vacant again. Yeah. So we've had four so far since the deposition was created. We've had four. One of them is just Intel manager. Is the facilities director or directly to the manager? I believe so. Yes, he does. Yeah. Any other questions on facilities? Okay, let's move on. Public works. Okay, we can spend a month on this one, but any questions on public works? Natural research. Okay. I would really like to understand what's going on with particularly food waste diversion and what the plan is for that. Because I know it affects our costs. Obviously we want to know what's going on with the recycling budget. And I would love to know whether or not it is on either the town manager's radar or the director of public works radar to reconsider the possibility of a pay-as-you-throw trash collection program. So, Annie, I would just to comment here. I think that would be a good question to ask Altosie to follow up on in this operations research business that he's doing. But I don't think that it's the role of a finance committee to push a department manager on making a policy decision that's probably got to be made at the board of selectments at level. So, I think it's a good issue to consider in our operations research, but I'm not sure it's good to undertake in a budget discussion with the department head. All right. Can I request that since we're looking at trash collection for operations research, that that operations research include an analysis of the financial implications of pay-as-you-throw trash collection? You just asked. So, it's a good offline negotiation between you and Alice to what he wants to include in that research, but yes. All right. Good question. Okay. Any other questions on either the waste? I think what I'd like to see, Christine, is to dig into the cost of field maintenance and how they're handling that and also what's going on with tree replacement, the efficacy and the cost of it. And I think we lost a lot of trees along Mass Avenue because of underground methane or something. I don't remember the details, but I come across these holes in the ground with the grates on them that there's no tree in. And I assume that those trees have died. And we should sort of understand what's going on there. Anybody else have questions on DPW? I, in line with what Charlie just said, it'd be interesting to know if we're being reimbursed for the cost of putting in those new trees by the gas company. I'm not sure which gas company it is, but we lost a ton of trees there and has the gas company fixed those areas so we don't lose more trees. Okay. Let me suggest that DPW is a huge budget. So feel free notes to Christine offline if you have other detailed questions. What's the next one after public works? Police. Okay. That's Darrell and John. Yeah. So let me just start with a couple of questions that I know we're going to ask. One is the personnel side looks pretty static. On the expense side, it looks like there's a lot of moving around, but we'll ask obviously, but I'm guessing that's more bookkeeping than moving stuff around between different accounts. On the personnel side, I think one of the major issues is there's 10 vacancies in the department. That's about twice what I've seen over the five or six years or whatever it is I've been doing on budgets. So there's some questions there about why the high number and what's the, what are their expectations about being able to fill them? I think eight of them are patrolmen. And then of course, then there's the other question. John, I'll anticipate your question about where things stand with the whole body camera issue that came up last year. So those are the two or three questions I have on the list. So if anybody has others. If I can only make one comment in a polite way, I think it's that nowadays, I think we have patrol officers as opposed to patrolmen. I think they call them patrol, place patrols, sorry. Yeah, I get educated on this at home all the time, you know. Darrell, my question would be about the 518 court time, which goes from $1,000 to $37,000, $142, seems an extremely precise amount. And wondering what's happening that all of a sudden there's a lot more court time or expanse or what the story of that is. Other bit to run away, yeah. Any other questions on police? Okay, let's go to fire. John, are you gonna do a fire? Yeah, I mean, I just, does anybody have any questions? I mean, things are pretty static, pretty level funded, both on some slight increases on salary or probably contractual on the expense side, everything is level funded. So the overtime budget's gone down, right? Yes. And what's the status on vacancies? There are still, they're showing, I believe it's one, two, three, four, five, six vacancies. And I don't recall whether that's, how that compares to last year's number of vacancies, but as you point out, there's a slight decrease in overtime. So perhaps there are fewer vacancies. In praise of the fire department, I will notice that they did three, five rescues last week in one day. Pretty impressive. Yes, they did. What's the next budget in 17, 18, 19? Is that schools? Oh, inspections. What kind of inspections is that? That huge? No, that's majority, Carol. So there's not a whole lot going on in this budget. They have a new director, Mike Burns, Mike Burns left. So I do want to talk to the new director about whatever plans they might have. It was also the issue last year where we suggested that perhaps adding some staff might help them generate some additional revenue. And if you remember, we asked them to give us some specific metrics on how adding that person would help them increase revenues and they were never able to do it. Right. And then I'm noticing this year, they actually have one, two, three, they have three vacancies, including an inspector. So I'd be interested to find out how how they're going to keep up to keep up or even increase permit revenues and inspection revenues like that if they're running understaffed. Looks like that's the... Go ahead. Sophie, was that you? Yes. And so I have a quick question or something that I've noticed is or one question is how much could they update their systems to help them with the paperwork be more modernized? I noticed that for like violations or where they issue daily fines, whether it's sidewalks or violations, the bylaws or whatnot, they still do it all by hand and on slips that they have to fill out or daily slips that they have to fill out for each individual violation. So I'm just curious whether somebody is possible to modernize that system? I did a site visit down there when I took over the agency and I didn't want to get too negative. I was surprised by the amount of paper-based record keeping they still have. And as far as I know, they haven't done anything to digitize their records and I'm guessing they have to move it out of the Public Works building because of the rebuild. I would guess that they haven't done anything, but I will ask. Can you also, Daryl, can you see if you can get some sort of statistical report on the number of violations and complaints they've had versus the number of follow-up investigations or fines or whatever the appropriate sanctions are for violations? I mean, I've seen a number of citizen complaints that, you know, buildings being built in more more expansively than the building permits and things like that and bylaws that aren't being enforced. We should get some sort of a reading on that. Yeah, okay. Any other questions on inspections? Sophie, oh no, okay, no. Okay, libraries, so Andy, this is your president. Any questions on the libraries? John Ellis. Yeah, I had a question. Fox Library was closed for the entirety of fiscal year 2021 and I wondered if that led to any staff savings or heating savings or any kind of savings because it was totally closed for the entire fiscal year. We'll make a note of that. Anyone else? Well, I mean, one thing to pursue is what activities are all these people doing during the pandemic? I mean, how many, what was the library attendance? Were there jobs switched around? What was the impact and how? I mean, there was, during the pandemic, I think those long periods of time where the library wasn't providing services. I'm not sure. Actually, I think they actually delivered books if you wanted them. Really? Okay. Yeah. Maybe I'm wrong. It'd be interesting to see, but they've been open and they've been, it'd be interesting to hear. Yeah, I mean, I'll ask Charlie, but I don't believe that they were like closed closed for that long. Okay. They did a lot, she did a lot of programs like the grab and go thing. So she did a lot of, had a lot of ways to make it so people could access books from the library. I mean, I don't think it was full staffing. Okay. Okay, I'll get, I'll get a positive report, Mary Margaret. I'll get, you know, something that I'll, I mean, I'm sure there's a good story to tell there. Yes. I like it. I'm sure, I'm sure there is. She's always thinking of ways to make things happen. I'm sure there is. I think you may find that based on my personal experience, they actually probably did more work when they were closed because they were hampered in the area and they actually, when you reserve a book, they have to put it out ahead of time and label it. It's, they actually probably do more work now, but we'll see. They also have an electronic lending methodology, Charlie. So, you know, they are lending. Yes, I know, I know. We get, I get a lot of those books at home here that way. I just, just ask that it would be a good thing to understand. Absolutely. So we're in health and human services. I noticed that it's, it's 10 minutes to 10. So, let me just, did I send everybody, I sent out a schedule of, this was only earlier this afternoon, a draft schedule of hearings for budgets. And my thought here was this year, as opposed to saying on a Tuesday, on a Monday night, well, who's going to have budgets next week? And then on Wednesday, you say, well, how many budgets have we got? I've actually had the temerity to make a schedule and say, have your budgets done by this day. Okay. And that's in that draft spreadsheet. So I would appreciate it if people would look at that and see what's unreasonable or whether we can meet that schedule. We have to overlay on that, the warrant article hearings, which are going to be worth coming as soon as we get a draft of the, of the town warrant. I'm hoping that that's going to be by the 7th of February. Charlie, did, oh, sorry. Charlie, did you say you send that out today? Yes. Oh, this afternoon. It was around four o'clock. I did not get it either. I didn't get it. No, I did not. I did not get it either, Charlie. Did you try to? It must be, maybe I use the, maybe I use that automatic thing that we're not allowed to use. Cause that's the process. You can send it to me and I'll send it to everyone. All right. I will do that immediately after this meeting. I apologize for that. I'm glad somebody said something because I was in blissful ignorance. So in any event, heads up, David, I put you first on that schedule because you have always traditionally been the earliest. I don't know if that's reasonable or not, but. So we can certainly discuss that schedule next on Wednesday night, okay. Also on Wednesday night, the town manager and deputy town manager, director of finance will be coming to give us their annual perspective. And then on the following Wednesday night, which would be the ninth, I think, seventh, I think. Let me look. Does anybody know? And Wednesday, Monday's the seventh. Yes, okay. So February night, on February night, the superintendent of schools and Mike Mason are gonna come before us. And I mentioned what the, yeah, that's Wednesday night. So, and we can also on Monday night, after the manager is finished, we can pick up on starting with health and human services on a brief review of these budgets. Let me ask you a question. Has anybody have any comments on whether this has been a helpful process or not? I'm looking forward to it when they get to me. That way it's less questions I have to ask. So. I think it's helpful. Yeah, Charlie, I think we can actually measure that to see how many budgets are tabled due to unanswered questions. That's true, we'll have a good metric. Okay. Charlie, are we meeting Wednesday? Yes, Wednesday, this Wednesday, yes. You have an agenda. The town manager's gonna be here. Okay, I'm sorry. Pardon me? You're not giving us Groundhog Day off. No, unfortunately not. But didn't everybody get the agenda today and for Wednesday? I definitely got today's and I got the meeting invite for Wednesday. So I assume the agenda is somewhere. I thought they were both sent out on the same email. Yeah, they were. But I don't think it's got the big schedule you were talking about the schedule. No, I know the other schedule is separate and I'll get to take care of that tonight. So, okay, I think in the theory of the Mary Rohn in practice of longstanding, a motion to adjourn is in order. So moved. I'll move. Second. Okay, the meeting is adjourned. Thank you very much, everybody.