 calling the meeting to order at 5.34. But first, pursuant to the governor's orders of suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law, this meeting of the joint capital planning committee is being conducted via remote participation. And I need to call out everybody's name to do a roll call to make sure you can hear me and we can hear you. So I will just go through the names that I can see on the screen. Mandy Joe Haneke. Present. Andrew Steinberg. Present. Kerry Spitzer. Present. Alex Lafave. Present. Tamsen Ellie. Present. And Peter Demling. He can just connect. He's connecting. Audio. Okay, I'm going to add his phone number. Peter, can you hold on? Sorry. He's in the attendees. He's 41323033. Yep, so I've got his phone number added here. So Sean, once I make you host, you'll just have to mute and unmute. I don't know if I'm going to unmute Peter. I'll be honest. Okay, so right now Peter Demling is with us and it looks like he can hear us, but we can't hear him. So we're about to fix that. So the agenda, Sean, maybe you want to put the agenda up on the screen so people just can be reminded of the order of what we're going to do today. Are you seeing that, Kathy? Yep. So the first up is Sean, who's going to give us an update on the Capital Reserve Fund that we set up as those of you who remember as far back as June. The new Capital Reserve Fund and Capital Resources for FY21. And then he will go right from there into a review of the five-year plan. And that he's got that organized and will take time to go back and forth on that. And then we'll get a quick update on where staff is on Capital Inventory, but I'm going to report on a process that we're going to be setting up to talk about what's in the Capital Inventory that'll be along with the Finance Committee and Council and ask you all to send ideas. So that's the order of today's meeting. The bulk of it will be just on item two and three. So Sean, do you want to just take over now with the chart set that everyone should have received? And if you didn't, it's in the packet or it's in your email. And so that is what's about to be shown on the screen. Sure. Can everybody hear me okay? Looks like Thumbs went up on that question. So after each, so the presentation is organized a little bit differently than the agenda, just to flow a little better. And after each item, I'm going to stop. And I figured it makes sense to maybe take questions after each item and talk through each one of those and then move on to the next item. So Kathy, if you see hands go up, just shout out that, you know, if I didn't see it. So as a quick recap, in the spring, we decided to meet sometime around now to review the status of the Capital Reserve, discuss availability of new funding sources, and discuss the five-year plan. A couple bonus items that we have tonight is we're going to talk about schedule and planning and sort of the table for the FY 22 process, and then also talk about the capital inventory, as Kathy mentioned. So on the schedule and planning front, so we're going to start the FY 22 process February. That's where the tentative first meeting is scheduled on the calendar. And the big change we're hoping to make this year, or we're going to make this year, is we want to provide JCPC with a complete packet of information on the front end to really help facilitate the review process and address some of the issues that have popped up in the past. Our focus is to give you a complete packet that includes a few different items than what you've received previously. So a couple of those items. So the first one is the capital inventory, which we'll talk about later. But we want to give you that updated list of our vehicles, our equipment, our buildings on the front end so that you can use that to help gauge the requests that's coming in for that year and the rest of the plan. I think you'll have a better sense of whether the requests are reasonable if you can see, I'll use the schools as an example since I worked there, and I know this isn't true, but if the schools had 10 brand new buses and they're requesting a new bus, you'd be able to dig into that a little bit more. So that capital inventory is one piece we want to give you on the front end of when JCPC begins to meet. The next piece that's asked for every year, but we talked about normalizing the process last year, is giving you an update on the status of all the articles that have been approved in the past. So it makes sense to get an update in terms of what funds are out there so that when you receive requests or you review the requests that come in, you'll know if somebody is asking again, if they're asking for a bus, but there's a bunch of approved bus money, again there isn't, but if there was, you'd be able to dig into that more and ask what's going on. So those two pieces we think are important tools to give you on the front end to really help your review process. And then the last change, which is really the biggest challenge, is presenting you with a five-year plan that's balanced or very close to balanced. In the past, we've given you five-year plans or 10-year plans, but as has been noted often, the requests often outweigh the resources that we have available. So we're going to put into place a new mechanism that I'll talk about in a little bit to help get that plan balanced. And it'll truly be a plan because the financing will match up with the projects that are being requested. And so the last piece that I'll note in terms of schedule and planning that hopefully will address some of the concerns that have been raised in the past is we're moving the CPA process up to the fall. They're actually going to have their first meeting tomorrow night, and they're hoping to have the recommendation from CPA for the projects that we funded for FY 22, hoping to have that recommendation voted on by the end of December. So the positive about that is when JCPC begins its work, they'll already know what projects have been recommended by CPA. And so we won't be in this place like we have been at times in the past where a project may be in both places, requesting funding from both and not knowing who's going to fund the project. You know, there still could be a circumstance where maybe there's funding requests to both places and that would still come up. But we think having the CPA process be its own distinct process in the fall will help facilitate some of JCPC's work as well. So before I go on to the next step, I wanted to see if there are any questions in terms of schedule and planning, anything people want to put out there as we think about the FY 22 process? Are you seeing anything, Kathy? No, I don't see anybody stand up, but are you, I guess the question I would have, are we going to try to begin fairly early in February? Last year we, for a variety reasons, and then it turned out it didn't matter very much because COVID shut us down. We were really at the end of February. And I think allowing a focus just the way you've outlined, our first meeting would look at this macro level of everything and then we would go down. So you would be getting out to us again, some kind of potential schedule then. Yeah, I believe it is the beginning of February. I'll send you, I can send the group some tentative dates. All those are subject to change, but we have sort of mapped out some dates that we think make sense, usually in our normal schedule in the past. So I can send that out to the group so people can react to it and let us know if it works. Okay. Okay. If there are no other questions on this, I will move on to the next section. So update on the Capital Reserve Fund and I'll wrap, roll into this if any other funding sources have become available. So as of today's date, we haven't had to access the Reserve Fund that was set up. We have had a few small to medium-sized capital needs that have arisen this year, but we were able to address those with older articles that had the same scope or, in most cases, COVID-19 cares money because most of the requests that have come in have been COVID-19 related requests, whether it was computers and sort of, you know, work from home type stuff or educate from home type stuff or social distancing work. So there's been a lot of that and all of those needs have been able to be paid for by CARES and or FEMA. So we still have a reserve balance of approximately 706,000. We are monitoring some of the projects that were raised last year as potentially becoming urgent during the year. None of that, we haven't received any again requests from Department Heads to access the reserve, but I did reach out to Department Heads last week just to do a status check and it doesn't appear that there's any changes to the situations for those projects. So we do think that the reserve fund should remain a reserve fund moving forward and not allocate the funds to specific projects and that's primarily because we still have a lot of uncertainty around a few major areas and I know there's always uncertainty, it's not sort of like the normal every year uncertainty. This is sort of big level uncertainty and a few of those areas I'll just note are, you know, local receipts. We're still trying to gauge whether the projections that we included in the budget are going to be on target and UMass, obviously they changed their plans throughout the summer and so we're still, we really need to see September, October and maybe November to get a sense of, you know, what are we expecting for some of these local receipt accounts, you know, hotel, motel, excise and meals, charges and things like that. Mandy, I see you raised your hand. Do you want me to finish the slide or is it an urgent request? You can finish. Okay. So also enterprise funds again, sort of similar to local receipts, we projected a pretty significant drop in service levels but we're still, we need to see more actual data come in for the first few months of FY21 to see if our projections were on target and again UMass has, they changed their plans in terms of how many kids came back and that'll all affect these service levels that we're talking about. And then federal aid packages, we were hoping to have a federal aid package approved by now. There are a couple packages being discussed in Washington and then I believe a new package was thrown out recently that was worse than the other two packages that were being discussed. It doesn't seem like we're much closer to having a federal aid package and that was one of the things we were hoping would be in place that would provide some new funds to municipalities or at least allow us to use our existing CARES money for revenue losses, which is a big thing for municipalities right now. On the expenditure side related to COVID, a lot of the COVID-19 related expenditures we've been able to purchase or, you know, we've got those over the summer in anticipation of students coming back or school starting, but it's really the revenue side where we're still concerned. And then the last big one is the overall FY22 budget and just all these factors rolling together and then add in the state economy and what we're going to see for state aid for FY22 is still a big unknown. So for all those reasons and all of that uncertainty, we think it makes sense to keep the capital funds as a reserve, still have them available to be used when needed, but not earmark them for specific projects at this point. And so there really isn't any action needed by Joint Capital Planning Committee right now. So I see two hands. Mandy than Andy. Thank you. I guess my question relates to keeping it as a reserve. The way you were talking about this third bullet point that involves local receipts, enterprise funds, things like that, that more goes to the non-capital side of the budget, the operating side of the budget. Is there a thinking at this point that if some of that comes in under budget that the suggestion would be to remove even more from the capital reserve and push it over to the operating side and not spend it on capital at all? I would say not at this point, but we do know that we're going to have to kind of look at the complete picture in a month or so when we do the first quarter report and see how things look and just see if we're on track. I wouldn't say that there's no possibility of that if there's some sort of surprise. We are pretty confident that we were conservative in our projections and our projections have taken into account a lot of the dips that we're going to see. But again, the plans of the college universities continue to change and also seeing what happens for the second half of FY 21 is going to drive some of our decision-making. And I'll just on that same note, I'll just raise that we already talked about this in the past, but the funds that are earmarked for capital, if they aren't used for different purposes or used for capital this year, they will roll over for capital next year so they can support capital projects next year as well. So Mandy's hand is still up. Andy, you took your hand down, was that, did you? I was going to ask about, really, it was a planning for FY 22 budget question. And I thought it was premature, so that's why I pulled my hand down for the moment. Well, I have one question. I think I asked you, Sean, when we were getting ready for this meeting, when we met in June, we weren't sure whether the state aid for the roads would come in at the same level that it had in the past. So I think you told me, yes, it has. Is that correct? Yeah, so we did receive essentially what we budgeted for Chapter 90 funds. We budgeted $841,000 and we received $838,000. So we did receive pretty much in line with what we budgeted. So that means the road budget, you know, when we rode up the report with that had had a, we think we're going to get it, the road budget has that extra money and at the road sidewalk budget has it, didn't it? Okay. Yeah. Capital budget. And then the other question I had, it builds on Mandy's question about if the enterprise funds get in trouble because of loss of revenue, would we ever go into it when we were reviewing the enterprise funds in June? At least some of them had very robust reserves of their own. So would you first go to taking money out of the reserves within the enterprise fund before you came over to, and I think we've set it up that this reserve has to be, any spending out of it has to be approved by the council. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. So I think the reserves of the enterprise funds we would always consider in any type of decision like that. I will note you'll get the first quarter, but not the first quarter, you'll get the fourth quarter budget report sometime in the next month or so. And you'll see that in many of the, or in two of the enterprise funds, the reserve balance took a pretty big hit because of the decrease in service levels during the last three or four months of FY 20. So the reserve balances that were once, you know, pretty high, they're still okay, but they're not what you saw last time you looked at it. Okay. Thank you. Does anyone else have any questions till he go to moving on? I don't see any other hands. Okay. So the next section is discussing the five-year plan. So this table is looking at the funding side of the five-year plan, and it's not really a specific plan at this point. It's a one model that we're looking at. And I more just wanted to go over some of the variables that we're thinking about right now that will inform some of the conversations in a FY22 process. So you can see what we have approved. Essentially we're preparing for sort of a slow recovery or a slow return to our normal capital levels. We all want to get back to 10% as quickly as possible. It took a really long time to get to a 10% capital allocation. And then it seems like as soon as we were there, it dropped off a cliff right away. But we also want to be realistic that sort of everything I'm hearing about the economy is that it's going to be a slow, long recovery. So this model, for example, is looking at, there's really two variables that play into that slow recovery. The first one is the new growth estimate. And so how much we have in new growth will affect the overall levy, which will affect the capital, the cash capital allocation. And so our normal, in a normal year, we always use 600,000 for new growth. We dropped that down to 450 for FY21. This model shows it going up a little bit for FY22 and not returning to normal levels until FY23. And then on a similar effect, the percentage that we allocate towards cash capital, we have it returning, it's at 5% for FY21. We have it returning to 8% for FY22. We do feel that because we deferred capital this year or pushed some of the capital off a year, we do need to get back to funding a lot of those projects. And then 9% for FY23 and not back to 10% until FY24. So all those could change where those will be updated frequently as we get more information. But those are sort of the two mechanisms, the new growth estimate and the percentage allocated towards cash capital that affect how much money is available for capital projects. And we'll get more information next month actually on new growth. We'll get some more information on our actual new growth for the year. So that's on the funding side. One other piece on the funding side that I'll just note, we did, again, you'll get this in the fourth quarter report that's going to come out at some point soon. We are going to be returning some funds from the FY20 budget to reserves. And we've been building up our reserves over time specifically, some of those reserves, specifically to support capital projects. And so one of the projects or components of the five-year plan that we're going to be working on is to get more specific around what scenarios we would use reserves to support capital. You know, whether that's supporting the four major building projects or sort of backfilling the cash capital if we have to use some of the cash capital for the four major building projects. But again, just a note that we will be looking more at that piece of it and how to reserve support capital over the coming years. And then on the expenditure side, there's a few themes that I think they've always been there, but we're really going to focus on them for FY22. One is that we really need the plan to factor in the four major building projects. We've sort of held them off to the side some years, some years we factored them in. But I think we're at the point now where we need to include the financing in some way, whether it's the debt for the actual major building projects or the costs, you know, if we don't do those projects, the deferred maintenance costs, we need to include those in the plan so we have a complete picture. And related to those, we need to, you know, really factor in the cost of maintaining those buildings that are slated to be replaced or renovated while they're awaiting approval or while they're awaiting the actual replacement. It's taken a long time to, for those projects to get approved, but it makes sense because there's such large expenditures that it should take a long time. But we do need to maintain the buildings while that process is happening. So that needs to be a focus of this year's plan. We do need to address vehicles and equipment. I know some people have been on the committee for a number of years, we've pushed vehicles and equipment off for at least a couple years now. And we don't want to get, you know, a substantial backlog in vehicles and equipment. So we're going to need to focus on that. And that will include, you know, looking at the entire fleet, like we've talked about, which will be part of that inventory process, looking at the entire fleet and figuring out where we make sure we're sharing vehicles the way we should be across departments and utilizing them effectively. We want to focus on maintaining existing assets and infrastructure that includes roads and sidewalks, but it also just includes, you know, our vehicles, our buildings. Just before we start looking to do new capital projects, we need to really focus on maintaining what we have. And so related to that, a piece of the capital improvement program that you'll see this year is a project waiting list. So some of the projects that are sort of expanding what the town can do are new things. If we don't have funding for them, they may end up on a project waiting list, which will be something we include in the capital improvement program. So it's transparent and everybody can see it, but it wouldn't specifically be on the five-year plan yet, because we wouldn't have, we want to identify funding for everything on that five-year plan. So there'll be a list, which basically has a number of projects that have been deemed worthy or good projects to do when the finances are there. And the committee will be able to, to ACPC will be able to review what's on that list year to year. And so that'll be one of the tools that we're going to have to use to try to get our five-year plan balanced. It's really taken a hard look at the out years of the five-year plan and identifying the projects that are good projects, but they're not maintaining existing assets or infrastructure. They're not essential. And then we might have to put them on this waiting list for the year. So do you want to stop here to ask for questions, Sean? Yeah. Yeah. Any questions? Okay. I'm looking for hands. I have one, but I don't, I'm trying to see if there's any other hands up. Okay. Andy's got his hand up. Andy. So getting back to the question that I was thinking about, I don't know where this fits into the process, but there's a couple of pieces that are out there that we probably need to know about as we develop a five-year plan for ourselves. One is participatory budgeting commission and whether that has any future. And very much related to that is the recent history of trying to encourage citizen requests to JCPC for projects that are generated from the citizen side. And I think that at some point in the process that we probably need to be thinking about both of those issues is to whether they're likely to be continued in the next couple of years as we try and catch up from the devastating effects of what happened with COVID and the fact that we had to cut our capital budget in half for the year that we're in right now. And so I just wanted to put those issues out there because they're all probably capital expenditures have come out of the 10% to whatever extent they are, so they are competing with other needs that this committee identifies to recommend to the town manager. And if I could quickly follow up, that's a really good point about the resident capital request. That's another process that we're looking at because I think everyone at different times in the past has felt that they like the process or they like the idea of a resident capital request, but the process has not always felt that it's super smooth and sometimes maybe a little clunky. So we're also thinking about the flow of the resident capital request and how that works. And I welcome if people have thoughts on this committee or suggestions to send those to me or to the town manager. But that's a good point that you raise and I just want to let you know that we're looking at that as well to see if there's a way we can make that process smoother in future years so that it's satisfying for the resident submitting the request and also the committee. The other hands I see up right now is Alex, your next and then Carrie. So I just have a clarifying question. So on the review of the five-year plan, the first one is to plan for the major building projects. And I guess I feel like JCPC's role relative to the capital projects versus the day-to-day capital needs. What I've heard in the past is that the capital projects are just decisions to be made in the finance committee. So I guess I want to make sure that I understand our role. Is it just making sure that we have the numbers, the correct numbers for finance committee making decisions and that we're putting them in the right years? Like what is our role relative? Like it's bullet one, but what's the expectation of JCPC relative to that? Yeah, that's a great question. And I wish I had a great answer for it. But I think the process I'm hoping that will happen this year is that we're going to present you with a complete capital improvement program. And it'll be a draft because it'll be February, it'll still be very early and things will be changing. But that we will present the JCPC with a complete capital improvement program that includes all those things that I identified earlier, including a balanced five-year plan. And that we're going to, if there's something related to the four major building projects that's going to happen within the next five years, that it's on that balanced five-year plan or at least identifies the, you know, our thoughts for how we're going to finance that. So I think JCPC will certainly see that as part of the, you know, part of their review process. And whether, you know, whether JCPC weighs in on the projects themselves or more, you know, your role is to weigh in on, you know, there's not enough funding for these other projects because too much is being taken up by the new buildings. I'm not sure how that's going to unfold, but it's a good thing for us to think about. Carrie. Thanks for this presentation. I guess I have a question about the federal funding and where that's showing up when we look at, well, first of all, I was wondering if maybe it's just being reflected in the operating or is it showing up in when we go back to the slide with the review of the five-year plan? So when Carrie, when you say federal funding, do you mean like the CARES? CARES, money, yeah, sorry. And just because I know that's not something we can count on and given all the uncertainty right now in the federal government, but is that reflected at all in here or is it not? And just kind of curious about how much we were able to, like the scale of. Yeah, that's a great question. So it wasn't on the, you know, what we presented in the spring because it was sort of still developing at that time. Right now, the CARES Act money can only be used for expenditures through December 30th. So it wouldn't necessarily play into the future five-year plan at this point. I'm hoping that changes, you know, with a federal aid package, something that extends the timeline. But as of right now that the CARES Act monies can only be used for things through the end of this year. And in terms of scope, so we've bought, this question's come up a little bit. So maybe I'll work with a town manager just to maybe put a memo out there that kind of summarizes the major things we've purchased with it because I know a few different people have asked this. But we've purchased a lot of technology to facilitate working from home or devices for students. We have purchased a lot of PP&E for the schools and for the town staff, and that's gloves, masks, some more sophisticated equipment for first responders. There's been a lot of disinfectant or cleaning materials and disinfecting equipment, UV lights, again that's mostly on the first responder front, some high-power things for them. And one of the big allocations, which we don't know how much will be spent yet, and so those other areas I would say, you know, we've spent somewhere between, you know, two and three hundred thousand dollars on the sum of those things. But I'll try to get you exact numbers at some point soon. We did get approval to use two hundred thousand dollars of CARES money for the rental assistance program and to help families that because of COVID-19 had were experiencing financial difficulties. And so we won't know exactly how much of that is spent until we get information back from the housing trust. And there's a few other things. Again, I think probably the best way to do it is for me just to put together sort of a summary of what we spent so far or what we're what we've gear marked to spend so far so people have a better idea. So just a follow-up, like there's a question that you triggered with that was one thing is if we do have this deadline of when we need to have spent it by, are there things that we could purchase? Like PPE is something that we're going to, I know the schools bought a certain amount for a fixed period of time that we were estimating and hopefully we'll be in the building soon and start using it. But I'm wondering if can we pay in advance for things like PPE that we know we might need down the road? Or is it stuff that you really need, it only can you be used to fund stuff that you need through December? Yeah, I think what the rule is you have to have it by December 30th. I think it's likely that there will be some, you know, PPE and cleaning supplies and things like that that extend beyond. You know, the town manager and others have been really reaching out to department heads to find out what they need because we do have this pot of money. We are working with department heads to say, you know, what, you know, anything you can think of that would really help the, you know, the stakeholders that you serve, whether it be students or residents that's COVID related, let us know so we can, you know, we can get approval for it and get it purchased. So we are doing a lot of that outreach. If you have suggestions or if anybody has suggestions, they can always sort of email those in or let, you know, let Mike or Superintendent Morris know or anybody and they can reach out to us. But we are working actively with department heads to figure out what they need, you know, what can they foresee happening and using the carers money for that. I'm a related note, I'll just say that a lot of communities are having difficulty spending all of the monies. The, a lot of money was earmarked for every community in the state. And I think it was maybe July that I saw an update that sort of in total only about 25% of the funds were requested. It might have been a little bit more, but it was, I think, you know, there was a expectation that those monies might be able to be used for revenue replacement at some point. And that just hasn't happened yet. So but we are actively looking for what needs there are related to COVID-19. Well, I know we just voted last night for approving sports and it did come up that some of those sports are going to need equipment in order to play it in the new, to meet the new guidelines. That's great. And then just the one last question is, when do we get to see the the idea of creating this waiting list for projects? Or when do, is that in February that we're going to be able to start reviewing that list? Yeah. So we were sort of weighing the benefits of doing that five-year plan, like the detailed five-year plan now versus gearing up for FY 22. And I think because of all the changes that we've talked about in department heads, spending a lot of their time dealing with COVID-19, you know, on the school side, how much time has gone into it, but also our, you know, our first responders and others. I think it makes more sense to put that energy into the FY 22 plan as we, you know, moving forward. Okay. I see Mandy's hand is up. So yeah, those answers have generated a lot of questions. My hand was originally up to just clarify. So something like the school building project that just got into the process and therefore borrowing for the actual building, if it passes, wouldn't occur in the next five years, that would be more likely to be seen on a waiting list than on the actual five-year plan. I just wanted to get that. Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, so for the four major building projects and planning for those specifically, we're probably going to have to take a longer look than five years. And how that appears in the capital improvement program, I still have to think about, but those are obviously big enough and permanent enough obligations that we're going to have to look out more than just the five years. Something like that wouldn't necessarily be on the waiting list because well, I guess it depends. So it depends how that project is funded. If it's funded from cash capital and we're waiting for that funding, then potentially it could. But really the intent of the waiting list was more for the individual projects, not the building projects, but the department requests that come in each year. Okay. And then the other question that that popped up was in your response to Kerry on the CARES Act and then five-year plans and all. I get concerned when I hear responses that say we're going to put the five-year plan aside and focus on FY22 and make sure that one balances because for the last two years, that's what has happened. And so your response when you said we're going to tell the department heads to focus more on FY22 and getting that ready to go when I thought the whole purpose of meeting now and maybe the next meeting and the meeting after was to try and see a five-year plan that was close to being balanced. So I just wanted to put out there my concern when I heard that the focus is already shifting to FY22 and away from a five-year plan again because it seems that that happened yearly and we can't have it happen any longer in my opinion. Right. No, I understand that and I am excited about this fiscal year because I do think this is the year that we deliver on a lot of those pieces of information that we've promised in the past, whether it be the inventory or the normalizing the status check on old articles. We are going to deliver on that this year for the FY22 process, but I do understand some of these things we keep saying we're going to do it next year. Again, just some of the thinking so you can see that part of it is there again, there's so much uncertainty around some of these funding sources and where we're at right now that we could try to balance the plan, but it would be with all these unknowns that are still out there. And just so you know, we are working on it, it's just the process of getting department heads to spend a lot of time thinking about it, given everything else going on right now, sort of the trade-off that we're thinking about. So I have a few questions. I don't see other hands up. If you can go back up one slide, Sean. So when we're looking at any of the years other than this year, but I look at just FY22, if I take, if we can achieve 8%, and then we subtract out the borrowing, we have 2.8 million, which is a little bit better than one, it's definitely better than 1.4 million, which is what we were looking at, but it is a lot less than people were looking at the year before. So I think, you know, this interaction with when will we have a good sense of can we get to 8 is one question, and then will we really be at 9 by FY23? You know, looking forward, are you going to be able to do some scenarios that suppose we can only get to 7, and then the next year only to 8, you know, then what on the capital side? Because, and then on, even with the schools, the, is it beyond this five-year period, or is it possible, since the Building Committee hasn't met yet, but is it possible we would by start to know more in a defined way what kind of money we're talking about in financing by FY25? You know, so do we have, we know library is coming along, and then is there also school, so this interaction with how much money are we really going to have when, so I'm just wondering if you're thinking that you're going to be able to do, you know, the list with this amount of money, and then if I, it's built on mandates, if I have to scale it back, what, what, what do I scale down, or is that going to be something we have to sit and start to grapple with in February? You know, are you going to give us some, you know, there's only, you're not a staff of 100 people, which can show us lots of different pieces, but that interaction with the what's on the waiting list, what is urgent, and how much money we have, so that's one set of questions, and then I just want to build just on the CARES Act, I think it would be useful to both show what we've spent the money on, but Paul talked about a number of how much do we have available, because I think what we're hearing is it's a use it or lose it situation right now, so it'd be nice to know the pot of money we potentially could spend, how much have we spent so people get a sense of if you have ideas, we really need them, so, but I'll just stay on that question. Yeah, no, that makes sense. Again, the amount of money that was awarded, all the allocations to all the towns are posted online, so I can share that information as to where you can find that, but all the town allocations are posted, and so essentially whatever our allocation is, plus what we spend is sort of where we're at, but we can put that together. Just real quickly, when you're looking at this table, you wouldn't, the borrowing is different than the debt payment, so when you're looking at how much would be available for other projects, you wouldn't subtract the borrowing from cash capital, you would have to see the bottom part of this table that has the expenses and what the debt payment is for that year, so it's a little, it's just a little nuance there. In terms of when we'll know more information, so we'll get some information after the first quarter report, I mean, as we're developing the first quarter report, we'll see what the summer looked like in September. I think it's not going to be a full picture until really the second quarter report when we see October, November, and December, and we have sort of those core months of when schools back and things are, you know, what the, I don't want to say the term, the new normal looks like, that we'll have a really good idea of what our revenues look like and our local receipts look like under this new system of operations. And then we'll, and then we'll continue to have a little bit of uncertainty until we really know what the second quarter or the second semester looks like for the schools. And if it's the same system as the first semester, if it's a different model. But I would say after the second quarter report, we'll have a much better idea as to what resources we might have available for FY 22. And was there a third? Was there another part of that, Kathy? Well, my main was if you have a pretty good sense of FY, if it's firming up, I guess, you know, are, you know, I'm asking this like risk tolerance. So if FY 23 couldn't go to nine, if you could only stay at eight, you know, or will we be seeing some of that in February was my question. And I see Peters also got his hand up because I just, I think it's very helpful to know when we're looking at the, how many vehicles are being requested, how repair for buildings that we might have this much less in the following year. We're only going to know one year at a time. I realize that, but no, I think you're right. I think we can, we'll include our estimates of what the following years look like. And depending on how much unknowns are at the time when we're developing it, we may have to do maybe a range of low and high end. So we can see what resources are available under different economic situations. So yeah, we can definitely do that for February. Okay. So Peter has his hand up. All right. I think my audio is working now. Yeah. Hi, Peter. User error before. So me a culpa. So the thing I've been worried about, well, one of the many things I've been worried about with COVID and the schools since this all began is the FY 22 operational budget. Because we don't still yet know to what possible level of absolute disaster that could be. And unlike roads and sidewalks and some of the other things the town supports, with the schools, if you really knock the services back to the Stone Age and the schools, it takes generations to get those things back, like people leave and they don't come back for generations. So the reason I bring this up in a JCP meeting is that, when I think about disaster avoidance, I'm wondering, are we going to have a four boards meeting this fall? Is that in the offing? And if not, do we have a sense of when we might get a first sense of what the level of funding is going to be operationally for the surface departments, like particularly the schools? Because if it's shockingly low, then one of the emergency solutions to shoring up the operational budget would be to pull from and undo all this good work that you've just presented. I'm capital aside, right? I don't want to go there. Nobody wants to go there. But my instinct and disaster avoidance is to first think about the potential disasters and talk about them, even though I don't want them to happen. So rather than just assume we're all going to have all this capital money to play with in February, I'd rather sort of think about operational emergency stock gaps first. So I don't know if we can talk about that at all. Yeah, I mean, that's sort of what happened for FY21, right? I mean, we had this emergency situation, not a lot of time to think about it, and the major area of the budget that was hit was capital. I do worry that we've deferred enough or pushed off enough in the year that we are going to have to get back to it soon. But to what level, I think you're asking the right question in terms of what FY22 looks like. We do plan, I don't know if it's called a four boards meeting anymore. It may still be. I'm not sure how that works. But we are planning to have that sort of financial indicators presentation where we present what were the financial condition of the town and then sort of talk about what the next year is going to look like. And so, yeah, that process, the way it has happened in the past will continue to happen. Do you have a date for that, Sean, or a rough one? I think we have it for either late October, early November. Again, we've got a draft calendar. I just don't have this specific. It's all tentative dates at this point, but I think it's either late October, early November, somewhere in there. Let me see. Are there any other people? I have to pull the hands back up. Paul Bachman has joined us and he has his hand up. So, yeah, we're putting together some dates. We need to review that with the council president because we have the public forum on the budget that we want, that we need to schedule and what was called the four boards meeting. So we want to do those in the fall, some later in the fall, when we feel like, what are with the information that we have. So the idea on the four boards meeting in the public forum on the budget is to do that before the budget process really gets underway. So I'm not seeing any other hands up, Sean. So one final section. So I'll just do that. So just a quick update on the capital inventory. So we are, the town council was presented with this part of the charter that they're supposed to tell us what requirements they want or what criteria they want in an inventory. And that was referred to the finance committee and the finance committee is working on that now and Kathy can provide an update on that. But I just gave one of the things we talked about was giving this committee just an idea of what we currently have. So you can see some of the things we currently have and then think about if there are other things that you might want to see in a future inventory. And we talked about the inventory might be a two year process where we have sort of a base version for this first year, then if there's things people want added that potentially they're sort of added for the following year. But you can see the criteria it's sort of the traditional stuff you would expect to see for vehicles and equipment, you know, the year was purchased, the department where it's located, the make and model, the mileage we want to get to two years of mileage. Kathy actually raised that and it was a good idea of having two years of mileage. So you can see how much the vehicle was used in the prior year, the condition of the vehicle and then the value. And then on the building and infrastructure side, a list of all our buildings, square foot data, the year was built when it was renovated, the condition as well. And then the values are all insured values because we don't get our, you know, our buildings are appraised every year, sort of for sort of market value. So the values sort of take with a grain of salt, but we can, that's all the information we can provide sort of based on our current data that we collect. Yeah, Kerry's hand is up. Thanks for sharing this. I guess one of the questions I have is, you know, is it possible to potentially draw something like a useful life of something? I'm assuming that the pumper might last less or longer maybe than my mini van or whatever. So I don't know if that's something that's available, not necessarily for everything that you're going to be doing an inventory of, but for the items where that might be readily available, it seems like a useful item. And then the other question I have is, this just looks like a lot of work for whoever's going to be pulling it all together. So I'm going to recognize that it's going to take some staff time and kind of curious about who's going to be responsible for pulling this together. Like the school is going to, I'm assuming, are we counting everything like every Chromebook, is that going to be on here? Or is there a certain threshold of value that we need to pass in order to get on this? Just because I could imagine it being a lot of work to track down everything that was funded. And I'm sorry if this has been answered at the council level, it's the first time I'm learning about it. You know, I just, let me just say something about in a response carry to your useful life. We are being asked at the council level and finance of what in addition, so their remaining useful life was one of the things the charter suggested should be in this. So what I thought would be really useful is not just now, but as people go away from this, to send those ideas to me, and I'm on the finance committee, because the finance committee is going to be saying, you know, what else or what's really important. And we were going to put it through a thought process on how hard would it be to get this information? And how important is it to have it? And also look at how do other towns do their inventories, because we don't want to have the whole staff tied up with creating, you know, populating the inventory. But for this to be useful to us, we want to at least get the ideas on the table. So any and all ideas, if you either now or just send them through, I mean, Andy's on this call too, but just send them through because finance will be collecting the ideas, but then trying to think through, you know, what deserves a priority. And talking back and forth with staff, and is this realistic? Can we even do it? Is it worth doing? So I didn't mean to cut anyone off, but I wanted to make sure I open that up. And if you send it just to me, I'm just going to compile them, you know, and then send them on. So, Andy? Yeah. No, I appreciate Kathy's really done a good job of explaining the process that Finance Committee thought about. But it's good to have this slide up right now, so that you could the one that was up, because you can see what the charter actually says. And Paul asked that the council provide advice as to what to how to respond to that particular provision in the charter. And it was referred to the Finance Committee. The Finance Committee, of course, would make a recommendation back to the council and then the council would discuss and adopt. So what we've talked about is trying to reach out to other committees of which I considered this to be the most important of the committees, though other committees may disagree with me on that until I come to it in a second, because I really think that it is important that we, as a Finance Committee, hear from JCPC about what is desirable. So the process is first to reach out to committees. The other committee we know that has expressed an interest for a long time in inventory items is ECAC, the Energy Climate Action Committee. And when you look down at the vehicle inventory list, you can imagine all sorts of things that they might want to know about about fuel consumption, fuel usage, mileage, and what is available in fuel-efficient vehicles. We want to be very cautious in adding things in the first year because of the point that Kerry raised that this is going to be quite a burden of staff to just do what's already being done and get to an inventory up to date. So as Kathy indicated with the Finance Committee here's back recommendations from committees, we will be working with staff to hear their input on what is really practical to do and ultimately get a recommendation then back to the council for the council discussion so that it can act as provided in that charter section that is quoted there, which is 5.7A of the charter. So if you have any suggestions or comments, all of us would like to hear them. Okay, so now I have Alex's hand and then Mandy. So Andy might have somewhat answered my question and I guess my question is more at a macro level. I know the charter requires us to create this, but what is our goal in creating this? Because what we capture should be a direct correlation to what our goal is, right? So your comment about ECAC is going to have a different goal than JCPC is going to have. And, you know, when we had talked about vehicle and equipment inventory, you know, one is us having a good understanding of when something was purchased to be able to cost out for the future, but then also are we making good use of town vehicles across different areas of government, but this wouldn't necessarily tell me that per se. So I guess my question is, are you looking for comments about this is how this could be a useful document to JCPC and here's what we would need or are you, I guess for me, I don't have enough of a sense of who's driving what this is going to be used for and by whom to know how to make suggestions about what it should contain. Kathy, I'm ready to respond to that a little bit. You know, I had one thought, Alex, but I agree it would be good to have a goal as we're spending staff time generating it. So I had suggested to Sean and he said he was already thinking that I'll stay on vehicles that if we have, we own a lot of vehicles and we see some of them are only being driven a few miles, you know, relative few miles each year. The question that we've had before of could we be sharing them more? Are they sitting in the lot? You know, why do we still have them? Why don't we sell some of them off, you know, pull down the inventory? So on vehicles, both on remaining useful life, but you know, we heard in finance, I'll use DPW as the example that we heard when we got a vehicle list on DPW, they said we were told that when you buy a new truck as a replacement truck, they don't often get, always get rid of the original truck because the new staff that come on can practice on the older truck, you know, so we accumulate vehicles and then, you know, hearing conservation say their truck is falling apart, you know, my mind was like, could one of those trucks be painted a different color and become a conservation, you know, if it's still got some useful life. So I think I'm trying to think of with vehicles, you know, and then on some of the, we've got some buildings in inventory that we're not using at all that we own. So at some point with the building inventory, we were talking about is there a plan for disposition of this? Is this capital that is not being used or could it be used for renovated be used in a different way? So I've been trying to think of which pieces of this. Now that we have facility managers, if we knew, you know, what goes on this list of major highback systems that they've only got a year left on of life, you know, so it's what goes on the list is going to matter as well in terms of how useful it is. I mean, again, to follow up on that, I guess, again, like, right, I'm hearing a goal from you that I would argue this doesn't do anything about, right. And, and, and quite frankly, I think what you're talking about is incredibly complex, right, because how Guilford, you know, let's just talk about order of priority of use of vehicles, right, on a snow day, right, the library is not going to get plowed, nor is the school, you know what I mean, like, because so I mean, again, I think that this idea of an inventory list could spiral wildly out of control with staff time. And so the more I don't know who it is, the more whoever whoever's creating this comes up with why we're creating it, and keeping it a narrow focused goal. And then maybe in future years, you know, if there's an offshoot that JCPC can ask to relative to figuring out vehicle, you know, when we purchase vehicles, or I don't know, like, I just, like, I'm not even sure how to give input, because, like, what I'm hearing you say, that doesn't do at all, you know, we need something different. And, and no, I completely agree. I mean, I think the goal setting on why is going to be important. And I just, I don't want to take up too much time here to myself. So I see Mandy's hand is up on this also. And then Andy's hand is up again. I would just encourage, I think in JCPC, we deal with requests over $5,000. I don't know whether that is a number that is up for discussion. I think it has been a potential discussion item at some point in times of moving that number up to 10,000 or more. I don't know whether it makes sense to align the capital inventory to that number or not, because I understand that if you get to down to 5,000, you might include a whole lot of stuff that adds staff time. So I would encourage the finance committee, if we're talking about this, to think about whether it is, you know, logical to align the number, the dollar amount of on the capital inventory to the dollar amount JCPC deals with or whether those should be potentially different dollar amounts. Because I believe finance will be able to make a recommendation as to the dollar amount, minimum dollar amount that gets included on an inventory. Thank you. Andy. Yeah, so that was very helpful because I think what you really have to do to get back to this is look at section 5.7 of the Charter as a whole and sort of look at subparagraph by subparagraph because it actually fits together in a very logical fashion. The capital inventory is the first part, is the first section A. Section B is the capital improvement program and it establishes in 5.7 B the committee that we're sitting on today during capital planning committee to provide advice to the town manager on what should be in the capital five year capital improvement program. And then the section C as the capital improvement program submitted to the council as a part of the budget process on May 1st of each year. And then it also has the other two subsections that's completed in the public forum in the adoption process at the council level. But it does fit together and so we really need, I think the finance committee recognizes this, that the capital inventory is being created for a purpose of informing the JCPC about recommending a five year capital improvement program to the town manager. And we really need to, as narrowly as we can, focus on that. But we do have other committees I need one that have other motivations and at least we need to hear from them because if they start making separate requests to the town manager for information and it creates a duplicate inventory, that's not going to be helpful either. So it's really a process piece that we're working on developing. But as a finance committee, we are very conscious of a point that has been made several times that this is a very burden, could be a very burdensome process if it is not done carefully in developing what is requested. Any other comments on this? I mean, Alex, just your hand is up, go ahead. It wasn't that everyone has to send their best idea. If you look at the list and conceptual pieces, that's all we're at a gathering right now. But Alex, your hand, I think you were trying to raise your hand. No, I did. Yeah, I did. I just took it down because you acknowledged me. No, I mean, Andy's comment is helpful, right? So if really the point of this inventory is for us, right, JCPC and us being able to come up with a five-year plan around capital, right? And that's a different, and I understand that. And I guess my question, and again, maybe this, I don't have, I don't deal in capital inventory list. That's not something I'm used to seeing. So, you know, when I see the building, right, and I see the example that you gave, I'm not really sure what that tells me in order for me to, it tells me the building's in fair condition. I don't know about the HVAC systems. I don't know about the roof. Like, like, I'm not sure I understand what I'm getting from that to help me with planning, but at the same time, I don't want somebody running around, you know, like, I don't, so again, I'm trying to, I don't want to create a list just to create a list. Like, if we truly want to use it as a tool, what does that tool look like? Yeah. Sure. So, no, that's a good point. I mean, so that list for now actually came from a sort of a bigger facilities report, which had much more detail on every single building. And so, so that was sort of the highlights of that report or summary of that information. You know, I suppose what you could use it for is, you know, if you see, we have a capital plan and, you know, we're spending all the money on buildings that are in good condition and no money on buildings that are in poor condition. Again, that could raise questions that you might just want to dig into deeper to find out why, you know, or what's the thought process behind it. So I could see some, you know, some usefulness there, but I also get your point that some of it, you're not going to get the detail, the granular level of detail to know what's wrong with the building. So. And who defines poor versus good versus fair? This is sort of one of the issues we've had with JCPC in the past, right? Is some groups are like, everything is urgent. And some people are like, it's all fine. We'll figure it out, right? So is there some objective measure? Yeah. So the, it was actually, I never had seen it before, but the, I believe it was a 2015 facility report that was, I believe Ron Bahanowitz had put together. And he had a very detailed scoring system. There were different components and there was a score applied. And it was, you know, I think you've tried really hard to be objective and scoring the buildings. So it would be like the facilities manager would do this and then when it comes to vehicles or Yeah. I think it would be sort of, that's who I think we'd look to at this point. Oh, I think you're. Yes. Thank you. So I think it's important to clarify roles. So it's up to the town manager to present a capital plan to the town council with advice from JCPC. And so I think it's, you know, in order to develop the capital plan, I have to get advice from the town council. And that's, that's going through a process now because we've requested that advice is going to finance committee. They'll provide the information that we need. It's useful to hear the comments from the JCPC, but I don't think the JCPC should spend an inordinate amount of time on what this thing is going to look like. I think our mission at this point in time is to put something together that's going to be relative that seizes the information that's most readily available. So we have some base to start to work from. And that's an enormous task in and of itself. And then I think from there, we say, okay, this isn't very useful. It's just a list. It doesn't give us the information we need. Here's what would be really useful. And then we start to work on that. And so what we've been trying to work on this year is sort of sequencing our workload. So it's not everything is falling on everybody at the same time, which is why we're putting CPA up front, JCPC early in this, in this, you know, late winter, early spring, then operating budget later. And I think that will help all, you know, the library, the school department and the town as we work through all these different processes. Thank you, Paul. Just looking to see if there are any other, I don't think there are any other hands up. So that is, we just, we got through the agenda that was planned for today. We tentatively agreed on the 23rd of September, two weeks from today to come back. And the one issue that Ida identified was one Alex reminded me when we wrote the JCPC report that we were supposed to have a point at which we sat down with the chair of the community preservation act and talk about ways of coordinating. And so there's a question I have is do we want to have the meeting on the 23rd CPA meets tomorrow night? We will have a schedule and they've moved up their time period. So they will have made a lot of their decisions before we start meeting. And so we, but everyone said yes to that date. So that's the one clear agenda item. And then are there other things that people would like to come back to meet? So do we need a meeting? Is there something else that should be on that agenda? Are my two questions? Kerry? I was just thinking it would be great if Sean could share the information on the CARES Act at that meeting if we do come together. Yeah, I mean, whether it's a meeting or just an email or something like that, we can share that information out. Paul, did your hand go back up or did you just not take a hand? Yes, it did. So CPA will not have a full committee. They may not have a chair at that moment in time. They will not have a planning board representative until the planning board votes. Someone, I put them forward to the council and the council reviews and approves. So I don't, I think you're premature at this point. The only thing the CPA committee is going to do is to authorize Anthony, I think, to put out the RFP on that first meeting. It's sort of a perfunctory meeting. They're not going to have a, I don't think they're going to have a substantive meeting. Son, you can weigh in on this. But so I think it's a little bit early to have that meeting. So. So it's possible if that was the only agenda item and that it's not necessary to meet to discuss that. And I also, Mandy, one of the things you remarked on, I had thought by now we would see the more detailed five-year plan that started to address that list we saw in June of delayed from 21, you know, that none of the delayed had been moved into FY 22. But my understanding is it's just too soon to be able to take the very specifics or show us what's on the, in the waiting room. What went below the line, what's above the line? And so it's sort of a question I'm asking the committee, do we want to just cancel that meeting? Get Sean to get a memo out to all of us about the CARES Act, you know, on how much does the town have? How much have we spent? Or do we want to meet? And should it be two weeks from now or should we push it, push the date? Because I don't want to keep a meeting on people's calendars if we don't need to meet. Peter and Mandy both have their hands up. My general preference is to push it out until we have more stuff to talk about, but I'm flexible. Mandy. That's going to be my response too, that it sounds like at least a month before we need to, given what I've heard. Okay. So people can undo that date on their calendar. They can delete it. And then, you know, in terms of, Sean will get us as soon as he can. And when we go through all the scheduling on when the scheduling might happen, this, we picked this time because it worked in the spring toward in May. So if the time in the day is really difficult for people, people should let me know. You know, so Wednesdays at 5.30 we're picked for people who work so they could get there. And I realized that it cuts into the dinner hour. So, and but later would keep us up at night. So in any case, Mandy. I was just going to say my conflict with the later part of Wednesday depends on whether things can get back to meeting in person or not. So I had orchestra rehearsals on Wednesday nights, but they are at least for the fall not meeting and who knows in the spring. So I may not have the conflict that I had in the past, but I won't know until January. Okay. I mean, I don't need to hear anything through this now. So I mean, people can send individuals in when we try to figure out dates. Some of the council committees are starting to re juggle their what day they meet, what time of day they meet, because Zoom makes some things more possible. So I think, I think that's it. Now I do, we have, we do have some public. So we do have a time for public comments. If any of the attendees who are in our public room want to raise their hand and make a comment. And then after that, I don't have anything that was late breaking in the last 48 hours. So we would be adjourned. So I'm just going to wait to see if any hands go up. It doesn't look like it. So I want to thank everybody. And thank you, Sean, for making it relatively easy to look at a five year plan. So we didn't have to stare at a lot of detail to think about it very much. But we look forward to the next steps. I think the meeting is adjourned. If everyone is comfortable with adjourning, is there a consensus? Yes. All right. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Sean. Thank you, Paul. Thank you, Sean. Thank you, Kathy. Meeting is adjourned at whatever time, 649. Thank you.