 At this time, we will call our public forum on the town budget to order. Welcome to those of you that are here in the audience and to those of you at home. I'm Lynn Griezmer and it is my distinct pleasure to have been chosen by my constituents in district two to represent them on the council and by my colleagues on the council as president of the first Amherst town council. I am joined this evening by members of the town council, including manager Joe Hannity who is vice president and Andy Steinberg who is chair of the finance committee. On my left, your right is town manager Paul Bockeman, town clerk Margaret Nardowitz and interim finance director Sonja Ulrich. There are several other town people in and around helping us tonight. Thank you for being here. We are all here to listen to the public's thoughts about the FY20 budget. Prefacing that, there will be a presentation about the town's present priorities, revenue and expenditures, history and forecasts, potential capital projects and the budget process and timeline. This will be followed by an equal amount of time for public comment. There are handouts for this evening's presentation available out in the hallway and I just want to draw attention to the fact that we are meeting the requirements of the charter by having this forum tonight and one of the most important pieces of the charter is the definition of what it means to have a public forum. And the phrase public forum shall mean a meeting during which more than one half of the meeting time on the agenda is devoted to public comment. With that, I'll turn it over to Paul Bockeman. Hello? Okay. Thank you, Lynn. So this is new to us. We've never done one of these before and as Lynn said, this is a requirement of the charter. So welcome to breaking new ground. And like all things with the charter, it's the first time we're doing it and we're going to learn from this and see how we can do it better next year. One of the key characteristics as Lynn said of the public forum is the definition which shall mean that one half of the time is devoted to listening to you, the public. To my mind, the requirement to have this forum is to ensure that decision makers, the town manager, the town council are available to listen to the concerns and opinions of the public. Their concerns. It's really an opportunity for us to hear directly from you before budget decisions are made. It's not the only way, but it's one of the ways. In prior years, the fiscal budget process would begin with staff preparing a financial indicators presentation, which is typically given in the fall. This report provides a financial report on the town's finances, trends over the past 10 years, how the town stacks up against other communities, things like that. This will still happen, then the select board and the finance committee would take this information, meet and discuss and ultimately approve budget guidelines. While the select board and finance committee did this last year, this will be done by the town council from now on. This will be an important way for the council to establish the priorities it wants to see in the budget. The charter now requires a new step, this step. This year and into the future after the financial indicators report and budget guidance from the town council, but before budget decisions are made, there will be an opportunity for the public to express its opinion on budget priorities. Again, before decisions are made and before the budget is presented. It is important to note that this is not a budget presentation. It's not a budget presentation precisely because the decisions are not to be made until we hear from you. There will be a budget presentation in May. That's when details about the budget will be presented, but that will come later. That's the process. Now let's talk about the FY20 budget priorities. These are the broad categories that we will be focused on during the budget development. So every counselor, pretty much every single one, has talked to me about the condition of our roads and how we need to invest to maintain our roads in acceptable condition. This goes for sidewalks too. We also have needs for new roads to be paved and new sidewalks to be built. Last year, the town devoted nearly $1 million to road work. Previous years, the town had contributed about $300,000. This goes along with about $850,000 that we get from the state and under a program called Chapter 90. How did we increase this amount by so much? We prioritized it and didn't do many of the things our departments wanted and needed. That doesn't mean these things that the departments asked for aren't still needed. They are. But they have just been moved back on the capital plan. And we're doing the same thing in as much the same way this year. We're saying no to many requests from departments because we want to make another large investment in roads. The second point is that has been evident in sustainability. And you all know, as you all know, one of the first actions of the new town council was to establish an energy and climate action committee. With the formation of this committee, the council stated clearly and unequivocally that taking action to mitigate and prepare for climate change was to be at the forefront of our operations as a town. We have pivoted as a community to embracing sustainable architecture, operations, and working to inculcate a sustainable mindset into everything we do. It doesn't happen overnight, but it's where we need to be going. The next set of priorities includes reasonable, sustainable development. The council has talked about the importance of the master plan. It's important because development addresses the need for additional housing in the town, and along with why is economic development contributes to our tax base. But where development happens and what it looks like are large questions that need to be addressed. And I use age-friendly, which shows up on the screen to not be a euphemism for old people, not that I have anything against old people because I'm one of them, but to talk about the need for good sidewalks that can be used by everyone, runners, walkers, strollers like, for developing parks and playgrounds and providing activities for youth and maintaining and expanding services and opportunities for seniors and the youth. Those are our big areas of focus. Then of course, we have our urgent need to address the needs of our buildings. Over the years, the town has generally built about one building every decade or so, often to replace an outdated facility. However, the last time the town really built a new building was in 1990, nearly 30 years ago when the police station was built. We have been remiss. We have not been responsible to our future generations, and we need to get started on this work. I think there's no argument that there is a crying need for a new fire station, new public works building, and of course, a new school. And I believe in this community, a renovated library is in keeping with the values our community holds. The question is, how can we afford it all? We will be developing numerous scenarios over the next several months. This will be a highly engaging process with the public. We will soon have an interactive tool available online, a sophisticated spreadsheet that anyone can use to prioritize the four major projects, move them around on a timeline, increase or decrease the spending, and adjust any assumptions. Not everyone is going to get everything they want. There are going to have to be changes, adjusting expectations, figuring out what's affordable compared to our needs. This is one of the highest priorities of the town council, and the council will be working on this over the next months. While we have not set a schedule, I anticipate that there will be a full blown community engagement process coming up. Are we going to be able to afford these projects? While we have a big need, we have a key advantages as we grapple with the funding. First, we have been working for years to build up our reserves. You can see our reserves have increased to about $12 million. This year would have been higher, except that we took $2 million. We basically borrowed $2 million from FreeCash to offset the funds that we use for the health insurance trust. That money has since been paid back. We, the employees, and the employers have since paid that. And so next year, FreeCash will be higher. Second, we've been elbowing out room in our budget to devote more funds to capital. From this bar chart, you can see two things happening. You can see the contribution to our capital projects, which is the gray line going up. And you can see the debt service, which is the amount that we pay back for the money that we borrowed going down over time. So this goes out to 2024. So that's a good trend for us. And third, at the same time, you can see that our, oh. And fourth, we have a strong bond rating, which will keep borrowing costs low. The bond rating is like your FICO score. The better your bond rating, the lower interest you have to pay on your loans. We work hard to have an excellent bond rating, and we do. So let's go to the budget where we look to be going in the near future. First, I want to note that municipal finances during stable times are pretty static. Our three main sources of revenue, property taxes, state aid, and local receipts tend to move and sync with the economy. If people are buying more and newer cars, then there's more excise tax coming into the town. If people are building additions to their homes and there's new development, there are more tax revenues through property tax coming into the town. And on the expenditure side of the budget, a large percentage of our budget doesn't change from year to year. We continue to carry out the duties that are required in running a town. Continue to offer many of the same programs and services, unless there's a proposal to add or subtract something. But overall, we provide police protection, fire protection, snow removal, public works, all the basics of municipal government. So this is one of our working spreadsheets. You should, there was one out there in the front of the building when you walked in. I know the type is teeny tiny, but it's available online. And this is, we're using this just for illustration purposes only. This document is presented to the town at the financial indicators presentation in October. We are continuing to use the October spreadsheet for now because that is the one people are familiar with. We will be updating this particular spreadsheet and we'll present it to the finance community in the next couple of weeks. Another important note is that this is the general fund only. It does not include enterprise funds. It is also important to note that this is a working projection and it changes constantly as we get more information. So with any budget, there are two sections, revenues and expenditures. So we always start with our revenues. Revenues and expenditures. So we start with the revenues. So revenues have four major categories. We have property tax, which is the biggest followed by local receipts and state aid. And then another category. Sometimes a pie chart helps because you can visualize the various revenue categories and that breaks them down into the four different categories and you see that property tax is the largest slice of that pie. The next slide is for our general fund revenue from each of the major categories. The thing to notice on this slide is that the only real increase from year to year is from property taxes. That includes the increase in property taxes allowed under proposition two and a half plus new growth, which I'll touch on next. New growth includes any increase in values, like I said earlier, like a new porch or dormer plus all new buildings. We typically project this to bring in about $600,000 per year. That spike in FFY-17 was due to a revaluing of property that is owned by Eversource and provided the town with a larger increase that year. Back to our projection seat. We now focus on the expenditure side of the budget. We've looked at the revenue and now we're gonna look at the expenditures. And this also has four categories. It has operating budgets, it has capital budgets, it has fixed and miscellaneous costs like retirement and other post-employment benefits, and it has unappropriated uses, like state assessments, overlay, other assessments. And here's our pie chart that shows the relative budget categories of the town, elementary schools, regional school district plus the other categories. So next I wanna give you a snapshot on where we are in FFY-19 and what we're looking at in FFY-20. For FFY-19, that's this fiscal year, which ends June 30th. We're in good shape. This is the year where we transitioned from a self-insured health plan to a fully insured health plan. There's, for next year, there are certain things that we already know. We know our retirement assessment from the Hampshire County Retirement System and we know that debt service we'll have to pay for loans we borrowed in the past. These are obligations we are required to devote funds to. But back to health insurance for a second, because this was the biggest financial challenge we faced last year. Our health insurance has stabilized due to the work we did last fiscal year. Stability came at a price, however. The good thing is we moved all of our employees from a self-insured plan with all the volatility that that included to a fully funded plan, fully insured. This move gave us stability from last year to this year and with a terrific 0.6%, that's 0.6, less than 1% increase for FY20. This is good for the employees and for the employers, which include the town of Amherst, including the elementary schools and library, the regional school district, and the town of Pelham. This is very good news for next fiscal year. But it came at a cost. The employees, and I commend the leadership of our bargaining units and retirees for being intimately involved with this decision, gave up some choices, choice of plans, took on additional plan costs, and for the first time we introduced deductibles. I thank them for taking that leader important step. Without making this move, the conversation tonight would be entirely different. The issue of health insurance isn't fixed. It never is until there's a national plan to address health insurance costs. We are stabilized. We are all together in one group with two options in that group. And we have been aggressive about instituting wellness programs for our employees. Health employees are good for themselves and their families and good for both of our budgets. So we talked about what we know, what we don't know, and we talked about some of the assumptions that we were working on as we build our budget. We aren't expecting much from state aid. We would like the state to give more local aid to towns like Amherst and funds for road work. And at the same time, we would like to see fewer mandates. We also don't know the impact of payments from recreational and medical marijuana. We have one medical marijuana facility open on Meadow Street and two recreational or adult use marijuana facilities working their way through the permitting process. One will be co-located on Meadow Street and the other will be on University Drive. We also don't know the impact of the recently enacted tax on short-term rentals, things like Airbnb. We will not project any income from these until we get some experience under our belts. That's basically our always our practice but it's also the advice of the Department of Revenue. So we know what we know, we know what we don't know and here are the working assumptions that we have included in our projection. The property tax only will increase at 2.5% is permitted by Prop 2.5. And we are still projecting new growth on the spreadsheet at $600,000, the spreadsheet you have in your hands. Although that might change with updated information from the principal assessor. We are projecting hoping for a 2.5% increase in state aid and we're not projecting a significant increase in local receipts, fees, fines, et cetera. We are projecting a decrease in ambulance revenues which is significant because our ambulance revenues are going to decrease because last year the town of Hadley went out to bid for their services and contract with a private delivery service or private service for their needs. Hadley made up about 20% of the calls to our fire department for EMT emergency medical services. And so that the revenue from the contract we had with Hadley plus all the fees that we earned from the ambulance rise was taken out of our budget as well. This is good news in terms of our staff because they were experiencing stress because of the number of calls. But we did not decrease the staffing of the fire department but there's less revenue coming in. And lastly, we will not be using any reserves for requesting operating budget overrides. So here we are in our budget timeline. The budget, as I mentioned earlier, is not set. That will happen over the next six weeks. As I work with our staff to finalize the budget, I am required to submit to the town council by May 1st. We are all eager to hear your comments, priorities, and any other thoughts you may have. Thank you for your attention and the opportunity to serve this town. I'll turn it back to Lynn. Okay, the town council has been running fast and hard since being sworn in on December 2nd. Just a little over three months ago. There are two timelines that we are now going to show to you that we must meet to complete these budgets over the next four months. The first is the regional school district budget timeline. This is a budget that based on the charter, we quote, feel it is prudent to consider and act on because it relates to the other three towns who are partners with us in the regional school district and they hold their town meetings at the end of April and May. So our calendar there starts on May 12th when the school committee votes and gives us the budget. I mean March 12th, excuse me. And then the finance committee holds its first public hearing on that on April 4th and we vote on it and take it onto the council and the council will vote on it sometime either the 22nd or the 29th of April. That's just the regional school budget. The second one, however, is the whole town budget. So our timeline there is, first of all, as the town manager mentioned, he will present a budget to us on by May 1st. The town finance committee will review the budget during the months of May and the finance committee will hold a public hearing on the budget and in this case, it will be the FY20 budget on May 21st and the finance committee will take a vote and then by June 30th, the town council has to vote on the budget going forward. So there's three dates here. I'd like you to make sure you note and join us. One is our public hearing for the regional school budgets that's April 4th. A second is a public hearing on the town budget that includes the elementary schools and the library and that's May 21st and then on June 3rd, a public forum on capital improvements. We're now ready for public comment. You may wish to comment on any item in the budget, anything from general government to capital and you may also wish to comment on the regional schools and the elementary schools but I just want to point out that their boards are in charge of their budgets and hold public forums as well just as the library trustees are in charge of the library budget. And finally, a very, very interesting moment is that the town council cannot actually increase budgets the way we used to be able to do when we were in town meeting. So it's a little bit of a difference and it makes it even all that more important that we hear from you during this meeting and going into the future. So we hope that when you give us comments you will tell us a little bit about how these information affects your neighborhood and also your own experience in town. There are some ground rules for public comment. First of all, we ask that you only speak when recognized and when speaking that you first provide your name, address and the district you live in. While you may want to continue to talk on a similar topic we hope you will also focus on new items and we will start out with a limit of three minutes and I think that probably will be more than adequate for most people. If you have a written statement please provide it to our town clerk and she will make sure that the council sees it at some time in the future. So I'm going to moderate this part of this so we'll have a show of hands for those people who would like to speak. I'll call on you and we'd like you to come forward to the mic unless there's a reason you are unable to and then we will make sure we bring a mic to you. May I see who would like to speak? Yes, sir. I'm Jeff Lee, 815 Southeast Street, District Five. I just came to voice my support for recognizing the importance of public transportation in the budget, particularly the bus system, PVTA. I think it's extremely important to the town and the residents on many levels. Economic development brings people into town. Environmental sustainability and global warming mitigation gets cars off of the road and economic justice. It helps poor people get to work who may not be able to own automobiles. Also town-gown relationships. It helps both students and non-students alike. So I would just urge you to include support for public transportation in the budget. I do understand that town meeting appropriated $53,000 last session out of the Transportation Enterprise Fund. I do know there are complications around how that can be implemented, but I would urge you to do what you can to support public transportation. For me, the most important thing is advocacy and I think including money in the budget helps to advocate, shows the state that we're really serious about supporting PVTA. So I appeal to you to help us do that. Thank you. Additional comments. Come forward please. Claire Bertrand, 610 Bay Road. Is that the info you wanted? So I'll start with the comment that I hope I may have missed it, that there will be the chance for online commenting. There's not much of a crowd here, but I'm sure with Amherst Media getting it out there that maybe others will see it and want to be able to comment. And I hope that's the case for those who couldn't be here tonight. Certainly. So one of the things that I hope you remember to include money for is to implement ranked choice voting. And there's also significant short term capital expenses that the schools are facing. And maybe that's the school budget, but I'm not sure how that fits with the town planning, but I'm sure they're married. So like that to be considered. And there was a really good slide that you had for the long-term capital or I'm sorry, the money we owe and how it's going down. And I think that slide is super important. I would need to look at it longer. And I think it tells a story that is part of our planning for investment. So that to me would be a really helpful piece of information to get out and maybe enhance. Because we do have a lot of possible upcoming capital expenses and how they fit in to a balanced budget is super important. That's all, thank you. Thank you. Additional comments, please come forward. Amy Gates, 54 Spaulding Street. I didn't have a planned speech, but I was just curious about whether I might just propose an idea for additional revenue. And that is with all the off-campus housing that's sort of taking over the town and something you have to work on. If you might do something like you could have every landlord charged even if it was just $10 a bedroom or $20 per room and that would be a fund that would go directly to the town and you could call it like a bedroom tax or something. And I thought with all the amount of students off-campus and I know they're already paying a lot but just maybe $10 each room could go towards the town budget might be a way to bring up some more money because as a homeowner my fear is with these huge projects coming if we start overriding proposition two and a half our real estate taxes become sort of untenable. I mean, sometimes as a, for me as a homeowner I start to feel like as a resident that we're considered sort of the credit card for the town and you need to sort of please remember and take into consideration that there are lots of us out there that are just squeaking by with the real estate taxes and we love the town and want to stay here. And I guess I had a question, I don't know if you can answer that and you said that you couldn't increase budgets but can you vote to decrease budgets as a question? You can. Yes, we can. Thank you. Are there additional questions? I will say that we are going to remain in session to meet the requirement that we be here for as long as we spoke, if we'll all stop speaking and we will be welcome if people want to join us that are watching at home. Okay, we'll be reading in session till 723. Yes, Bob, please come up. Robert Pam, 229 Amity Street. These are comparatively small items but it seemed to me that it might be worthwhile to talk about them. My understanding is that a small the departments and each of the other entities, the schools and the libraries are often very tight in terms of how much money they have. The town has made a decision last year, as I understand it, that smaller capital budget items are no longer funded as capital budget items but have to come out of the operating budgets of those agencies that creates some difficulties for those agencies and it might be worth considering whether that is an appropriate thing to do. Second, there has been, as you know, a large discussion about buildings that are being constructed particularly in downtown. One of the ways in which it is discussed is about setbacks but setbacks in planning terms usually means do upper stories get laid further back from the footprint of the building. That's really not what most people are concerned about. What they're talking about is the size of the sidewalks. If you were to look at our downtown, generally they are 15, 20 feet wide and people can get around quite easily. The new buildings have not been set back from the street at that level and that has been a concern for many people in my neighborhood and I believe in other neighborhoods as well. So those are two of the questions that I would ask at this point. Thank you. Please come forward. Barbara Pearson, 11 Page Street, District 3. You may have talked about this because I came from another meeting and I missed it but I think there's a lot of confusion in the town as to how much revenue the new buildings actually bring to the town. And so we have people disagreeing kind of vehemently but without the actual figures. So I once asked our town manager and he very carefully said, well, it's online but I have to confess, I can't figure it out. So if it's online, if we could take it off, I mean if we could leave it online but also put it in a more easier to digest form and see what the actual impact both positive and negative, I mean we have to figure out what the negatives of them are too but if they are in fact cash cows for us then that changes some of the discussion. If they're not as lucrative as some people have said they are then that also changes it. Thank you. Additional questions? Comments? It's the advantage of being here. Barbara Pearson, 11 Page Street. So I noticed there's a thing here about health insurance and so forth. And I, there too I've asked a little bit about this but I haven't done it formally but this has been one of the, okay. So I think we've just changed. I know that we now have this new bill on the federal level that wants to abolish insurance companies or take insurance companies out of the healthcare equation and I think that what's happened in the town is that we've just gone to using insurance companies to administer our health programs and so forth and I'm just wondering if there's possible to have some kind of a special courtesy. Something that talks about what the expense to the town has been, what it's been historically, what its projection is, whether in fact it is, I mean my understanding is that this is one of the things that is sinking the state. I think it's also a burden on the town but I don't get the impression, I mean I don't see where it is and so once again I guess I want the Cliff Notes version if possible, okay, thank you. Thank you, additional comments? I guess I have a question about the school budget. Not quite understanding, I know there's the school board and they're gonna figure out what they feel the budget should be but when it gets bumped to you, I'll kick to you, do you have any power over what they say and can you decide to change the budget that they've presented you? Cause I mean I'm just sort of looking at the pie chart and it's kind of shocking what is the expenditure for the public schools versus everything else so I just didn't know if you had any say or if they're their own. We can lower it but we can't do anything else. So does that mean then, so I can understand if you lower it then they will have to then say okay we have less money so that means we're gonna have to make the cuts with this particular then they reallocate, okay, all right. Correct. Where do sidewalks come from? I mean who pays for them? Which part of the budget are they? It's in the capital. Just plain old capital? Yes. Is it a separate line item? Yes. Is it increasing? We're trying. I happen to be on foot. It's hard. Are there additional questions? Robert Pam to 29 Amity Street. In any budget there is always a competition between the capital side and the operating side. It is very good that the town has made strong efforts to raise the amount available for capital budgets and has reserved an increasing portion of the tax revenues to cover that. It has however also meant that there has been a very limited amount of money for the operating side. That has had implications over a number of years. One has been in the days of town meeting. We've all remember those days. There has always been a strong impulse to not fund social services of any kind. Social services in this state are largely a state function and a private function and are done at a very limited level by towns. That has had implications frequently for the ability of the town to support local initiatives of one kind or another. And it's something that we should be considering whether or not that is appropriate in terms of social services. There are ways in which as I understand it, the town is now working very hard to make sure that capital expenditures will not have a disproportionate effect on low income people in our town. And I think that's good, but that's not necessarily the only way to think about it. And so I would argue that there is a need to at least think about whether any social services need to be funded. In general, we have done that through CPA funds. Capital funds are being used to the extent that we can to not punish people for being poor. But on the operating side, there's really not very much that is done on that. I would say that we have done something wonderful in terms of bringing health services to our town and I'm very glad about that. But I would suggest that we think about each of the agency activities. And I think about the schools and I think about the libraries, their ability to provide some of these social services and to provide access for poor people to the kinds of things that I remember from my youth. There was a time when if you wanted educational services, you could go to a night school in my school. Those kinds of things don't really exist anymore. There is, from my youth, kids would go to the library if they wanted to get off the streets and to do something useful with their time. And you need to have locations and people who are available to help in those kinds of ways. So I just would like you to remain focused on those kinds of questions. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. Please come forward. I'm gonna take the gentleman with the red jacket on. Since we're here, the gentleman with the red jacket, Bill Cazan, district one, I just wanted to remind the council section 10.11 of the charter creation of a participatory budgeting commission. Since we're here to talk about budgets, that has to happen within six months of the assumption of office by the council. And I look forward to the creation of that commission. I think it has a lot of potential. Thank you. Thank you. Jeff Lee, 815 Southeast Street, district five. I appreciate the previous comment. I wasn't aware that there was such a commission and it kind of impacts the comment I was gonna make. Seems like this is almost premature to offer public comment on a budget that we really have no idea what it looks like. And so maybe that committee would be a chance for the public to weigh in, but I'm wondering if there might be another forum once the preliminary budget is prepared so that we can comment on that. There is in fact that. We're coming up on our time, two more minutes. Any more comments? Any final comments? So I'm going to declare this meeting adjourned, but I would like to share with you one very nice piece of news we've received. And that is the first congregational church of Amherst was successful in their appeal and will remain a temporary shelter and not have to do the $75,000 of renovation. Thank you for joining us this evening.