 I am, this is Christine Deschler, chair of the finance committee. I permit me to confirm that all members and persons anticipated on the agenda are present and can hear me. Members and staff when I call your name, please respond in the affirmative. Jordan Rummy, I think is not here tonight, correct. Shane Lundell. Is Jennifer Seuss here? She may be late. Sophie Migliazo. Is Sophie here? She's listed as here. She's on mute. Yes, sorry. I'm here. All right. Brian, you're here. I'm here. Carolyn White. Carolyn. Rebecca. Yes. Hello. Grant Gibbian. Here. Yes. Charlie. Charlie Foskett. Here. John Griffin. Yes. Darrell Harmer. Here. Annie Lecourt. Here. Ellen Jones. Here. Tofer Haiam. Here. Peggy Bliss. Here. Ellen Tosti. Here. And Karen. Here. And Dave McKenna. Here. And Tara Bradley. Here. Tara's here. Right. Tara's here. Here. Yes. All right. Do we have any of the public present? That's it. All right. We have ACMI. All right. So this is an open meeting of the Allington finance committee. It's being conducted remotely consistent with Governor Baker's executive order of March 12, 2020. As extended on July 16th, 2022, due to the current state of emergency in the Commonwealth, due to the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus. In order to mitigate the transmission of the COVID-19 virus, we have been advised and directed by the Commonwealth to participate remotely. We have been advised to suspend public gatherings and as such, the governor's order suspends the requirement of the open meeting law to have all meetings in a publicly accessible physical location. Further, all members of the public bodies. Allow it encouraged to participate remotely. The order which you can find posted with agenda materials for this meeting. Allows public bodies to meet entirely remotely. So long as reasonable public access is afforded so that the public participation and less such participation is required by law. This meeting will feature public comment only in writing by email to tbradley at town.arlington.ma.us.com. For this meeting, the Allington finance committee is convening by video conference via zoom app as posted on the town's website, identifying how the public may join in comment. Please note that this meeting is being recorded and that attendees are participating by video conference. Accordingly, please be aware that other folks may be unable to see you and take care not to screen share your computer. Anything that you broadcast may be captured by the recording. All supporting materials that have been provided to members of this body are available on the town's website. Unless otherwise noted, the public is encouraged to follow along using the posted agenda unless the chair knows otherwise. Before turning to the first item on the agenda permit me to cover some ground rules for effective and clear conduct of our business and to ensure accurate meeting minutes. Please remember to mute each speaker after they conclude their remarks. The chair will go down the line. Members inviting each by name to provide any comment questions or motions. Please hold until your name is called. Further remember to mute your phone or computer when you're not speaking. Please remember to speak clearly and in a way that helps generate accurate minutes for any response. Please wait until the chair yields the floor to you and state your name before speaking. Members please do so through the chair taking care to identify yourself. Finally, each vote taken in this meeting will be conducted by roll call vote and the chair will vote only in instances where there is a tie. So before I describe what we're going to do tonight, I want to give a hello to Peggy Bliss. She missed our first meeting. I should have introduced her at our last meeting. So I want to give a welcome to Peggy who is new to the finance committee sort of. She has been married to a finance committee member, Bill Keller, who is on the committee for several years. So she's new, but she knows what we're doing. And she's joined us anyway. So welcome Peggy. Oh, thank you. It's good to be here. It's good to have you. All right. So tonight's lineup will. We'll approve minutes and then we'll get into the public safety. Budgets and then Annie has several budgets. And then when they have concluded, then I think there, we have a few other. Budgets that are ready. And we'll also, if we have time, we'll also go back to the finance committee. And then we'll get into the public safety budget. So with that. Minutes. Does anyone have any. Revisions to the minutes of February 1st, 2023. Not seeing any hands. I think we are. Madam chairman. I move that we accept the minutes as presented. I have a second. I'll vote on the minutes. Jordan. Is he still Jordan still absent. Shane. Yes. Jennifer. Sophie. Sophie. Brian. I'm staying. I wasn't here. Caroline. Caroline still absent. Rebecca. Yes. John. Yes. Yes. Yes. Grant. Yes. Charlie. Yes. John. Yes. Daryl. Yes. Annie. Yes. Ellen Jones. Yes. Topher. Yes. Peggy. Yes. El Tosti. El Tosti. Yes. But down the bottom. Okay. I'm sorry. I have my mouse on the. Meeting minutes for today as I'm recording the. Results of voting on the minutes, but these. These are the minutes. Sorry. Back to the minutes. Okay. Yes. D. All right. The minutes of February 6, 2023 have been approved. So let's go into budgets. Daryl and John, I'll defer to you at this point. Okay, so for tonight we have the police budget that I'm going to do and the fire budget that John is going to do. We still have inspections to schedule, but these are the two, two big ones so I have a short deck. Everybody see. Yes. Okay, so first up. There was a big enough by the way. Everybody see it. Yes. Okay, apparently there was a production glitch in the manager's budget that affected some of the line items for fiscal 22 didn't affect any of the bottom line totals. But if you can see here where this blue box is. When I first looked at it that the numbers obviously look really strange. The actuals in 22 look wildly different from all the other years so as we reviewed it with the chief liar and in her budget analyst. It became apparent that the problem was that these line line items are actually printed a row too high. So I don't know what happened. I don't know what the actual issue obviously. So this is actually the correct page you see the line items line up better so again as I said, an only effective 22, and it didn't affect the bottom line totals so this until until we get an official correction from the town. So from a budget perspective, the salaries lines are pretty basic the only big number is 5100 for salaries. And most of that increases differentials and education credits. So the question I have that got answered for me today as you'll see. There's a line 5112 that says school credit and 5115 that says differential. These are actually fairly small numbers if you were to look at the salary details. It actually has very large numbers so it turns out that for police officers and ranking officers. Their school and Dave you probably know this their school credit and differential show up in the in the salary details pages, and then get rolled into this line 5100. These two lines 5112 and 5115 are actually for civilians. They're not school credits or differentials. Then on the expenses area. The only two issues are 52 18 training and 52 36. Uniforms budgets and gloves. And I'm going to explain those now. Just to run through some of the budget increases and other issues from fiscal 23 to 24. The parole officers is going to arbitration in May. Remember the Sandy mentioned that when he briefed us last week. The ranking officers apparently haven't given their approval to go ahead into into negotiations so those haven't even started yet so. This is obviously an unknown what the impact of collective bargaining is going to be over based on what Sandy said last week. This increase I guess could be significant. I just talked about the credits and differentials on the expenses side. The two line items are training. Which increased $10,000 and that is going to cover a succession training for chief flyers position. She's planning on retiring in the next year or so. So she very smartly is doing some succession planning. And they have money to send one person to training and I think they're trying to get a grant to send a second person. And then under uniforms badges and gloves, there's an increase of $25,000. And that covers the cost of bulletproof vests, bulletproof vests that should be where the cost were shifted from the capital budget to the operating budget. On the vacancy side. They have in the budget book. They have three parole officers. One sergeant, one animal control officer social worker and a dispatcher. And then you'll see the third line down after the book was printed. One of the patrol officers resigned to become a firefighter in Cambridge. So that seemed to be an interesting career move. They have filled the social worker position that got filled in December. And people might remember that's the position that split between the police department and health and human services police has 75% of that budget. And each of us has 25%. And then the dispatcher. One through a whole interview process, which I'm going to talk about in just a second. And they're having to repost the position so of the eight vacancies, seven that were in the budget book and then one that showed up after they're still got seven, they were able to fill one. So on this dispatcher position. It's actually kind of interesting and kind of a little bit very illustrative of what they're up against in terms of hiring. This dispatcher position is not even in civil service. They described it as a revolving door so they obviously have trouble filling it begin with. So they posted the position they got 40 applications for it. They selected 20 for an interview so they're already down to just 50% of the applicants. And of those 20, seven accepted the interview, and then of the seven only three showed up for the interview. Well, and then they made an offer and then it turned out that the person had religious objections to the public vaccination. So they are all the way back to reposting the position. So that just kind of shows the some of the challenges they haven't as I said this is not even a civil service position. When you get to civil service. They, they're even more constrained. So civil service is now close to 140 years old. It was originally designed to protect employees from patronage and political and political interference. But now policies and collective bargaining have provided a lot of those protections and in many cases more effectively than civil service. Under civil service hiring and retention has gotten increasingly difficult and increasingly competitive. Towns have to hire from lists, based on scores from state administered tests. And there's also absolute preferences veterans disabled and so on. So now towns are actually offering signing bonuses and education benefits to try to be more competitive. So the challenge with civil service is the residency requirements, the town that the applicant actually lives in has automatic preference so they said the chief said they have to list three towns that they'd be willing to serve in. So what Arlington happened to be one of them but the person say lived in Belmont and Belmont had an opening then Belmont would get the preference for that person. So civil service also requires that officers live within 10 miles of the town they would serve. So many towns have over the last few years left civil service it's around 40 so far. I've listed some of them for us to leave so service I went through this last year we're just as a refresher to leave civil service either the town has to bargain with the unions, or the town manager could propose a warrant article that the town meeting could then approve. And if Arlington left civil service then it conduct conduct its own exams recruiting job requirements and so on. You heard Sandy talk about it last week so it's clear it's under increasing consideration but they haven't made any haven't taken any formal action yet. So finding from other towns is that it essentially does default to a collective bargaining issue and in some cases it's turned out to be pretty expensive I think they said Lexington ended up having to negotiate a 4% increase and there was one town I don't remember what town where they ended up having to reinstate education benefits. So the leaving can be expensive but it could be in the long run. The extent that it improves the town's ability to recruit and retain public safety personnel and that be worth doing so something to keep an eye on. And then the last slide is the body cameras issue. This really hasn't changed much from last year there's a couple of a couple of updates number five. The police department got a grant from the state executive office of public safety and security to fund software that originally would have expired last June. They got an extension to this June. Because the funding is pending agreements with the unions. They haven't purchased any equipment yet pending resolution the collective bargaining, the arbitration also includes the cameras issue. And as I said earlier the ranking officers there doesn't seem to be a timeline for their negotiations so not clear what's going to happen there and then what's the impact on this state grant going to be. The state's policies intend to align with the state develop policy. The state was required to develop these policies, which they they released recommended regulations on August last August 2nd. And here's a link to them I've also put the regulations on our SharePoint site. So that is it. What questions are there. From last year you can only ask questions that I know the answer to Darrell can you make sure that Tara has a copy of your, your, your deck so that she can send it out to members. Yes, and I'll put it up on the SharePoint site too. Great. Thank you. All right. Questions, Charlie. Thank you madam chairman. You answered the first question I was wanting to hope I was hoping that that presentation would get up on SharePoint so that's good. We know if the body cameras are going to be capital or operating expense. It's actually going to be a mix of funding there is there was no capital request this year for them. They got funding out of their asset forfeiture fund to pay for the hardware. They got an amount of $47,000 from the town meeting which I think was in 2021 for maintenance, and then they have a $40,000 grant that one that would expire in June from the state for software. So that that looks to be the funding sources. Thank you. Tofer. Thank you madam chair. First, I noticed that the uniform badges and gloves jumped a lot up by almost 30%. Did they explain why. Yes they did that's the down here that's the $25,000. Oh, I'm sorry for the bulletproof. That's okay. The bulletproof vest. Yep. And the other is, I'm not sure quite how the money works with this. So, I believe the town is getting sued over the actions of an officer. And just how does that work in terms of both the legal expenses around that as well as any settlement that might happen. I think we'll defer to people on the committee that might know more about how we handle things like that than I do. I think there is a settlements fund isn't there. There's a settlements fund, and we also have insurance. So. Okay, so that's if there's a settlement. Yes, about legal costs just, you know, leading up to that. Hopefully avoiding that. And a different budget in a different budget. We need to be doing this within house lawyers are out of house lawyers and out of house lawyers would appear in the legal budget. And then in house lawyers would be covered by salaries for the house lawyers. Okay. All right, thank you. Dave, your hand is up. You're muted Dave. I have a comment for Darrell Darrell, just a historical thing. Many years ago, there was a lot of police officers in Allenton transferred year after year to the Allenton fire department. Yeah, for some reason, I don't know why that was going on. It didn't last maybe two to three years. You'd have wanted to transfer. The other question I do have is on the cameras. That's only for patrol officers. Am I correct on that? Do you know, I believe so. Okay, so you see, being a former police officer, the public has an idea that every police officer out in the streets going to have a camera. And that that's really incorrect. It's really the patrol officers that are on patrol each shift. So what, so if you have detectives, they wouldn't have cameras and personnel that work in administration they wouldn't have cameras only only patrol us. And I don't know. I could be, I just don't know whether the side and supervisor on the street would have a camera or not. I'm not sure. I can, I can follow up with the chief on that. It's just said, the public at large, they have an idea that everybody's wearing a camera and that's that's really incorrect. It's the patrol officers that will have the cameras because the other ones that have the most interaction on a daily basis with the people on the street. So that was just a couple of comments. That's all I have to say. Thank you Dave. Sophie, your hands up. The first comment is in response to the question earlier that the lawsuit with the involving the police department is covered in the legal budget and the response we got was that so far they don't need any additional funds related to that so it's covered in budget. And just a question on question on the 10,000 for the training for the succession training for the chief's position is this something we've typically done and is this spent for one person or several people and doing. I mean, does that mean they already know who the next person is. That was actually something we asked the, this $10,000 is for one person. And, you know, our response was that kind of makes it clear who the next police chief is going to be. So they are, they are trying to get funding for a second person. It's still a little. Darryl, did the chief mention a grant connection with that second one. Yes. Is there a commitment from those receiving this training that they're going to be staying on with Arlington or can they get the training and move somewhere else. We didn't ask that. I can. My assumption would be that if they're, if they believe they're in line for the position they'll be committing but you know obviously they can't be required to take it I don't know what provisions they would be if they obviously one of these people is not going to get the position so. They're down. I mean, what is the timeframe for hiring a new, or what what's the timeframe for she flirty retiring. She sat over the next year or so. And if we don't have someone in line when she does still likely be some interim or acting. So she was when she for iron left. This training might be of use for that, if anything else. Sophie, do you have any other questions. Um, no, I will I guess the follow up question is, is, did she individually pick who this person is or who, who normally makes that decision of who the next police chief is. Well, normally the select board, select board in. Right. So are they deciding who gets the training or is she deciding. I don't know. I'm curious. But yes, please. Anything else Sophie. Shane. Thanks. Thanks, Christine and thanks for the presentation to two questions of what is. The first time is 659 budgeted, but we spent over a million. Actual in 22. So do we think that's going to be enough. And then the second question is about, obviously, somebody who's been through a hiring process before obviously very frustrating for the department to get all the way there. Is there a uniform process about vaccinations for the police department. Those are my questions. Thank you. So the answer to the first is a lot of the overtime is driven by the vacancies. So I would expect the, the 24, while the, you know, the two budgeted numbers when the actuals, and then I would expect those will be hired because they're, they've had chronic vacancies. On the vaccinations, I believe there's a, there's a talent policy. I don't know. I just, I just. Maybe that's, they should consider putting that in the posting at the very least, right? Because it's a lot of work. That's a good point. From sitting at the meeting was that the vaccine, the prospective candidate not getting vaccinated was a was disqualifier from the position. So it sounded like it was policy. But I think it's talent policy, not department policy. And I don't know if the town has a religious exemption. I don't know. State does. Any other questions, Shane. I'm good. Dave. I just wanted to go back to the chief's position in the last ranking losses contract. We lost you, Dave. I still can't hear you. I'm not sure he's muted. He's not, he's not here. Okay. There you go. Am I back? Some reason this only kicks out when I talk. So. The chief of police's position in the next chief will be from the ranks of the current police department. That that that's an that's in the current contract of the ranking offices, which allowed the management to do away with civil service. There was no argument from the ranking offices after a negotiated settlement. That's number one. I can't remember the other question that somebody had about the police. I don't know. Hello. There's a question about the training and. I guess that these maybe. Well, yeah. Well, what would happen there on the training? This is something new, I guess. But when I say that the next chief will become come from the ranks. That could be that could be captain's lieutenants or even a sergeant. So that's, that's the ranks. And it could come out of that. So that's what that's what they agreed upon. So that this training is something new. And I'm surprised that. You mentioned that that she's considering retiring a year and a half from now. Usually that's, they keep that close to the, to the vest if you do, but. Unless you want succession planning. Yeah. People to step up and. I think it's a good idea. Going back to appointment of the chief, the appointment of the chief of police now because it's not in civil service. The appointment is the town manager. The approval of the board of selection. So the town manager points to chief of police. And with the approval of the board. Thank you. That's it. That's it. Thank you. Brian, you have your hand up. Quick question on the bullet proof vests. Moving from the capital budget to the operating budget. Is that a rotational item? I assume that's not for the whole department all at once. And then it lasts five years and they replaced them along those lines. Or is this an annual event? There is, there is a replacement cycle. It's not replacing all of them. I'm trying to remember if they brought it up in the. Capital request and I don't remember. I can look if, if you want Brian. Well, I don't need, you don't need to be specific. I'm not going to not vote for it because of that. I'm just curious if this is going to be 25,000 every year, 30,000 every year going up forward. And they would say rotate it once every five years. And it says that the best is good. They're going to do 20% of them now, et cetera, et cetera. There is a designated lifespan and the vastest don't remember what it is. And as to, as to whether this will. You know, permanently be in operating versus capital. I know there's always this tension between the two budgets. Oh, yeah. I want to get stuff out of. Into operating and operating some cases wants to push stuff into capital. My understanding is that. The expectation is that this will be the permanent. Okay. But who knows next year. There's operating budget constraints that I might get. Revisited. Okay. No problem. Thanks a lot. Darryl. Did you say that the police department. Had a capital request for these vests. Through the. Through the machinations to balance the capital budget. It was agreed that it would get moved to the operating budget. Which accounts for the $25,000 increase. Okay. Do this not do a question more for when capital planning presents, but have. Was there any similar. Shifting, you know. There was. And I shift for it. I think those were the only two. Brian, your hand is still up. Are you finished? Another question. Yes. Josh, you have a question. Yeah. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. We're fixing the. Error there in the column for 22 actuals. And maybe you've already answered this. I may have missed it. But in terms of some of the lines, which have much lower actuals than. The 23 or 24 budget. Is. Is that just. You know, a way of putting a little extra buffer in there. What would like on holiday pay. I'm just looking at her. So. Those are number 23 and 24 budgeted items. You really depend on that. Why would you budget 225,000 when you only spent. 180,000 or whatever for the past two years. For injury earnings. They haven't budgeted. No, no, I'm looking at holiday pay. So I can answer that if you like. So part of what happens is that at the. At the end of the. At the end of the. At the end of the. The. Change over of the year. Okay. Sometimes. Money is encumbered, but it's not yet spent. It's yet to be spent. And so sometimes that explains that differential, that the actuals don't actually reflect. Everything that you obligated yourself to spend in that fiscal year. Because some of that money is being held over to pay bills that are yet to come in, and that's not going to be spent. So. So I'm looking at this. Like court time here where there's a big gap. But, you know, it, it sort of explains some of the other lines where this will seem a little low, but it's probably not because it's going to get spent. Do they try and accrue for those things or is it just. No, they're not allowed to accrue. Josh. Well, no, but if they have a. A service that's been rendered, they're not allowed to be paid. They're not allowed to. Yeah, that's, that's not so much accrueless. It's what we call encumbrance. Okay. The court time issue was a COVID issue. That's why the actuals for 21 and 22 or so long. Okay. For the holiday pay. Remember, there's, there's been significant number of vacancies. And obviously if the position. You know, Excuse me, I have to get a cat off my desk. If there's a, you know, they can see that person's not. That position is not accruing the holiday pay, but I would imagine they have to assume that. You know, those positions are going to get filled through the year. So they need to account for. I mean, I guess it's just as someone new to kind of look at these budgets this carefully. I think that's why it's not going to be the same. And I think it would appear to me that we're obviously just picking up the same number for 24 is 23. And maybe one, maybe those numbers didn't even reflect actuality from earlier years. And so I just don't know if they're trying to kind of. How accurate people are trying to be. So that was just a question. And then on the, on the body camera. Why should I would anticipate that town meeting. And I think that that's been kind of lingering for a couple of years. And with kind of just the general mood in the, in the country. I think there will be a question as to what. What's holding that up. I know that. The manager indicated it's a bargaining issue, but. That's what's holding up. It is a bargainable issue and they can't move until. They've bargained. And agreed. Unions have agreed. So that, that is what's holding it out. Right. Okay. Do you have a sense that they, that they. Have the perception from both. The management and the union side that it just doesn't. Look good from a. Optics perspective. I'm not sure that's a motivating. Back there. Okay. Thank you. That's it. Thank you. Thank you. Darrell, didn't you say earlier that. The unions were, were seen receptive. But they were just, it's just a bargain. Like any issue. If it's. Seem accepted, but. The bargaining is what it is. And they're going to. Try to get what they can out of it. Dean. I don't, I don't have a question as much as I. I think it's a big issue. I think it's a big issue. I think it's a big issue of the budget for. Newer members. Because you know, Josh, you, you actually hit on the question, I think. Or the frustration every new member. Has had with the police and fire budget. And. It's interesting because it's. When you're on the. When you're on the committee for a lot of years, you start to become comfortable with it. Right? So what you're going to see is how do you, when you, when you build a police and. Or fire budget. Do you assume a vacancy? Right? Because what. Or do you not assume a vacancy? So in our budget police and fire, the chiefs go ahead and they assume they'll take. Assume all the positions just out. Know that it's going to be. Vacancies. And what's unique about the public safety budgets. Versus the. General government budgets. Is the lead time. And so they take another big budget. The school. So if a teacher were to retire, the last day of school, June 30th. Is a break of, you know, all of July, all of August and come up September 1, there will be another teacher. In the seat, right? There'll be a new teacher. But with police, it's different because if somebody retires. This was vacant. You have to go through this process. You have to go through this process. If. We can articulate it, you hire someone, you send them to the academy. They come back. It's a, it's a run rate. And we're a vacancy run. And while they're there, that vacancy is occurring. You have to. Um. You have to hide. You have to cover those ships. Can't go without. Right. And so we've always debated how to do this. Like you assume if you're running at a 5%. 6% patrol and vacancy rate that you just budget in it. You're not. And I did what we've come back to after like circling around and around. Researching and having study groups and things like that is. This way of doing it here. While messy and like, not, not perfect. Because it does beg all that. Like great questions people have asked, which are all perfectly normal questions. It just, it's better than the alternative of trying to estimate vacancy rates than being wrong the other way. So that's just like. Yeah. Yeah. You just said something that sparked a question. So are you saying like when we hire in the police and fire department, we hire someone and then they get trained. Okay. Okay. There's they have to. And the, the. Classes in the academy are. Scheduled and. Not necessarily. Right away. No, right. You have to wait for the. Training to happen and do stuff. Okay. I did not know that. Thank you. John, you have a hand up. Yeah, I would maybe just note. I imagine there's kind of some interplay between the overtime. And the salaries and wages. Like, as Dean mentioned, they, they're budgeted for full employment. Doesn't appear that they're going to hit for employment. As a result. The overtime. I think. I think the chief even mentioned that the overtime is going to be higher than is going to be closer to 20. 2023. Overtime is going to be closer to 2022. Then it was that then you then the 659 you see there. You know, is that an issue? I would think it's not an issue because there's going to be some excess in the salaries and wages. So I feel like those two kind of take care of each other a little bit. In the sense that they're not 100% accurate in the budget, but they kind of play off each other. And I've been a check. I think one quick comment. Go ahead, Dean. Just trying to just sort of. I think historically I explained our, what the other committees. The other thing we've always said to the public safety chiefs is. You know, we give you a budget, right? We do salaries. You look at that bottom line. Don't show up looking for a reserve fund transfer. Like manager department. Scheduled people. Do your job. You get paid for it. It's great. But, you know, don't come back looking for a transfer every like 250 through a thousand. Right. And you're right. So like that, that's always an overtime line might be crazy. Like it might come way out of whack this year. It could be like. Five points. Five points. Five points. Five points. Yeah. Like it might come way out of whack this year. It could be like. Five point five million to salaries. But we've, we've historically held the chief accountable for delivering the balance. Yeah. Actual at the end of the year. And that's, that's the, that's the middle ground. Yeah. And I've worked in. Public sector my entire career. And. You know, it's okay to turn money back in at the end of the year. So, okay. To ask for money at the end of the year. So. Charlie. Thank you, madam chairman. I just wanted to add one thing. There's another variable. In this. The salary vacancy account. And overtime issue and that's retirement. And some of the retirees. I don't know if it's. If it's also true in the police and fire, but some of the retirees in town. And I think it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, a crew. A combination of vacation or sick time that they get upon retirement. That also has to come out of. The salary budget for that year. And it's pretty difficult for. Department managers to predict. Exactly. When these retirements will occur. Which may raise a question as to chief Larrity. When. Time comes to retire. Whether it's going to be a payout. Or a payout. Or a payout. Anybody have any other questions. Comments. So Darrell, do you have a recommendation for the finance committee? Yes. Now I'm going to ask an embarrassing question because I ask it every year. Am I moving the taxation total or. Adoption of the taxation total or the appropriation total. The taxation total. Wasn't that. Yeah. Okay. So I'm going to move adoption of the fiscal 24 taxation total of 186,000 to 178,000. The total of the fiscal law is 189,000. 96,000 seven hundred seven hundred and 50. Second. Second. Any other. Questions, any discussion. On the police department budget. Seeing. No hands will go. It's where we'll call vote. Those in favor of the proposed motion approving. Proving the budget as printed, say yes or aye. Shane. Yes. Jennifer. Yes. Sophie. Yes. Brian. Yes. Carolyn. Rebecca. Yes. Josh. Yes. Grant. Yes. Charlie. Yes. John. Yes. Darrell. Yes. Annie. Yes. Ellen Jones. Yes. Tofer. Yes. Peggy. Yes. El Tosti. Yes. Dean. Yes. Dave. Yes. It is a unanimous vote. Proving the police department budget. And I apologize, I actually had on that slide about the fill in dispatcher position. I had it set up as a nice animation, which for some reason shows not to work. Thank you for your presentation, Darrell. Next is fire, John. Are you ready? Yes. All right. This is on. 122. 22 of the budget. Right. Take it away, John. So you guys can see my spreadsheet, right? Yes. I have a couple of screens here. So I just, I get worried, you know, which one is getting captured. So you see the spreadsheet that's moving. That's great. And then I just want to check. Now do you see, now you see the word document. You need to share your whole desktop and not just the. Yeah, I think I'll, I think I'll unshare when I just go between the two. So I have a spreadsheet and I have a word document. Although. I will say I don't have any animation. Attempted or otherwise. Probably a good move, John. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So either way. So it sounds like you can see my spreadsheet. And I will put it on the screen. Yeah. So the fire department is, unlike the police department, the fire department is at full employment with all 81 positions staffed, which I thought was, you know, impressive. You know, after listening to. She flurry described the challenges with civil service. Apparently chief Kelly is able to fill the ranks. Despite those challenges. It also makes for, I think a little bit of a more clear cut budget, just knowing that the positions are filled and, you know, you don't have to anticipate that interplay between the overtime that we were just talking about. The 23 budget and the 24 budget. Quite similar. As you can see, you know, on page one, 22 and your budget books or here on my screen. Really the, the big numbers that moved. Related. It's entirely to, um, Memorandum of understanding that was effective July 1st of 2022. That I just gave some bumps. Two in a couple of different items. Really all the items that you see. Movement in the school credit. The EMT, um, stipend in the longevity. All that movement was a result of the, uh, the memorandum of understanding, which took effect in July 1st. Of 2022. Uh, so I think the 2024 budget. Uh, takes those numbers into, um, into, uh, account. Uh, so now I'm just going to head back over to my out. Word document. And I think the best way to do that is to, uh, hold on. It probably just drag it over to the same screen as the spreadsheet. I don't think you can. I don't think you can. Cause he right now you still see the spreadsheet. Give me one second. I think I stopped share. And then I share again. So bear with me. I apologize. John, if you hold down control and select the word. Document in the Excel spreadsheet. It should allow you to share them both. Really? Okay. Now, now you see the word document. Yes. Like I said. So there's. Um, these are the items I just wanted to go over. I didn't put too much detail in these. I wasn't sure what was the appropriate thing to put in the presentation. So I kept a pretty high level. I certainly can put more in. Um, but these are the items that, um, That I think are worth mentioning. The ambulance offset. Um, I actually provided footnotes to Allen over the weekend. Um, so I'm just going to, um, I'm just going to give you some examples of what I thought was worth mentioning. The ambulance offset. Um, I actually provided footnotes to Allen over the weekend. And, uh, those I actually also ran those footnotes past chief Kelly and he was in agreement. He thought that there were pretty good summary. Of what happened with the ambulance offset. Um, you know, I apologize. They're not in this presentation, but I, I can just describe. What was in those footnotes? So there's two. Ambulance funds. And the other is a returns funds to a revolving fund. And the fund that goes back to the general fund gets the gets the money from providing basic life services. The town of Arlington provides almost 100% of the basic life services here in town and they continue to provide them and they historically have provided them. So there's really no change in who's providing those services. The amount of money that they're receiving for providing those services has gone up. So as a result, the money going back into the general fund has gone up really just because the reimbursement rates have gone up. So that's kind of the first thing that happened. More money going back into the general fund because the reimbursement rates for providing basic life services has gone up. Then the second thing that happened was there's the advanced life support revolving fund. So this is the fund that just continues to kind of fund itself from billings to the ambulance services. This there has been a change in who provides these services because of the increased demand for those services through COVID and also the difficulties in hiring people to fill those positions. The department gave a more central or direct role to Armstrong Ambulance. They basically said if you provide a dedicated ambulance to Arlington then you can kind of be in charge of providing those services. The fire department still participates but instead of it used to be the town of Arlington built for those services and then would pay Armstrong Ambulance as appropriate. Now Arlington Armstrong Ambulance does the billing and they reimburse the town as necessary but the end result is a less money is coming back to the revolving fund. So I think at first glance it looks like a reclass, it looks like oh they're taking money from the revolving fund and put into the general fund but it's actually two independent moves and so that that was the first item that I wanted to mention and will you'll see it on your budget, the only place that at least I see it in the budget page is down at the bottom via the offsets. There's historically the revolving fund was returning 211k, 213k, now it's down to budgeting just 100k so that's down 113k and that's resulting from the ALS fund being, you know, Armstrong Ambulance taking a little bit more about having a little bit more of an involvement in the ALS services. That's the first item I wanted to mention. The second item is the, so there's this, I actually noticed this first when I did a review of the fire receipts that were on the public payment website that pretty much anyone can go to the town of Arlington's website and see all the different payments that were made for each fund out of the entire town which I'm sure you're well aware of but this expense actually did kind of catch my interest 62,606, just public safety, hospital, medical care, not a lot of details to it and it didn't really have anything else comparable and then sure enough the chief, chief Kelly explained to us, we didn't even ask somebody explained to us that the town was sent a bill for knee replacement surgery for a firefighter that retired 25 years ago and chief Kelly was pretty surprised but apparently the retired firefighter mentioned that he was a fire department employee and that's maybe where he injured his knee or maybe that was where he injured his knee so the insurance company sent the bill to the town of Arlington and I mean I don't know how much back and forth there was but chief Kelly seemed kind of surprised that you know he's getting hit with bills for a bill for employees that retired decades ago and you'll see that number, it's down in this, it's all the way back in the 2022 actual and it's in this number, actually I forget that you guys can't see my spreadsheet but it's down in that line 5257 if you have your budget books open and you go down to account 5257, you'll see that in 2024 it's up to $95,274, the hospital and medical care is up to $95,274 and the bulk of it is at $62,000 so chief Kelly just mentioned it that it's something that you know obviously he didn't anticipate he hopes that it's nothing that he knows any way he can prepare for. The next item I wanted to mention is now I'm actually gonna go back to my budget so I'm gonna stop here and the share screen yeah so okay oh number third number three on my master budget is the of the items I wanted to discuss was the master budget birth the payroll detail and so all the items in salaries which you know clearly makes up the bulk of the fire department's budget all of the items under salaries were supported by pretty detailed spreadsheets and and I thought that I was asking but you guys can see like when I flip over to these detailed spreadsheets you guys can see that right yeah okay cool all right excellent so so as I said I think that's a good thing that you know these numbers are all supported by free pretty detailed you know to the level of actual employee what what each employees is expected to receive there were some differences when you compare the budget here on page one with the detail you know it's nice that they provided the detail and and in the most part for the most part the detail what spot on there are a few differences and actually Alan reached out over the weekend regarding one of them and this top line they're budgeting 67 six six million seven hundred nine thousand of the detail showed six million well actually I'm gonna unhide this column here F is what the payroll detail provided and Alan sent me an email over the week and just noticing that the detail supported six six million seven hundred six thousand we asked if we could you know identify the missing three thousand two hundred forty two which was a great question and I did get a little bit of you know I learned a little bit more about it but I haven't quite fully resolved it but in you know looking in that I figured if I'm going to ask about the thirty two forty two I should also ask about the fifteen thousand which is the difference in the school credit and the twenty six thousand which is in the difference in the empty pay the empty defibrillator pay so you know there's three there's and then also the yeah so the longevity the longevity is pretty much you know hundred hundred two dollars difference we'll call that pretty much spot on overtime is spot on really just the it's really the EMT is the big one and then the three the the the thirty two hundred up and the school credit so all in you got a discrepancy of thirty two hundred fifteen thousand and twenty six thousand so I actually sent those out to um I sent that out last night to Chief Kelly and also to um to the budget department and Chief Kelly called me up this morning and said that you know he kind of knew what they were and I said that's great if you guys can just send me back some you know confirmation I didn't get the confirmation back but you know I guess I don't know if we have any thoughts on it is a budget it is a forecast so you know it's alright obviously these aren't exact numbers because they haven't occurred yet but there's there's a little bit of a discrepancy between the detail and the and the budgeted amounts I don't know if you know we may want to wait to hear back or we can just go with the budgeted amounts but that's just one other item that I wanted to bring up um I'm going to put back to my uh my word document finish this up here all right so back to my word document right um so and again as you can see on the budget detail if you have that open the the the biggest increase for the year is in the EMT the free bilater pay account number 5117 it's going up by 137,000 this year and that's that's really just a formula driven by the memorandum of understanding which which took effect July 1st in 2022 everyone is qualified as an EMT gets a five percent of their salary for FY 23 and 5.5 percent in FY 24 so it's I believe it's contractual it's a formula it is what it is so it's you know it's a big increase but that's what's driving it um and then I just mentioned the OT Chief Kelly did say that the OT is trending downward this year again just looking at the actuals to budget if you go all the way back to 2021 the actual was a 669k then it jumped way up to a million 15 in 2022 I assume there were some vacancies back then um now the last two years they've budgeted uh 473k and Chief Kelly did say that they're actually on track to to not exceed that overtime budget so that's kind of what I was thinking earlier when uh when Dara was talking about the police OT they probably will exceed their OT because they have vacancy whereas according to Chief Kelly they they should not exceed their OT again because they don't have vacancies so um although Chief Kelly did make one I thought it was a pretty good point he mentioned that um you know anytime the the the firefighters get a bump in pay whether it's a percentage driven by an agreement or memorandum of understanding anytime the base pay goes up he he pointed out that in theory everything should go up by the same percentage for the budget uh but so yeah I guess he he felt that it doesn't always go up the budget the budget amount doesn't always go up by the same percentage but he just wanted to point out that it should you know something I will keep an eye on um and then the final item is which Dara I don't know if you mentioned this but it's it's I guess I'm sure it's a town-wide thing is the maintenance budget for each department is decreasing we actually heard a lot of the same stuff from the police department and the fire department saying that uh you know in theory they are no longer responsible for the exterior of their buildings uh so they are budgeting less money for the uh for the maintenance of their buildings as you can see down in account 5202 it went from um it went from 43k was the actual 2022 but they're only budgeting 20 000 going forward but I think both the police department and the fire department you know noted that there was a little bit of maybe some tension on you know what's what's capital what isn't but they said that they you know they they still continue to be responsible for what what's inside the building and they understood that but sometimes maybe there's some um you know it's not clear cut and the one example the chief did note was um and this is a current year so this is an FY 23 item is that there's a crack in the in the garage there's a crack in the the flooring of the uh station downtown and they had an engineer come in and look at it just because they want to make sure that the crack you know wasn't driven by the the engines or it wasn't going to get worse or if there's anything they should do to keep it from getting worse and the engineer that came in charged a certain amount of money I think it was above a couple thousand dollars and the the chief was informed that that's that's you know maintenance for the department to handle so I don't know what the right answer but that was just an example of something that he he wanted to to say you know they're continuing to keep an eye on so those are the the items I wanted to mention inside and put it on to one clean document that's what I'll do uh for my next presentation but I at least I hit the points I wanted to make so with that I guess I'll throw it off for questions I just want to clarify something John so there you're saying that there are some discrepancies in the salary and wages line the school credit line and the empty yes line yep and um and I'll go back to my spreadsheet so we can talk numbers there and can you go over again what what's the amount of what amounts are we talking about so right here and I sent these exact numbers out to uh and I'm actually going to pull my email real quick so um yeah I sent these out to Julie and to uh to Chief Kelly last night and the numbers are uh you know 3242 right here I'll make them yellow too so you're 3242 you can't see your screen oh you can't see the Excel spreadsheet my you're not sure now you can right yes yes yes I'm gonna make them yellow these are the discrepancies here 3242 and um 15483 25 16 and then 102 so these numbers and you know I think yeah these are included in the master budget so everybody sees these these numbers so that when I say payroll detail this is what I'm referring to um okay Christine if I can comment on that yeah go ahead yeah thank you madam chair and the the numbers aren't very big and these uh this level of detail isn't something that we you know write up in the report for a vote to town meeting but you know the the budget report that we get from the manager is really a combination of two spreadsheets there's a you know detailed salary spreadsheets and and the detailed master budget spreadsheet the master budget spreadsheet is what's sort of linked to the long-range plan and there are very often there are discrepancies between those two um just because they're not linked together and one's updated and they forget to update the other one usually not a big deal but in the finance committee report we put the you know total budgets that are voted by town meeting and the expense and salary bottom lines on the same page and they have to add up so if whenever I see something where the salary details in the budget don't match the salary lines in the summary that goes like a page one of each budget I have to resolve that um just because we need to they need to match in the finance committee report um and usually what that ends up is going back to uh the the town manager of CFO and they they resolve with some sort of typo it's probably the master but the page one that is correct but whatever the discrepancy we just need to resolve it so we know what what the bottom line there's the details are not shown to town meeting but the bottom lines have to match they have to vote on something so that's that's why we have to you know do this resolution and then we can't really vote on it unless we you know make an assumption that the page one of the budget is correct I um I am not inclined to want to vote this budget tonight until we get that information having said that however putting aside these numbers I think we can um if anyone has questions or further discussion about other items let's do that so that when it comes back up hopefully we can vote on this budget on on Wednesday night um but um putting putting the reconciliation of these numbers aside do people have questions on the fire department budget shame thank you christine and thank you john uh for that presentation two two questions um one is um this memorandum I guess I'm used to hearing like collective bargaining so curious why we entered into this memorandum of understanding and uh number one and number two as um jennifer's with me and jordan are we working on the facilities department budget so um sort of just curious if there was anything else the chief had said about you know this this crack in the floor and whether this is a facilities department or dpw thing that should be addressed and um oh so I think the my takeaway was that that the fire department had to pay for the consulting for the engineer to review it as far as the conclusion of the engineer I'm not even sure it was it was 100 available maybe maybe they're still waiting to hear back from the engineer so maybe just something to keep an eye on yeah I don't know what the conclusion is I did see the crack but yeah I don't think they've heard back the official uh analysis okay and then the memorandum of understanding I guess like yeah yeah short so I I the memorandum of understanding is out on sharepoint and I found it to be very helpful and you know surprisingly easy to read uh the numbers are you know it's only about four pages uh why it was signed I you know I'd have to defer someone else and there might be some language above I think in the first paragraph there is some language saying that um you know as they continue to negotiate their agreement they will um they will consider this memorandum of understanding um they will you know to me it seems like it's kind of um as as collective bargaining drags on you know just to get the the employees to continue to show up for work every day you got to have like a partial agreement but again I will have to defer to someone else on the rationale of signing the memorandum of understanding I can pull it up because um well I can if um I can find it in sharepoint and I can take a look yeah I guess it just yeah I'm so used to hearing collective bargaining and I just yeah if we're if we're getting this collective bargaining agreement is probably normally you know 10s in 20 30 40 50 pages probably very difficult to read this was four pages so um you know why the town opted for this yeah I don't I don't know hi I'll take a look at the agreement yeah thanks Tara other questions still for yes thank you um thank you both the the presentation John um I was just curious what is out of grade pay with 5 1 1 9 yeah um I would I would have to look into that I'm not sure I see it's you know it's budgeted for 9500 out of great pain now Chair out of great pain is the concept of an employee going to be you can see a job grade above their normal job grade so I do not proclaim to know the ranks of fire department but historically out of great pay is it your one job level and you're covering a higher job level you get paid at the yeah that makes sense to me yeah okay but I I didn't confirm that but it makes perfect sense to me yeah that does job um my other question was on 5114 and injury earnings and just may I miss this in the police budget but those are fairly big numbers and we don't budget anything I'm just curious as to I mean I know it could be hard to predict injuries but we don't budget anything for those that category yeah I don't know if that's an insurance issue whereas maybe the insurance would be picking it up at a certain point maybe a workers comp type issue um was it the hospital and medical care line cover that 5257 well I guess though it but it comes out of actuals so right madam chair yes go ahead Dave if I remember correctly the time of our action is self-insured for workers company station that's why we're going to our insurance budget you'll see a large amount of work this problem um so even though workers comp pay is like I think like 70 percent or something like that it still has to it has to come out of the department and um and so this goes back to that same concept I had mentioned earlier like you know if you haven't if we have an employee and they're being paid out of the first line 5117 salary changes and then they get injured we have to pay the carrier who then pays the employee how do we budget for that historically we assume nobody's going to be injured no they are causing reduction in salaries and wages then increase is that answer the question for your toe for for now yeah okay anything else tofer that's it Dave McKenna just a point of point of information most of both the police and fire departments they really don't have what we call other departments the workman's comp it's a different formula it's called line of duty injury where a police officer or a firefighter if they're injured on the job their salary is paid in full paid in full um all the time that they're out it's so out of that this this question it comes it's coming out of their salary but the salary is paid in full minus no taxes so that's police and fire only and it's it's it's called line of duty injury now i just curious that that's that's now would that come out of like the fire budget or would that come out of the like a different like a general fund come out it would come out of to my knowledge it would come out of the fire budget until such times they deem whether they're going to retire the fellow or the stuff like that got it so and i'm just thinking a lot here i apologize but uh so i assume let's just say someone does because he actually the the um chief kelly did mention that you know in the past year eight eight employees were out on extended sick leave five employees were out on injury leave 30 employees were out at different times on covid leave he had mentioned that to me um now the way i see the budget working is okay those guys continue to get their salary those salaries are budgeted so that's not going to really move the needle here that's not really going to move much because they're just getting paid what they anticipated they would be getting paid however whoever has to replace them if someone has that that might drive the ot or maybe that maybe it's almost like a subset of the ot but i can look into that but i would think the general salary line is going to stay pretty you know pretty uh stable there it it does it does draw the um the ot accounts yeah it would impact those yeah i imagine it doesn't pack them but but i can only tell in the police department if you have something like i'll give an example they have a an individual presently has been outlined a duty for over a year and the town the town side they recognize that and they've been trying to resolve the issue whether or not that employee is going to come back to work or take a disability and that's that's out there someplace right now and then maybe just so from my understanding so would that person be listed you know as an employee receiving salary in the detail that we're kind of looking at yes got it got it that's what that would have been my understanding too thank you sorry i'm the one i'm supposed to be the one answering the questions right now i'm asking questions but thank you maybe it may be possible that the five one one four line item is an accounting line to keep track of this so that is why there wouldn't be a budgeted amount because you can't budget for it number one but it's just to keep track of how much is spent got it so it's historical dean so i may end up saying this um whenever your member presents but i think you get a really good job so get a budget it's got a lot to do with it thank you i think really good job i concur thank you any other questions about the fire department budget all right as i said we won't vote on the fire department budget tonight hopefully we'll vote on it on wednesday we'll just um john it hopefully by then you can explain the differentials in these three and four counts um and then we'll just go right to a vote unless people have questions about the information that you're going to get if you have anything that you can share with the with the with the um committee between now and wednesday if you get any information from from the chief for julie please um send it to us or give it to tar to send it to us all right yes certainly all right um so we will um wait until wednesday to take a vote on the fire department budget and daryl did you say inspections um we'll have to hold off on that uh yeah i'm waiting to hear back from my champ on the schedule in the meeting okay all right well then let's go to annie and your budgets okay so um here's how we're gonna do this um rebecca and i are presenting on recreation edburn's arena the libraries um health and human services including all the sub departments a y cc and the council on aging transportation enterprise funds so essentially all enterprise funds other than the um water and sewer and the whole health and human services budget and the library's budget but we're going to do this in this order i'm going to talk you through uh recreation and rink and then rebecca will do the libraries and then we'll flip over to um health and human services and i'll cover that and the council on aging transportation enterprise fund and then rebecca will do a y cc i do not expect us to get through all of this in the next hour but i just wanted to give you the lineup so you know what we're doing rebecca do you want to contradict me at all no that sounds great okay so let me get where i want to be which is on the recreation budget all right i did not prepare any kind of spreadsheets or anything for this budget because um there's a bunch of stuff about an enterprise fund that is pretty straightforward so the enterprise fund is usually what we're trying to do is to see what the expenses are and then what the revenues are and we're asking that fund to be in balance and it is essentially self-contained so all of the expenses have to be covered by the revenue earned within the enterprise fund um so for recreation for example you will see that everything here is earned this line transfer from general fund if we are sending some money from the general fund to the enterprise fund it will show up as either transfer from general fund or transfer from other funds depending on whether or not the accounting department has gotten to fixing it and you can see the recreation budget is not accepting any funds from the general fund this year they're not asking for anything um these are the expenses unlike a lot of budgets that you will see they do not split the salaries and the expenses we're just sort of running down the side um what joe has done over time is that he has tried to budget um based on his programming here what the expenses will be they do run an after school care program and so that's this set of expenses um and let's see if there's anything else and then the kids after care and three school salaries and then pretty much they do the same things with salaries so reservoir staffing summer program salaries reservoir beach salaries these are all separated out um but the full-time um uh employees are represented in salaries and wages so let's go look at the salary detail which we do have um recreation did add one position this is a shared position with the rink obviously there's a lot of things that the rink and um the recreation department chair um so this is an off-hour supervisor which is basically somebody to be managing outside of regular town office hours so um it's they use a lot of young people for things so on and so forth and i believe that person is intended to just be you know an adult supervisor available at those off-hour times um you'll see that the director of recreation is charge point eight to the recreation budget and then the other point two shows up in the rink which you will see a little later so um let me just pull some things out here okay um the if we start at the top here one of our questions was about the salary and wages temp this was something that joe had originally budgeted like rolled into other things last year but it's bringing back into the budget so it's really just a repeat of a line that existed it's uh dog park supervisors stipend and a few other things like that that are just miscellaneous small salaries that are not full-time year-round positions um there was a big jump in reservoir supplies here and the major explanation for that was it's two things one is that he's rolled chlorine for the reservation for the reservoir into that budget instead of budgeting it separately and the other is that he's added 25 000 for maintenance of the new landscaping at the reservoir that that concerned about dpw capacity and doesn't want to lose ground on that landscaping so he's added some money to this budget for that um most of the rest of these things are increase in program costs which are covered by increases in program revenue he's raising fees this year um changing scheduling a little bit for some of the summer programs and he believes that will be more cost effective and that the revenue will cover uh okay and then these are his revenue estimates we did ask him how good he feels about these revenue estimates and he's feeling pretty good about them he thinks between the increase in fees and the increasing need for the programming that he will make these numbers because this is an enterprise fund it has retained earnings at the end of the year it keeps the money that it earned and didn't spend currently in the recreation um enterprise fund the retained earnings is 1.1 million dollars and joe is going to pull out 200 000 of that to support his revenue budget next year you can see he normally budgets about 100 000 he doesn't always use it but in this case the preschool that the recreation department runs is going to move into the parminter school once the program currently there that will go back to the high school to move back to the high school and he's pulled out some money to do some retrofitting in the parminter because they're going to move the preschool in there because it will save him a big chunk on rent he's now renting a commercial building and he wants to stop doing that um so those are kind of the highlights of what's going on with recreation do people have questions about recreation alan what's your question um well the question goes back to the off-hours um supervisor that's I believe that's a new line item it is uh whenever there's a new position I like to put a footnote in the report just you know a one-liner why so you know it can give me a one-liner that that justifies you know why it's a new position it hasn't been in the budget previously let me let me take Rebecca's notes really quick and see if she did a better job of notating this than I did um off-hours supervisor it may be there's always been a supervisor and they just pulled it out for transparency and it used to be in a different budget or maybe a brand no I think it's actually an added position and I remember us talking about this but I'm not sure um let me get back to you on a footnote on that but it is in position and it is related to making sure that things are well managed in off-hours okay thank you and I just wanted to make a point since this is the first enterprise fund um each enterprise fund has a health insurance uh number as a line item in their expenses and if when we get to the insurance budget you'll see an offset of like six hundred ninety six thousand dollars part of what I do is I take the off is take the uh expense lines from the enterprise funds including both water and sewer and add them up and if they don't add up to the same number as that offset at health insurance then someone's going to get questions so while you're doing uh the enterprise funds just double check those numbers and make sure that they're they're built into the offset in the insurance budget okay I mean do you want do you want that done before we vote Alan or are you just suggesting no no well we'll need to resolve them before we vote the insurance budget but if if the numbers from the enterprise funds add up to a different number then we're going to have a problem with the insurance budget okay that makes sense though just it's a heads up cool Brian uh yeah I have a quick question uh you said there's one point one million in the retained earnings how much is there in cash in cash in the retained earnings no no how much cash do they have but retained earnings is one part of your balance sheet usually there's less cash available than the retained earnings otherwise there'd be one point one million in cash if there was no other items on the balance of the enterprise fund right I'm not sure that we're using it's all it's all cash it's all cash we're not there's one point one million in cash okay so I was asking yeah we're not it's not we're not they're not using retained earnings the way you would use on a balance sheet here they're just using it to say reserve or money leftover or whatever that's what I that's what I thought but I just wanted to ask okay thanks all right Alan Jones said I cut you off before you got finished asking questions no okay Charlie do you have questions you're muted Charlie thank you madam chairman um I I so Annie I have several questions here okay um so the the overall expense budgets growing by 319,000 that's like almost 20 plus more than 15 percent yep and there's 150,000 of the increased expenses in items 53 1010 through 53 1040 plus the reservoir supplies program that's 50k that's a that's a huge jump in expenses do you know why those like what what what is fall contra winter contra so so what all those line items are is that is Joe trying to create essentially cost centers for his programming so fall contra is fall contracted services fall contracted programs tired and outside organization to come in and do a program same thing for winter spring and summer and then the fall in winter in spring in and summer in is all in-house programming so they are providing the programming either using their own staff or by hiring staff directly as opposed to contracting for a service okay so so that that there's 100 to 150,000 in these outside contracted services now are they completely variable in other words if the if the revenues don't come in on the revenue side the those expenses go away or is the town on the hook for that so i don't believe the town would be on the hook for it the uh the enterprise fund would be on the hook for it well the the town guarantees the enterprise can i finish answering sure so um the the these are the costs of the programming and then he similarly splits out the revenues okay so he's predicting um and it's not going to be sort of one for one at this point but he's predicting increases in revenue because he's increasing fees and i believe he's assuming some increase in participation so i believe that these increased costs are relative to increased participation but um i didn't ask him specifically line by line to explain that so i could go back and ask him to explain all these differentials if we need to any yep uh can i just add a comment which is on the winter on the contracts i can use the winter's example most of the programs with vendors are set up as cost share and so the standard rec department contract would say look it up like let's take the up and there's one i know nearer right take the winter puts all the doors on yep he sets up an agreement with the vendor that says um we're going to share player registration revenue 6535 right so player comes in you face 200 dollars for the season here she pays 20 we're split that six five so to answer Charlie's question um if the program doesn't occur then both the revenue and the expense go away because they're directly linked to one another and um and that's that's how a lot of these the same thing with the summer contract right a lot of those are the summer summer camps like the i know the soccer camp that's big in there it's the same arrangement it's a cost sharing arrangement with the vendor they don't get a right and and you know there's a concomitant increases and a bunch of income here and a bunch of this has to do with increasing fees as well either fees or participation so you know we're in balance i was less concerned about asking about the individual variation of costs here as long as we're in balance what we did ask him was how good do you feel about these revenue estimates and he was pretty confident about them and had a good detailed explanation for how he derived them so um but i'm happy to go back and ask any questions the committee would like answers to before we vote the budget if you prefer madam chairman yes john can i have a follow-up here um so right dean are you saying that these the the winter contract then the spring contract etc these are are variable costs in other words if if the uh if the projected attendance doesn't show up the costs go away is that yeah so to put a very fine point on it um so i'm tre the treasurer the islands and soccer we run we are the line item that says winter contract and expense we're not all of it but we're the we're like 80 000 and so we have an agreement with chip with direct department that says we're going to run the league and then based on enrollment we're going to split the cost so when 350 kids show up to the futsal league we take 350 kids we take the rate that's how many there are plenty for every kid to play in futsal we take um the fee we sit down together actually it's awesome to look by the participation by the fee you get with the total process then we back out our cost share we split what we're sharing uh we it's our staff it's our people we hire people we get the uniform we get to put on that um so when that league didn't play during covid we didn't have revenue we didn't have participation and we as the soccer club didn't get any income so the town didn't have any expenses thus it's a completely variable program on those contract ones thank you that was my question anything for the chairley no that's all thank you very much madam chairman jennifer uh yeah i just have um a small question but also a big picture picture question just because i'm new to this so on a previous budget we voted for the taxation total um you know that's that's not true here right what are we voting on the budget and do we care how much given that it needs to be in balance um what the particulars are i'm i'm just it's just a big picture newbie question i'm just not sure so and what happens if there's a cost over and do they tap into um the reserved money in without our needing to vote on something so um i can answer the first part of that question which is that the reason that we care is that we want to be sure that the recreation director is properly managing the enterprise fund we want to review his budget and we want to you know as i said my biggest question for him was his revenue estimates right this isn't taxation dollars i can't go you know look at what our property tax increase agreed upon increases i have to trust that when he says he's going to make $150,000 at the reservoir which is higher than last year's budget and higher than 2022's income that he has a reason to believe that he will make that money right so that was the general discussion that we had with him and then the other thing we always are concerned about is whether or not there's a transfer from the general fund that's a direct obligation on on our taxes which we are trying to get the enterprise funds to not have now later when we get to a y c c and council on aging transportation you will see that we do make general fund contributions and in fact we're making you general fund contribution to the rink but that is a long agreed upon process that covers some debt the rink took on that the town agreed to pay for so um that's why i'm looking at this the other reason worry about the retained earnings is because if those retained earnings drop below a certain level then there is no cushion for plugging a hole here without the town taking it out of the general fund presumably as an reserve fund transfer although charlie or al would know better than i whether or not that's what we would do yeah so i'm assuming that transfer in 2021 was something that we did after the fact i mean that wasn't budgeted for i assume i said that's yeah i believe so and it's such a small amount i don't even remember why we did it right right managing this budget at the time but that wouldn't have been um you know either that or we budgeted a larger amount but we ended up transferring less than right and then so then the question is if for some reason costs were to go higher do they have the ability without going to us to transfer additional amount from the retained earnings or is that part of the process of date i don't remember whether or not we have to actually vote on a transfer for retained earnings but i don't believe so it's not our reserve fund right right right i think al toasty has the answer to my question but it sounded like no or somebody yeah al charlie do you have an answer to that question uh it has to be appropriated through town meeting it has to come from there's a trend from retained earnings from retained earnings no however in other words these this line is transferred from the general fund has to be no no no we're talking about the retained earnings if they don't fund i know we have to appropriate that they need more money from retained earnings for example there were some sort of cost of retained earnings that would have to be a transfer approved by the finance committee it does yes okay um and then some specific questions that sounded like the 200 000 transfer from retained earnings this year is is sort of a one-time thing and they'll go back to the the historic average of 100 is that yeah i'm not even sure 100 is the historic average i think that's still giving himself a cushion that he may not use got it but yes we'll drop back to the usual budget after the uh the renovations to the apartment are done in those the preschools moved got it and then i just have another particular question so unlike many budgets there's somebody who does payroll yes is it not possible for the the ring to or for for you know the rec to use the rural department that's looking at the schools it does for everybody else that would feel more efficient um i don't think that the payroll clerk and the payables clerk here are not using the town systems okay i think that they are having to submit the paperwork to those town systems am i correcting do you know yeah so he needs staff to do that it's it's essentially a couple of administrative folk on his on his staff okay thanks you know particularly his payables are going to be complex there's a lot of people involved and there's there's a lot of expenses involved right those contracts are not payroll they're payables to you know the folks who who um are running those programs right okay so al toasty yes thank you um there's a drop in health insurance i'm assuming that somebody dropped off the plan yeah we asked that question and joe believes they either dropped off a plan or that people chose cheaper plans there was no magic bullet there that caused his health insurance to go down and wasn't something he like worked at um so okay uh then uh i mean just to follow up on the prior question you know they've got the authorization to spend these amounts of money where they would get trouble is if the revenues did not come in then expect it in which case they would have to try to control the expenditures to match it if if at the end of the year they were not successful and totally uh wiping out the deficit it would hit their funds and eventually you know would would hit free cash but that's my question actually you said retained earnings were a million one that i'm assuming that's carry that includes carryover from june revenues to pay the summer expenses yeah i didn't ask him to distinguish i just asked for unbalances my question would be what was the fund balance at the end of fiscal 22 i didn't ask that question um i could double check with joe whether he meant that that was the fund balance at the end i mean to me a fund balance is always the end of the fiscal year but i didn't specifically put it that way down so i will ask yeah it's uh sometimes gets asked to town meeting and if if the 1.1 is for your fund balance then that's like way too high uh well if you recall out it was about 700 000 dollars last year and then here's your 2022 actuals yeah so it wouldn't surprise me if it's 1.1 you know unfortunately that's not true for the rink so yeah my my guess is the 1.1 includes the carryover from june but it would be good if you could ask about what the fund balance at the end of 22 is i will do that i will get maybe well i think last year we got maybe to do a walkthrough of it in a little spreadsheet and i'll see if i can get that again thank you you're welcome rebecca thanks i was just gonna um add one thing to clarify on this use of retained earnings um because as annie mentioned he's talking about doing some renovations uh to the school building so that they can move the preschool over so um one of the things that joe mentioned is not only then do they save the rent they're currently spending on this mass app building but then he sees this as a way to increase capacity because there really is a huge demand in town for preschool during the school day and after school for elementary age kids and so when they move locations they will have a lot more capacity so of course you know their their revenue but then their expenses will go up but they'll be able to serve a lot more kids so um so it's almost kind of an investment in the sense that you know they can really provide a lot more with this renovation yeah it's a it's a i would say it's a very smart move so thank you yeah oh jones well now they just brought that up i'm looking for the reduction in rent um you mentioned rebecca or would that happen next year maybe next i would happen later okay yeah because right now the the investment this year for savings next year that's right the school building is still being used by the public school preschool right so the public school preschool moves to the high school then they do the renovations then they move over the rent department preschool okay do you know where the what line item the you said i think annie said that they're renting a commercial space now i believe that that would be in the expenses for the it would be in this kc after line it's okay so it's these two items the preschool and the kc after school that's that program right so the the rent's not specifically like lined out but it's it's part of those expenses okay thank you kc also you see it in some places listed as kids care it's the same program so for yeah thank you just a question come on so we have a public school preschool and then we have the rec department preschool how it seems like wouldn't we just have one i mean i understand there might be two facilities here but how did this come about so i i i believe that the public school preschool is also partly a um intervention program for kids with um known yeah it's not entirely but it's it's partly integrated preschool yeah beginning to get at it's it's a way of beginning that intervention early so that you have a better um later school experience right generals you know this better yeah i mean it's it's state mandated and about half of the the kids um have special needs and the other half don't since the idea that that's best practices to sort of integrate students in that way okay and then the rec department is just running a it's rec departments just running out something like that would be available to general preschool might be interested in boys and girls club or whatever right yeah okay so thank you any other questions i don't see any other questions i know that annie has a list of things that she has to get answers for but does anyone see any reason why we can't still vote this budget tonight i move the budget be voted as presented second any further discussion all right we'll take a roll call vote on the rec budget uh shame yes jennifer yes sophie yes ryan yes yes rebecca yes josh yes grant yes charlie yes john yes daryl yes annie yes l jones yes tofer yes higgy yes el toasty yes dean karman yes dave mckenna yes all right another unanimous vote all right that's like it is done thank you annie and what's up next um the rink um okay i'm going to try to remember all the questions i got asked uh i believe the clothing allowance here is contractual i got that right rebecca that was one of those contracted items same thing for the stipends can i interrupt annie he actually mentioned that some of the clothing stuff is is actually you know sweatshirts that say yeah that's a direct department that's i think this the uniform that is in gloves sorry you're right absolutely thank you this is actually like yeah uniforms and polo shirts etc that they buy for the dcr lease payment we are budgeting for that dcr lease payment but apparently we never pay it it and we don't pay it because we are entirely responsible for the building and we haven't seen dcr since we signed the 99 year lease and we don't send them the money and they don't try to arrest us um maybe i shouldn't have said that in public but anyways um you can see that joe is trying to plan for increases in the cost of utilities this energy line is the energy to run the entire rink you know the chiller etc etc gasoline is vehicle natural gas is heating for the parts of the rink that need to be heated if that are not where the ice is i think i've got that all right repairs and maintenance the concession stand there's $12,000 worth of expenses here alan jones asked a question about this earlier today and the answer is that on the revenue side the number is wrong so when we get to the revenue side i'll correct that obviously they didn't i pointed out it was losing money yeah it was losing money um and then this is that debt service on past um projects um which we get $50,000 transferred in from the general fund to cover a part of this uh and then these are the revenue estimates that's that $50,000 it says transfer from other funds but in this case it is coming from the general fund um the concession stand number here should actually be the same as last year $15,000 so um when we vote this we're gonna have to oh shoot i may have to get joe to do some different math and we're gonna be able to vote this because we'll be out of balance at that point it would be okay to show a gain i guess but you don't think we should check that with sanding before we do that um oh there used to be gains in these things it's not a crime all right fine we'll add some money to the we'll do some math and we'll uh vote the budget accordingly um so they're covering point two of the off-hour supervisor point to the director of recreation um and then part of all of the um facilities coordinator and administrators so this is the thing about rec and rink they're all in the same building it's the same staff they are uh attempting to split the uh expense of the personnel and some of the other expenses evenly so um that's why you see the same titles with the salaries play okay um i don't think there was anything else dramatic to say about this budget rebecca do you remember if there was anything else dramatic to say about this budget um not dramatic but one sort of interesting thing was if you look at the energy costs um energy referring to electricity and then also natural gas um natural gas uh he said also runs the dehumidifier for the ice skating rink and just one thing i was surprised by is he said that they can really notice the difference in weather so if we have when we're having warm winters um it really it he really notices how much harder it is to keep the rink cold so some of that budget increases energy actually costing more and some of it is that he thinks he needs more energy just to keep the rink cold and dehumidified yeah questions john yeah just curious about the um the service 58 56 thousand dollars just what that relates to yep um i i can't tell you specifically what projects but i know there've been some past um capital maintenance projects at the building that were um serviced out of the enterprise fund but that the town has agreed to uh reimburse part of that debt service and that's what the transfer from the general fund is i would have to have somebody with more history to know exactly what the details of that are so it's it's related to debt held by the town not debt held by the the ed birds arena well it's yeah sort of madam chairman hey charlie uh yes the uh a number of years ago the agreement was made an agreement was made between the capital planning committee and the town and the enterprise fund that the capital planning committee would fund um on certain projects one of which i think was a uh a renovation of the electrical system at the rink um the the capital planning committee would fund 50 and the balance was going to be coming out of the retained earnings or the the surplus in the enterprise fund that's that's what that's all that that's the reason why it says transfer from well the funds it doesn't say transfer from general funds it's it's coming from the capital budget charlie got it can i just on that comment you spent i just just to clarify a lot of your members if i if i recall where this all started was this goes way back i think it's like here at the Romney administration yeah the rink was a dcr property dcr gave it control of it to us under like an incentive 99 year lease with a requirement to do certain maintenance on the build so it's like here we're going to give this to you for like $10,000 a year you've got to do all this maintenance and the enterprise fund at the time couldn't support the debt service so it wasn't like we just it's not a willy-nilly decision it wasn't it was like dealing with circuitry we had which is how we got to that agreement not a fair way to put it no okay how would you i would put it that they were specific there were specific capital requests made of the capital planning department and since it was coming from an enterprise fund we wanted to see i was chairman of the capital planning committee at the time when we wanted to see the enterprise fund pay some of those debt service costs so some of the costs come from the enterprise fund and some come out of the capital budget which is essentially the general fund but it's a you know part it's allocated as capital budget right but these when i was putting out these were triggered off of the shift this all started when the state gave us the bill when it was a dcr building we weren't doing that yeah that's what i was getting at that may be i can't i don't know when when did that shift take place i don't recall but a long time i think ronnie was down there i mean i i have the contracts on place but i don't remember when it was done thank you madam chairman oh i was just wondering if there was a reserve fund and how much around how much was in it yes there is retained earnings here as well and the last time the number joke gave me on that so i'm losing track of where my documents are hang on one second annie i have a hundred and five thousand yes that sounds right hundred and five thousand dollars so considerably less and joe's comment was that it's a little close for comfort so i don't know whether he's hoping that you know somewhere in here he'll get more money into that by achieving more revenue than he's predicting or what but you know he's aware that he needs to get that up because that's his cover as charlie said for anything that's off in his budget so any other questions jennifer you still have your hand up are you done sorry about that so annie what is your recommendation uh well my recommendation is that we vote this budget but that we need to add three thousand eight hundred and ninety three dollars to the revenue side and i can do that math if i can get to my um calculator let me just a sec one two plus three thousand eight hundred and ninety three equals okay so the budget as printed accept that the revenue adjustment will make this revenue number here six thousand six hundred and fifty seven thousand three hundred and fourteen dollars and i'm doing that based on turning this into fifteen thousand dollars do you want to check my math i got the same numbers okay i'll uncheck my math okay so everybody needs to either note in your budget book or somewhere that we are voting a revenue surplus of several thousand dollars here and i think you have to edit the on the balance line above that three thousand eight hundred and ninety right under these revenues yeah the balance instead of zero okay so instead of zero that will be a positive three eight nine three eight nine three you are correct charlie does everyone understand what we we have done can you repeat that number please so the the new revenue number will be six five seven three one four tara and the balance will then be three eight nine three and the positive right positive thank you okay is there a second to that second any questions discussion charlie um madam chairman and andy i think the balance has to be has to be negative right um oh because the revenues are negative it's not negative it's just a credit balance credit balance has to be in parentheses yeah that's just what i wanted to okay got it does that make sense tara that we're representing representing revenue as a positive as a number in parentheses yes i just don't know um if i said the ed burns arena enterprise fund budget totaling six hundred fifty three thousand four hundred twenty one dollars in expenses offset by six hundred fifty seven thousand three hundred and fourteen in revenue with a three thousand eight hundred ninety three dollar resulting balance surplus surplus surplus resulting surplus okay yep grand thank you madam chair um is there a reciprocal entry in the next page so i've set that as well yes so where it says concession stand stand on the revenue budget 173 where it says 11107 that should be 15 000 15 k even okay thank you you're welcome hello jones and just a detail that we don't present this number corrected this all goes into the finance committee report and i don't represent positive revenues with parentheses on them yeah it'll be clear right cool all right we have a motion that's been seconded unless there are any other questions or any discussion we will take a vote does everyone understand what we're voting on all right um shane yes jennifer yes yes sofie yes ryan yes rebecca yes josh yes grant yes charlie yes john yes daryl yes annie yes l jones yes tofer yes piggy yes autosti yes dean karmann yes dade mckenna yes and a unanimous vote that budget has been approved what next annie rebecca um we have but we have 17 minutes i'm ready to start on library i'm ready to start on libraries if that works sounds good all right so let's see i'm gonna share this all right are you able to see this library budget so annie and i had the opportunity to talk with uh anna litten who is the new director of libraries um and she was super hopeful and um very responsive so that was terrific um she walked us through a bunch of these items so if we start with salaries the library currently has 24 full time and 14 part-time staff the part-time staff are not fully benefited um and they also have 16 pages who are not benefited and then they do make some use of on-call libraries and library assistance um if we look at the salary line item here um you can see that the the percent increases you know quite modest it's 1.27 percent so there's a few explanations for why that's pretty reasonable um one is that it is it's the increase over last year where last year's budget is modified by the collective bargaining that was approved at the end of town meeting um and if you refer to the budget explainer document that we got from julie she did note that due to a restructuring of their contract staff in the library union and who are grade one or two will stay at the same step in fiscal year 24 as they were in fiscal year 23 um we also see that with the hiring of the new library director she's coming in at a lower salary than the previous library director um and then also it's not reflected in this budget document but ana also did tell us that they have just last week filled this position of the assistant library director um there's a branch librarian coming over and although it doesn't show that in this document the new assistant librarian is also coming in at a at a slightly lower salary than the previous person holding position um one else one of the questions that we had uh referred to this overtime amount you know my my question was just does that suggest that you need to hire somebody to cover those hours um and she said that that refers to the the sunday use of the library so the contract requires that they offer the sunday hours as overtime to the staff um differential just for those of us who are new just refers to the fact that they get a slightly higher rate for hours worked in the evenings um and the clothing and the stipends are just contractual items uh if you look down at all of our various expenses you see that they're all just level funded with last year what am i doing here um with the exception of this item towards the bottom the licenses in annual fees of 22 000 and what that refers to is a software license of the mln software this is the software that actually runs the library system so so for example the software that runs the rfid system that allows you to check out the books by just putting your books on the stack on the desk um they the decision had been made to move this item from previously it was in the capital budget um so it's not a new expense it's just no longer in the capital budget um and i my understanding is that the decision there was because you know if you think of a capital expense as some software that you purchase and then you own the software uh this is a little bit different in the sense that we have to pay the licensing fee every single year in order to use the software um but it's not it's not something new that we're buying it's just new onto the budget um and then another thing just to be clear about is this other contracted services which is the you know we're we budgeted the same amount as last year that refers primarily to uh this the contract with Minuteman library network so that refers to um exchanging of materials with them but also software or sorry uh electronic subscriptions and things that we get through the Minuteman library network um what else oh yeah so one one thing that she emphasized when she talked with us was also you know what we vote on in the budget is this these other expenses for the library so separate from payroll if we're allocating something like half a million dollars the the library is actually spending about a million dollars on all of these um expenses where they get the other half a million from some from state aid uh some from the fox and robin resale shop some from the friends of the robins which runs book sales some from the Arlington library foundation and some from the trust funds so when we look at our budget you know we're only spending it appears from this budget it looks like we're spending like 200 000 on books and materials for example um but in fact a lot of the you get essentially twice as much spending um in this expense category because of the outside revenue sources so we're getting extra books and materials lots of different programs um during the pandemic they were able to provide a lot of technology services to the community um they're not reflected in the budget here because they came through these outside sources uh and then the last thing is this fox offsets at the bottom refers to 25 000 that comes to help pay for fox librarians um shop um uh yeah then the last the only last thing i was going to mention was um it's not it's not important for today's discussion but just to give people a heads up that when we're talking about capital budgets in the future the library is really hoping to eventually rebuild the fox library they really see that that's a need so there's going to be um the state is going to be opening up the grant process soon for for them to apply for potentially you know help rebuilding the fox library so i suspect we'll hear more about that in the future when we talk about capital. Annie is there anything you wanted to add about libraries but i just wanted to add and i don't know if you have that um slide quickly available but it turns out that we are the fifth highest like library system in the state for circulating items um and we're sort of behind like brookline and newton and cambridge and boston um so we beat out wooster i don't know if that's interesting or not but i thought that was kind of cool uh so the library is highly in demand and that demand has been going up for all kinds of materials um and she also said that we're the highest user um of every every system in the minimum network so we're really taking full advantage of our membership in that as well yeah um so this is a highly in demand uh service to the community um one other thing to note just because it's always um a a thing that everybody on the finance committee should keep in mind that we have an obligation to spend a certain amount of money on our libraries and where we get our state aid and to continue to participate in the minute man um network if we fall below i forget what the term is rebecca but we must have put it in the notes so i'm right somewhere um but our you know minimum required allocation i think it is um if we fall below that minimum required allocation we run the possibility of being decertified and no longer having access to the minimum network um so uh it's something to just always have in the back of your mind about our obligation to our library budget stepping up my soapbox thank you all right uh questions l jones uh and regarding that soapbox you know how close we are to that cliff any idea i i don't believe that it's an issue this year one of the reasons that came up in discussion with anna is because as we continue to try to move maintenance lines like the maintenance line you're seeing here into the facility's budget we've moved part of the library maintenance there we then had to prove to the state that that was actually money spent on the library so as much as it's more practical to have facilities have control of it we need to be sure we can work out the accounting and the accountability to the state for that money being spent on the library um before we can complete that process thank you um we have come close in the past we have had times when we were delaying an override because of the condition of the economy where we had to ask for waivers to that requirement and where we cut hours there's also an hours requirement we have to be open a certain amount um so it is um something that in in stressful times can be an issue and we just all have to keep in mind the consequences of too deep a cut so far yeah thank you um sorry i'm the fox offsets could you i'm quite like someone coughed or something i kind of missed that so sure so there's a resale shop called the fox and robin and basically um they make about 50 thousand a year and they put some of the money some of the money goes towards um materials and programs for children and and it would appear you know it it doesn't appear on our budget they just wanted directly so here um but but then they pay 25 thousand and it's sort of unofficially to help cover uh children's library and at the fox so this is money that they voluntarily give us from the resale shop okay thank you charlie i saw your hand go up but then down to a question uh actually thank you madam chairman but um alan and and annie uh had a long discussion on the question i was going to ask thank you um i have a question about the trust fund is it is it a one is it one fund or a series of funds do you know that i do not know that um i i actually do it is a group of funds it is various um former citizens of the town that have um bequeathed to the town some money to be invested and to provide funding for the library i don't know how many funds it is but that's why it's called the trust funds because it's more than one um do you have any idea of how much in total those funds contain i don't but i would suggest that if they are throwing off three hundred thousand dollars a year there's a lot yeah so um but i can uh follow up on that um and ensure it's numbers on it oh do you have the answer to that yeah so the trust funds so annie's right so it's what i would answer it is it's both one fund and multiple funds and so as annie said it's multiple funds but it's managed in one by one investment advisor um i don't know who the town goes with these days um when i say the town it's measured the treasurer is custodian of funds manages it in consultation with the library trustees and so you know they have an allocate this data is required allocation to things you can't invest in um i forget it's a big number if i'm sale it's like four or five you know it's like real money and so they meet like once it's like the treasurer meets once or twice you have trustees you go over the investment strategy they go over the distributions how it's going to be run things like that so that's kind of how it works and then when he gets those shows up here thank you any other questions jennifer uh yeah just a little question what are the library pages um those are the sort of you know for lack of a better word the the least um the least skilled employees of the library so people who um you know reshelf books and things like that so it's in is it a new expense or wasn't in or my i'm misunderstanding this so it wasn't 23 and i guess it's in 23 i guess it is being budgeted in 24 it's been there for a long time never a while okay yeah i just i was just misreading it okay great thanks it's it's quite a few people and they're all just grouped together yeah madam chair i move the budget is printed i have a second second second all right any further discussion questions all right all right if you want to approve the budget as printed say yes shane yes jennifer yes sophie yes brian yes rebecca yes josh yes grant yes charlie yes john yes daryl yes annie yes el jones yes tofer yes pecky yes altosti yes dean carman yes dade mccanna yes nice unanimous uh the library budget and i developed a great job on the library as well was that dean i think the library presentation was great that was another first i agree thank you absolutely was awesome can can i just say that that given that rebecca is my budget buddy that i think she was much more articulate and organized than i was so i really appreciated the the uh come back for our team um uh charlie a question uh i have two two comments uh following up on what djus said i think our our new members uh tonight and last week have given really uh spectacular presentations they've raised the level of the game so i congratulate and secondly just a word of caution town apparently deployed a new barracuda network protector i don't know what the exact term is it's like a firewall which sits outside the town system and i found out that i was getting all my emails to town uh staff members were getting caught in the barracuda and when i finally talked to the it department today they i don't know what they did but they they helped out and then i found out that from uh from eda cody that in in one five minute period she got 15 emails for me so um just be aware that if you don't get a response from somebody you sent an email to it might be that you're trapped in their new system to know thanks charlie did you get a bounce pack no oh i just got disappeared i'll toasty madam chair and move we uh adjourn so second second all in favor say aye well hold on tophi has a question tophi yeah thanks i just wanted to say um we're going to be meeting about the it budget next week so if you have questions on the it budget and i suspect some members may uh please get them to me uh this week thank you tophi any yeah i just want to add similarly we will be presenting the health and human services budget and a y cc on wednesday night and we did get some questions after our budget review so if anybody's looked at that budget it has additional questions please get them to us so we have time to ask christine for answers um and also to judge whether or not we should let her know that we're reviewing her budget on wednesday and she may want to show up so thank you all right um i had this motion to adjourn second and all in favor hi hi hi and my post all right we are adjourned i will see you all wednesday night thank you very much good night all night thank you