 Okay, calling the Finance Committee meeting for March 12, 2019, to order at 10 minutes after 2, and I'm going to thank Yamers Media for once again being present and working with us as we're going through the transition of trying to establish a system of recording through other means than their presence each time, but we're glad to have you here today. So we have a fairly significant agenda, and I wanted to propose a shift on orders, and I'm going to make a very quick announcement because it's an easy one. Question that we've written about remote participation, and I checked with the town clerk who's also the clerk of the council, and she confirmed that we do not need to have a vote of this body, the committee, to allow remote participation, that remote participation is automatically a part of our practice, but that there is a form that needs to be filled out by a member who wishes to participate remotely and submitted according to the policy that was adopted by the Select Board, and it is available in the committee page under Select Board. I assumed that it might be elsewhere, but I just wanted to alert you to that since the question had come up. If you don't have a copy of the agenda, there's some extras here, so I'll pass them back, but it was the same as posted. So getting to the order, what I would propose that we do is in the order that's theirs to take numbers two and three, which is the financial consideration of the Statement of Interest to the MSBA, and the funding for identified major projects is the first item, they are together really, so while it is listed separately, it is one item, and do that first, then do the review of the March 7 budget forum, third is review and consider the suggested changes to the committee charge, and look at our work, see if there are any modifications we want to make to our schedule and work plan, something that we said we would put on every agenda even though we didn't anticipate we would make changes every meeting, and then public comment in that order, is that agreeable, then I think that we would like to get to that first combined item of the financial considerations to the Statement of Interest and the funding plan, and turn it over to you, Sean. Thank you. Yes, we have a minute, taker. Thank you. So before I start, just two things, so I've got some chest stuff going on, so if I pause periodically for a cough drop or water, just be a second, and I'm going to go through the presentation quickly, but I'm going to try to speak slowly, so if you catch me not speaking slowly, raise your hand and correct me, okay? All right, so we're going to start with a presentation, and then I'm going to bring up that model that we talked about in the past. So here's what we're going to discuss. We're going to start with just, you know, based on what I've looked at, can we afford some version of all these projects? We'll quickly go through the assumptions. A lot of them you've seen before, but I just wanted to lay them out again for you so you kind of know what's being put into the models. We'll look at the cost estimates for a few options, or we'll look at the cost estimates for all the projects, and then we'll look at different options for how to phase those projects or different versions of those projects. We'll talk briefly about some of the operating costs, considerations, and then some of the capital cost considerations, and then next steps. And at the end, then I'll bring up the model that is almost ready for sort of a public sort of thing, but I'll talk about what I want to try to do first before we put it up for the public to play around with. So let me make this a little smaller. So this little disclosure, read this. This is just a saying, basically these are all estimates, you know, as you see fit, apply ranges to it, you know, it could be 10% higher, 10% lower. We're using sort of inputs that we've got from previous architectural reports and things like that, but again, these are estimates with a lot of assumptions built in. So it's in the ballpark, but you'll have to range it. Also, it's sort of a living thing as we get more information, we'll update the models. And lastly, we looked at some of these options. We looked at five options in particular. There are many other options that could be really feasible and desirable that haven't been looked at. So by no means are the options that are presented here the only options or could be other models to look at. So can the town afford these projects? And I think based on what I've seen, yes, there is ways for the town to afford these projects. It's going to require really prudent planning and budgeting. I think based on sort of the amounts that have been put out there in prior architectural reports, those costs are going to have to be reined in a little bit. But looking at those hard and setting some budgets and some costs, restrictions on what we think these projects might end up at, there is a way to afford all of them. We have to take advantage of available grant funds. So sort of can we afford these projects? We have to do all of these things in this list. Now, if we don't do any of these things in this list, then we might not be able to afford these projects. We have to plan for these projects in a way that keeps our debt load below the legal debt ceiling. So given the number of projects and the short time span we're looking at them, we are going to, that debt ceiling is going to be a consideration and we can't go over it. So you'll see in the models that we're testing each of the options for, does it go over that debt ceiling? That is, I think it's 5% of our combined DQV, so you'll see what that looks like. And then also it's going to require town approval of one or more debt exclusions. So in all the models that you're going to see, we assumed a debt exclusion for one school and the library. So in some of the models there are two schools being proposed. One of those schools is assuming a debt exclusion. In the models where there's only one school being proposed, that school is being assumed to be a debt exclusion. Some of the assumptions, so the first few you've seen, borrowing rate at 5%, we got that from our town financial advisor. Cost escalation, that was from JCJ Architects, who provided a range of 4% to 4.5%. That's also the rate that TSKP Architects used in their models of 4%. Net zero premium, I'm using 7.5%. The range I got from JCJ Architects was 5% to 10%. The TSKP models range somewhere between 6% and 12%, depending on the different options. So in the middle, it's really going to depend on how those projects, those buildings are designed. MSBA effective reimbursement rate, so for a new school construction, assuming 50% reimbursement rate, for a addition renovation, assuming 55% because of the additional reimbursement points for a renovation project. We did get some estimates from TSKP recently of their ranges of reimbursements, and these numbers are within their ranges. So it's going to vary based on schematic design and ultimately what's eligible to the MSBA, but it's within the ranges that TSKP sat, and it's reasonable based on whatever reimbursement rate was last time we had a school building project. Ongoing capital, so one of the pieces of feedback received last time was we had to build in an assumption around ongoing capital needs outside of these four or five building projects. So the amount that's being used right now, which is a variable that you'll be able to play with in the model, is 2.5 million. That's roughly half of what's available for capital projects right now. We're about 5 million, which is the 9% to 10% of the tax levy. So again, it's going to take some real belt tightening to make this all work, which we knew we would have to do to afford all these projects. The good thing is if we do at least one of these, some of these projects, some of the capital items come off of that capital plan. So it will make it a little easier to handle that. Tax levy growth, so we're assuming 2.5%, this number basically is used to show what the amount available for capital is. So if the tax levy goes up roughly 2.5% per year, then the 10% of that goes up the same rate. That's an assumption that is good probably for 5 to 10 years, depending on new growth and things like that, that could change in the future. So just to be cautious of that, we're assuming 2.5 going forward, but there's no guarantee of that. And if you have questions as we go, I feel free to ask them. It's OK with that. So now we have that answered, so go ahead. Ongoing capital, 2.5 million, and then you say that's half of what is spent today. My brain is not putting that together. I don't know what you mean. So right now, we take 9% of the tax levy to devote towards the funds for JCPC and what's used to prioritize projects. And so that about today is about five in the ballpark of 5 million. So all the projects that JCPC is considering have to live within that amount. Going forward, we're going to have to pull some of those funds to pay for these projects, these four or five new building projects. So that money that JCPC has, that 5 million, some of that now is going to have to go to pay the debt service for these new projects, which is going to leave less for the remaining needs of the town. This was money not to be used for the small capital projects, not buildings. Is that right? So this is money. So the 5 million, basically, the way the town works is each year that 10% or 9% of the tax levy is devoted towards capital. So all the needs right now for capital are coming out of that 10%. When we do these building projects, that 10% is going to have to cover those building projects as well. So this assumption is basically just saying we're going to have to reduce how much can be used for things like roads and regular building improvements that we make every year. We're going to have to reduce the amount of money for that in order to afford the debt service for these new buildings. Well, that just seems strange because we've been talking about lack of maintenance on all kinds of town buildings. And this would then continue lack of maintenance because you wouldn't be any money to do small things. Well, so there would be 2.5 million to do the, so basically the 2.5 million here is what's going to be available for all the small things. Now some of those things aren't super small, right? Some of them are sizable. But the 2.5 million is what would be available. Now in addition to that, there are chapter 90 funds which are separate from that. There are other sources of revenues that are separate from that, but the portion of the tax levy would be the 2.5 million. But you're right, that's one of the realities to afford all these projects is we are going to have to tighten this piece of it. OK, Paul. So I think those are really good points that Dorothy's making, but I think it would be good for Sean to get through his model before, and you can change that number, you say, I want to do $3 million or $4 million. You can change that and see what it does and say, well, if we do $4 million, we can't afford one of these projects. Which one do we knock off? So I don't think it's worth debating now whether it's a good number or not. He made some assumptions, which is what this is an assumption, and you can change that assumption. I was going to build on the point you just made. If we take a mortgage out on our house, we're going to have to repay the principal. So we have less for everything else. Just on the zero net energy, the premium, you're just applying that to the ones which are not already built in. Yeah, so you'll see it, but the one that is school that we've built it in. Essentially, it's being applied to the fire station and the DPW. OK, go ahead. So some other assumptions. So the town share of the library project, there's some fundraising built in there. There's grants. So the number that ultimately the town would pay, that number came from the library director, so you're aware of where that figure came from. Year of construction is an estimate. So again, that's a variable you'll be able to adjust in the models when you play around with it. The projects to be debt excluded, we used one school in the library. You can also adjust that in the model, if you want to try different things. So cost of moving sixth grade to the middle school. So recently, the regional master facility study group looked at that closely. They brought in the old principal of the middle school back when there were many more students in the middle school. And they have identified a way that you can move the sixth grade into the middle school without any significant capital costs, essentially. There may be some capital things you want to do, but there are no required capital things to fit the sixth graders in. And we're going to be looking at that model more this Friday with the regional master facility use group, and more of that will be presented in the future. But basically, there is a way to fit the sixth graders into the middle school as it is now. Now, that's what's different than if we build an additional cracker farm. So if you go with the option of building additional cracker farm, we're estimating 5 to 10 million. So out of all the estimates, there's two that I feel sort of least strongly about. And so this is one of them, because we don't really have a great way to estimate this. The way we've estimated it so far is we've looked at some of the MSBA guidelines around how many square footage would you need for classrooms, and special ed spaces. We took the additional students. That would be brought over, and how many would be per classroom, essentially, and then multiplied that total square footage addition that we would need by the rates from the TSKP report. I don't think there's any guidance at this point what the model would actually look like a cracker farm if an addition was built there, if it would just be all the grades would be a little bit bigger to absorb those 137 students, or if there'd be something else. So again, this number is probably one of the weakest here, just because we don't know what that looks like yet. Can I just ask, it's your best guess right now of the getting from the 750-ish down to 600, all of them went into cracker. Not some part of them went up to the middle school. No, right, it's all of them going into cracker. It's all into cracker. Yeah, basically I took the enrollments at Fort River and Wildwood today, less 600. And so that's where the 137 comes from. That would have to move. So that does include sixth grade. It includes sixth grade. And I also looked at some comparable MSBA projects, new constructions that were similar size or similar number of students and then scaled it down to the square footage. And then again, it comes out between five and 10 million, but there's a lot of questions, would there be other code upgrades that are required in the building? That building does have some sprinklers, so some of the major ones may be recovered, but again, that's a big question that would have to be studied more. So here are the cost estimates. Again, you'll want to apply your own ranges as you see fit, but this is what we're using to put into the model. So the library is the same number you've seen. It's 35,600,000, and it's based on a year of construction of 2023. The DPW. So the DPW and the fire station, we originally started using the numbers that came out of their architectural reports, and I'll be honest, when we projected those forward with cost escalation, they became really sort of unrealistic, just in terms of the cost and how quickly they grew. So these numbers we actually set some caps at, going back and looking at this. So we set the DPW at a base year cost of 25 million, and the fire station at a base year cost of 20 million. So just to bring something to you today that is reasonable, we had to do that basically, otherwise it was just the cost escalation was getting out of control. So that's still going to grow as we go forward, but that's what we put in for a base. But that includes the net zero. So if you keep going down that column, so the DPW were projecting the year of construction of 2025. So that would have nine years of escalation. That gives you the 35.6 million preliminary cost estimate, and then there's the net zero premium added in. So in 2025, we're projecting the cost of about 38 million using the 25 from this year as a base. Yeah, go ahead, Lane. This is playing with the model. But in other words, if we were able to build either of those sooner, we save money. And so in the model, I'm going to let you guys test out soon. You can play around with the year of construction. You can play around with the cost escalation factor. You can adjust the base cost estimate if you want to make that lower or higher. You'll be able to adjust for all those things. But 2025 is what we use for now. The next one is the fire station. That one we adjusted down a little bit to 20 million. And that one, we're projecting the year of 2027, just because of the relationship between that and the DPW. And the same thing, cost escalation here is farther in the future, but the years of escalation are less because the base year has escalated already. So the base year for the fire station of around 20 million, that was based on the year of construction of 2020 from the architecture port. So if you get confused by the years of escalation or less, it's just because that number was already in the future to start. And so the total cost for the fire station in 2027 we're projecting at 28.3 million. And then the rest, there's really three of them, but under each option, it's an ADRENO versus new construction. So there's the 315 student model, new school, and then ADRENO option. There's the 420 student option, new and ADRENO and the light yellow. And then there's the 600 student, new and ADRENO. And so the second number that I referred to before that I have sort of the least confidence in is the ADRENO for the 600 student school because the addition, the possible addition for a 600 student school could be much different than what was proposed in the TSKP reports. I just don't feel as good about that number that we're extrapolating out. But this will give you a sense. If anything, I think that number is a little high for the ADRENO for the 600 students, but that's what the rates are coming out to right now. So another thing with ADRENOS is when you look at comparables or what you think are comparables on the MSBA website, there's a wide range of what renovation is needed at all those schools. So they're not really easy to compare to, essentially. Some schools need a total gut job, some schools don't. So again, that's the second number that I feel least confident about. Kathy, you had a question? When you're looking at two schools rather than one, you've got a couple of different ways of getting to two, which is one's an ADRENO and one's a new. Realistically, one would come, just because of the way the grant funding comes, would come much later than the first. So I'm wondering whether you shouldn't put, you've got a one-year escalation factor there. So I don't know what the best number is, whether you say seven, but because we can't be in the queue at the same time. So that's one of the options we haven't looked at. So all the options you're gonna see in a minute, all of them assume we do both schools at the same time. So one with MSBA funds, one without MSBA funds. And the reason we're doing that is we wanted to give you a sense, because what I've heard from some of the communities that we can't do one school on weight to do another school, there could be such a long time in between, and there could be some equity issues there. So these options assume we do one school, or do both schools at the same time, one MSBA funded, one not MSBA funded. But again, that's something if you wanted to look at the alternative of what if we do weight to do them, you can do that in the model. I did, the reason I'm raising, I think that's a reasonable thing to put in, and then you could, as you pointed out, we could put in seven years from now. I just don't want two to look like the same price of one, which they're very near right now, because in the raw prices, because they aren't realistically as near as they are if you talk about needing- In the future, right? Yeah. And then below just again, so the moving sixth grade to the middle school, you wouldn't have to add any cost at this point to those last two options on the end. If you build an additional cracker farm, then you would add five to 10 million to those two options at the end for the 600 student school. Go ahead. Well, there's one option you didn't consider. There's many options I haven't considered. Build the 600 school without state aid. In other words, if they don't give us the go ahead now, are we gonna wait and go through this one thing again? Yeah, no, that hasn't. Just go ahead and build it. Right, no, we haven't considered that. Not yet, again, we could look at it. So when you go back to the previous slide, when you are saying new 315 students, school ad reno, that's not saying here's two schools. It's saying here's how to get one school with 315. Yeah, maybe that's unclear. So this is basically each one of those is one school. So school new 315, 59.5 million. That's the cost for one new 315 student school. The ad reno is for one ad reno school at 315 students. That'd be the 46.7 million. So if you were going to do two schools, you would add those, you'd do double that and then subtract out any grant funding. Does that make sense? He's given us a way to get 750 with two schools if we were to go that route. Right, so if you wanted to get to roughly 750, you would say I need to do one 315 student school, one 420 student school, that gets you to 735. And that would be sort of your ballpark cost for that. Just to make sure I completely understand this, we could also say two 315 new schools. I'm not saying we can afford that, but if you were, then we would be saying 59,499. If you did two 315 student schools, you'd probably have to then think about moving sixth grade to the middle school or an addition of Crocker Farm because you'd only get to 630 students which wouldn't cover all the students needed. But what I was, the point I'm making is if you were going to give some school, some students a brand new school and some students a renovated school, then you have the two options. I'm looking for a little bit of equity. Yeah, yeah, right, yep. The nice thing about the way he's done it, Lynn is if we multiply your two new schools, you can compare it to the cost of one new school at 600, so. And these are still just inputs, again, these aren't any proposals, these are just inputs that you'll then take to put into the model basically, the total cost that you come up with, you'll pull that number, pop it into the model to project out the debt. But the MSBA number is not counted in, it's not subtracted. Not yet, you'll see it on the next, or a few minutes. Shauna, did you have a question? Hello, yeah, I'm still not clear what ad reno means. So ad reno, so TSKP looked at lots of options and so one of the options they looked at is an addition renovation, which means some portion of the building would be renovated and then they would build an addition and they looked at different size additions. So they looked at a very small addition, they looked at 50% addition, essentially. They looked at a lot of different levels, yep. Good. So these were the four original options that I said we were gonna look at and come back with numbers on. And I've given you a bonus option so you get five for the work of four that we'll talk about in a little bit. But essentially the fire station, DPW and library under all the options are new and those are the years that they're projected to be constructed. The first two options look at replacing Fort River and Wildwood with some version of Fort River and Wildwood, either new construction or ad reno. And under each of those, one school we would get MSBA funds and one school would be without MSBA funds just so you can see if that's possible. And we brought it one year forward from what you saw last time. Last time we looked at 2021 as the year of construction that seems less realistic at this point. So we've escalated that forward one year to 2022. And then option three and four is the 600 students school. Option three is with the additional cracker farm and option four is with the sixth grade going to the middle school. So those were the two ways to get to the 600 students. And both would assume MSBA funds for all the construction costs, which is not a guarantee, but that's the assumption for now. All right, so all the options have basically two pages. So each option has two pages to it. At the top of each of these pages is sort of a reminder of what you're looking at and what we're projecting out. So this option one, this is what we're calling a three school option. So you're gonna be left with three elementary schools at the end of this. And it would be those, the two projects would be new construction. So that wouldn't be add right now would be the new construction for Wildwood and Fort River. So you've got the total cost. You've got the five projects in each of those columns. You've got the total cost for each of those projects. Any grant funds that are available. So for the library, you can see the grant funds and that would also include fundraising. For the elementary school, Fort River were assuming MSBA funds of a 50% reimbursement. And then nothing for Wildwood because we're assuming we're doing that without MSBA funds. The town cost is the net of those two numbers. Dead Excluded just says, are we excluding this project's debt? And so you can see we're saying yes for the library, no for DPW, no for fire station, no for the Fort River project, but yes for the Wildwood project. I need to go, this is where I need to go. Slower, okay. All right. So this chart at the top, this is gonna be on the same chart, the same layout of the chart, you'll see on all these different options. And it's basically a summary of what's being projected below. So you've got the library. Each of those columns is the information for each of the different projects. So if you look at the top, you'll see library, DPW, fire station, Fort River and Wildwood. When we get to the options that have the 600 student school, you'll see Fort River and Wildwood go away and in exchange it'll be a 600 student school. The first row there, total cost. So that's the total cost that comes from that previous screen we looked at of the projected cost. Where am I seeing it? So at the top, you see where it says total cost on the left? Yeah. Right there, I see the words with the look, as though it's your library. When you said total cost, I thought you meant all projects. Right, no, I mean, sorry, total cost for each individual project. I got that. Yeah, okay. Then below is the grant funds for each individual project. So for the library of the 19.7, that came out of a report that the library director shared with me. So it's a combination of the MVLC grant funds and private fund raising and things of that nature. We don't have any grant funds for the DPW or the fire station. We're assuming MSBA reimbursement of 50% for the Fort River. So you'll see roughly a 50% reimbursement there, that negative 31.9 million. And then we're assuming no MSBA for Wildwood because we're gonna do that at the same time. And that would be a non-MSBA project. The next row down is just a net of those two numbers. So the library cost is the 35.6 less than 19.7, leaves you with the 15.9, which is the number that's been presented. The DPW can do the same numbers because there's no grant funds for Fort River. You've got the net town cost of 31.9 million. And then the Wildwood school with no grant funds, you've got the cost of the town of 59.5 million. Good so far? The next column or next row down says whether the project's debt was excluded. And so the importance of that is if it's excluded, then we don't have to look at it in terms of, does it fit under the 10% of the tax levy that we use for capital projects? Because there's gonna be a separate revenue source from the taxpayers to pay that debt. So the library, we're assuming the debt is excluded. The DPW know, the fire station know, the first school project for River know, and the Wildwood project, yes. And then lastly, the start date is just sort of a reminder to give you a sense of when the debt kicks in. 2023 for the library, 2025 for DPW, 2027 for the fire station, and then 2022 for both schools. And whether they could literally be done at the exact same time is a question. But again, just for illustration purposes. And then the table all the way at the right is just a reminder of some of the key assumptions that are being used. So the borrowing rate, 5%, cost escalation, 4%, net zero premium, 7.5, MSPI reimbursement, 50%, and ongoing capital, 2.5. And all of those are variables we can influence. So for example, even the borrowing rate, I looked recently at municipals, if I go out 20 years, it's not getting much more than 3%, in terms of an investor buying them. So this is on the, you're certainly being conservative. Again, we went with what our financial advisor said, which given some of the uncertainty, but you're right, I think rates are a little bit, are less than the 5% currently. And then the other question, this is sort of a bottom line question that we'll see as you iterate these. Does the world look any better? This is a pretty ugly picture right here. That's where the bonus option comes in. So the bonus option is back. Does the world look any better when you spread these out even more over time? It would. I don't have any options here that spread it out past 20, 27, because we wanted to look at sort of doing these projects in a tighter timeline, but the more you stretch them out, the more affordable they get. Yeah, because they get more expensive as a project, but other projects are winding down in terms of what we're paying off. In terms of the debt ceiling, you spread out more. You're right, the overall cost gets more expensive, but how it relates to the debt ceiling and how it relates to the percentage of the capital funds we have to spend on them, you can be more flexible. All right, so I'm gonna go to the, there's three charts for each option as well. Before you go there, you have this odd shaped star, and it says 46.5 million over. That's the first chart. Okay. I was gonna go right back. That's why I called it the ugly chart. Okay. So this is a version of the chart you've already seen. I've tried to take some of your input and factor it in. I get a little simpler, but also put in some stuff that's what you've requested. So essentially what this shows is from 2019 through 2057, that the black line, that's the funds we have available for capital, and that's for all capital. So that's the 10% of the tax levy. We assume we got to 10%. So again, it grows a little bit every year as our total tax levy grows. That's why you see it scaling up in the future, but that would be sort of our upper limit of what we can afford if we're gonna use the funds we already have set aside for capital. Good? Okay. And that is also just to round that out. That's the same pot of money we have for JCPC to do all those smaller projects that we talked about earlier. All those smaller projects have to live within that 10% as well. So if you start in 2019, the existing debt, that's the runoff of all the debt we currently have on the books. That's general fund debt. And so that's relatively low and it's winding down. The next bar is the assumption we talked about for ongoing capital needs. So up until around 2021, it's basically using up all the available funds, but in anticipation of the project starting in 2021, you'll see it goes down to the 2.5 million, which is a variable you can adjust. And we also have that scaling up as well. So we realize the 2.5 million, that would be a first year thing, but we also have that growing at I think 2.5% as well going forward. So you'll see that yellow bar grow in the future because we assumed we wouldn't hold that constant if the tax levy is growing as well. Then the next one is the green bar that starts in 2022. So that would be the debt for Fort River that is not debt excluded. You won't see the Wildwood debt on here. You won't see the Wildwood debt on here because cough job, I'll buy some time. Oh, you got them? It's been a rough few weeks. So you won't see Wildwood debt on here because it's debt excluded. So that's coming from a different source than these 10% of funds. In 2025, you'll see the gray bar pop up. That's the next project. Or sorry, in 2023, the library project would begin, but that's also debt excluded. So you won't see that on this chart because that's coming out of a separate pot of money. Then in 2025, you'll see the DPW kick in. You can see that's when we push up well above the available funds. And then in 2027, the fire station kicks in. And so that ugly star in the middle of $46.5 million, which will also be in the sheet you can play around with so you can see what that number is under the different options you look at. That's how much above in total for all the years combined, how much above that 10% we are. So essentially we would have to find $46.5 million, which we don't have, reduce the project somehow by that amount or space things out more to stay under. Because the debt exclusion is already taking account of it. Yeah, right. I mean, this also assumes a debt exclusion. So you're well over the available funds under this model and you're excluding debt for two projects. So the taxpayers are kicking in additional funds already. And I'll show you how much in a second. Look at that. What a guy. So does this chart make sense? And this will be the one that you can, this will be the, all these charts actually will adjust as you play around with the variables. But this is the main, one of the main ones to look at. I just want to correct one thing. It's really not an ugly star. It's just sticks out. I want it, yeah. I meant an ugly story. Not that the picture is quite elegant. But this isn't, I mean this shouldn't surprise anybody. I mean we've heard this for a while that there's really very few places that have ever done a project without MSPA funds. And then you add into the fact the other projects on top of that, that it shouldn't be surprising that it's somewhat unaffordable. So the next chart is the debt ceiling analysis. So our debt ceiling is about 105 million that could fluctuate in the future. We just kept it flat at that 105 million for now because that could go up as new growth happens things grow, if there's a recession it could come back down a little bit if the values depreciate. So we just kept it at the flat 105 million but just note that that could scale up a little bit as well. So under this the debt payments and so these debt payments are all the debt payments including the projects that are debt excluded. So this would include the library debt payments and one of the school debt payments in addition to the other projects. So you can see we go quite a bit above the debt ceiling. Which we're not allowed to. So again that was to illustrate that this model doesn't work necessarily from an affordability standpoint and it also doesn't work from a legal standpoint. And then this last chart is just to show what the taxpayer would feel. So this is the impact from the debt exclusion. The first one would hit in 2021 from the school and then the second one would hit around 2023. Note these years will be a couple of years off because when the projects have started and when the debt actually happens and when things like that actually happen there's gonna be a little bit of a timing gap there. But essentially this is how it would feel to a taxpayer. So this is on a house that is, I confirm this, it's the average household value in town or average property value in town of 354,000. So the increase to their tax bill, they've already got a significant tax bill, right? The increase their tax bill would be $700 starting in 2021 which would be the high point for the school project. And then it would go up to about $900 in 2023 when the library project would kick in. And then it would just go down from there because there would be no further debt solutions under this plan. So the high point under this scenario would be the $900 in 2023. And this would be again on average, on average house. We can give you sort of the figures basically to figure out what it would be on any house. We can provide that. The assumption that it goes down is based on the assumption that you're not gonna do anything in 2038 or 2040. As soon as you're not gonna do any more debt exclusions. Yeah, so the reason it goes down is so it's tied to your debt payments each year. So the models of debt payments are declining debt payments as you pay the principal down. There's other models for that, but what? We'd never really get there. Because you'd be building something new. Only if you did another debt exclusion, which we wouldn't necessarily do another debt exclusion. But you're right, if you did another debt exclusion then this chart would change in the future. So those are the three charts that, again, same for, the charts look different, but it's the same charts for each option of what they're looking at. So I'll go through the next few options a little quicker just so we can get to the conclusion. But again, it's gonna be a similar format for each of the options. So that's all option one, three schools. So you're replacing two schools with two new construction, new constructed schools. And then doing the other projects as we discussed. All right, so this is option two. It's the exact same as option one, except for instead of new construction for the schools, it has addition renovation for the schools. So it's a little cheaper or a little less expensive. The only difference on the assumption table is that instead of 50% for MSBA reimbursement rate, it's 55 because the renovated boost. The debt exclusion assumptions are the same. The total costs for the schools are a little bit lower. Interestingly enough, I don't know if this was a mistake, I can try to verify this, but interestingly enough, the AdReno cost for a 420 student school was the same as the AdReno cost for a 315 student school under the TSKP report, the most recent thing they put out there. Now that may be because the building already is big enough to support 400 kids. So going from 315 to 420 doesn't make a huge difference. But just note that, that's something that looks a little quirky because you have larger students, but the cost is the same. So affordability here, the amount we go over the available funding is a little bit less, it's 32.9 million because the school project is less expensive. The amount that we go over the debt ceiling, a little bit less, but we're still well over it. And the impact from the debt exclusions is a little bit less because again, it's a cheaper school project. So you only hit a high of about 750 as opposed to 900 under the previous model. So option two, same as option one, just AdReno instead of new construction. Any questions so far on option two? This pertains to any of the options where we use both the Wildwood site and the Fort River site, which we would be doing if we were doing two RENOs. Are you using the figures from the Fort River study for the RENOs? Yes, that's the basis we're using for both schools because that's the most recent figures we have on a school. There probably would be some subtle, maybe more subtle, but some differences between the costs between the sites just because of the land itself is a little different. But that is the assumption we're using is the same costs. Thank you. Does this include the incentive that MSBA gives for net zero buildings, 2% or something like that? Yeah, so the TSKP came out with a range of reimbursements that includes those incentives, but it also is a wide range because they don't know what's eligible, so the 50 and the 55 is really, again, it's within the range of TSKP, it assumes all those incentives, but that number could vary 5% more or 5% less. The project we did with Wildwood, the reimbursement rate was 51%, and that also took advantage of at least some of the energy incentives. It wasn't net zero, that wasn't a requirement, but it was lead, gold or something, so that 51% included bonus points as well. Okay, out of curiosity in case I'm asked, when I went to the Fort River Feasibility Study, they had a B and a C option, but both had the Renault in it, and they both qualified for zero net energy. Did you use the B or the C? One was 50% Renault, one was, you know, like there were six different ways. Yeah, I think I used the... Did you use... I'll tell you the exact, I think I used the E, to be honest, because I wanted to get the range of... So for the new construction, I used the A figures. Yeah. And I think for the Renault, I used the E figures to give the range. So you used the lowest end of what the Renault used? Yeah, after the Renault used, just to, again, try to give you, if you're trying to range it, to give you that range of it. Okay. Yep. So there's actually, so there's A through E, and then there's a code upgrade, so there's actually six different sections. But the E doesn't take care of the open classroom problem, does it? They did open classrooms. Other than one. I think the code update didn't take care of it. But I think the... Yeah. Okay. The, chart, the third one, the affordability, affordability is the, I'm trying to look, the 10% of levy is what we've allocated for capital. What's been here? Capital. So is the 32.9 the total of the bars that are above that level? Yeah, so if you take the bars that have exceeded that 10% for all the years that they exceed the 10%, the sum of that is 32.9 million. So an obvious alternative, not one that I in any way recommend whatsoever, but it is there, is to cut the operating budget and increase the 10% which gets back into the question of which of our vital departments are we not funding? Right. Yeah. And again, it's 32.9 million aggregate. It wouldn't be per year. So again, it's an aggregate number. So per year you'd have to look for changes per year. But yeah, that's another alternative. Okay. All right, I'm gonna go to option three. So option three is a two school option. So this is replacing Fort River and Wildwood with a new 600 student school. And this first model is assuming an addition at Crocker Farm. So the first three columns haven't changed in that top table. The new school column is in there now. The 89 million is the new 600 student school from the cost estimate page. Plus I think it was about seven million that I added for the addition at Crocker Farm. So it adds in somewhere in the middle of that range for work at Crocker. And then we assume 50% reimbursement because the majority of this would be new construction which would leave a town cost of 44.5 million. We would exclude the school. So again, what I said in the beginning is under all the options, we assume one school and the library. So under this option, we would assume the school and the library. And this would be 2022 as well. So under this option, the amount we go over is closer, right? It's down to 11.9, which would make sense because the cost for the schools to the town is much less. It still creeps up over the debt ceiling for a couple of years, which would be a problem that we have to figure out a way to deal with. You know, we've talked to our financial advisor and we don't wanna go over the debt ceiling. We don't really wanna be close to the debt ceiling either. We'd be comfortably below the debt ceiling to maintain sort of a good liquidity in the future. Yeah, go ahead. I can't understand why with the reduced cost on the fourth option, maybe I'm jumping ahead. You are, you're on option four? Thank you. One option three. Yeah, I know. I'm looking at it compared to four. I have a question on why four doesn't go down. So Paul had that same question. So I've got a good answer for you. It's $3 million cheaper somewhere. It doesn't go down because the debt's excluded. The school debt is excluded. So the school debt isn't in this chart. The school debt is to the taxpayers. So when it goes, it's a little more affordable in option four. It's more affordable for the taxpayers, but it doesn't affect this chart because the only projects that are coming out of this chart are the DPW and the fire station. Thanks, Paul. That was good. Good heads up. Well, I'll explain it. I'll point it out when we get to option four. But that makes sense, right? I mean, again, if we're assuming debt exclusion for the school, it doesn't come out of here. Okay, so we're gonna go. So again, option three, if you go to last chart, you can see the impact on the taxpayers. It's about $700 as a high. And there's a summary at the end that kind of summarizes all the charts to some extent. So option four is the same as option three, except instead of addition at Crocker Farm, you're moving the sixth graders to the middle school. So you don't have that new construction costs in the number. So you can see it's 82 million instead of 89 million. And so Dorothy, what they were saying is, if you look at the star in the middle, it's the same as under option three. And the reason it's the same is because the school debt is not coming out of this, it's coming out of a debt exclusion. So again, so this chart stays pretty much exactly the same. The debt ceiling gets a little, again, it creeps down a little bit better. And the debt exclusion impact gets better as well because the overall cost is a little bit less expensive. So you get under $700. So those were the first four options. And based on those four options, I felt we needed to develop a fifth option. I'm faced just to see if we can afford this somehow. And so that's where option five comes in. So this option is the same as option four, which is a two-school option, the place in Fort River and Wildwood with a 600-student school. You're moving sixth grade to the middle school. And it's setting some cost caps on all the projects. So these cost caps were completely me guesstimating. So these numbers will change. This will be the discussion the town council and the town manager has to have with the school committee and all the other groups. But just for illustration purposes and see if there's a way we can make this work by setting some cost caps in place that are within the ballpark of what those projects were coming in at, could we get the models to look more affordable? So for the library, basically the cost cap. Do you want to do a question now? Good. So for the library, there's two ways you could do a cap for the library. You could either ask them to reduce the overall cost of the project or you could ask them to raise more funds. So either way, what I said is the town cost would be 10 million, essentially. So that's down from 15.9. So it's a sizable drop. So that one, you'd have to really look at. Again, this is not a proposal or recommendation. This is just for illustration purposes of how you can play around with it. The DPW, we just set at 30 million. So I think when you escalate it, we had it at 38 million. We said, all right, if we do it in 2025, has to be 30 million, can't be more than that. And it has to be a phased in thing where you spend the 30 million up front and then the funds become available in the future. You enhance it based on plans and then that could be an option as well. But we've capped it at 30 million. The fire station, we capped at 20 million. And the new school, we capped at 75 million. All the years stay the same. All the assumptions stay the same. But essentially, we just lowered the prices to put in some restrictions. Yep. Yeah, go ahead. So I know this may sound outrageous, but in other words, the sooner we build these buildings, the less they're gonna cost us. From a cost escalation standpoint, yep. Yeah, go ahead, Paul. So I think from a cost escalation standpoint and also probably a borrowing percentage standpoint, because as Kathy pointed out, people are borrowing at 3% now. Our financial advisor is projecting it will go up in the future. So the sooner we can borrow money, the better off we are. Can we, in terms of borrowing, if we're anticipating that we're gonna have this, do you have to link the borrowing to a specific project? Okay. There is a thing called arbitrage. So you can't borrow money at our tax reduced rate at 3% and then invest it someplace for 4% or 5%. That's illegal, it's called arbitrage. So we have to borrow the money when we need the money and that's how our borrow, you'll hear from our fiscal advisor, and that's how they structure the debt as we can't borrow a whole bunch of money and just sit on it for a whole long time. But if we had a strategy, and I'm, again, I'm gonna do it in a spirit if you've just put some numbers in here. You know, for some of the things that are, if we're building a whole new building, building it in pieces, maybe some of that is more feasible than others. The library, there was an estimate, Don, of doing fundamental repairs to it and one of the ways the estimator did it was completely replace the roof, then do an elevator and you didn't have to do them all at once. You could go out with debt with for 5 million or 10 when you had specific things like that attached to it, correct? Yeah, and I know Northampton did some road repair that way, which we don't wanna do, but, again, if we wanted to grab a loan to free up cash for something else. So there'd be some ways of playing with this to get Lins sooner might be better in some ways, yeah. So you would be going to the designs of the buildings and saying you can't have all of this, but there might be an understanding that at some point in the future we might build or add on. Yeah, I mean, I've only been related to the school process, you know, and pretty much all processes, there's like a value engineering piece. So you propose something and then sometimes you have to get the number down a little bit because what's initially proposed may not be affordable. And you can design buildings so that future additions or future work is more easily done than otherwise. So yeah, I think that's right. So just thinking out of the box, do we ever consider renting instead of building like a DBW building? Could that be something that's rented instead of built? Yeah, I don't know if there's a facility that exists that could do that, but if there's something that would be an option that could definitely be looked at, you'd have to have a long-term agreement because you don't want to be kicked out of a DBW building, but yeah. I know we've asked, I think what you've done is built the kind of thing tool to show people what kind of hard choices there are because going back to the original that we're maintaining only two and a half million on the everything else. And looking at being in JCPC, watching the requests come in, which roads aren't gonna get repaired or when the next boiler goes, or does that mean no new vehicles for quite some time or no expensive new vehicles? We can buy a Jeep, but we can't buy a fire truck. And this also assumes doing all five projects or four projects, right? So that's the other assumption that Town Council, maybe you've discussed, maybe I'm not sure if you've just confirmed that, but all these options assume we're trying to do all the projects that are out there. And the model will allow us to just wipe one out altogether or say we're doing it the way I said some could be done in a repair feature because it's not a whole new building. Okay. I guess to respond to Shelley's question from a moment ago. In reality, because there is no DPW facility or fire station out there would really the thinking outside of the box, I assume would be is to work with a private developer to build something and then rent it back to us. I would find it unlikely that that would work because our borrowing costs are always gonna be lower than the private enterprise because we can get tax free bonds whereas a private developer cannot. Yeah, that's a good point. But their construction costs might be a lot lower. I mean, I just don't know. Lynn is not, I don't know enough on. Yeah, Lynn. So those are things that we can explore and are exploring. One of the questions that popped up to us is if we had a design build rent sort of model which is doable where a private developer would come in, build a building, rent it back to us, they would get the revenue from the rent over a period of time was whether some scenario like that whether that would be subject to the net zero requirement because it's not a town building and would people perceive that as a way that the town would be skirting the net zero bylaw which is it's becoming more and more of a common practice among municipalities who are straddled with debt is to have this model where they use, you commit to a 30, 50, 90 year lease to someone for a facility and then they build it for you and they feel like they can manage it and make money off of it by, with their investors. So it is an option, but it's, we have some unique situations that we would have to take into account if we went that route. Good. Shall we follow up? Just to another question to what you just said even though the private builder is not subject to net zero could we ask them as part of the building requirements to make it net zero? So in looking at this, I like the options. I think it's very clear when you go through it but I thought we were adding to the capital budget more money for sidewalks and roads and since the other capital has been reduced I don't know where that's gonna happen or is that another chart? So what we discussed is if you look at any of the charts before the debt kicks in, trying in these early years to put more money into roads and sidewalks before the debt for the projects kick in. You know, that's something that JCPC is gonna have to work with this year but I think that was the thought originally was we know these projects are gonna happen so in the next few years can we increase the amount spent? I just wanna make sure we all see that even in your most optimistic option five we're going out to the taxpayer for a little over 500. Yeah, why don't I finish just get to the summary table and then if there's a weekend before we keep going. So again, this first one, it's 1.8 million or this option five, sorry, is 1.8 million over but I think that's a number that within the reserves the town has above sort of the guidance around reserves but also capital and operating that we could figure out 1.8 million if this plan works. It's under the debt ceiling. We're still kind of looking at like how far under the debt ceiling do we wanna stay but this one is, you know, it's not right up against the ceiling which is promising. And then the impact on the taxpayers which is again, it is sizable but it's much lower than the other options or lower than the other options. So this is just a little summary of all those things that you looked at to try to pull out some of the key numbers to compare them. So I have a couple of comments and then I'll go around to my left and right to see comments and questions that come up. One is that just reporting from JCPC discussions for those who are not at JCPC meetings regularly. Last year, JCPC put off some projects that we didn't think at that point were not needed. We just thought they weren't needed immediately. And so there's a question of how far we can continue to put off non-road projects without really harming either the functionality of the town or jeopardizing an issue that has been raised but in Dorothy before, which is building up sort of a debt to capital that we're gonna have to then dig out of in the future. The other thing that gets back to point just reserves are not figured into any of this. You weren't figuring on using any of our accumulated reserves which is really where the starred amount would have to come from if we weren't going through this operating budgets. Yeah, I think there's different ways you could do it. You could use it to help there. You could use it to supplement JCPC's funding in certain years if you wanted to do it that way. So, but you're right, that's not factored in for now just because it's not really close to some of the big numbers that we were talking about in terms of what we would need. Just wanted to point that out. Lynn. It also does not include savings based on net zero. Right, yeah, on the operating cost side, I note that that from an operating cost perspective, Right. there would be savings for all these buildings. So, this is totally separate and it may be more of a Paul question than you but I don't know. Whichever one of you wants to take it. Library project, we keep hearing the year 2021. Is that the point at which a decision would be made as to whether or not they will receive the state funding? That is the point at which they must apply. And when would they actually start construction? What I'm really getting at is whether or not the year that's in here, which is 23, I believe, is the construction year. Yeah, so in 2021, according to the most recent chart I know of, that would be when the grant funding announcement happens, which I think is what you just said. That's what they would find out about the grant. And then this chart construction begins in 2023. Okay, so I have two more questions. On DPW and FHIR, we have feasibility studies. How long does it take to do the next, the schematics estimate? Under a year. Under a year. And then once you have schematics, then you go out for build. So if you were in fact going to go after those faster, you could reduce each of those down to, if we had the land, to 2022. Okay. And the school, that's based on our best estimate coming out of MSBA, this next cycle. That is a challenge to the town. We're gonna rise to the occasion. But it reduces the cost by about 4% a year in the way he's budgeted in. But it loads it up on what else we don't have to spend on it. You know, I'm just looking at the free cash line. It's a lot thinner than you'd like it to be if you want it to be suddenly taking on debt service. Yeah, you'll still have to plug everything in and see what, if it pushes you over and all those variables. So this summary chart, again, I'll just quickly go through it. This is all five options. So they're laid out at the top. Options one through five. The first line down, total principal costs. So this is the aggregate principal costs from all the projects under each option. So when you play around with it, that number will change if you change your assumptions. But from these five options, that's the aggregate principal cost. The line right below that is the net principal cost of the town. So that would be less any grants that are available. So either the grants for the library and the school. Below that, just let's remind you whether there was the exclusion. So for all of them, one school, one library. Below that is the impact from the debt exclusion. So it's the max and the average. So on an average home value of 354,000. So for option one, the max of all the years would be $897 and the average over the life of the debt exclusion would be 613. Below that is whether the debt ceiling was breached under the model. So that's a big one of whether we could actually do it. And then the last one was those stars that were on each of those charts at the top of how much are we over the available capital funds. That's the amount we were over under those options. So these are the five options. Again, there's countless other options we can. We'll look at whatever, how are you to guide us. But we can kind of complete this chart for all of them so that you can compare apples to apples as best as possible. So I got a couple other slides and then wrap up and I'll show you the tool which will be a relatively quick thing. Just wanted to check in on that. Okay, just do a quick one question that I had as an option for you have nothing in there about what might be a rental cost that the town would need to pay the region to use the middle school for sixth grade. It's on the next slide, yeah. Yeah, so there's a couple of operating cost type things that we'll talk, I'll go through in a second, yeah. And if you have one school rebuild or whatever, then we also have that extra building space that could be used. You're reading ahead. You guys are all reading ahead, I can tell, so yeah. Coming soon. Yeah. No, well, it's my fault. I would like to send these out before these meetings. I just, again, give it a time and a thing. So why don't you go ahead and throw us the chart. So operating cost consideration. So as we discussed, net zero, this is all based on the upfront cost of getting to net zero. There would be significant operating cost reductions if we're generating all of our own electricity and heat and not having to pay for those types of things. There would be a large operating cost reduction, which is not factored in. You'd have to do some sort of life cycle cost analysis of what that overall amount would be, but that's certainly something that should be a consideration. Maintaining three school buildings will be more costly than two school buildings, so not even getting into the staffing issue per se. You just, you have more square footage to manage. If you had the three buildings, roughly 80,000 square feet for Fort River and Wildwood versus the square feet that we would have under our 600 student school building, which is 110,000 compared to 80,000 each, you just got less space to manage. And so the maintenance costs should be less, capital improvement costs in the future should be less, insurance costs should be less. So just from sort of non-staffing, the two buildings should be less expensive. Staffing patterns will shift based on distribution of students. So under a couple of these models, there could be shifts of staffing. Overall staffing levels would still be a school committee town decision. So I know some people are like, well, when things go down, it's really up to how the program is set up. And that's not something we can really project at this point. And again, under these models, they're savings built into the operating budget. If we do nothing, the budgets might be even more oppressed in the future. And then lastly, cost of potential agreement with the regional district. So as someone mentioned, some agreement would have to be worked out for the sixth grade to go to the middle school and what the cost of that agreement, if any, would have to be factored in. And then on the capital side, pretty much under all of the options, if they happen in the relatively near future, we can remove a sizable chunk of the projects that are on at least the schools specifically from the 10-year capital plan. I added two roofs, some new doors and windows, and there's other things as well, but it gets you to seven million pretty quick. So really that's something that would happen under any of the options that they're done soon. And then the earning potential of vacated sites. So not factored in as, well, if the fire station goes somewhere else and the fire station lot is available, what is that earning potential? And same thing if you go from three schools to two schools, when the school sites is open, what is that earning potential? Which would be significant, depending on what is done with those sites. Next steps. So we'll talk about what other information you need in order to make the presentation to the full council, which I think is next week. And then I wanted to look at the capital projection tool. I'm in a second. I've secured it to be a version that I think would be suitable for the public to use. It hides a lot of the big nasty tables and gets it down to just those two charts that really show all the information so you can just plug in the numbers. And what I wanted to do was either let you or the full council pilot it for a week and just you use it, play with it, do whatever you want to it and report back to me any, or share your feedback back to me, any errors you see, any issues you see, any things you think would enhance it. You can see if we can enhance it in any way, but let you all pilot it for a week or two, get that information back to me and then we'll make those enhancements and try to get maybe a final version that could go live at some point soon. I think that'd be great because I just, I really liked it. I liked this as a presentation as a handout into talking through, but I think the modeling is particularly strong when you can say, okay, push this one off three years later. You showed us a big jump down when we reduced the cost, but if I remove one or say, I'm not going out after the taxpayer and you say, well, you just blew up the whole thing and so people can just, so playing with it a little bit to see how easy it is for me to talk with the public. I mentioned to this in our district, we had a small meeting that I'd hope that this was gonna be developed and people were really excited about it, saying that that would be very helpful to be thinking about this. Sure, go ahead. I just wanted to go back to the question I asked, which is if we did not, if we were turned down by the MSBA, would we be able to go ahead and build a school but we would probably have to drop one of the other capital projects? Yeah, I think that'd be a good one to pop in there and see my gut instinct is the town would not be able to afford 80 million on its own for just the school. I mean, and do really any of the other projects. I mean, maybe one of the other projects but that would be really tough, I think, for the town to do, if you're talking about the 600 student school, which was somewhere in the 70, 80 million dollar range, to not have the MSBA funds for that, I think would blow that chart up in terms of the affordability. But I'm just thinking about how people feel. Yeah, and again, I think that's a good one to. Because then we have to get into all of that repairing and roof replacing and on things that people aren't happy with anyway. Yeah, I think we could have a what if session, at some point, and just have them model up and have people say, what if this? And we can plug it in and see how it plays out or you can do that with your meetings. Yes. So I guess you've looked at what we would be able to remove on the capital cost considerations for the schools. And I don't know if there is a good way to get FHIR DPW in the library. So I've been asking them or looking at it closely during their JCPC presentation. So the fire department, I asked, and they didn't really have anything on their 10 year capital plan that could come off other than the feasibility study itself. There wasn't anything there. DPW, I thought I looked at it and I didn't see anything that looked like naturally could come off, but I'll double check that. In the library, my recollection from them is that they haven't been putting things on the JCPC plan because they've been anticipating the new building. And if they aren't gonna get a new building, then a bunch of stuff would have to go on to the JCPC plan. But we're gonna hear from them on Thursday. So I can ask that question. So I have a couple more questions. Yes, go ahead. So if one of the things that the town is, Amherst is not unique, so this is not a criticism, but so often we build new buildings and then we say, gee, we hope they stay together and we don't properly budget for the ongoing upkeep so that building remains as good as the day it was built. And how, obviously, we have to take that into our operating and our other capital costs. Is there a formula we can find to use for that? Sure we can. And one easy one you could think of is take the savings you get in utilities and set it aside for future maintenance. You'll get a decent chunk of savings for each of those buildings from the utilities and maybe from the net zero requirement. Maybe you'd stash that away in some sort of reserve to maintain those buildings in the future, but I'm sure we can find some more formulaic calculation. There are some places that are beginning to require that when new buildings are built, that is done. So it's not left to that consideration. I guess I have a, I mean, basically, we all live in an open environment, an open government environment. It's not clear to me how we can provide this as a test to the council without providing it to a test to everybody. Yeah, that'll be a challenge, I mean. I think what Sean is saying is we want, with any software you put out, you always beta test it before you release it to the public because if we release something and there's a cell that's wrong that we haven't discovered and then everybody's been playing with it for two weeks and it just looks foolish. So you always would beta test it with real users versus just internal people using it. I don't disagree with that, Paul. I think it's a lovely idea, but in a world of open meeting and open books and FOIAs and everything else, how do we provide the access to town council or to the finance committee, which I think the rest of the town council would not be happy with and prevent other access. So this isn't perfect, but the version we give you, we can call version one. You play around with it. Do we need to get to be back? And when we make updates to it, we'll call it version two. And the version that gets posted on the website or however it's distributed, we'll make sure it's called version two. So if people are using one that is not labeled that and they'll know they're using something that is not the most vetted or up to date. I think you're right. Like, theoretically, if we say don't share this yet, we're gonna post it so everybody gets it the same way. Hopefully we can follow that, but if it does get out to some people, they just have to be aware that they're not using something that's been vetted. So, okay. I'd even call it beta one. Yeah, I like beta. In a town like Amherst, they understand the word beta. Did you finish, Lynn? I did. I had one and I don't think it affects the modeling. So it's actually a question Paul might know. When we do a major construction project, like in the middle of the town, so we had two big buildings that went up, do we ever have an estimate of the cost of municipal services on what happens with that while the construction's going on, whether it's police, fire, road repair that's on our, in this case it would be particularly on our budget because we couldn't build it to the developer, we're the developer and do we ever have those numbers or could we put them together and some of these sites would have a bigger impact on the town than others, so a major construction of tearing off a lot of material on Amity Street would probably be more disruptive or, I don't know, same with the Wildwood and Fort River, but is there any way of doing guesstimates of that and I don't consider them capital costs, I think of them operating budgets. So that's the first question, I'll just ask my second one. It's related to development. If we can't, as Annie said, we could look over at the operating budget and say spend a little less there. But if, how much of the new growth revenue that we've been getting, if we started earmarking more of that to go into the capital budget, so take our regular piece, but a bigger share, how much, how tightly are we budgeted on the operating budget that that would send the schools into a tailspin or send departments in? I don't have a sense of the wiggle room on that. Just tell me, I'm not good with microphones. New growth is a big part of our overall budget calculation for revenues to set part of it aside. I can't see how we could do that without operating budgets, school, town, library all taking a cut in their operating budgets. So on the presentation from last Thursday, you'll see that you'll see the new growth and we estimate 600,000. Sometimes it came out at a million. Sometimes it went below that. But if you look, we look at the 10 year average. So we're not saying, oh, look at these three years, we were awesome because we're looking out when construction stops for whatever reason. So we budget at 600,000 as an average. And so, and that's built into our operating budgets because our property taxes only go up 2.5%. So that's the difference when we, for a lot of our other expenses that are going up higher than that, like our OPEB and our Hampshire County retirement and things like that that take higher than 2.5%. So that's our cushion. Not it's not even a cushion. It's built into our budget for that. In terms of, I assume you're talking about public construction projects, not private construction projects. Yeah, no, I was just thinking because we had two big private ones, we get some sense of the public service costs. They didn't have to absorb those. You know, a guesstimate on what is, so when we do it, we're in charge of fixing the roads and the sidewalks or rerouting the traffic. So those costs like costs for any, if you put out a contract that requires closing a road and they need police details to do that, they're responsible for that, to building that into the price of the construction project. That's not a cost. It's a cost of town bears, but it's important it is included into the capital cost of the project. That would already be built into these estimates of a school that we have then. I think they have contingencies built in. So I think it's probably not specifically outlined but it's within the contingencies, I would say. What's not built in is what you might be referring to as suppose a intersection needs to be reconstructed for some reason. That's not built into any of these projects at all. And the reason I'm asking is, I know when we were looking at the old school project, the one that didn't get voted in, there was talk about the number of buses that would have to be coming and going and that you might have to redo the intersection on Strong Street where they came in to do something there, whether it was traffic lights. And I don't know whether there was ever an estimate but that's a related cost to something that's new and expanded that's not disruptive in the same way. Right, so that specific question. I don't think any of those numbers ever came from the town or an estimate of a need for an upgrade of that intersection. I think those were privately developed. That was nothing that DPW ever put forward and I don't think they have a sense that that's a requirement for that site already, for that intersection. Yeah, at least on the schools, there's a traffic analysis done as part of the feasibility schematic phase, which I think generated that info. Okay, I'm looking around to see if there's anything else on the questions because I probably need to reserve a little bit, go into discussion next is to. Andy, can I just do two minutes real quick? Yes. So this is the tool I'm gonna send you. All the cells have been locked except for certain ones, which are the ones you can play around with. So on this first page, it's essentially the base cost and these variables down here. I might do a little color coding to make it a little more visually obvious what ones you can adjust. And then, so that would be it for this first chart and this would be for generating your cost estimates. And then on this page, it's everything that is highlighted yellow is what you can touch. So you can year to begin, number of years to bond, the cost would come from the first page and then whether or not the debt exclude it. And so as you play with these numbers, this chart would adjust. You basically, once you touch the numbers, you have to save it so you save it to your desktop and then all the charts will adjust as you save it. You can play around with the grant percentage for MSBA so you can make different assumptions there. Also down below, it gives you the, this should say average, sorry, I got to correct that. It says median. This is the impact on the average household under this option, whatever it is. This is the max impact on the average household under these options for all the projects that are debt excluded. This number is the amount that you're over the 10% levy so this would be a cell just to look at. It's not something you would change but it would calculate how much over the levy you are. And in this cell you could change, this would be ongoing capital. So if you wanted to play around with 3 million or 3.5 million, you would change this and that would change the size of that yellow bar for ongoing capital. And so all those charts that you've seen today are here. I might make a first page that's like instructions or something like that. But the hope is to get this to you relatively soon. Again, do like a week or so of a pilot. Get the feedback. Again, it could be just things that don't look good or that aren't working the way you'd expect or if there's other charts you think would be really helpful for demonstrating the different options. We can try to do that too. Yes, Lynn and Dorothy. Then I'll look the other way. Going the other earlier page, did I see you not that you were freezing the projected construction year? No, you can change that down here. Okay. Yeah, it links up to here but you can change it. The one thing that I was just thinking about when we were talking about this, that's gonna be a little iffy for public uses. So if you change the base cost estimate, these cost estimates are based on a certain year that the architects were assuming. So if you change that, you're not really tying it to any year of construction, you just sort of playing around with it. And that would impact how many years of escalation you're assuming. So I gotta think about how to organize that in a way that is user friendly. That's the only issue I see on this page that I wasn't thinking about before. But you can adjust the projected construction year or the zero premium and the cost escalation. Andy? Yeah, Dorothy. I've seen this thing with many, many names. I would like you to have a clear name so that I know what we're talking about. Okay. On your first page, what is the name you have right now? Oh, this whole thing? Your thing, yeah. Your machine, your capital machine. I don't have to think about it. But when I send it to you, it'll have a name. Let me in. John Super X model. No, no. You've done an amazing job. I just, before we, we're not criticizing, we're just anxious to get our hands on it. Trust me, if you heard the assessment method conversation, you know, I love to name things, so. How do you want the feedback? I think email, I mean, you can call or email, I think would be most helpful. Email just because I can start and sort of compile it and work on it all at once. This is really a question to Andy. How do you want to do the distribution? Do you want to do it just to our group, meaning finance or to the whole council? Let's hold that for just a second. Let me see if there are questions on the left. Okay. I'm getting back to your question. I think that we should talk about that as a group. I always like to do things, you know, I think that it's what's most helpful to you, Sean, because we could take it in concentric circles out. The reality is that it's not gonna help unless it's really out in a useful form soon with making a decision that would be a different decision about whether or not we vote yes on what the school committee has already voted yes on regarding statements of interest. And so it's really what we do after the statement of interest, but while we're still having the community as a whole consider through the capital projects and understand the capital projects and what we're asking and suggesting and getting there. But I don't think that the SOI deadline, decision deadline can be a factor in this. Is my correct on that? Yeah, I mean, again, today's presentation was, I mean, the major fact and the major determination the SOI is can you do the 600 student school or could you do replacement of both schools? And so the goal for today was to kind of give you a sense of the affordability of a three school option versus the two school option, which hopefully it illustrated that. But you're right, I think in order, making the public tool, I don't think would be super helpful for the SOI vote. It's more for the bigger plan vote or not vote bigger planning. And the reason I pointed that out is just to get back to the committee. If it would be helpful to you to have it go out in sort of beta one, beta two, and then the final version so that you get the committee to look at it first since we've looked at it a little more then get the rest of the council to look at it and then get it out to the full. We could do it in the sequence and we could make it fairly rapid and make it very public as to what the deadline for the final version is with your guidance, of course. And that would remove some of the anxiety that Lynn was referencing in the prior question that she asked. And I also think when this does go out, I mean, and I'll try to think this as I'm doing it because I'm used to playing with models like this. But when I saw one that had been developed for the town a few years ago, I had to look up a bunch of terms so I could read what was in the spreadsheet. Right, glossary of some sort. Like having a glossary of some sort. Yes, exactly. Trying to think of the idiot glossary when I say affordable, I don't mean no tax increase, for example. I expected to get the affordable, no tax increase and when debt service overdrive, that is a tax increase. So just these terms that you have to in the chart make short or what's a reno of a school. So I'm gonna keep in mind like, which things people won't know. So when you go in, here are terms you seem to know and then you're gonna see it in the sheets. Yeah, that makes sense. Yes, Lynn. Andy, I wanna reiterate what you're saying and that is this is really not the decision making for the SOI. It really is the large capital plan. And I think we need to, and I'm drawing Paul into this and that is, is this the type of thing that we want to have ready for that public forum? I think this would be very confusing to people. I mean, you're all bright people. You're seeing it for the second time now and it's hard to grasp all the third time and it's hard to grasp and not totally understand it. So I think one thing Sean said, which was interesting is to have some public sessions where someone could say, show me this or they don't have to do it themselves. We could have sessions where we are doing it. Show me it with the library eliminated and they can say in their words what they want and we can walk through with folks. I think that's an option. But your question is, is this, I think Andy said, this is not, the SOI should not be contingent on this tool. It really is a multi-month conversation you are gonna be having amongst yourselves and with your constituents. And so I don't think we should tie this to that thing. I think the presentation that Sean did early on about affordability in terms of two schools versus one school, if you feel that that's necessary for the council to address, that might be something that can be put into a presentation based on this model. But the interactivity of the model, I don't think is critical to that conversation. I think we should talk about that since the feasibility study requires that we have to look at three options. And so the community's not ready to close off that conversation based on everything MSBA is saying. So, I mean the superintendent has put out a very responsible proposal and we frankly have nice date on that. But the MSBA gives directions that there have to be some exploration of three options. And the schools and all of the process should we be so fortunate to get the funding again from MSBA, they're gonna debate things like, gee, is it educationally sound to send the sixth graders to the middle school? Is it, you know, educationally sound to do it this way or that way? And our job as a council is to take this as we come up with a capital plan. So my question was really, we have a forum that's I guess in May where we have to do, is it a forum or public hearing? Forum where we have to do capital plan. Now, we could spend that time on the capital plans like we're discussing at JCPC or we could spend it doing multiple workshops with this and give the public an opportunity to play. So I just wanna leave all those options open. That doesn't mean the council has made its decision by then as to which one we wanna go with. It just means we're starting to get public input. Tell me. I just wanna reiterate that I think it's important to share this with the community because I'm getting a lot of questions still about why are we not considering the three school option and now that we know it's clear that the feasibility does require the three anyways. So it's all a very transparent process and just now that we have a little more data even though it's approximate and not real but just giving people that view or what that looks like I think it will be helpful for people and just making it feels like there's more transparency. This is the numbers we've got so far. Just projections. This is what it's gonna look like and what our affordability looks like. And by this you're referring to the presentation we got at the beginning of the meeting not the spreadsheet. This thing, this unnamed sheet with the variables that you can play with the variables that we don't think is available. When you say it's important to share is it this? Well in the least that and then for the people who are more advanced and adventurous and want to go in themselves give them that option but in the least though. Well that's why I said made the point that the spreadsheet's not gonna be available in time for us before we have to make a decision of the council and that's what Paul confirmed. But this piece is now because it was presented at a public meeting is now a document that should be available. And again if you feel like a what if session would be helpful before if there's some idea out there that's holding somebody up from voting a certain way and they wanna see what it looks like we could figure that out based on your timing. We're gonna get this electronically right? Yeah. I think that will be helpful if someone can talk someone through with this shows. I will say that one thing that you've not really considering is that I hear from so many people we're not going to do all the projects. And that's what they're saying. So you haven't really built that in. One plan, one town? No right so again the major assumption here is trying to make come up with a plan or an option where all the projects are done. I think I haven't considered but I also think the council is sort of that's a conversation the council has to have about what you wanna do. So I can just add the mission to staff was can we afford four projects? And that was what the delivery was was here's how those four projects stack up. You can go in and zero out any of those projects and then it'll change the chart when you are able to when this is out there. So you can say I don't wanna do DPW or library or fire 0-0-0-0 what does it look like then? I wasn't talking about me playing with it. I was talking about public perception. So but I think we can assure the public that it will be available before we have to make any of those decisions because each decision has a trigger point either it's gonna be decided by the voters and the debt exclusion override or it's gotta be decided by the council in an authorization process to issue bonds which requires two thirds of the council and we as a council would likely want to have significant process beforehand. So the spreadsheet plays into providing essential information for those discussions but for the SOI at this point we're not at the override we're not asking the voters to approve an override we're just trying to see if there's agreement amongst the council to put in a request to let us get to that decision. So that brings us to the question. We're not gonna try to bring this into Monday's presentation or are we? I would think we could reference, I mean it's ultimately decisions to the presenters but I think that if reference is made that we're continuing work on the interactive tool and it's now in the testing stage and will be available before critical decisions have to be made could be enough of a statement I would think, I think that the presentation of the PowerPoint is the more essential thing because it really does address the various school options which are what people are so anxious to know about. So let's talk about two different things we're talking about the PowerPoint presentation and the tool. Let's say the tools isn't gonna be ready by Monday which is when your council meets. The question is do you want this presentation to the council or not because I don't think that that was an expectation by the school committee chair and the superintendent that they were gonna be focused on the statement of interest presentation. If the council feels it needs additional information on this financial background it could say what is the finance committee's recommendation or you could schedule a session to bring this additional information in. We could just keep it as a backup. I mean they keep it as a backup option in case the discussion comes up and there is a need for pulling that out but it does feel like the focus is on the SOI and state. And as a reference point I think it took Sean an hour to go through the a little bit over an hour to make the presentation today. So the president would need to build that into the evening. Yeah, I know I start to look at say can we look at just one, three and five or something you know like because explaining what you've put into these will take time no matter what you do and you've tried to do it in such a balanced way of saying there were two cheap ways of two schools which was the runaway. I mean cheaper, they're not cheap. Dorothy? I would like to ask if you could do another option which does not have a debt exclusion override. No debt. That is one of the things that also that we've been told by a number of people that tax increase is not something that some people can tolerate. They say they will move or whatever. So can there be some way to do it with the school without a debt exclusion override? Okay, so just to, for so criteria would be no debt exclusion override, the school and what else? Okay, within 2020 to 2030. Because again, depending on how far you go out you could. We can play with that. We can play with it. Yeah, I think that the question of the SOI we're getting back into that whole point that the SOI submission ultimately is to give us options which may be what we end up in our recommendation. But we recognize that there are these issues out there including the question of whether taxpayers can afford any kind of a debt exclusion override and whether they will make that choice in their others. Which project to put the debt exclusion override to which it to attach it to. The select board's decision several years ago was to attach it to these two projects. But it could have been attached to DPW fire station and we could have not attached it to one of these other two projects. Just if there were, I'm not saying for sure that this is a good idea, but if there were a simple way of saying you're one new school, the 600 with no debt exclusion with the best case scenario where we've got the match, how much is left over for another project without naming what the other project would be, you know that there would be and I just don't know whether that's worth doing. I can see it in these numbers. So what Dorothy is saying, she can't, you know if someone is asking that I can see what happens if we try to do all of them, we can't. So Dylan, I'm seeing you're nodding your head but that's the only simple way I could say, you know what's left if we fund the schools out of our own allocation. But unless I misunderstand this model, every one of those questions can be answered with this model. Absolutely, it can be answered with this model. All you do is take away. Yeah, it's easy to do with this. He can do it with his fingers right now, he could. So I think the bottom line is this is not what the SOI depends on. I totally agree, we're not making that decision. There's no recommendation here of any, just again, giving you a sense of portability basically or the cost of different projects and the timing. But you'll want to adjust. And if the tool gets ready once it's made a step, I can show people, I'll be able to do sessions to show people the answers to those questions. Anything else on this topic? So I guess to getting back to the question of the PowerPoint, it is correct that it would seem unlikely though I have to turn to the president of the council to answer that we could build in enough time to make the kind of presentation that would really present it. Otherwise I think what we need to do and it could be a part of the finance committee report is not a report or recommendation, but to kind of find a way to report the results, the bottom line, if we had this presentation, we had this discussion and the summary chart is. And I will work on that immediately and share it with Sean and Paul and the rest of you on the committee so that you see what I'm drafting. I've actually started a draft that was based upon last week's meeting and I didn't push it through because there was no council meeting this week, but then I would add to it and give the draft completed of what would be a written finance committee report and get comments in the draft. Right now, unless it's been fixed, there's not an easy way to post our own packets for finance. So if this got attached as a background piece of material, not to be presented at the council meeting or just somehow you were referring to it and people would know how to find it is what I'm looking, you know, what they wouldn't have to email us. There would be a place to get it. We just figured that out. Yeah, I think we need, that's something that I've been concerned about and I don't particularly want to spend time today discussing it as how we can improve our online packet availability to provide information on various documents so we look at through time. So is there anything if... I just want to clarify on the trial, which we haven't decided when that will start, we would take it out into concentric circles starting with the finance committee then the full council, then take it public. Yes, and as far as what I'm suggesting and this is the important part, so I really want to make sure that we have an understanding of it. The basic report to the council that will be included in the finance committee report is really page 19 on the PowerPoint and the question of how we got there is what we can't explore because we don't, we can't get into the depth of it and that we don't, we aren't making a recommendation, we're just reporting this information. But we'll make the whole thing available. We will make the whole thing available when we figure out how we do that, yes. Particularly if you introduce it by saying this was, the question was asked can the town afford the four projects and that's what this aims to show. So that we're not recommending any of this out of the other but it answers that yes it could. I think that's right. Just be careful with the yes it could. This was the question asked. Yes, question mark. The agenda item was really a consideration of the statement of interest. What we're really saying is this was the financial model for all capital plans even though that wasn't how it was listed in our agenda, right? So it's sort of number three and an attempt to give you information for number two. So it looked at funding plans for the identified major projects. Again, not making a, just giving you options, not making a recommendation. And within that you could gain some of the financial considerations to the SOI vote that's coming up around three schools versus two schools. Yes, go ahead. Xiaomi. Is this something that might be clarified on Monday with what goes into the SOI? Is that something we're gonna talk about? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I think that's a good question to ask. A lot. There's a lot that goes into it, but that's okay. I mean in terms of from the financial information that we, nothing, not that. At this point there is. Yeah, not much. And I think that the question that we will pose, I assume, either in advance or that night is, once it gets to a feasibility phase, if it gets there, which we hope it will, if we're voting yes, that what questions are done still open for discussion. And that's just gonna be a natural question that we all know is gonna be asked at some point by somebody, so we just know it's out there. And anything else on two or three? Because I wanna keep an eye on the clock and keep moving, because it's already four o'clock. And I think we can get through the rest pretty quickly. Okay, so we'll take a two or three minute break. The question came up about how many times we should be asking the superintendent to be with us and whether we can find a way to condense our process so that we, now the superintendent's time is preserved. And one thing I said I would do is contact the chair of the committee on finance in Northampton and find out how many times the chair of the committee on finance came to their combined process and the answer was one. And that was because they had a meeting of the, they have meetings that are joint meetings of the finance committee and the council as a whole. Is this for the purpose of the regional budget? This is for the purpose of the regional budget. So my thought was that we have a regional school district budget hearing on April 2nd, and that we urge all of the council to be at the budget hearing and that we ask the superintendent to make the budget presentation as where he is present at the April 2nd meeting both to the council and to the public because the public hearing does not have to follow the same context of a public forum. The superintendent of schools and I have corresponded and he is not available on April 2nd, but he is available on April 4th. We changed that date to April 4th, you are correct. And I just changed my note on that. But it still remains the same to what the suggestion would be is to receive the budget for initial discussion by this committee on the 26th with Mr. Mangano asked the superintendent to be present on April 4th for one presentation and then have us take a vote on April 9th. At that point, it may be that the council is sufficiently informed and the committee is sufficiently comfortable that you could then go ahead and have the vote when originally scheduled and can cancel the additional meeting because we said April 22nd or 29th, we didn't say it had to be. We just asked the council to reserve that option and that would give us the ability after the public hearing and input we received there to make that decision as to whether the council might be comfortable going ahead and making the decision on the budget on that earlier date. So that's what I would propose. So then the finance committee would take our vote on April 9th? We would still, that is when it was previously scheduled that we would take the vote, we would stick with the April 9th date. And it may be April 9th when we make our final recommendation as to whether the council should go ahead and act on that earlier date. And then you're wondering if the full council is going to do it on April 22nd? Yes, or the committee could make that recommendation because it's ultimately, it's really up to the committee and you as president choose to do. I don't think that it needs a council vote as to when to take it up, it needs a council vote to approve the budget. So that would enable you to then cancel the additional meeting for the council if we felt comfortable. But the important thing is to encourage the all councilors to attend on April 4th and that we as a superintendent make only one presentation regarding the regional school budget. Does that mean you have the full town council on the 22nd at any point? Don't take either date off. Don't take either date off. Leave them on. And then the 23rd? 23rd is a two. That's a regular meeting. That's a regular meeting of the finance committee and that's not related to this. This is adding the 4th at 630 and I guess the questions we'd probably have to post it is a joint meeting of enough counselors, right? I've already informed the council of that meeting. I will let them know again and ask them to reply to Angela to let us know where we stand. So does that, any comments on that? If not, I think the only things that we're gonna have are really quick if you have another meeting. I'm sorry. Thank you. So is, is there any other followup discussion on points that we've previously discussed? If not, I wanted to get to the questions that came out of the request that we review the committee charge and what I was gonna suggest is given the hour that we put this off till next week and put it on the agenda. But I have listed these questions and if you have additional questions that you think about the committee charge and you have them now, please say them so that I can add to the list. If not, then you can also ask additional topics when we take it up next week. But I think that the major point is that the charter doesn't require that the finance committee have non-voting citizen members. It enables the council to make the decision and the committee charge provided that. So I think the question one I have is given our experience now and what we know about the complexity of the material and the discussions. Should we have citizen members? Second one is if so, what number? Because it was four that would make this group go from five to nine. The third one is whether there are any qualifications that or attributes of skills, whatever you might wanna say, citizen members might bring to this committee by having them participate and whether that should be included in the charge. We sort of have reached the point on the when question that we would, if we go forward with citizen members, people have already applied and that there would be a process that would try and finish appointments and have terms begin on July 1st, but I do wanna, that was a fourth question. And the fifth one I had was term length. So just responding to that out of rules since this was sent there first, our recommendation was that the terms be at least two years, not shorter than that, you know, for this non-resident and there was a strong, just so when we come back together there was a strong view of at least a few of us that qualifications were critical for this reason and that one of the things that we could even consider two or three year terms if we wanted to stagger them and they would provide continuity over time to the finance committee, you know. So one of the things they'd be bringing to us is they'd be committing to us and we'd be committing back to them. So I just wanna bring back that discussion and the last recommendation, Andy, that I think Lynn sent to you was that the interviews of choosing and figuring out among the pool would be done by the chair of the finance committee and brought back to the finance committee with us as a group seeing the full pool. So reopening the question whether it's two, three or four, you know, we've posted it as four and people have applied. So I think it's hard to pull back from that, but that we would be a deciding body with you doing interviews since you're the chair. So just to bring, those were pieces that were recommended back. Yes, go ahead, Lynn. I believe that after the finance committee approves, it does go to the full council. Right, then it goes back to the full council so it doesn't stop with us, but that we're a vetting process that then comes up with the names that go to the full council. I think what's going to end up happening is that we've recognized that there are council actions where more than one committee might make recommendations to the council before it makes its full decision. So I thank you for that report, and it is helpful to know and valuable to know what the other committee thinks, but I think that our recommendation is going to be our recommendation, and we should approach it independently from our particular expertise and what we understand from having functioned as a committee and our understanding of the complexities of the committee. So I did add interview selection process. The reason I hadn't put that on initially is that that's not traditionally part of a committee charge. That's really a separate process, but it could be added to the charge, so I'm glad you did bring it up. The whole issue of appointing and the process for appointing has been a major, major. I can't tell you how much time this has taken of the outreach communication and appointing committee, including an hour and a half consultation by phone with our town attorney, and coming up with ways to do this that balances encouraging people to apply, doesn't expose people and make them feel like they have to be out in public, and at the same time, completely respects open meeting law, and they're almost done. They're meeting on Monday and they hope to complete a recommended practice of interviewing, and the only change that really applies here is that for the finance committee, which is the only committee of the council that has residents on it at this time, the actual selection or recommendation of those would come from the finance chair after interviews, and that all of the other recommendations for town council appointees to non-standing committees would come from the outreach communication and appointing committee. This changes who would do it. That's what it is. I do follow up question that I may hold until next week, because at this point I've identified I think the issues I think we don't have time today to have that discussion, and so we should just but be prepared to talk about it next week, which is what I wanted to do. That sounds great. So, having said that I don't think we have any minutes to approve, there's no public to make public comment, so the only question that I have left is whether there are any matters that the chair did not anticipate 48 hours before the meeting, but that you think are important for the committee to take up now. I think we should talk about our recent budget hearing. That is actually, thank you, that is actually on the agenda, and maybe it's just, Andrew, do you have some thought on it? I do. I have some thought, okay. There was someone wrote a comment about how this wasn't publicized, but the fact is that Scott Merzbach wrote article after article in which he put finance, committee, budget hearing in the headline. So in terms of the newspaper, it was very well publicized. The town is trying to publicize things purely by the website, and I will say that I think that's not a good idea. Obviously the website's very important. Those people who know about it and use it appreciate, and I've been seeing improvements on it, but I never looked at that until I ran for town council. It didn't cross my mind to look there. So an awful lot of people who may have thoughts about wanting to say something about the budget wouldn't look there. So I'm gonna say some things about possible ways to improve publicity, but I'm also gonna add what somebody said to me. She said, I said, why didn't they come out? It was definitely again and again. It was in the paper, it wasn't listed. We had a great turnout at our district meeting. We had flyers that announced it. George has sent out his own newsletter, which had it in it. Why did nobody show up? And the person who was somebody very well versed in town business said, that's because a lot of people thought it wouldn't make a difference. Now I think that it would make a difference. So we have to say, why would somebody need to come out at a night to go to a budget hearing? And I think that what we had said, and if we'd publicized it, that your voice is needed, we really wanna hear from you, but finding a way to get that out, you cannot count on counselors to do it through email. We don't have the emails for most people in our district. And the business of getting them is very slow and bit by bit. So I don't have any way to actually email my people in any kind of way. I was thinking about the high school in Port Washington, where I lived for a number of years. It had a bulletin bar board, an electronic bulletin board outside the high school, which often didn't have anything on it. But when there was a special meeting, hearing or school play or something, it was announced. So inside the building downstairs, you have a little electronic bulletin board which says what committees are meeting, which is fine. I don't think, I'm not saying to put that outside on the bulletin board. I think only big things should be on this. But that would be a clue that something big was happening if it were in fact on an electronic bulletin board somewhere in front of Town Hall. So I realize this doesn't really answer how are we gonna get people there. I think the presentation was excellent. I think that the people would have benefited and enjoyed being there. And I think that we want to get, we have other hearings planned. I really don't wanna go to a lot of hearings if there's nobody there. So I think we all wanna get the public there and we're gonna have to think of new ways to get them involved. Our existing systems are not sufficient at this time, is my opinion. I have one. Following the hearing, I mean the public forum, I did two things. One was I asked Mandy Zhou if she would be willing, even though it was not legally binding, to ask the members of the commission, the charter commission, whether or not answering questions during the public comment period could be counted toward the half of the time that would be public comment. And she has, she's in the process of that, she's heard from four. I've also asked Paul, I framed a question for our legal, our town attorney, of the same thing because my observation is that there were a few times, small as the audience may be, but remember we were on TV, where answering questions could have strongly enriched the content of the meeting and would signal to others that this is a time to come and have a little more than a dialogue than what people get when they do public comment at our meetings. So I just wanted to bring you all up to date on that issue. Yeah, other comments, Shelley? I think it would be helpful as we know our dates and everything in advance to have all the dates, the important hearings and public forums date in one place. And then, so throughout the year, we are publicizing that and people through different channels, the district meetings, office hours, public meetings and so forth. So that's one thing. And I had a forgotten outcome back to it. The one other thought I had, and I don't think it would have made a difference for this meeting in terms of turnout, but I think in terms of publicizing it for the next one, the one comment we got that I thought was very insightful is that we were not previewing the possible budget for the coming year. We were looking mainly at the current year. And there was a reason for that because we didn't know yet the state aid coming in, even though we had the tables. And I think something more concrete that you were right in the middle of the budget process. So trying to figure out whether we redo the timing, if it could have been a week later, or if we don't have the exact numbers, we could at least be telling people that each of the budgets you see are gonna be about two and a half percent larger. That's where our growth is because it was hard to grapple with what people were being given. And so that's more a next year. So we could get it in flyers out. Come get the first preview of next year's budget. Come say what's important to you. We could play it up more. And I'm glad we didn't play it up that way because they wouldn't have gotten that if they'd come. So it's just a different way. If thinking about the timing of it. And I know the charter says we have to do it by March 15th. So it may be there's no way of playing with the timing. Yeah, that was gonna be my response is that I think that at this point, charter says what the charter says and that putting the forum before the budget is presented by the town manager as opposed to after was a decision that the charter commission made and put into the charter. It makes the budget hearing that this committee holds more significant because that's what the one where it comes in after the budget is out and available to the public. And that sort of gets back to what was the anticipation of the commission and how can we take the charter as it is and make it most useful. And just to give you my one thought on the subject is close to what you're doing, but just saying. So here's the current year's budget. What would you like to have been different in the current year's budget? And then it doesn't require speculation at all. It's something concrete people are reacting to. And that would be something that, at least if there's a groundswell of public comment on a particular piece of the current year budget, there would be an opportunity for the town manager to consider that before releasing his recommended budget on the first of May. We will be doing, just as finance, this past finance committee did guidelines, we'll be do guidelines in the fall which are setting the parameters. So we can be thinking both the way you just said, Andy, but we can also be saying, here's the rough world we're living in that there's a projected increase in revenues of X percent. And we've set these guidelines. So I'm just thinking of some way of making it feel very real that it's the right time to be talking. The guidelines were shared in terms of the percentage increase. I do think that, Kathy, you've mentioned the suggestion, Andy, I think you've added to it. I think looking at some real numbers, even if they were the present year, and then what would happen if we went through the guidelines might make for a much more rich conversation, but there is a danger to that. Yeah, I mean, the other thing that I had thought about is just trying, and I made the suggestion another format, but suggesting that some group try and think about who are the people who you thought might have come but didn't and actually do what Dorothy did a little bit of and that is make some kind of a methodical survey. Why didn't you come? Did you know about it? This interest you? Did it not interest you? Why didn't you come? Your comment that you received was very helpful, but would it be richer if we did it on a more methodical basis? I don't think that that's this committee's role because the next forum won't be about finance. The next forum will be presumably about master plan and planning. So it's a question of what could be done in the next forum that would be helpful. And I guess my last comment, Dorothy, I appreciate what you said about the high school. It's hard for me to imagine what the central location is given, what Amherst is like in a very skinny and long town north south and the fact that people from your district go through downtown pretty frequently, people from far north and far south don't. And so I'm not sure that solves all of our problems. Shallowney? I just want to again reiterate the people that I spoke to, something to what Dorothy said that if he's promoted it as asking for a hate, this is your chance to come and give us feedback. What do you think about the budget? Like talking about it, not in technical terms. This is the public budget forum, which people said we didn't really know what that meant. So how we talk about it should be really simple and clear. The other thing I was going to say is now that they have that online forum or online forum. I think we can all go around and I hope that the forum has a link. I haven't gone and I think I checked it, but I don't remember if there's a link to the presentation that was made. So we can tell people if you miss the budget, take a look at the presentation and then send us your feedback. So that's something we can all do. One other thing is somebody has suggested that we set up a way that questions can be submitted from people who are not in the audience. Questions and comments, and yes, if we're allowed to talk. I just want to mention that we've been using the word hearing in forum interchangeably, but this last event was a hearing. I thought you said it was a hearing. Is the one where we can't talk? No, public forum, the public forum defined by the charter requires that half of the time has to be reserved. Yes, has to be reserved for public comment. The question is what constitutes public comment? And if the council or the town manager have, you know, respond to a question or ask people to clarify, does that get counted towards the halftime the public has or does it get counted back towards the clock? Okay, I think we need to adjourn so. Yeah, and hearings do not have that restriction. Are we, is there an agreement to adjourn? I think so, just the housekeeping, Dorothy handed us all a set of minutes. I don't know whether we approved hers and mine has typos in it, I can fix them, but I think we have to vote out our minutes at some point. Yeah. I can send mine around again with the typos fixed in it. Okay, let's take care. Nobody commented on mine, and I'm sure there's the errors and emissions. Let's jointly make an effort to do minutes as the first item next week, and that'll put the pressure on all of us. So you adjourned. So we're adjourned at 4.30.