 You need to go through the process and make sure everybody can hear and be heard. Right. So why don't you just call the finance committee to order. And not do that. And then I'll do the council, which will include everybody. And then I'll do the additional people. Okay. Okay. Lynn, when you're ready, you can cue immerse media. And I'm doing that by doing what? Recording. By saying we're ready. I'm sorry. Thank you. Thank you. We're ready. Okay. Andy. Good evening. It's us. Six 30 PM. And it's. June 8th of 2020. And I'm going to. In a moment, call the finance committee to order. What is happening this evening. Is that the. Charter town charter requires the finance committee. Hold hearings on any budget that is going to be considered. And this is a public hearing. For two. Actually, it's two different public hearings for two different budgets. The first one is the budget for the regional school district. And after we call to the committee and the council to order. We will. Then proceed to the hearing and I'll explain the hearing process. But I'm now. My name is Andrew Steinberg. I'm the. Chair of the finance committee. And I'm going to turn. This over for a moment. To the council president. To the council president. Who's going to call. To order the council. Okay. Given that we have a quorum of the Amherstown council. I am calling the council to order. At six 31. We're going to now go through the process of making sure you can hear us and we can hear you. Okay. I'm not going to stop the meeting or make note that somebody has not been able to continue. So I'm not going to do this in particular order, but in order of my screen, Andy Steinberg, can you hear me? Yes. In Greece. Yes. Kathy Shane. Yes. George Ryan. Yes. Pat DeAngelis. Yes. Sarah Schwartz. Yes. Darcy Dumont. Yes. Can you unmute and confirm you can hear us? Yes. I hear you. Thank you. Dorothy Pam. Yes. Mandy Joe. Yes. Okay. And then in addition to that, we have two people. Three people. I missed two counselors. Oh, shall any ball mill. And can you hear me? Yes. And Evan Ross. Yes. Thank you. And then we, in addition to that, we have three members who are non-voting resident members of the finance committee. Bob Hegner. Yes. Aaron Povinelli. Yes. Okay. And Mary Lou Tileman. Yes. Okay. And then since we have the school people starting first, I want to make sure that Mike Morris can hear us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, superintendent. Doug slaughter. Yes, I can. Okay. And. I saw you earlier. Where are you? Alison McDonald. Yes. Thank you. All right, Andy. Why don't you start? Thank you. Okay. I'll do that. Thank you. I'm going to go right over to the board. I'm going to go into the committee as soon as governor's, governor Baker's March 12, 2020, order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law. General law chapter 30 a section 18. This meeting, which is joint meeting of the. Council and the finance committee. Is being conducted via remote participation. We're convening now the meeting of the finance committee in addition to having already convened the meeting of the council. So this is the first of two budget hearings as I just explained. The hearing is required by section 5.5 of the Amherst Home Rule Charter and is pursuant to council rules of procedure rule 5.2 We are going to first have the hearing of the regarding the regional school budget. And so this is the process that I'm gonna proceed by which is consistent with rule 5.2. It generally follows the outline but there is the provision in the rule for making appropriate modifications for budget hearings which is what this is. And so we're gonna start with the presentation of the budget by the superintendent of schools with the participation of staff that he's going to introduce to us and the chair of the regional school committee who he can also introduce to us. After his presentation, I'm going to then open it up first to council members and members of the finance committee all eight members of the finance committee. Of course, five are also council members. And I'm gonna try and recognize from the council members and finance committee in order that I see hands going up in the raise hand function. And after questions from the council and finance committee, we then open it up to any public attendees who wish to either ask questions or make comments regarding the budget. At the conclusion of that portion if any other council members have any other comments to make after having heard from members of the public or we'll entertain any final comments and that will conclude the first hearing and then we will proceed to the second hearing unless it is not yet seven o'clock which we will have to recess because the second meeting which is regarding the town managers proposed July budget for the town, which is a one month budget is a separate hearing that was posted for 30 minutes after this one. So with that introduction, I wanna welcome our superintendent, Mike Morris and superintendent Morris. Please make presentation and tell us a little bit about the budget that you're asking the council and its finance committee to consider. Sure. So first I just wanna acknowledge Chair McDonald who's with us today. So thank you for coming on the call and I'll turn it over and I'm conscious of the time constraint that councilor Steinberg mentioned. So I'll try to be brief in my comments as will Dr. Slaughter because we know there's other things in your agenda this evening. So the regional school budget was passed in March and repatched again in late May and because of the situation with COVID and the financial implications it meant cutting a couple of hundred thousand dollars from our budget. And it's a particularly hard time of year if you watch any show. Johns Hopkins had a really good presentation recently ASBO which is a national association of school business managers school business officials as well as my professional organization came out with a budget report today that suggested that doing school next year will be more expensive, not less expensive. Given all the CDC precautions there was a very lengthy presentation last week so if anyone's curious about what that looks like please I encourage you to watch the joint school committee meeting that was last Wednesday night or go to our website which has that presentation from that. And so what we tried to do is we knew that reducing staff was not gonna be a viable strategy because we're gonna need all hands on deck to make some sort of schooling work given the CDC requirements. And so you will not see many reductions in staffing and that's certainly we value our staff and that's part of it but the other part of it is in order to have school function next year we need as many staff as we can possibly have. And so it put us in a somewhat precarious situation we think we've drafted a budget that well we know we drafted a budget that met the guidelines that was expressed it's a challenging budget it's one that we think can be fiscally responsible and hopefully be implemented with fidelity next year. The other thing I wanna be really clear about is to be unclear about is we don't know what school look like, right? That presentation last week was the beginning of a conversation we have a survey out with over 700 responses right now from staff and families about what school might look like given the CDC requirements. Some of the questions you all have tonight will probably be great questions that are unanswerable, excuse me because at this point, Desi has not yet to even release its guidance that won't come out till next week on what it's recommending let alone what we're able to do. So we are in a very difficult situation as it relates to opening school we know how critical it is for students and frankly for the community that we're able to open school for as many kids as possible next year we know the long-term consequences of not doing this well and with that, that's where we find ourselves as we come to this budget. So we did have unanimous school committee support in passing it. I think the last thing I'll suggest before I turn it over to Dr. Slaughter is how incredibly challenging this is for everyone for staff members, administrators. We're essentially trying to recreate what school looks like with wildly different rules and it's upended what we think of as education. We've had to incur significant costs in different places because of that and the uncertainty is very hard. We talk, you know, superintendents come to town councils every year and we talk about what changes and to us and to educators that feels like large changes. I know to members of the public it could be perhaps feel like smaller changes. This is significant second order change that we're talking about and first order change and second order change and third order change. It's really resetting what education is. And so I think some of the uncertainty that may be felt in some of the responses because we're still trying to engage the community to make the best choices. In this case for the four towns as well as for the Amherst, I'll speak to Amherst but there's a regional budget of how to put together an educational program that's gonna be most effective for students given the CDC requirements. Again, because of time I won't go into them that may be interesting to you but, you know, went to them ad nauseam so to speak in a very long meeting last Wednesday night that people can watch. So with all that, those caveats and that context setting, I'll turn it over to Dr. Slaughter who has a brief presentation before we open up for questions. Thank you, Dr. Morris. I'll begin and I'll share my screen here. Hopefully I can do this without much issue just to sort of take you through a few slides that I've prepared that you've gotten and so hopefully everyone can see this without issue. This is a new slide that was put into your packet this afternoon, I believe. And I thought I'd start with this because it helps to sort of frame where we normally are as far as a budget process and things we may need to encounter relative to our budget process. So to start with, you know, in normal circumstances with the regional school budget, what happens is that the regional school committee goes ahead and adopts a budget and recommends an assessment method. Then those go to the council and the town meetings of the three other communities and three of the four towns must adopt the budget in order for it to be adopted. But given that we use an alternative assessment method, every single town must accept the alternative assessment method in order for us to have a full budget. And so that hasn't changed. That has been the status quo for us for a number of years. If we are to amend the budget during the fiscal year, which very well given the unknowns that we have could occur, I thought I'd just share with you some of the things that would happen process-wise for us regarding that amendment process. So first order or first thing that has to happen is that any budget decrease or reduction in assessment amounts only requires the regional school committee to approve of those changes. So anything that reduces the burden on any of the member communities or reduces the overall expenditure of the district is allowed by regional school committee vote. It is a two thirds majority required in that circumstance, but it doesn't require action by the appropriating authorities in the communities, which is the town council and Amherst and town meeting in the other three towns. If the budget itself increases, and so the regional school committee recognizes we need to increase the expenditure level of the budget, three of the four towns need to agree to that, even if the assessed amounts don't change. So if for some reason we have additional state aid then what we expect and we wish to expend that for the purposes of the programming in our schools for the coming fiscal year, we can do that, but it still requires three to four communities to say yes to that. Likewise, if, and maybe more importantly, if we have a change such that the assessment to a given town or all four towns needs to increase, any town whose assessment changes or needs an increase must approve that change. So we may have a budget that stays flat, but we need to assess more of the communities. If one of the communities assessment changes and the others don't, that one community would have to approve that assessment. Now the way our assessment works, the recommended assessment method works, if one town's assessment changes, they all change. So it could be an interesting circumstance, but if the assumptions we have regarding minimum contributions that communities have to make changes after we've sort of set this budget, it could be an odd circumstance where an individual community might have an assessment amount change and then they would have to go back to town meeting and vote on that. At the bottom of the slide, I placed a little bit of context from a history standpoint on Amherst's assessment over the last few years. These are the budgeted numbers. And then likewise, the overall budget for the regional school district. And these again are based on budget numbers. As we go to the next slide, you'll see when we put some actuals in there for fiscal 18 and 19, those percentages from the previous year change a little bit based on the actuals of the year. But what you see in that slide is that we've held the percentage change in assessment to Amherst within the guidance of the finance committee over the last few years, but that often doesn't match or mirror what happens to the budget as a whole. And so the budget as a whole typically goes up a much smaller amount year over year than you might expect relative to a particular school's assessment or town's assessment. And that assessment, you may or may not know, it's a fairly complex calculation. It's based on a variety of factors, the way we do it, one of which is how many kids are from Amherst in the school district, but also based on a factor of ability to pay based on what's called EQV, which has to do with a wage factor, in other words income basis, as well as the property values within the community. So it's a fairly complex calculation that's involved in calculating those assessments. And so it doesn't track smoothly necessarily, although we try to put in the assessment method we try to pick is one to mitigate the large spikes both positive and negative to any given community within the region. Slide to the next slide. So on this page, so we generally start from a standpoint of a level services budget. And then we calculate as best we can, given that we usually do this in the fall and we're only about a quarter of the way into a fiscal year, we're trying to project our level services for the coming year. And then we typically look at our resources and get some guidance from the various towns about their ability, given their projections for revenue, what they might be able to pay. And we recognized even before the COVID crisis that we were going to have to reduce the budget from level services by a significant amount. And so at that time, we were taking out about $322,000 worth of expenses in order to meet the revenue we thought we were going to get in what I've thought about today is the Halcyon days of January relative to revenue predictions for the Commonwealth. Obviously, since the COVID crisis kicked in, we've adjusted what we think revenues are likely to look like and what we've gotten feedback from the member towns about what they think they can afford. And so we've tried to take that into account and put that into place here. And so a couple of things I'll point out. Anything in yellow is something that we've done since the COVID crisis hit. In particular, one thing I'll point out on the revenue side, which is the CARES Act. So that is an infusion of money. I know it's showing as a negative number with the parenthesis roundup, but that actually reduces your expenses, essentially. But also immediately below that is an estimate of a reduction in state support. So we didn't and don't have any particular insight as to how or what will be reduced from a state support standpoint, but we do have an expectation of a pretty significant drop. It could be chapter seven, it could be transportation aid to the region. Could play into some of the other factors around special education support and that sort of thing. So we sort of left it in a bit of a block of an estimate of reduction and didn't try to assign it to any particular category. And then of course, so those essentially the CARES Act is prescribed and dictated by the legislation that passed on the federal level and the states using a Title I distribution. So our sort of slice for the regional school district is about $230,000. That's a fairly firm number. So it offsets a fair amount of that that we were expecting to cut, but we made some additional reductions in expenses to try to meet the constraints that the member towns are under relative to the revenue they think they have to fund the school and the rest of their operations. And so we made an additional set of reductions of $494,000 on top of what we had already done coming into the beginning of March. And so what that results in is this more detailed budget here and I won't go into too much detail, but there's a number of factors even within this, even that are as with all budgets, a bit of the circumstances as we understood them at the time. So we have some areas of the budget that may look like they're rather large increases relative to the circumstances we find ourselves. But I think that some of the increases that you see in this column are reversed by virtue of this reduction of $816,000, which is the $322,000 in the $494,000. So those kind of offset and reduce the overall budget. So we actually have an almost level services budget. It's actually a little below, not level services level funded budget. It's actually a little below level funded from the current fiscal year to next fiscal year. And so I'll slide to the next slide here and just to show you. And so we've had under discussion a number of assessment methodologies over the recent years. The assessment methodology that is currently being recommended by the school committee and is this one with this kind of a beige or I guess a beige or tan sort of color. It's the 45% statutory five year average method. That gets into part of how the calculation is done to do the assessment. It was the recommended method coming into to the approval of the budget previous to the COVID crisis. And so we've remained with that because it was the conversations we had had with the communities about our shifting of assessment method over a number of years to a slightly different model. This was another step in the process. The member towns were familiar and comfortable with that. And with the reduction in the overall budget, what you see in this slide is that that the recommended assessment frameworks is just a little below the fiscal 20 numbers. So the fiscal 20 number is here. The fiscal 21 number is here and it's about just a little, about $40,000 less than the current year's assessment. So with the exception of Leverett, each of the four communities is actually having a lower assessment than they do in fiscal 20. Try to think, one other thing I'll point out and this is something I said earlier is that we've asked for the chapter 70 and the transportation reimbursement. There's really some others in here that could be as well. And that's just to note that we didn't know, we left our projections from pre COVID situation. We left those projections in place and then we have by virtue of our cuts required, we've sort of factored that in. So the projections for revenue there on the chart from the state don't reflect the actual thinking that we have. It's just we didn't have a place to sort of specifically put it. And so we kept it into these sort of cuts required section but it effectively will affect chapter 70 is likely to smaller, transportation reimbursement is guaranteed to be smaller, almost guaranteed to be smaller and some of the others may be affected a little bit as well. Our use of D&D and so that will be as we have predicted and projected here. So that lays out the assessment methods and the one in particular that we're recommending for this year. I think at this point I'll pivot to the last slide which is a significant change in our expectation around capital. We recognize that the current fiscal year has had a rather significant alteration of plans and so we knew that we would probably be in a situation where revenues for fiscal 22 will also likely be challenging to work with. And so by reducing our capital plan rather significantly and trying to anticipate some of the costs that we're gonna have to incur for COVID related expenses we're trying to formulate a capital plan that will keep the kids safe, keep the buildings moving toward the direction we want them to but at the same time recognize that the choices we make here in our capital plan also impact our community's relative to the assessment they need to pay. And so one of the things also about capital is that we don't have cash capital the way Amherst does so we're not setting aside a certain portion of our revenue for the purposes of doing capital projects. Obviously if we have revenues above expectations or actually really expenses below expectations so that we have resources available we'll sometimes do a capital project with resources like that. But in general we borrow the money for our capital expenditure. And what happens is is that we do the borrowing in January or February, that sets your assessment for the next year and so that's why the assessment if you're looking at those numbers from earlier the assessment for debt from the region did not change even though we've altered the budget and we've significantly altered our capital plan because the borrowing that we would do for these items on the capital plan that I'm displaying now will not be a part of the assessment the debt assessment to the town of Amherst until fiscal 22. So that was part of the thinking as far as trying to mitigate the sort of out years and the longer term effective of the difficulty we'll likely see in revenues for the state. So by reducing our capital planning here we're really sort of trying to think even further ahead into fiscal 22 in some respects. And so that's part and parcel of that. Obviously on the COVID-19 needs at the time of bringing this together and even still we're trying to shape our idea of what we need to purchase and things we'll need to implement in our schools to make them function safely and well for the students. There'll be some aspects of this that will be covered by some money from the federal government but I doubt that all of it will be and so that's the rationale behind putting in a place for about 75,000 for the purposes of trying to meet the needs of some COVID related items probably ones that won't be covered by federal reimbursement. The other two projects, the walk-in cooler freezer is a scaled back version of that project and then the grounds improvement is really the removal of a modular on the back of the high school that's been slated for removal. It's really starting to become unsafe and a bit of a problem relative to fire risk and that sort of thing. So we really wanted to take care of that before it got much, much worse. So I think at this point I'll stop. This has been the slides that I have and I'll turn it back to the superintendent in case he wants to add any additional comments relative to what I presented to you and be happy to answer any of your questions. Given the time I'll turn it over to the chair of these committees to see if there's questions so thank you, Dr. Slaughter. Well, thank you, Dr. Slaughter and Superintendent Morris. So to remind everyone who's watching the meeting the next two steps that we're going to proceed through is that I am going to be looking for raised hands from members of the council and members of the finance committee. So all eight members of the finance committee and members of the council and I'm going to do my best to try and spot order but if a bunch of hands go up at the same time I won't be perfect in that score and proceed through. This is the one presentation for the council of the regional school budget and the process that we're going to be engaging in next is that we'll be discussed again at the finance committee meeting tomorrow but without the superintendent or Dr. Slaughter being present and we will as a finance committee make recommendation to the council which is scheduled to take the budget up on June 29 but this is for all of the council your opportunity to ask questions about the budget and anything that's related to the budget that you think is important to bring forward so please take that opportunity and I see the first hand that was raised is from councilor Shane, Kathy. Thank you, Andy. I think I'll just try to focus on making sure I understand the numbers and because I'm on finance tomorrow we can ask some other questions. So when you went through the slide dog that showed cuts and additions and you had one was you were prepaying the out of district. So are you able to do that because in this current year you had enough funds that you could prepay and will you likely be able to have that again next year? So part of what I'm worried about is not just this coming year but the year after it so that seemed like you had a buffer there because you got 170,000 out of that being able to move it. So was that because there was an access or you had some money in this year's budget that you could do that? I can try to answer that one, Doug. So the short story is we froze our budget on March 13th except for essential COVID-19 related items because we knew we saw the storm coming, the fiscal storm and it was a way to preserve for one year knowing the towns we're gonna have an incredibly hard time preserve some of the staffing and other things that we knew we'd need moving forward. So we can't bank on that moving forwards. We tend to budget conservatively so it's not the only year if you go back that we've prepaid Tuitions. Mr. Mangano could fill you in with more details and is wearing his former hat that's still dusty but I'm sure it's in the closet. But it is you're rightly noting that it's not something you can necessarily count on year and year out, but it is something that we got incredibly conservative on March 13th and this is exactly why. Okay, and then if I look at the amount of money for cares which is a flow in, is that your best guess right now or is that you said it's fairly solid so that is that money in your hands more or less? So I'm just trying to get where is the uncertainty even on the numbers you've got on this table? Yeah, so this is money that has been assigned to us using a desi calculation on Title I. It is the case that compared to the Great Recession where this inflation adjusted, the federal government spent about $128, $129 billion, trillion dollars on, excuse me, billion dollars on K to 12 education plus K through higher ed, so far they've spent 27 and that was during a less challenging fiscal time without the social distancing and other needs in the pandemic. So I think to your point, this will help us for next year and I would urge US counselors to be advocating that the federal government play a larger role. I'm happy to send a slide deck after YouTube video of experts on this who are saying if the federal government doesn't stop, doesn't jump in, schools will not be able to function in the future and so there is a bill that passed the House whether that passes the Senate, who knows but they are the only ones who can jump into this situation and again, if anyone needs backup, please email me. I'm happy to send you more YouTube videos of experts or articles than you probably wanna look at or read. Then I'm just gonna go down my list as quickly as I can. So the guesstimate of a cut in state aid, about what percent did you go ahead and take the leap? I know this is a guess, so the dollar amount. So I actually went back and looked at some of the 2010 and 2006, like what happened to us last time? So I just, I don't know what you put in here and if you don't have that right now I can ask it again tomorrow. I'd refer to Doug on that one. Okay. So, I mean, as a percentage, I mean, the state typically gives us a little over $10 million, so it's a small percentage. That's a short story. Yeah. Then on, when I looked at the payroll accounts and I realized when I went to the next page you had sort of a pre-COVID FY 21 and then at the very bottom you subtracted out the things but the administrative cost central administrative and then the school administrative went up by about six, a little over 6% but on the cuts page you took out a Dean. So if, is that, that's before you've done the adjustment on the top, it just looked like somehow the administrative staff was increasing more than teaching staff was on the, as I said, it's the FY 21 before you took out the pieces. So. Yeah. And that's exactly it. Kathy, that was based on a level services budget and some things rolled over. There were other administrative cuts even before the COVID related cuts, so to speak, that cut into administration. There are no new administrative positions that are proposed in this budget at all. And if you look at the cuts page we tried to keep things as far away from the classroom. In terms of rifts or reduction in force notices at the regional level, all this resulted in a 0.4 riff and that was mostly based on someone returning from a one year position. So we really kept things away. We're not reducing sections or we're not reducing teacher load. This was purely based on someone who was in a coaching role, returning to a teaching role but there were no program cuts. There were no offering cuts or no course cuts based on these, this budget. And am I right in assuming that the non-union staff got a 2% COLA so that there is that built into this budget? There is. So the non-unit staff in FY19 took a zero just for background for people who weren't aware of that. Things aren't optimistic in terms of that looking forward for FY22 and to think of that happening three out of four years for people who are, I can't get to take vacation as Paul and I have spoken. Literally I wanted to shut down the dish for a couple of days because of how intense this process has been and will be over the summer. And they're saying, no, I'll just lose my vacation days because contractually they can max out. I felt for morale and for what people are putting in and what they've been through as well as what they will be through it felt fair and equitable that they would have the same COLA as the teachers for next year. Okay, and I think my very last question is the substitute line in the operating budget as you're looking forward. It didn't go up very much. And I did listen into your classroom discussion on configuration and it including that any teacher who feels sick should stay home and what do you do with the classroom? So just on that's one that I think as the year rolls out, people have to look closely at because you may need to bring in more help than you had to before because teachers would come in and teach when they were sick, you know? I mean, they weren't. And they're being asked to absolutely not do that now, you know? So it's just, I was looking at whether that adjustment and it doesn't look like you fine tune that yet. So hopefully there's some contingency funds or some ability to move around in the budget if you have to. That's true. I think the only flip side or the only optimistic fiscal side I should say of it is that there's, I did not see a scenario in the fall where secondary students are in school every day. I don't see that as being viable. And so that might mitigate some of what you're talking about but you're absolutely correct that it's something we're aware of and we may have to use more internal staff simply from a public health and safety perspective. Certainly it's a hard job to be a substitute teacher to be a substitute teacher in a socially distant school. We are gonna have to do training for them and we may have to just literally rely on existing staff to cover spaces and reconfigure things more than external staff coming in, not just for fiscal reasons but from public health reasons as well. And I wanna publicly sing the praises and I'll do it every moment I can of Julie Fetterman who is a rock star in terms of coordinating and connecting with us about this public health piece and how it connects to public education. Thank you. I'm gonna turn it over to others because I get another chance tomorrow. Thank you very much. Okay, well thank you. For anybody who's just tuning in on Amherst media right now I just wanted to, or has in the last few minutes. We have two hearings this evening. They were scheduled at 6.30 and seven but the seven o'clock meeting will begin at the conclusion of this hearing. The hearing that we're currently doing is about the proposed regional school budget which has been presented to Amherst in the other three towns in the region and will require council action at the end of June. And what we are currently in is questions from members of the finance committee and the council and then we'll see if there are questions or comments from members of the public. So Mandy, Joe, Hanakie, I think Mandy, your next person has to be recognized. Thank you, Andy. My questions all sort of go to the same thing but I'm gonna try and ask them all together since they're somewhat related. I appreciate the new slide about the assessment method and decreases in budget and increases in assessments and how that happens mid-year because I look at a budget and I look at the unknowns and I foresee budgets having to change. So I just wanna confirm that we've got a proposed budget in front of us that actually shows an increase in revenue from the state. You've addressed that a little bit as to how, I'm still confused as to how that is calculated as a decrease when it shows an increase and it comes off the total operating budget and then you calculate the assessment required. Once we pass an assessment of whatever that would be about 16.4 million, if the state aid does not come in where it's assessed or in the budget, which is around 11 million right now and change, that would in theory, unless the budget itself decreases, the $32 million budget decreases, would require the way I think about it as either as an increase in the town's assessments. And so I wanna confirm that if state aid doesn't come in where the budgeted numbers are, the 11.7 showing on our budget on the fourth sheet of the slide that if the regional school committee does not reduce the total operating budget of 32 million in response to a lower state aid that Amherst would actually have to affirmatively pass an increase in assessment above the 16.4 million. I just wanna make sure I'm clear on that. And the next question sort of goes to that issue, which is, I've seen, I think Desi came out with some sort of guidelines on Friday about PPE and state classroom sizes and all and some of that concerns me. No more than 12 people in a classroom is one thing I read. No more than 10 students in a classroom. That has severe budget implications, I can only guess. How is that manageable under a budget like this and is this budget, I guess the question is, is this budget reasonable given the guidelines we're seeing from the CDC, from the Desi, are we going to be looking at instead of a decrease based on revenue from a potential decreased in revenue from the state? Are we gonna be looking at a mid-year budget request to increase the budget or can you operate under this budget and CDC guidelines? I guess it's one of my questions. How reasonable is that to expect? Sure, well, I can jump in a little bit and if Dr. Slaughter wants to add, he can. I mean, I think the regional school committee have a number of tools that's disposable, one of which you said it could re-engage the towns. The region does have an E&D line. So it does have reserves and depending if there's a gap with that gap is, it could think to use that also as a school choice line. So I think there's a number of different scenarios that the school committee could use. It certainly would want to keep all the towns, elected officials connected to that and in order to make decisions. In terms of the Desi guidance, let me clarify. What came out was that the class size piece was about summer school. If towns choose to have summer school, they have not come out and that won't come out till next week about class size guidelines in classrooms. So we are analyzing class spaces. I think it's our estimates depending on the classroom, 11 to 15 students can be in a class. The high school particulars are Frankenstein kind of building. It was built in three phases and, you know, so some classrooms have more space or different orientation than others. I think as I said last week, there is no scenario that I foresee that all regional students will be back in school five days a week, anytime with the current CDC guidance in place. I think as a little preview to our Thursday school committee meeting, we have two school meetings this week. You know, the survey that I mentioned has over 700 responses. And I think for many people, it comes as a surprise to them that the CDC guidance will equate to a pretty significant shift in the number of days in school their children will be attending and the options. And I think Miss McDonald and I were pretty clear about this. No one likes any of the options, right? And that's true across the Commonwealth as well. And so I think to your point, the challenge will be, how do we meet the greatest number of students' needs in all three districts? Sorry, because my job has all three districts. That's the way I'm thinking about this. And we're having a number of joint meetings for that purpose. And what's possible, what's advisable, but there's no scenario I see where 950 students can be in the high school at a time. It's just not gonna happen, right? And I think Gazette got the headline right. So whoever wrote that, I think it was Scott. Well done, that we need to de-densify the schools, right? It's not just about number of kids in a school. It's all the other factors, number of kids in a hallway. How do we get kids lunch, right? All those pieces contribute to it. So I think what is gonna happen in my prediction is that we'll have to have a pretty thorough process. And as Miss McDonald has been great about, we're engaging the public early and often, both the public presentations and surveys and surveys that we just put out is not the last one that we're gonna offer, to be able to come to hopefully a community consensus of what's the most important thing in the long term for our students, and particularly as it relates to educational debt or our achieving gap that people use different terms that we have, that we have to weigh. And so it's gonna be messy. It's not gonna be clean. I think that another preview of the data is I wouldn't say there's consensus on a model or an option. I think there's gonna be lots of discussion that needs to occur. But the reality is we're trying to be good fiscal stewards despite this situation. We are not unique. Every district's going through it. Unfortunately, some of our space needs are more challenging. For instance, the middle school has classrooms that don't have windows, which according to CDC guidelines is a big problem because the ventilation doesn't allow for external ventilation with a window. So we're analyzing all those pieces. So long-winded way to say you're right, it's complicated. You're right, the amount of funds that we have to give is probably inconsistent with what's needed to do the best job that we wish we could do. Some of those are not short-term fixes. We can't pop out and build a window when there's no air on the other side of it. It's the rooms that are back to back. But I think what we're committed to is engaging the public with realistic scenarios, getting their feedback and making the best decision we can for our students. But there is no wonderful scenario. And I think comparing mid-COVID school to pre-COVID school is actually something that we have to start doing a better job. I have to start doing a better job communicating. It's not actually a helpful comparison. It's really about what mid-COVID school option versus other mid-COVID school options do we have. And there are fiscal implications, as you note, to all of those decisions. For instance, and then I'll stop because I could go on for this forever. It's a good question and it's obviously what I'm breathing these days. People are saying, well, why don't you rent a building or use the bank center or things like that? So every school building we use has to have a nurse, has to have an administrator in this. So it's not just simply about the spaces and getting more. It's actually the staffing that would accompany those spaces that makes it even more problematic than just can we get a couple of classrooms here or there? If it wasn't a public health crisis, maybe we could get by with being more flexible. That's not in the cards for us this year. And so I think we have to live within our means, both from a space perspective. We're gonna do our best financially. The PPE, the personal protective equipment email that you referenced that came on Friday. The number of materials, a neighboring district, similar size district, estimated there'll be 400 pieces of PPE needed in the first couple of months. And that isn't free. We are working with the town and I wanna publicly suggest and state that the town has been wonderful about partnering with us on that. And I feel very fortunate to be working with town staff and with this community and values education so much. Not everybody has that luxury. So long winded, I apologize. I'll be quicker next time. Eddie, can I just jump in? It's not 400, it's 400,000 pieces of PPE. Oh, my apologies. I was so worried about timing. I lopped off three zeros. Bye, apologies. Thank you. 400 did sound a little low. No, no, no, it's... Okay, go ahead. Dorothy, all right. I'll give one quick thank you. I have a quick question. We've changed the way we do health insurance, self-insured, but I just wanted to be sure that if a number of teachers did catch COVID-19 and had extended and expensive hospitalization, would that affect our budget? Or would, since we're now part of a bigger system, would we keep our, what's in the budget as our estimate? I'll defer to Dr. Slaughter on that. All right, I can answer that. So the short answer is it wouldn't really, it would likely when we go to renew our rates, we renew our rates each year, it might have an impact on our rates in fiscal 22 to some extent, but that's also gonna be our experience in combination with everybody else's experience. And it's a much bigger pool than we used to have. So I don't think it'll be too, too bad in that regard. If we had a significant draw on our insurance by virtue of a number of people being in expensive hospitalization or healthcare circumstances, yeah, it would have a negative impact, but it'd be mitigated to some extent relative to the others that are in the group with us. And they recognize that there's some peaks and valleys to things in some respects. There's one other thing I wanted to point out in talking about just back to Manny Joe's question around the revenue picture. The thing to keep in mind is in that revenue section of that slide, the fourth of five, and it has a number of revenue sources, not all are state revenue sources. So the total is 11.7, but E&D and E&D for contingency are both money we've got in hand in reserves. We have additional reserves on top of that that we will also could potentially draw on. It would require action by each of the four communities to do that if we were to utilize those funds, those reserve funds. Interest revenue is also not a state aid piece, but charter reimbursement, some aspects of Medicaid, that depends on how much service we provide. Those all have variables and have state components too. I think if I could add one last thing, is the other thing we've really slowed down filling vacancies. And so we're waiting to see more state guidance because we do know there's uncertainty there. We've heard really, I've heard personally really different things for different state legislators on what to expect. And I'm not alone in that regard. I think that the municipal side is probably in a similar space. So I think we've tried to be conservative on things that we could be moving forward as well. Mandy, you have a follow up? Yeah, I just wanted to track back. I had two parts to sort of my question on the revenue and then on the assessment. So if I could get maybe an answer to confirm the assessment understanding that I have that if we pass this budget and state aid decreases by 25 or 30% and so the budget at 32.1 million is, if your state aid isn't subtracting your 11 or 10 million out, it's only subtracting eight million out. Do we have to, if the school committee does not reduce the budget by that 2 million say, does Amherst have to re-vote and approve an increase above the $16.4 million in assessment in order to be assessed higher? Even if the budget, funded budget 32.145 million does not change. The short answer is yes. However, I think if the state aid dropped by that larger percentage, I think the school committee, I mean, my suggestion, you know, as finance director, I think superintendent's suggestion and perhaps the way the school committee would take action would be to, you know, review if there were any other and we would be into the fiscal year a little bit. We would have a lot more clarity on exactly what the program we're trying to execute is looking like. And so I think we would have a much better idea of how we might be able to reduce our expenditure even more. We'd have much better numbers on exactly what our staffing looks like. You know, right now we have projections on who and how many, you know, people we are anticipating meeting and that sort of thing. We'll have much greater clarity on all of those types of things. So we'd look to obviously reduce our expenses and lower the overall budget as best we could before we went back to any of the four towns and asked for more. And we also factor in the fact that, you know, there's only so much capacity among the four communities to take on additional expense. And so, you know, we don't live in isolation here. We're trying to recognize that, you know, each of our four member communities are affected negatively as well when we are. And so we recognize that and we'll take that into account. And I'll just add to that and I don't mean to be flip about it and hopefully this isn't perceived that way, but if chapter 70 drops 25 or 30%, no one's running school next year across the Commonwealth. The school year is getting incredibly more expensive towns across the Commonwealth do not have the capacity to make up that gap. And that, you know, you think of us, you can think of larger districts and what it would mean for 25% loss in chapter 70 for large urban districts that are much more reliant on state aid than we are. So I think the state will have, and that's, I know that's a political statement, but it's the truth. And so any advocacy that we can have from the town council, both the state and the federal government, we'd appreciate it just because we know the economy of the town isn't gonna function if the schools aren't functioning. Hey, well, thank you. I don't see additional questions right now from other members of the council, the finance committee. If there are additional questions, we'll have one more opportunity for counselors and the finance committee members to come back at the end. I wanna make sure that we now take the time for those members of the public who are watching who wish to offer public comment by way of questions or comments that they have. We ask you to limit your comments to three minutes and that you indicate if you are participating on the Zoom call, you can use raise hand to ask to be identified. And if you're participating by telephone, you can press star nine on your telephone. So I'll just give it a moment. And President Grismer is gonna let me know if there's anybody I don't think that there is who's asked to be recognized. There's nobody at this time. Okay, so thank you. And is there any additional questions from members of the finance committee or members of the council? So seeing none, then I think that we can... Well, I have noticed that just in time, Mary Lou Talman has asked to be recognized. Mary Lou. Yes, we're talking about this as a plan and that's great, but are we talking about it just for the fall or is this for a whole year? This is a whole year from now and much has changed within the last three or four months. So between now and January, we may know far more and maybe schools will be in full session. So my question is, is this plan for the whole academic year or just for the fall semester at this point in time? Mary Lou, if I know the answer to that question, I'd be going on TV left and right. I'd be selling the answer to that question. I would love to know and I don't mean to be unjust. I'd love to know the answer to that question. I mean, I think some of this gets to vaccine and timelines for a vaccine. The reality is we don't know. The CDC guidance, my clear answer, and I apologize for the poor attempted humor, but the CDC guidance has three steps. Step one is schools are closed because the data, and there's a whole chart on page nine of that, document the data shows that schools can be closed. Step two is that schools are open with enhanced social distancing. Step three is schools are open with social distancing. There is no step four until there's a vaccine. So your guess is as good as mine. I tend to be a pessimistic person on these kinds of things. There are those who are more optimistic than me. I like those people. I hope that they're right. I pray that they're right, honestly, for in terms of people's lives. But it's not something I can predict. The challenge at the secondary level is that once we go down a road, we don't really have a great way to undo it. So let me give you really specific. So at the high school level, it's likely the case that we will have to adapt the schedule to reduce the number of sections that students attend a day. So when students are in, right now they attend six classes a day. They have seven classes total and there's a drop schedule. That's not gonna happen next year. There'll be fewer classes a day to reduce the number of opportunities that students are mixing with one another. You can't go back once you've gone down that path completely. Students could be in school more, but you can't undo what you've set up. And it might be a model where students are taking almost like more like a block schedule, whether in fewer classes, more time. If you look at the Beloit model, a lot of colleges are looking at. They're looking at having students take two classes at a time. I'm not saying that'll happen at our high school, but that's a common model that colleges are looking at to again, to promote containment. And so once you go down that model, you can't, it's not as easy to undo what you've started. So the short answer is it's complicated. We don't know. I hope the vaccine comes sooner. There are some commitments that will be made in the fall that may not be completely reversible even if students are in more often. And so that is one of the vexing things of the situation. Not only do we not know what state funding is, not know what the state model is, that they're gonna at least promote to us, we actually don't know how long this will last. And that makes an additional challenge. It's exactly the right question to ask. Unfortunately, I can't give you a very satisfactory answer. Well, a follow-up then would be, how does this impact the extracurricular for children and the sports, the MIA? So that's another thing we're waiting on. I mean, the CDC guidance is pretty clear that they're really talking about sports that can be played with social distancing that eliminates some and it does permit others. I looked at Connecticut, they have released their sports plan for fall. You know, a great video, if you've just Google CDC Foundation, they have the public health director or doctor from Mississippi as well as their school committee, head of their school committee association. And the public health doctor said essentially, you know, I can tell people not to play football all I want, it's Mississippi. People are gonna play football. I was talking to Doug about this earlier. I think what we have to do is we have to be very cautious and I've been very conservative and some people like that and some people don't and I get that, that we're gonna follow the public health guidance. That's gonna drive our decision-making and we're gonna make the best public health, best public education decisions based on public health and not the other way around because I think when it's a slippery slope, once you go down, well, I think it'll be okay. And so MIA and the state will come out with that information. And so I think it is a concern. It's also a concern for before and after school programs. We do have an after school program at the middle school as well as many, many, as you know, clubs and after school experiences. But the key print, one of the key principles in the CDC guidance is that students stay or in as few groups as possible. You don't want students mixing with other students. And some of that's around how the virus spreads. It's also around if the virus comes, do you need to shut down a classroom or do you need to shut down the school and for how long? So there's a lot of different reasons. You know, I tend to like some sports that would be contact sports. I like watching them. I'm not sure how likely it is that we can do that. Football is a good example. Dr. Slaughter knows very well. I like watching football games. Our team had a historic season this year. It was fantastic. I'm not saying there won't be football, but that is a sport that's hard to play in a socially distanced manner. Well, thank you very much for all the answers. Thank you for the questions. And if there's no others, if there ends up being no others, thank you very much for the council for having us and engaging us in a really uncertain time. So on a reminder by fellow counselors that as last year, there was one presentation at the equivalent of this hearing, which was much earlier in the budget cycle year, where the superintendent and finance director from the schools was present to present the budget and answer questions for us. And again, this is anticipated to be that meeting, that hearing, and we will be taking up the budget after discussion in the finance committee at the June 29th meeting, which is about the time that the town meetings in the other towns will be taking place. There is a process that would allow for a 112th budget, which would be only used if we fail to get the three town meetings in the council meeting about some time. I don't know if my superintendent Morris you have something to add. Yeah, I just wanted to comment, I think as the council knows that we did have to submit the request for the one-tenth budget, the way it works under state guidance is that we submit that to DESI to the state. If we don't have all towns agree on a budget by June 1st, we did indicate that we believe there's support for this budget. And as long as the budgets pass in all four communities by July 1st, it's not something we'll have to manage, but the state feels like they couldn't wait till June 27th when two of our towns have town meetings. If it failed at one of those meetings, that would give them very short timeline to set up a one-twelfth budget. So we did submit that document and just wanted to make sure the council and the public were aware that we were asked to do that. Okay, so with that, as I see no other hands raised and President Hasen to advise me that there's anybody from the public who's asked to participate, I want to thank Superintendent Morris, Dr. Slaughter and School Committee Chair McDonald for having spent the time with us in the public hearing this evening and for having participated in the hearing on this budget, which is, as I noted earlier, required by our home rule charter. So thank you very much to the superintendent and the others who participated this evening. And with that, I am going to declare the first of our two hearings regarding the regional school budget to close and convene so that we can convene the other hearing. And I'll stop for just a moment to ask the president of the council if she wishes to have us take a recess before going to the second hearing or so we move straight into the next hearing. I think we should move in straight into it. It's past seven o'clock, it's 7.35. And so let's just keep going. Okay, so with that, I will convene the and call order the hearing for the one month budget. And just to remind everyone of what we agreed to, that there is a the town manager is working with his staff on preparing a FY21 budget, but in order to give more time until June 29th for the preparation and presentation of that budget, we need to do one month budget, which is to allow for appropriations to be made to allow for operations during the month of July. And it will then be incorporated and become a part of the full year budget. So with that, I'm going to turn it over to the superintendent and we will be following exactly the same procedure as with the last hearing with the same sequence presentation from the town manager and staff that he wishes to introduce and incorporate into his presentation and then questions from all counselors and finance committee members. And again, I will try and recognize people just in order to go off and see if there are any members of the public who wish to ask questions or make comments. So with that, I turn it over to the town manager. Thank you, Andy. So first, I want to say thanks to the superintendent and finance director for the schools, Dr. Slaughter. Terrific job. They do a phenomenal job and the work they have cut out for them is just immense. I'm communicating with Mike seven days a week every day. I think of a day that we didn't communicate at something during the last three months. So, and you should know that that's an unusual situation. He's a high communicator and it doesn't happen in many towns where the town side and the school side work so closely together. So it's a history for the town and I think that's a terrific thing. I think Mike and Doug and the school committee for the way they conduct this. Also want to recognize that we are being staffed by Athena O'Keefe and Serge Fedorovsky who are doing the staffing for this meeting. So if people see those names on the screen, that's there are this town staff supporting the council and the finance committee during this meeting. And tonight I'm joined by Sean Mangana, the finance director and Sonia Aldridge our comptroller who will do the bulk of the presentation. This is one of our public hearings as the chair said and we have the region, we have the one month budget. We will have a public forum on the capital improvement program. Then we'll have another public hearing on the FY 21 budget and that will be followed by about eight individual finance committee meetings where we go into that budget in deep detail. So this is the beginning of the one month budget. This is permitted as the chair said by virtue of a vote of the town council on April 27th that actually directed the town manager to create a one month budget along these guidelines. So with that, I think Sean Mangana is going to take the lead. He has a few slides. This is going to follow very much the same format that we made to the town council a week ago. So Sean. Thank you, Paul. Hello, everybody. So yeah, this is going to look pretty familiar to the presentation from a couple of weeks ago. We did add a couple of new slides to respond to some questions that came in. So some of this will be a refresher. So a little bit about why we are going with the one month budget. We do have quite a bit of uncertainty this year, probably more than any other year I've been involved with. We need more time to gather information on some of our revenues and expenditures and some of those major items that we're looking at are what the colleges and universities are going to do in terms of reopening and what that means for our local economy and the expenditures associated with the colleges and university. What the K-12 schools, library and other town services do. You just heard a great presentation from the superintendent and school finance director. There's a lot going on there and may have some additional costs. So we have to keep an eye on that. The state budget and what our state aid sources look like. State and federal government aid programs. So aside from our regular state aid that we get from the government, what else is coming in? We have the CARES Act. We've got a pretty good handle on what's available right now but there is talk about the scope of some of those funds possibly being brought in so we can use it for revenue replacement but that hasn't happened yet. So we're keeping a close eye on that and then just keep an eye on our local economy and the local receipts. Since the last time we presented this we've been able to dive into our enterprise funds quite a bit more and gauge the impact on water, sewer, parking and solid waste to get a sense of what's going on with those revenues and forecast those into the future. So a lot of unknown around these different areas and for that, that's why we're putting forward a one month budget. The total one month budget is on your left and it'll be the same on every slide. The total is $11,570,046 and it's broken into the different functional areas and then enterprise funds. It is a one month budget. It's not a one 12th budget because it does include some large one time expenditures or really one large one time expenditure but it also factors in actual spending patterns as well. So I will scroll down. So this budget gives us the authorization to expend funds in July if we didn't do it and we would have to have a full budget by July one. We came up with these amounts by using our accounting system to see what has been spent in the past and also consulting with department heads to get a sense of whether, you know the historical spend day in aligns with what they think they need for the coming year. The Hampshire County pension assessment is the one sort of a single really large expenditure that is paid during the month of July. It's paid during July because the pension system gives us a discount if we pay it all up front and it's a pretty sizable discount. So most communities in the pension system do pay it all up front. This is not intended to replace our full FY 21 budget document. You will still get the nice 200, 300 page document electronically at some point. It does not include any additions or reductions. So there's no programmatic or operational changes in this one month budget. This is just to get us through to the full budget. We'll get into much more conversation around the, any proposed additions or reductions during that time. And the hope is that the 12 month budget will completely replace this one month budget. So we're not gonna bring forward an 11 month budget to you, which kind of, you know you can't really get the historical context for that. We're gonna bring forward a full 12 month budget which will replace this one month budget during the month of July. So as I said, it's not a one 12th budget and I will you call upon my experience with the schools to explain why. So the schools are a good example that the salaries go way down during the summer because some staff at the schools are only paid from September through July. So you'll see salaries go way down for July but you'll also again get that pension assessment that hits during the month of July. So that's why it's not exactly a one 12th where expenditures are equal every single month. We really did look at actual spending and then take into account, you know a little bit of an increase for inflation things of that nature. There was a question on the retirement assessment which is a separate item in the one month budget. You'll see it's there at $6,192,108. That's just the general fund portion of the retirement assessment. The question that we received was what is the amount for those other areas? So we did include those here so you can see the different amounts which are included in those other enterprise funds. And there's a question about what are the most significant one-time expenses? So really the pension assessment is the really significant one-time expense. There are a few other little ones that will vary by department. Sometimes there's maintenance agreements that are paid in July that you pay for the full year, subscriptions, there's sometimes longevity payments that come up but those are very small relative to the one large expense that I described. So there's a question about whether capital is included in these enterprise funds budgets. It isn't currently, it will be part of the 12 month budget conversation but right now this is just to keep the enterprise funds going for the month of July. And the last question that we received was what I mentioned a little bit before, have we looked at the impact of COVID-19 on the enterprise fund revenues and expenditures? And we have, we've been looking at consumption of water and sewer consumption and particularly the impact of the college not being in session on those enterprise funds is that water consumption, sewer consumption went down. Also parking, the fact that there's not a lot of usage of parking right now and we haven't been collecting, women charging fines and things of that nature. So parking revenues also went down. So we are looking at that for the 12 month budget conversation and we'll have much more to present for that 12 month budget on enterprise funds. And with that, I will turn it over back to the chair. Andy, you're unmuted still. You're still muted, Andy. So I think now we're here. So thank you very much for the presentation and some of the questions that I had posed in advance had been answered but just now becomes a time for members of the council and the finance committee to ask questions. So I will be, as I said earlier in the first round be looking for raised hands and respond and then try and recognize people in the order in which I see the hands are being raised and the other things that I'd like to remind you of is that there is a series that it goes on because we really have a capital budget. There will be a separate forum that's required by a different section of the charter that requires that there be a forum on regarding a capital plan and that's required to be a council forum. And so it will be called by the president of the council in accordance with the charter provision. There will also be a second hearing because if you look at the charter it requires that there be a hearing on the FY21 budget which is the finance committee is tentatively scheduling for July 13. And in addition to this hearing about the one month budget and the council vote is anticipated that we will be as finance committee reporting back to the council in order to be able to take a vote on the one month budget on June 15th the annual FY21 budget to be presented on June 29th and a series of meetings for the finance committees have been previously noted. So my colleagues on the council and the finance committee, if anybody have questions I see Kathy you have first question. So let me turn to you. I just jumped in when I didn't see other hands. I have one that's more general about what we know already as you, when I looked at the one month Sean you just explained and it was very clear why some of these one months are less than a one 12 of the budget guidelines. The regional school is I think exactly. Do we have a sense now or when will we, will we have it early July where their savings on this year's operating budget because we had less over time with staff that could if state aid is down if some other things are down or when we come back so it's not so much this one month but was any of that figured into this one month that you know that you've got some money that if expenses come in more than we expected for the town services as people start to come back that helps buffer. And so that's question one and the other one is pretty easy. I Paul gave me an answer to it but I'll just ask it here is the 2% COLA figured for all the non-union staff in this budget. And if yes, when we go to the full budget does any decision we make around the one month budget affect decisions we might want to make later on the full year budget. And that would be just an example but also on staffing and other things that we'll see in the full year. Yeah, so I'll start, is that okay Paul if I start? So I think your first question was about looking at this year and what expenditures look like this year and has that been factored into what we're thinking about for next year. I'll let Sonia speak to that a little bit. She is working on projections for what the rest of this year looks like to determine if there's any savings this year or we're pretty confident we're not gonna need any additional funds at this point. And anything that does get turned back this year will go into our planning and around the use of reserves going forward. Sonia, do you wanna talk a little bit about the process you're doing right now after you wanna meet yourself? Yeah, thanks Sean. I'll figure this out eventually. Yes, I was looking at it quickly today. Our revenues are coming in better than I expected so I don't think we're gonna be, we might have a small deficit but not as much as I thought it was gonna be. Remember I said about 500,000. So and then we have lots of savings because we had vacant positions for quite a while on the operating budget which will offset any deficit in revenue and whatever is left would fall to pre-cash. We can't commit it for next year's budget. It would just fall to reserves. I don't have figures right now. Everyone's handing in their carry forwards, what's out there committed that needs to get paid. It's gonna be a process before I have final numbers. And normally just to add to that, a lot of that we don't find out the final number until the end of July or even into August when everything has completely stopped and we can reconcile everything. Your second question was about the cost of living adjustment increases. So that was factored into this one month budget. Those have been rolled forward at the 2%. Paul, do you wanna speak a little bit about if there's any changes after that? Yeah, so we did put the 2% in this just as the schools did and that would go into effect on July one. The 2% is what all the other unions, all the unionized employees are receiving. So to single out the non-union employees, I thought was not fair. And also they're the ones who are doing the bulk of the work right now and getting through this very difficult time. So again, an alignment with what the school department has done. That's what we're proposing as well. I just wanna make sure people understand my question on COLA. I wouldn't, I would completely agree that the moderately or lower paid staff and I'm just looking at what some other entities have done, not towns necessarily where the very top people have said, we can forego that small increase this year or for part of the year. So that was the question, but I think you also had told me by email Paul is that all these decisions can be revisited with the 12 month and I mean, there are no furloughs in here now. I mean, we don't really know much about staffing here if things go south. So the tool that we would use is the same tool the university would use, which is using now for FY20 actually, but we don't really compare ourselves to the university. Our situations are totally different. Our pay schedules are totally different. We do compare ourselves to other communities and our neighboring communities are doing the same thing we are here. So, and in terms of implementation of that, I think that we would implement them on July one, as I said, oh, and then what I want to add is the tool that we do have in our possession is the furlough tool and that can have the same impact as a not including the cost of living. And that's a better tool in my mind and from Sonia and Sean's mind because that's something that we can apply across the board. So if we have a big deficit and we have to cut it and we have to reduce our expenses, we would ask all employees to say take a little bit of a cut instead of a small number of employees taking a very big cut. So we can do that in the course of the year, when we need that tool. So it's the use of furloughs is something I think is much more understandable to employees as well. If we show a deficit and employees understand that we have to cover that deficit through reduction of costs and everybody's sharing the pain in essence and they're not working. So there's a feeling like, oh, I'm not working. I'm therefore I'm not getting paid. And so I find that that's a much better tool. It's more flexible and we can call it to order when we need it. And if that happens and if we find out in November, December, whenever we need it, we can pull the trigger on that. Sonia, did you have something? Yeah, I just wanted to add that we've used the COLA method before where we've not given COLA to the union or we've cut pay like $1,500 across the board or for the lower paid non-union employees and stuff. And it throws our pay scales off. We just actually recovered from the last time we did that last year. So it really throws everything off. So the most efficient way to do it is with furloughs across the board. Well, I'm not seeing any other question. People who have their hands raised right now. I just before asking to see if there's anybody from the public who wishes to speak, we'll ask one thing, which is confirmation. There is a difference between, of course, level services, which was the measure of the budget that we originally had thought we would be asking in the first set of guidelines that the council issued. And then level funding, which is what the current level is by whatever increase in amounts was. And usually when you go between those two, there are adjustments that have to be made in either staffing or programs. And we'll get into this discussion in greater detail with the full FY21 budget. But I'm assuming that you have, that there are no significant changes in staffing or programs that are built into the one month budget at this point and that just wanna get that confirmation if that's a correct assumption. Yeah, I can speak to that. Not from a budgetary standpoint, there isn't. There may be operational because of COVID-19 and things that happened last summer might not happen the same way this summer, just as we all would expect. But there are no budgetary programmatic reductions built into the one month budget. Is there anyone else from the council who wishes to ask any questions at this point or from the finance committee? Because again, this is gonna move fairly quickly with the schedule that we have this being before the council on June 15th. Seeing nobody who's asked from the council for members of the public, again, remind you that this is a public hearing and so we welcome questions or comments, ask it to try and limit anything if you do wish to comment or ask a question to three minutes that if you're participating by Zoom you can use the raise hand function if you're participating by telephone. You can use the star nine on your telephone to indicate to us that you wish to be recognized. So I will pause for a moment and ask the president who's gonna monitor this to make sure to let us know if there's anybody who's asked to be recognized. Nobody at this time. Nobody at this time. So there is no nice to see one councilor who's asked to be identified and I will keep an eye or president will keep an eye on the attendees list to make sure that nobody's come in late. But I'm gonna recognize now there's two counselors but councilor Pam first and then councilor Brewer in that order. So Dorothy. Okay, I just want to make a comment that I have heard from a number of people that they would prefer in the future if we had a meeting and not a webinar so that they could be seen and participate, feel that they're more in the room with us. I know there's technical problems but I think that there's an attempt to work on that. So I'm just making the point now because it's been spoken to me. I've been passed on to me a number of times recently. Andy, I'd like to- Thank you. Yeah. Dorothy, thank you for bringing that up and I just say that not related to this hearing but separately today we had a conversation with IT to see whether or not we can figure out some kind of registration system that allows people to come into meetings and be seen. So we're working on it. We're very aware of it. It's a comment that came up regularly during our district meetings and also now periodically during council meetings. Okay. Thank you. You have one other hand up. Yeah, I do. Alyssa. Thank you. I just wanted to mention since I know the finance committee will be meeting tomorrow that I completely support the schools and the towns approach to COLA's and future furlough considerations using that as a tool either potentially later in the year or hopefully not until the following year because we have no reason to believe following year is going to be great. And recognizing what was said clearly about we work to be both an employer of choice and to be comparable to our peer communities and we're not in any way, shape or form anything like the UMass athletic department and how it's talking about the little teeny tiny give backs from certain people. That's not the way our salaries are set up but at either the school or the town level. So I am very appreciative of the thought that went into that and looking at what we did in the past when we did make a straight dollar figure cut and it was a mistake as many people suggested at the time and it created ill will and it also didn't help us in terms of getting to our other goals. So thank you for thinking through all those different possibilities because I know a lot of different people are doing it different ways. Thank you, anybody else? Mary Lou. This is said, but whatever we do it needs to be consistent across the town and the schools and the library. So if we're doing colas, it's for everyone and not colas here and something else there. And I have a second question about the budget in terms of is there anything in here for summer programs for children or are we not going to do LSSE this summer? I'll let Paul weigh in because he spoke in with Barb about this. There is a budget for the community services for LSSE in here but Paul can talk more about what that might look like. Yeah, so the guidelines came out for how to do summer camps in there. So onerous that we've determined that we cannot do municipal camps this year. And we really feel terrible about that because I know a lot of people depend on it but the types of camping experience that children would experience under the guidelines that the state has put down would not make it doable for us. So we will not be offering camps and we will be making an announcement about that tomorrow. Okay, thank you. Anything else from members of the council? If not, then I think that we can call hearing of the finance committee to a close. Finance committee will be meeting tomorrow afternoon at 2.30. We'll have a discussion about the one month budget over we have a couple of days that we can do a couple of meetings where we can do that but it will be before the council. And of course, the council will have the opportunity to ask additional questions to the town manager at that time since it is a regular council meeting and town manager is at council meetings. So that there is one more opportunity unlike the region budget for a kept driving home to the point that we made that might not have the opportunity to directly as councilors ask questions of the superintendent but we certainly can have the town manager. So it has seen no other hands being raised either from members of the council and finance committee or members of the public. I think that we can conclude the hearing for this evening for the one month budget. And I want to thank the town manager and finance staff, Mr. Mangana and Ms. Aldrich for their participation this evening. And that will enable us to adjourn the finance committee meeting and I turn it over to then to President Griesmer to conclude whether there's any additional business or whether she wishes to adjourn the council meeting. I just want to remind us that next week at 5.30 we have an information meeting about the capital budget at six o'clock, we have the public forum. And then at 6.30 we have our regular council meeting with a very, very full agenda. Other than that, meetings adjourned.