 So I am Christine Deschlerch for the Allenton Finance Committee and I'm calling the June 26, 2023 meeting of the committee to order. I want to confirm the attendance of members of the committee and confirm that people can hear me. So when I call your name, please respond to the affirmative. And I'll just go ahead with that right now starting with Jordan who's not here, Shane. Jennifer. Here. Sophie. Brian is here. Carolyn. Here. Rebecca. Here. Josh. Grant. Charlie. Here. John Griffin won't be here. Daryl. Daryl's here. He was here. He was here. He's here. Sorry, I'm here. All right. We'll have to re-learn how to use the mute button. Annie. Here. Al Jones won't be with us tonight, Topher. Here. Hey, you won't be here. Al Tosti won't be here. Dean Karman. Dave McKenna. Here. And Tara Bradley. Here. All right. All right, let me continue with the script. On March 23, Governor Hurley signed into a law supplemental budget bill, which, among other things, extends the temporary provisions of 31st, 2025. This further extension allows public bodies to continue holding meetings remotely without a quorum of the body physically present at a meeting location so long as adequate alternative access to the deliberations of the meeting is provided to the public, which is what we are doing today. Adequate alternative access includes providing public access through Zoom video conferencing, ensuring public access does not ensure public comment or public participation. This meeting will not feature public comment. Those wishing to provide comments may do so by emailing our executive secretary, Tara Bradley, at tbrowley at town.arlington.ma.us. This meeting is being recorded. Accordingly, please be aware that other folks may be able to see you and take care and have to screen share your computer. Anything that you broadcast may be captured by the recording. All supporting materials that have been provided members of this body are available on the town's website unless otherwise noted. The public is encouraged to follow along using the posted agenda unless the cheer notes otherwise. I will introduce speakers, and then we'll recognize members wishing to provide any comment, questions, or motions. Please hold into your name as called. Please remember to mute your phone or computer when you are not speaking. Also, please remember to speak clearly and in a way that helps generate accurate minutes. Finally, each vote taken in this meeting will be conducted by a roll call both. All right, with that business done, I am going to hand it over to Alex and Ida to discuss their transfer requests. So go ahead, Alex and Ida. Can you hear me? Yes. OK, good. Sorry, having technical difficulties. Should I share my screen? We can walk through sort of that memo that was circulated. Yeah, sure. Just one moment. All right, so we have two. So thanks for having us, by the way. I think I've met almost all of you at this point. If not, I'm Alex McGee. I'm the town's relatively new deputy town manager and finance director. You all know Ida. She's joining us as well. So thanks for having us. We have sort of two higher level reserve fund transfer requests broken into sort of segments. So the first we'll go over legal bills. The first is a request of $62,362. This stems from a shortfall that was caused by some pretty extensive negotiations with our patrol union officer, excuse me, bargaining unit. We were on the precipice of going to the JLMC, which is the Joint Labor Management Committee, which when you are sort of at an impasse with a public safety bargaining unit, you go to them to sort of help get a deal hammered out. And so with the very extensive preparation that our outside labor council had to do, we had a shortfall in legal bills to the tune of $62,000 in change. There was also a $100,000 settlement. This was caused by an injury to a person, to a town resident. And they filed a claim with the town because of this injury, which was fairly extensive. There's a statutory limit of $100,000. We did not take it to court, which would have been more costly. So we were able to sort of negotiate the settlement before it went there. So kudos are due to our legal department. And then finally, we had about a $15,000 expense shortfall. This stems from we had a departure in the legal department, which necessitated a buyout of some sick and vacation time. And then it created sort of a shortfall of employees where we needed to, we had one employee who had to work sort of a lot of overtime to clean up sort of a little bit of a mess that was left by our departing employee. So in total, there's $177,362 we're requesting from the reserve fund to the legal department. And then separately from the deferred compensation fund, which is a separate fund that has been set up for this specific purpose, a request of $16,867 for a very long tenured employee who has recently told us that they plan on retiring at the end of July. So that money, we wouldn't have budgeted it anyways, but it's about $16,867 total. So when you combine those two, the total is $194,000 and some change, $16,867 coming from the deferred compensation fund and $177,362 coming from the reserve fund. Now, with the 1% annually that's set aside for the reserve fund, assuming these transfers went through, this would leave about $1.575 million, which would close to free cash once we close the books. But the end of the fiscal year is just right around the corner. So a little long winded, but if there are questions, I'd be happy to take them. I have two questions. One is the personal injury settlement. I don't need to know the specifics of the cause of the injury, but as a town, do we need to worry about it? This happening in the future is one question. And the second question I have is, what is the balance left in the deferred compensation fund after the transfer out? Sure. Maybe I can take the first one. And I'll do the second. OK. So I think that we always need to be scared of these kinds of things, but I don't know that we could have planned for this specifically. This was an injury that happened at a playground. And we have since sort of ensured that we are looking at maintenance of our playground equipment more closely because of this incident. But it's hard to plan for these kinds of things. This is sort of a freak accident on the kind of facility that's used daily by a lot of different people. And so yes, we need to be careful. And I don't know that we can plan for these kinds of things specifically, but we do need to do our best to plan for them. And I'll jump on the second question. We have now 38,324 in the deferred comp. And after we pay Vinny, we're going to have 21,457. What, 57 or 467? 457. Thank you. All right, other questions? I see Charlie's hand is up. Thank you, Madam Chair. So I have a question about the 16,867. You mentioned that the employee is retiring at the end of July. That's the next fiscal year. Are we spending the money out of this fiscal year or next fiscal year? It will be paid next fiscal year, but we need a transfer. We need the transfer has to be approved by you. So instead of waiting till the end of the next fiscal year, we will be transferring the money to DPW and encumber the funds. He has already put in the papers. We approved his retirement. It's just he just has to be paid out in July. Anything else, Charlie? No, thank you. I'm all set. All right, Tofer. Yeah, so just sort of a new member question. So it says it's a long-tenured employee. So I mean, how many how many employees are entitled to this? Or like, how long do they have to stay here to be entitled to this deferred compensation? Yeah, that's an interesting question. Oh, either you want to take it? Yeah, most of them have retired. We only have after Vimy is gone, we only going to have one person entitled of getting 7%. And then eight people who will be getting 2%. I'm not sure exactly how many years they have to be here. But I know that Vimy specifically has been with the town for 46 years. There's people that were hired prior to 1984, the town meeting in 84 that are entitled to this. And then after that, there's sort of a series of different votes that gave people different amounts. But yeah, so Vimy was hired in 1977 was his start date. And then there's one other employee who was, I think, hired in 1980. And they're the two that have this sort of higher level of deferred comb. Madam Chair, I can add something to that. Go ahead, Charlie. So towards the question, Topher, during the 80s, town manager at the time, Don Marquis, negotiated the deferred salary basically for people to accept at their retirement in exchange for not taking raises at the current time during severe, tough financial conditions of the town. OK. All right. Thank you. I was, guys, thank you for the history. And I just wanted to get a sense of how big an exposure, if you will, this was. So thank you. Well said. Brian. This question is for Ida. Are these accounts being the being counter that I am? Are these accounts the right accounts? Like, for instance, $177,000 to the legal expense? If anybody looks at this next year, whatever, they'll say, what the heck is going on over there? Where $100,000 of this is really for a settlement, for obviously for another expense. I would see going in another line. Well, we usually pay all the settlements from the legal department. So whenever we need an infusion in the legal budget, we put it in their department. We don't have a settlement line, let's say, an appropriation. If your suggestion is that we should have one, maybe we can look into it next year. And we always use the legal expenses line. OK. I trust your judgment. You're in control. There's no question about it. I just was wondering. OK, thanks a lot. Any other questions for either either or Alex? I'm excited. One other thing that I'd just like to note about the employee buyout is that these longer tenured employees, they didn't have a cap on the amount of. So this is just for deferred comp, but they also didn't have a cap on their sick buyout. More recent employees are capped. And so just to give a sense of those costs as we move further and further into the future, those costs will be more controllable in general. Just tofer for your sort of enlightenment. OK, thank you. Shane, your hands up. Thanks, Alex. Thanks, Eda. The services rendered, so the 62 and change, you give me a sense of sort of what that involves. And is it a flat rate or an hourly rate that the town is paying what sort of sort of contract do we have? And third question there is, do we expect that this will happen again, having to go to the jail and see? Without unions? Yeah, I can take those. So it is an hourly rate. We have used VH or VDH for a number of years as our labor attorneys. They offer very specialized services in working with our many unions in town. This specifically, almost all of it, stemmed from our patrol negotiation, which was very difficult. We just recently settled with them for FY22 through FY24. So we're about to enter 24. So there were about two years off of a contract in this entire time they've been sort of in negotiations. So they work on sort of the entire negotiation with the town's sort of labor team, which consists of the HR director. Currently, Sandy, in his capacity, is the prior finance director and myself now as a finance director. And so they work sort of hand in hand with us in sort of all aspects of that negotiation, which is really intricate. I wouldn't expect this to have to go to the JLMC into the future. I don't think anyone, so us, I know that I can speak for us that we don't want to go to the JLMC. The union has said that they don't want to go to the JLMC. They don't want to have it sort of in a judge's hands, essentially. And so it behooves everyone to sort of settle before you actually have somebody settle for you. So there is sort of the intent is to not go to the JLMC. It sort of exists as a last stop, I guess. Thank you. I'm sorry. You said we did resolve a contract without having a contract. Yeah, we resolved it the day we had the arbitrators in. We had it at town hall. We had the arbitrators there. And then sort of as part of this extended negotiation, we hammered out right at the last minute kind of a settlement before we went into the room with them, which is a very frankly good outcome. Thank you, Alex. Alex, either do you anticipate any further transfer issues that will come up between now and the end of the fiscal year, which is in a few days? Well, it's not over till it's over. We don't know yet. We always put those at that last sentence that we might come back for additional transfers. But we won't know. We still have like four days. So we'll make sure we'll give you a heads up if we need anything else. Like I said, the fiscal year ends on 6.30. So we still have four days to go. Charlie. Thank you, Madam Chair. I move that we accept the recommendations for the transfers as presented. Second. Second. All right. There's been a motion to approve requested transfers. It's been accepted. Any other questions or comments or discussions before I have a roll call vote? All right. Seeing none, we will take a vote. Jordan. He's not here, right? You're on. Shane. Yes. Jennifer. Yes. Sophie. Brian. Yes. Carolyn. Yes. Rebecca. Josh isn't here. Grant isn't here. Charlie. Yes. John isn't here. Daryl. Yes. Annie. Yes. Al. Jones isn't here. Topher. Yes. Peggy isn't here. Al Tosti isn't here. Al Tosti isn't here. Oh, is it, is it yes, Al? Yes. Thank you. Dean is still not here. Dave. Yes. All right. It is unanimous. The transfer requests have been approved. I will entertain the so-called Dean Karman motion right now that enables me with one or two other vice-chairs to approve any remaining transfer requests. So moved. So moved. Second. All right. Any questions about what we're going to vote on? Is there a cap? Oh, sorry. Yeah, it says 25,000 by yourself and 50,000 with the other chairs. Vice-chairs. All right. Is that acceptable? That is for me. All right. So everyone knows what we're voting on. All right. Sorry. Was it one chair, one additional chair, or the other three chairs for the 50,000? In the past, it's been one additional chair. OK. All right. Jordan isn't here. Shane. Yes. Jennifer. Yes. Sophie. Brian. Yes. Carolyn. Yes. Rebecca. Yes. Josh. Grant. Charlie. Yes. John. Is he here, Annie? Yes. I'm sorry. I skipped Darrell. Darrell. Yes, and yes. Alec Jones isn't here. Topher. Yes. He's not here. Al Tosti. Yes. All right. It's unanimous. Thank you very much, Ida. And Alex. You forgot me. I'm sorry, Dave. Yes. All right. Sorry about that, Dave. That's OK. All right. Unanimous. Thank you, Ida, and thank you, Alex. Have a nice summer. And we will see you speak to you soon. Thank you. Thanks, guys. Bye. Bye. Charlie, I see your hand is still up. Is that? It's a new up. It's a new up. Go ahead, Charlie. Before we have any motions to adjourn or whatever, I just wanted to congratulate the chair and a great first year as chair. And thank you for all the good work and thank Tara for your work as well. Second. Hey. Thank you. Thank you very much, Charlie. Appreciate it. All right. So I have just two things I just want to talk about very briefly. I don't want to hold people. We have some things that we discussed over the course of the budget year about doing some follow up. And I just want to remind people what they were and maybe seek some volunteers to maybe start working on it over the summer months so that we can focus more clearly on things when the budget season comes up. One of the things was, let's see. We talked about, well, we have the follow up on the Composting Warren article. I'm going to volunteer the people who shepherded the middle school people through successfully town meeting to make sure that they understand what we'll be looking for at the end of, well, in January. So you know who you are, Carolyn, Jennifer, Annie. We had a communications subcommittee with Charlie and Shane who did some great stuff for us last year. I was thinking it might be good to have some type of article. Maybe in your earnings.com to summarize what it is that we accomplished this year and also to talk about the upcoming override. I was wondering if there were some people who would volunteer to at least meet amongst yourselves and talk about whether that's a good idea to get something going to just start working on that. Is anyone interested in working on the communications subcommittee? Yeah, actually, I volunteered earlier to be part of that group, so I'm great. Great, thank you, Jennifer. And I think that Shane and Charlie if they're not going to help, they can at least advise. Oh, no, no, no, I'm not doing all the work. OK, I'll stop. Yeah, we'll still work on it. All right, great. I didn't know we had to re-up. I thought we were automatically pointing. So we have some liaisons to the Disability Commission. Sophie and Annie, you've been doing a good job with arts and culture. I don't know if you want anyone. Happy to assist. But if there's interest there, talk to Annie. Annie and Elle Jones had work on our IT subcommittee. Hello, sports. And Daryl. Yeah, you still free of us and there have been owners in the past, so I was happy to have someone pitching. All right, so anyone who is interested in that, please get in touch with Annie and Ellen and Daryl. That is a very important, very, very important committee for us. The leadership team, me, Elle Jones, Annie, and Daryl, I think we'll get together at some point this summer and talk about reporting. It's been on our list of things to improve. So it's going to be something that we've been complaining a lot for a while. And let's see if we can move the dial on a better, a more seamless reporting system there. Caroline, you volunteered to follow up on water bodies. And I haven't talked to them, but I will. That would be great. I think everyone knows it's an important issue. It's just an expensive issue, and it's getting more expensive. And it would be good to have someone embedded in it more so that we maybe we can try to influence it more than we've I think we've been able to. All right, so if you can just follow up, get the information, just have it at the dialogue with the water bodies group. That would be great. We talked about the issue with the Council on Aging Enterprise Fund being an enterprise fund. And I think we should probably have a team to think about and work on that over the summer. I'm going to volunteer Dean Karaman, myself, and Al Tosti and anyone else who wants to think about transitioning that enterprise fund to not be an enterprise fund. Just let me know. Because of the Elder Council, I'm actually interested in that as well. Fabulous. Great. That's OK. That's OK. That'd be wonderful. Thank you, Caroline. The only other thing I have on my list is something that Shane mentioned. And that was doing some having an operations research working group on the motor vehicle equipment repair division. Shane, I don't know if what your thoughts are about that at this point in time. I forget. I think it might have been Jordan that. Was it Jordan? I might have been Jordan. But I think that's an interesting discussion. Maybe I can start with Jordan since he had this budget, I think, right, Jennifer? Yeah. So I think there was a bunch of confusion about the current status and the current plan. So I think it'd be helpful to get clarity before we do that budget again and sort of, I think it's more about just conversations. So if so, those so anyone who is interested in working on that and and I know having worked on that budget, it's complex and problematic and has been for a while. So if anyone wants to work with Shane and Jennifer and Jordan on that, please get in touch with Shane and Jennifer. I do know that John Griffin is very eager to work on various projects. So that might be something that he might be very interested and very helpful with as well. So you might want to shoot him an email and talk to him about maybe him helping with that work. That is that was all that I have other than I know that we talked about field use of fees. And I think that was something that that Dean raised. And we might look at that a little bit more closely, maybe at the beginning of the budget season. Jennifer, your hand is up. Yeah, and I'm sure I was just curious about recruiting, which I think of months ago, Shane and Charlie and I sort of connected very briefly on. So I know that we have an opening in 18, but we also have a couple of floaters that in theory could be filled. And those people could float elsewhere. Is that right? Yeah, it is. So is that four or nine? And is there one more? There, yes, four and nine and 11. OK, 11. Yes. Yeah, OK. So we'll have to we'll have to advertise for that as well. And we can use start doing using the things that I used the various avenues that I used last year, putting on the town's website and the A list and your online.com and getting an email blast out. So we can talk about that. OK, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the recruitment efforts were were pretty good last year. I mean, I I started in a lot of places and that wasn't true in the past. So that was great. And I think if that's it, the only other. Yes, I was just about to say before one more thing before minutes, though, is I just want to get a very brief feedback about how people felt about the starting in person and going remote for much of February and then coming back in person in March. I just for those of you who felt that you wanted to have more in person meetings, raise your hand in Zoom. Caroline one more. Dave McKenna one and more. For the future, it wasn't horrible and unexplained then, but for the future. If more in person meetings. And you today, right? Anybody else? Charlie, your hands up. Yeah, I just think we should have as many in person meetings as possible. Jennifer. Yeah, I like actually the default in person with the option to go remote when there's just not enough for a full meeting. So if we think there's only sort of an hours worth, I'd rather do that. And I think there were some meetings in February that were kind of thin on the agenda that I called anyway. And mostly I did that because I just felt like we had so many new people and I just wanted to keep a sort of a team dynamic going. Next year, I don't know if I, if that were to happen again, I may not have called as many, I might have not called as many February meetings. And the same with the town, the town meeting, meetings before town meeting, I don't know. I probably should not have called as many meetings before town meeting. So I'm going to work on that. Carolyn, your hands up. Yabu, you did. Tara just brought up a great point, which is when someone has childcare issues, allowing them to be hybrid rather than having to come in. And I think still having hybrid available is worth it. But I do like one more in person. Yeah, I think hybrid is super important for those of us who may have other obligations or travel or whatever that takes us away. And we still want to be able to come to the meetings in the evenings. So if not to be able to fully participate or at least to be able to hear what's going on, so we're up to date when the next meeting is called. That's all right. So. All good points, Darryl. So speaking from personal experience where in March, I had a bad case of bronchitis. I could have attended more meetings if they'd been hybrid. So I think there are situations where a little flexibility is helpful to allowing people to attend when maybe getting down to the police station is difficult. Good points. And also having a fully remote meeting is also good. In the middle of winter when there are storms coming, instead of having to cancel a meeting, it is good to be able to just say, we're going to have a Zoom meeting and just count on it rather than the day before the afternoon. It's called canceling it because of the big storm, right? Which means that when we post it, we have to post it with that sort of language. Yeah, yeah. Well, yes, it's, yeah, we'll have to be careful and be thoughtful. All right, minutes, people. Thank you, Tara. Do we want to, so these are the minutes from June 7th? Do we also want to try to finalize the ones from tonight so that I could post those as well? I say we just keep those, we'll do those minutes in the fall when we are going to have to meet anyway for the special town meeting. So I don't want to have to keep people tonight unnecessarily more so than we've done already. So, but thanks anyway, Tara. So everyone sees the minutes of June 7th. This is the override discussion meeting. Does anyone have any changes or corrections to make? Do I have a motion to approve the minutes? Some more. Second. All right. So I didn't write down who voted, but my memory was so different from people. So if everyone could just look at the list. I might be wrong. Yeah. OK, so I may be wrong then. OK, thanks. No, good point. Everyone, everyone is comfortable as to how their vote was recorded. Yeah, that looks correct to me. All right. So unless we have any further revisions or comments, we'll take it to a vote. All right, Jordan is not here. Shane. Yes. Jennifer. Yes. Sophie is not here, Brian. Yes. Carolyn. Yeah, yes. Rebecca. Yes. Josh isn't here. Grant isn't here. Charlie. Yes. John isn't here. Daryl. Yes. Annie. Yes. Al Jones isn't here. Topher. Topher. He's kind of dropped off. All right. Peggy is not here. Altosti. Yes. Dean Karman isn't here. Dave McKenna. Yes. All right. The minutes of the 7th have been approved unanimously. All right. Does anyone have anything further tonight? I appreciate you're all coming, attending this meeting. I know everyone's eager to be done with the budget season. And this is it. I want the budget season to go on forever, Craig. Well, I might seem that way, because as I said, we will have a special town meeting. It looks like October. So we will be meeting most likely starting in September. And so be prepared, people, up between now. And then I hope everyone has a very enjoyable, safe summer. You too. Thanks, everyone. Good night. Good night. Good night all. Bye. Bye.