 Good evening and welcome. I'm Diane Meyerhoff, host for tonight's Essex Town FY20 budget and ballot item presentation, part of Channel 17's ongoing town reading coverage. Tonight's show is being aired live on Channel 17 and streamed live on the YouTube channel. We welcome your comments and questions. Please join the conversation at 862-3966. Tonight I'm joined by Evan Teach, the town and village unified manager, and Max Levy, the select board chair. Thank you both so much for coming out tonight. Thanks for the invitation. We really appreciate your coming out and you're going to tell us primarily about the budget tonight, I believe, yes? Yeah, we'd like to walk you through the budget, kind of what the objectives were to it and some of the details, but trying to stay kind of high level. Okay, we appreciate that. We appreciate that. And of course we'd love folks to call in, ask questions, comments, 862-3966. And this presentation is probably being done a number of times as well. Is that true? I do it a few times before a town meeting, yes, and I appreciate the opportunity to give it a whirl here. Good, good. All right, please start us off, Max. Okay, so our town meeting is March 4th. Oh, 4th. Yeah, it's Monday. And there are, for that day, there are three articles that we're going to be going over. The first article is accepting the reports of the officers. Okay. Usually not too controversial, although it has been in the past at least one time. And then article two is a vote on the budget and the budget amount that the select board has proposed is $14,730,649. Okay. And then the third article we have is called Public to Be Heard. And that's where the public can speak to us about anything that they'd like to talk to us about. All right. And we find that to be interesting and very informative. Good? Yeah, good, good, good input. And that's Monday evening. Very passionate people. Is that right? Is that Monday evening? That's Monday evening. Yeah, we start at 7.30. And before the town meeting, we do a community dinner. Yes. And that starts at 6.30. And it's held at the Essex High School. And people can come in. There's no charge for the meal. I won't say it's a free meal because the taxpayers pay for it. But there's no charge for the meal as you come there. And it's a great way for people to get to see each other that they haven't seen maybe for a while. And I enjoy going table to table and welcoming people. And it's a small turnout when you look at the number of voters. But the turnout, they're very passionate. And they know what's going on. Good. So that's been a nice thing. We actually borrowed that community dinner from the village. They were doing that for many, many years. And we thought that that would be a good thing to also adopt. And it's been well received. I did prepare a slide presentation. And this is one that I do at town meeting to make sure that people, you know, I can explain the budget a little bit better if I do it. My background from IBM, I'm kind of used to it. So we're getting a preview. Yeah, this is a preview. Okay. So the viewers, you should be feeling pretty special here that we're getting a preview. So if you come a little late on, you know, if your meal goes a little long on Monday night, you'll have it here. That's right. Exactly, Diane. Okay. So this is just to show the consolidated services and alignment that we've been doing over the past many years. The police and senior bus, those have been community-wide in Essex for many years. But more recently, about five or six years ago, we started with the unified manager for both the village and town. Evan. Yeah. And then that kicked off consolidation of other departments. And they're listed up here. I don't want to go through all of them, but they're up there. Last year we did the fire department alignment of pay and training, because our fire departments work very closely together. Evan is working to get them nicely aligned. And that's worked out well. So this budget is the first budget with a full year worth of that alignment. So what are we doing in this year's budget? We're looking at co-locating direct departments. The village and the town each have their own departments. But trying to deliver services in a better way for the community, one idea that was brought to us from the directors of the direct departments was to co-locate at 75 Naples Street, which is currently where the village rec department is. And by doing the co-location, this isn't consolidating the departments. It's just merely let's sit in the same building so that you can have one office that people can go to. You can have one phone number for people to call for rec, one brochure to go on instead of the two mailings that each one was doing. You can have one website, one registration system, and you can eliminate the confusion about which building do I need to go to. If I want an Indian Broke Pass, if you went to the village, they'd tell you, sorry, you got to go to the town. So from a delivery of service perspective, we think this is a smart thing to do, and we hope the people will appreciate that too, being able to have one stop shopping. But again, this is only co-location. There is a communications position there that both the village and town are going to pay for to help with the communication coming out of the rec departments. And is that a new position? That'll be a new part-time position. Part-time? Yeah. Did I miss anything on that? No, sir. Okay. So that's proposed in this budget. It's not a lot of money that's going to be transferred for this, but it is an alignment. We wanted to just highlight that so that people know. And as I said, we've been doing this consolidation of services now for a number of years. And one of the things people like to know is it's saving money. It's allowing us to do a lot of things smarter and better by working together and sharing resources, equipment sometimes, and even people. But we can put our finger on some real hard dollars of where some savings are coming in. And looking at the FYE budgets from 2014 and 2019, looking at what the community has a whole safe for both the town, municipality, and the village, it's not chump change. It's over $2 million. From just this consolidation of services to work smarter together, instead of having two isolated things going on, let's just work together. Tell me something. Sure. How far along are you on the alignment consolidation idea? In other words, you say it's $2 million. Is that 90% done? Is it 50% done? Well, what's the end game? It depends. Well, let's say on a scale from being separate to being completely together, whether or not that really happens or not may not. Well, I can tell you the departments are not consolidated. And that would be the rec department, the libraries, fire department, development. I think that's it. The development department is community development. Community development, yeah, planning. So those are not consolidated. And public works is sort of in that forming stage. They are working together and aligning a lot of policies and procedures, but they haven't officially been... Well, we haven't combined the capital pieces for both communities yet. That's still out there within each community. But you can really point to really over $2 million of savings just by working smarter together. And just recently in the recent storms, while they're not consolidated in true form, they're working together. So in the storm, the village had a piece of equipment that went down. They called the town's mechanic. He came and fixed a hydraulic line to get a truck back on the street. And the town asked the village to cover a section of sidewalk and a piece of plow route to be able to get it because they were stuck up in the northern part of the community that gets a lot more snow than the southeast part. So they are working together to make it work. And is that really a new thing over the years? I mean, would they have in the past not have called one another? It really didn't happen a whole lot in the past. Interesting. But it's wonderful to see the cooperation going back and forth. And again, the $2 million is really just the easily measured things. But there's a lot of things as Evan was talking about, that there are other benefits in addition to cost savings. Just working together smarter and sharing equipment and sometimes sharing people. It's sort of common sense, really. One would think that would be the outcome, but it isn't always the outcome, right? Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't. So if we look at this budget, which is the FYE 2020, the savings for the community-wide is about $0.7 million in this year. And you can look at what part the town is saving because that's what we don't have to raise in taxes now in the current budget. And that's about $321,000, a lot of money that we don't have to raise by taxes because by consolidating, we can avoid that. So the consolidation doesn't stop the increase in the growth of the budget, but it sort of bends that growth curve down. And I'll show you some numbers about that in a moment. So again, in this budget, we're saving $321,000 just by working smarter. And if we look at the budget objectives, you know, before the budget process is going on, but it's like, boy, we want to know, you know, what are the objectives? And one is to ensure continued delivery of quality services. And that town meeting last year was very clear that they wanted more police on the streets. And if you look at it per thousand people, how many police officers do we have, we're way behind most of our sister communities here. Not that we want to catch up to them, but we were way behind. And we want to be able to do some proactive policing, you know, some traffic work, checking businesses at night, you know, driving through. And if you don't have enough police, you really can't do that. So it was clear they wanted more. So I'll show you what in a moment what we did there. Find Service Delivery Efficiencies. Last year, the voters said, yeah, you can have another IT technician. And the IT department said, we're going to see if we can not have to fill that job. And during budget season, they came back and said, we're okay. We don't need you to fill that position. So we didn't add it. So it's not in this current budget. I talked about the co-location of the rec departments as another one that we're doing. And the other thing that not all communities do, but we feel is very important in Essex, is to focus on anticipating future capital expenses. You know you're going to need a new roof or new vehicles. Well, start saving for it. Don't wait until you need it and then go out and ask for a bond. So that's what we do. We save for future expenses for vehicles and equipment, you know, cars and trucks, road maintenance and paving, building upkeep. We have over 30-something buildings, you know, a lot of buildings out there when we need to keep those up. And stormwater, stormwater infrastructure is one we know we have to do because the state, you know, permit says, you know, you will clean up Indianbrook, you will clean up Sunderlandbrook. And we totally agree. Yeah, that has to be done to get the lake clean. So we have to put money away. But we also leverage that money with grants so that we can take like a, you know, pay 20% off in what the stormwater bill would be and leverage that to get 80% paid for it by, you know, various grants. And of course, we want to minimize the impact on the tax rate to our tax payers, you know. They try to keep that as low as we can. As I said, consolidating doesn't stop the growth, but it does significantly bend it. And when you can point to the $2 million of savings or the $321,000 in this year's budget, you know, those are real numbers. Yeah, I'm sure the voters appreciate that. I think they do. So those are our objectives. And if we take a look at the hard numbers now, this budget is $14,730,000. And that's an increase of $370,000 from last year. If you do the math, you see it's about 2.6% increase in the operating budget. And when you look at the estimated increase in the tax rate, that's about 2%. So, and again, as I mentioned, ad nauseam, I guess, the same as through consolidation is, you know, over $300,000. So why don't we dig a little bit deeper and say, well, what's causing that $370,000 increase? And what this shows is the major increases that go into that $371,000. And the top thing you see is salaries, including seasonal part-time work, is the majority. And you'll see that continuously throughout the past budgets. Now, salaries make up about 48% of the increase in the overall budget. But we also have stormwater and highway, which is increasing, you know, $91,000. And that's for both the village stormwater and highway and the town. There's winter maintenance and summer construction costs that have increased that we have to account for. And we need to take care of our roads. Vehicles and equipment are up a little bit because last year we cut out, I think it was $31,000 from that capital transfer for vehicles. So we need to catch up a little bit on that. So that's in there. But if we want to dig a little bit deeper down still, let's take a look at the salaries and see, since that's the majority of the increase, what's driving that. And the salaries and benefits, the change, as you saw on the other page, it's $177,000 and that's up about 3%. Actually, if you look at the staffing changes that I'm going to go over in a minute, that actually lowered the overall salaries. But there's raises and step increases that were $189,000. Then you take away the savings from the staffing work that we did, and it comes out to $177,000. And this year the benefits actually went down. I was going to ask you about healthcare because I thought that was going to be a driver. Yeah, it actually went down 1%, about $23,000. Because again, what you'll see in the next slide is that if you have very senior people leaving and you hire more junior people at a different salary, and sometimes they don't have the family cost for the healthcare, then your numbers can be significantly different. Or if you hire somebody with a big family, so the benefits can swing a lot, but this year they're down. We also took one position that was full-time that had benefits and made it part-time. And so we get the savings of not having to provide health insurance for that particular position. Right. So speaking of the staffing changes, as mentioned earlier for the police, we took one unfilled lieutenant position, a higher-level position, and we exchanged that for two patrol officers. There were two very senior, wonderful police officers, very senior, been here a long time, really great, who have retired. And when those two retired, we could actually bring in three patrol officers for a very little increase over what we were paying for these two very senior experienced guys. Dispatch, as you know, is a critical piece of our functioning for the police department, fire departments, and at Essex Rescue. We needed to add a part-time for that to at three-quarter of a position. So overall in the police, we have a 2.7 increase. We call them FTEs, that's full-time equivalents. And that increased the total budget to add these two-threquarter police, $30,500, because of the way, again, you know, exchange of lieutenant position and the two retiring senior folks. In IT, I mentioned that the department said, can they get away with not having that other person? And they stepped up to the plate and said, yep, we can do it. Now, we added, I think, $7,500 into the budget just in case they need to do some contract work. That's unanticipated, but that's a lot less than having that person. So that's a $71,500 savings in the staffing. Community development, we went from a full-time to a part-time position because it was... We had a vacancy. We looked at the position and said, let's see if we can get it done with part-time versus full-time. Yeah, so that's, say, $48,000 for buildings. I told you we had 30-some-odd buildings throughout the... Structures, buildings, parks. Yeah, a lot of them. And each different group, like the libraries or the fire departments, would take care of their own building. And what we're looking to do is have a part-time buildings manager come in and be able to better take care of our buildings and be more proactive rather than wait for things to break. Maybe be a little bit more proactive on that, which can in the long term save some money. Not that the people who are taking care of the buildings are doing a terrible job. It's just that we think we can coordinate that and coordinate contracts who take care of HVAC things, for example. Instead of having independent ones, maybe if we have a more blanket one, we can get better terms and have somebody manage that. So the idea is to have a half-time person come in for a $37,000 increase for the staffing. And then the rec department. I told you about we want to work smarter together by co-locating. And there's a communications position that we're going to fund. It's a part-time position. The town municipality is going to fund part of it. And the village department is going to fund part of it to have consistent communication coming out of there. And we also changed the senior center coordinator from a non-exempt to an exempt and to a director position. You probably should explain the difference between exempt and non-exempt. Well, so non-exempt is hourly. So they are entitled to overtime. So in this particular position, it's at the senior center and they do a lot of events that are not traditionally 8 to 5. And sometimes they're on weekends. And so we wanted the position to be able to be flexible and be able to work some extra overtime, which is more in line with the salary. And so it's all able to flex its hours better than a non-exempt position. Okay. Thank you. So if you roll up all these, you know, the additions and subtractions for the full-time equivalents, we're up in this budget. We're asking for 2.35 full-time equivalents with a total cost of $40,500 to add these two and a third positions. So again, Evan had some great ideas on how to, you know, how to make these things work where we can add FTEs where needed and look at areas where maybe we don't. And so to be able to add two and a third FTEs for $40,000 is pretty cool. Yeah, that's fantastic. Yeah, we're pretty psyched about that. I'm sure many businesses wish they could do that. Yeah. And again, we go back to, you know, one of my first meetings was the town meeting last year when people said they had a sense that they just didn't see our police as often as they'd like come down their street. And with a couple of very senior officers at the top and the pay scale looking to retire, it gave us the opportunity to look at how the police department was doing their functions and whether they could take those positions and their benefits and work on getting a third. And that extra officer, while it doesn't seem like much, it is a lot when you are doing response times, when you're doing visibility, when you're doing door checks, when you're doing community service that extra person allows us to be more visible to get down streets that maybe instead of seeing us once a day or twice a day, three times a day, you're going to see us the fourth and the fifth. Wow. It sounds very safe. Many places are lucky if they see them once a month. We have 36 square miles to cover. Yeah, it's a lot. Yeah. So that's the feeling and the goal. And then we believe that this budget and some of these moves help us achieve those objectives. And again, we're still below when you look at the number of officers per thousand. And how different is it? Do you know? Oh, he used to have the number. Is it a big number? He used to have the number. We're probably down about eight to ten officers. Wow. That's a lot. From, you know, every town's different. You know, we're rural and suburban. We have a dense village core, which is nice because you can get to a lot of places quickly. But we don't have a lot of population out in the north and the east. So it's kind of hard to say, but we want to keep up on the calls and be able to call for service. And, you know, Vermont has its issues with opioids and other things. And so we just want to make sure that we are getting after it before it becomes something that we're going to have to work three times as hard when we could have been doing it sooner. And are you all part of the regional dispatch as well? You're not. We are not. Okay. And, but we are keeping an eye on it. I'm sure. Yeah. As is everyone, right? Yeah. We have about five minutes left. So I want to make sure you get covered. Just about the end there. So this is the, here's the nuts and bolts. This is the, what is the impact of the tax? And the estimated tax rate that this budget reflects is 52.32 cents. That's an increase based from last year of a penny of one cent. And to, that's an increase of about $28 per year for an average household. Some assumptions that go into that and the average household home value is in our communities $280,000. And we're assuming our grand list will grow by a conservative one percent. And I think for the past several years it's been more than that. But we budget conservatively and we'll say let's anticipate just one. And as we've done in the past years, although it's not great practice, we've been using some money from our fund balance as a revenue. And this year we're looking at reducing that down to $100,000. And when you look at those assumptions, the average taxpayer would see a $28 per year increase in their, in the tax bill for the total year. And what do we do with that money? Well, here it is. This is a pie chart. And we always include this in our annual report. And it shows public safety is a big one. And that's our police and fire. Next, people could guess it would be highway. We've got to take care of the roads. So that's another one. But anyway, it shows where for total tax bill in $280,000 house is $1,465. But if you live outside the village, there's another $31 that we have. You can either call it rolling stock or it's what's remaining of the highway tax. That was up at 8 cents. It's down to 1.1. So significantly less than it was. But that's just to show where we are. And that's kind of it. So $28 per year for the average household and valued at about, the house valued about 280,000. 280,000, right. And assuming again, a conservative grand less growth of 1%. And as I said, it's usually more than that, but we'd like to plan conservatively. So, and how does that compare to increases in the past? You know. You have a slide for that? No. I'm just curious. Yeah. I actually do. You've been passing your budgets, right? Yeah. Yeah. This is a chart that actually shows where we were for the past budgets. And the average tax rate increase for the past, what is it, six years, is 2.5%. So this is, so this is, wait, I'm sorry. So we're doing 2%. 2%. 2.03 to be exact. 2%. As proposed. So it's a little bit less than what we've been averaging. Yeah. Good question. Yeah. It's interesting because they vary so much from different towns. And I'm always curious to know, well, you know, if you've got to have some big ones, do you have to do some small ones then? Because people just can't keep up if you just keep, yeah. Well, you know, we want to be sensitive to the tax rate. We don't like to see these big swings. And by planning, by saving money for future known expenses and not waiting to say, okay, we need a new dump truck that's going to be $180,000, $200,000, and then go out and bond for it or put it in the tax rate, we plan ahead and we have like a 15 or 20, I think it's a 15-year plan that goes out that far so that we can go anywhere. And we'd appreciate for the vehicle so we have the money to buy it. Yeah. Right, when the time comes. And that's how we can try to keep the tax rate from going really high one year to bouncing around. So it's more predictable. It's something to be proud of, I think. Yes. That's a good manager. I'm so glad you both came out tonight. We got our preview. I feel very honored that we're your preview. I have to tell everybody, of course, to stay tuned to Channel 17 because we're going to have more candidate forums. We're going to have in-depth presentation of school and municipal budgets. Don't forget, of course, to vote on Tuesday, March 5th. March 5th. And watch our live results show that evening starting at 7 o'clock. So I hope everybody will do that. And folks, voting in Essex on Tuesday, 7 to 7? Yeah. Polls are open 7 to 7. 7 to 7. And they go where? The folks outside, the village, go to the middle school. Okay, middle school. And people who live in the village go to the high school. Okay. And I think that kind of is them. All right. And of course, you can always vote early because I always forget to mention that. Yes. Go to Town Hall at any point. And that's becoming very popular. Yes. The percent is going way up at our town clerk. That's kind of all they can work on. I bet. When that's on the air. Great. All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you both, Max. Thank you for the opportunity. We appreciate it. And we will hopefully see you soon. We have another forum coming up. So stay tuned. Thank you.