 Okay, so welcome. I want to welcome our finance director Sean Mangano today. He is on a 24-hour budget bender answering all your questions. So before we launch into the questions and remind everybody that this is being recorded we'll be answering questions on our Reddit channel and via Twitter or basically any way that you can get us your question we're going to get it to Sean for him to answer. So before we get into that I just want to offer a chance for your town manager Paul Balkaman to give you any updates you might have. Yeah, so thanks Brianna. The couple things I want to mention one is that we had terrific opening of Groff Park yesterday. If you haven't been there you should definitely go check it out. We did not advertise in advance be out of the need for social distancing and so we invited certain key members of the community who had helped develop the park, LSEC Commission, CPA Committee, Town Councilors of course and members of the staff but go there check it out. It's a really wonderful new regional facility really paid for by taxpayers and grants from the state. So the spray park is not open yet probably will be open in a few weeks. August 1 is sort of our target date at this point in time but that will be another added feature to it. So beautiful new facility for South Amherst. The second thing is that we have the university announced their reopening plan starting in about five weeks. So we are we've been reviewing their their plans and what that has what that means for the broader community. So you'll be hearing more about that in the coming days as well. Great and Sean any any quick words before we launch into some of the questions for you? Sure I'll just give a brief status check of where we are in the budget process. So today we have our last budget hearing department review with the finance committee at 2.30 and people can join on to that meeting if they want to listen in. That meeting will focus on community services, planning and development and general government and then after tomorrow we have a public hearing on Monday the 14th which I think is at 7 o'clock Paul? Yes. So again can join in there and ask any questions that you may have and then depending on how things go the budget is slated to be voted on July 20th. That's great thank you for those updates and just a reminder to folks who do want to tune into those meetings. All of them are posted on our public meetings calendar at the bottom of our homepage and the links to join those meetings will be within each of those postings. So for the folks in the room to ask your question please use the Q&A function or raise your hand and zoom star nine from a phone. So feel free to start asking your questions. We have questions that have been started to come in through our Reddit channel so I might start with a couple of those. So our our first. Can you explain what the Reddit thing is that because that that wasn't something I knew very much about until it's brought up? Well I mean I might not have the best explanation of Reddit but it's you know focuses around different themes and communities where you can get really in depth in different threads and so we decided to take you know some governments who are using that to reach their community members where they where they are. In Amherst we have a Reddit community of about 924 members which isn't that that huge so we were just trying to kind of touch all bases with our with our Ask Me Anythings today. So we have gotten a few that have come in through there so that's that's been successful. So if you if you're on Reddit and you're watching this feel free to go check out that Amherst Community channel. So the first question that came in this morning around I don't know 4 a.m. would you say Sean? We got a question about this person this resident who lives on Potline Lane saw that there's about a 2.8% reduction in the budget and 2 million in capital reduction which is roughly 40% and they asked is it fair to say that the initial weathering of the storm will try to be offset by holding off on capital expenditures and their other question is is this just the calm before the storm and our towns and cities expecting the worst to come in FY22. Yeah so I'll just highlight some of my response that's on Reddit but there's I think a more thorough response there. So the the reduction we did make in capital was town funded capital we delayed some projects or put them on hold until we find out more information on our local receipts and state aid right we still don't have a state budget at this point. State has done a one-month budget for July and I think we're anticipating that they'll do at least one more one-month budget for August so we really don't have great information on what state aid will look like. So we did delay some capital projects and we'll have to revisit those in the fall with the Joint Capital Planning Committee. We do think that FY21 or that FY22 could be as bad or worse than FY21 depending on how quickly the state and local economy rebound. Again until we find out about state aid which is really dependent on the state economy it's hard to know how bad FY21 will be and how bad FY22 will be. We do have some information from the Mass Taxpayers Association which they've done some estimates of short falls and state and state revenue collections and things like that so we can get a sense of how big of a gap the state is looking at and that can help guide some of our decision-making. And the other big unknown that we don't have a lot of information on right now is whether the federal government will step in and provide some additional aid. So the federal government has given us some funds for COVID-19 related expenditures to offset those expenditures and we've utilized those. We submitted a request already for about 600,000 and I anticipate that we'll have another request in the next couple of months for you know another several hundred thousands of dollars of COVID-19 related expenditures for supplies, cleaning supplies, PPE, you know other equipment that's related to COVID-19. But as of right now we're not allowed to use any of that money from the federal government, the CARES Act money. We're not allowed to use that to make up any lost revenue and most towns and municipalities in the state are experiencing lost revenue from from the state home orders and the businesses that were closed during that time. So we make a long story short we do we are preparing for FY 22 to be another tough year that we'll have to do a lot of planning for. Great thank you. We got a bunch of questions in the room so I'll start with the first one here referencing page 6 of the FY 21 budget document that we have posted online. It says that the town gets 60,000 of revenue from Amherst College. What are they paying the town for? So Paul you may have the better sense of that one. I think it's something related to with ambulance receipts but I'll defer to you. Yes so that has to do strictly with the emergency medical services that we provide to the to the to the college. So they do a calculation every year based on the services that we provide for ambulance services in essence and it's sort of forward-looking we look at what we did the prior year and then that gets accounted for the next year. All right we've got another question here. Are restaurant revenues starting to rise significantly or not? So I don't think we have the information on that yet. I think you know we're talking about the meals tax. I think we've seen that the restaurants opening back up and Paul may have a sense anecdotally of you know if you've seen a lot of full you know full capacity restaurants but I don't we haven't started to see the data yet from that because there's a lag to when that those funds come in. Yes just to add on that so we mostly get our information at this moment in time from the business improvement district in the Chamber of Commerce and while many of the restaurants are up and running most by far most people want to sit outside. They're hesitant about going in inside so it's very weather dependent and so and they're doing a just a percentage of the business that they previously had done before so I think they're in survival mode. I think many restaurants may not survive the course of this entire economic downturn but I think they're all working really hard to expand their footprint outdoors. We've been working really hard to help them do that. We have outdoor seating in public way on North Pleasant Street, South Pleasant Street and on Amity Street. We've created eating areas on the North Common and in the bull above the on the bullwood garage. Johnny's has expanded out into the sidewalk. Jakes in North Amherst and Mission Cantina and South Amherst have taken over parts of their parking lot and so we're working with them to create as much outdoor eating space as they can to help their businesses but it's a it's a hard slog for them. All right so I'm going to move to the next question here. We have what line item in the revenue section of the budget would hold information about civil forfeiture by the Amherst Police Department? So that's a good question. We'll have to check with our controller who is the expert on the accounts and where different revenues go because the budget book doesn't get into the necessarily the nitty gritty of some of those types of things. So we'll get back to you on that one. I'm not sure if it's revenue that's within the PD or if it goes into a miscellaneous revenue for the general fund but we can get the answer to that and send it out. And I'm just taking a quick note here for the person who asked that question. We can follow up with you and we'll also post it when we get the answer to our Reddit feed as well where we'll put all the answers. So we'll share that out. Okay. What is the current plan for deciding how to spend the $80,000 for combating systemic racism? That's a really good question. So we knew that we needed to devote funds in order to take on this important task both I sort of see it in three different areas. One is talking about systemic and structural racism in our community as a larger discussion point which is going to be launched on Saturday led by the Human Rights Commission. The second is among town staff, the people here and others who are in our town staff who are interested in looking at our own biases and implicit or otherwise and how we operate on a daily basis and how we're doing things that contribute to systemic racism in the operations of the town. And then the third which has received the most attention is looking at how we deliver our public safety specifically police services. And, you know, having a group outside group, I mean outside meeting members of the community sitting down with police and saying, how do we do things? Why do we do it this way? Is there another way to do it? We purposely did not put the $80,000 in any one budget. I didn't want to put it in community services or police or town man anywhere because I wasn't sure how we were going to spend the money and but made a commitment that we would allocate these funds. And also we went to listen to the community and say, you know, here's where you should be addressing your time and your energy and your funds. So I didn't think it was in especially with this with this is not my is my role to secure the funds. It's the community's role to identify how those funds would best be spent. And I guess I'm going to follow up into someone says, okay, you say the community. What does that really mean? It means again, people are volunteering to step forward. We had a meeting the chief and I met with a number of community leaders who were initiated by the community leaders on an end is their meeting. They invited a bunch of people to participate. And so there are a lot of people who are stepping up saying we want to be engaged in this conversation. So as we start to expand that group and having more public, it's really hard to do in a zoom world. Unfortunately, we can't have a big meeting where everybody comes together and you get to see who's who's saying what. But we're so it does have to be a outside group. And I think this this conversation will continue at the town council level on the 20th when they start talking about about this topic as well. And I'll just use that, you know, as a reminder for anybody who does want to come into this conversation live. We've had some great questions that were sent through Q&A, but just raise your hand and we'll bring you into the room live. The only caveat is that we won't be able to see your face, but we can hear your voice. So next question I have here is what percent of our tax base in Amherst is commercial and how has that changed over the years? That's a good question. I don't have the numbers off my head. That's one area I haven't gotten into. I do know we have the same tax rate, whether it's commercial or residential, right? I don't think we have a tax rate here. But that's another one that we can try to pull up some of the information from our assessor's office and put that out there. There has been obviously a lot of new development in town lately. So we can get updated numbers there. Okay, great. You might have mentioned this a little bit earlier, but can you say what the expected timeline for approving the FY21 budget is? Yeah, so again, the finance committee will meet a couple more times. They're going to meet today, this afternoon, and wrap up the department reviews. And then Monday there will be a public hearing on the budget. And then I think actually the next day, that next Tuesday, I think the finance committee has made one more time to finalize their recommendation to the town council. And then on the 20th of July, the town council will meet and on their agenda will be to vote on the budget for FY21. And it'll be a full 12 month budget that will, for those who don't know, we're operating on a one month budget right now. And that full 12 month budget will replace the one month budget once it's approved. Great, thank you. Another question that came in to our Reddit feed just a few minutes ago, references UMass being online and the potential impacts to our Amherst community. And just, can we speak a little bit about how we think that's going to impact us this summer and fall? What UMass decides to do? Yeah, I mean, one thing we know is that the population of UMass is very important to the local economy here. We we saw that when they when all the students were sent home early and the impact that that had on downtown economy, but also like things like our enterprise funds, water and sewer consumption. We always have a drop off in the summer, but when when yeah, we see drop offs that are out of cycle, those things impact our budget. And so we're not exactly sure exactly how the configuration that UMass is looking at will impact the economy. We know that they're bringing back students, but there'll be a lot of online learning and and how often they're allowed to leave campus and things like that. A lot of that will impact will have will translate to an impact on our economy. So we're just going to know Paul staying closely in touch and providing feedback on the plan that UMass has. And we'll keep evaluating as we get more information. So this next question we've gotten in a couple different formats, but I think just to to keep it simple, we've had people asking, are we considering taking money that's already been allocated to the police department and reallocating that to different different programs in this budget or future budgets? Yeah, so the budget that I presented does not do that. It keeps the it holds the police budget level service level funded in essence. And that's what is being presented to the town council. And I think the reason for that is that making quick decisions at this moment without a plan. And what we want to do is not a wise thing to do for the town. I think the town council has expressed interest in having this conversation as as did the police chief and and so as do I and our finance officers in terms of how do we deliver services? Are they aligned with what the community would like to have the community would like to see the services delivered? So that's the conversation we will be having during the course of the next few months. We got a couple of questions too about education. And you know, Sean's probably well positioned to answer some of these types of questions. But how much are we spending on education per child? And this person notices that the school budget is increasing compared to other categories. And just how we compare to other communities in this in this spending. Yeah, so I got some experience there. So our per pupil student is about roughly $23,000 per student, which is more than a lot of our neighbors. And that definitely reflects the commitment to education that Amherst has had for a long time going back. You know, definitely since I've been here, but I know much longer before that. The in the budget itself, I think it's a little misleading that education is going up more than than others. There's a we basically said we were going to level fund the budget. And there's a adjustment we do every year that's separate from, you know, whether there's any budget increase, there's a there's adjustment we do every year for the elementary schools and the elementary school specifically around charter and choice tuition, the town pays it and then there's an adjustment to the elementary school budget. So this year just coincidence that charter and choice tuition went down for the elementary schools, which means we typically will then increase their budget a little bit, separate from whatever other funding adjustments we make. So their budget went up a little bit because of that, which is a retrospective thing that we do. Aside from that adjustment that we make every year, and sometimes it works the other way for the schools, sometimes they get less than other departments. And in fact, many years, I know this because I had to deal with it. And many years, the schools got less than the other departments because of this adjustment. Setting that adjustment aside, the region and the elementary schools came in below level funding, they actually came in $2,000 below level funding. We did let the elementary school in the region sort of work collaboratively. So that the elementary school wanted to come in a little bit more, the region came in a little bit under. And when and when you net out the two of those, they actually came in $2,000 under. So but again, if you look at the charts, you'll see it looks like it's a little bit of an increase. And that's because of that adjustment for charter and choice. It's not because of a programmatic change or anything like that. Okay, that's really good to know. So we have a question here, just kind of in general, how hard was the town's budget hit? This person is concerned, are we facing massive service cuts or layoffs for town employees in the next year, year or two? Yeah, I mean, the budget was hit very hard. You know, the exact number, any year the overall budget goes down is a tough year. And when it goes down as much as it did, I think, you know, over $2 million, it's, it's a real significant challenge. The good news is the town was in a really strong position to start this year. So we were able to weather the storm pretty well this year. And same thing with the schools, they were in a strong position. Going forward, if the economy bounces back, we could see things improve pretty quickly. If the economy stays where it's at or gets worse, there definitely will have to be some belt tightening as we move forward. And it gets back to what I said before about, you know, knowing more about what's going on with the state budget and what that's going to look like, which we don't have a good picture of yet. And also if there's going to be any federal aid to offset the impact to communities. Back in 2009, when we had, you know, a bad recession, the federal government, I know on the school side, they had some economic aid that went to school specifically to help with the, with the the revenue loss that the schools had. So we haven't seen that yet for this recession. But I know there are people that are lobbying for it. I know there's a, there was a national coalition of municipal officers or something like that that just recently wrote another letter to Washington, advocating for federal aid. And it's definitely something that I know we're also advocating for and talking to the town council about. And I'm just going to say a quick reminder to our live attendees that we're coming up close to our wrap time in about five minutes. So if you have any questions that you've come up with or you wanted to come into the room and ask them, please use the Q&A function or raise your hand, star nine for those of you on the phone. So I've got another question that just came in from the room. What metrics will be used to determine when the reuse it shed reopens? I miss it, but totally understand why it's closed for now. I miss it too, but I'm happy to hear about. Can you tell me more about what the reuse it shed is? I'm not familiar with that. At the DPW transfer station, there's a large shed with kind of any number of things. There's a book shed and just items that you want to get out of your house, but you don't necessarily want in the landfill and they're in usable condition. You'll leave it there or you'll take something from there. Gotcha. Yes, a very popular thing that the town has been able to offer and it is missed. But again, providing looking at guidance from the state and from our health director, it was clearly the one thing that we should be shutting down at the at the transfer station. I don't have a metric for when that will reopen. I think there's a we're in phase three of the governor's sort of four phase approach right now. He has said we entered phase three on Monday. And the thing that he said is that we will be in each phase at least three weeks. Phase three might last for much longer than that. So I'm guessing that reuse it shed won't be open for quite some time, unfortunately. But I can guarantee you when it does reopen, we'll have a ribbon cutting. And you'll be there first in line. That was a great question. OK, so let's get that one off. I did have another one that came in here. Let's see. And this is about fines and how that impacts the budget. So how are the fines collected from parking and traffic violations counted within the budget? Where does that revenue get recorded? So that is in. We have a transportation enterprise fund and a lot of that revenue goes into the transportation enterprise fund when we haven't been enforcing parking. So a lot of that revenue has dropped off. And at some point when we start reinforcing it, depending on how active downtown is, you know, we'll see that revenue start to go back up potentially. But, you know, we don't necessarily like fine revenue. It's not like the revenue that we want to see necessarily go way up. So but that's typically where it's located. But also just to add to that, since we introduced the app where you can pay by on your phone and the new parking kiosks, people have figured out ways to not overstay their meters. So we've had fewer parking tickets for people overstaying the meters, which has been a really good thing. So people aren't experiencing coming out from a restaurant and finding the ticket on their car, which is a negative thing for us. And we don't like doing it. But the reason we have people pay for parking and then enforce the parking is to encourage turnover, you know, in the downtown area, which is where the greatest need for parking is. And so that that's the reason you're being charged for parking. We have another question that came in through Q&A and going back to spending on APD, Amherst Police Department, how much money is spent by the Amherst Police Department in collaborating with police departments at Amherst College and UMass Amherst? I don't know if that's broken out as a specific line item. I know that they do collaborate and you know, there's definitely mutual aid there and cooperation, but I don't believe it's a cost that's necessarily tracked explicitly in our county system. Yeah, so we don't segment that out. There's a huge amount of communication between the three departments. There's an Amherst Police Department. There's the Amherst College Police Department. There's the UMass Police Department and there's Hampshire College Security. And so there is always very good communication amongst all those entities and through both our dispatch center and through our police leadership. But generally, each department is responsible for their own campus and we tend not to go onto the UMass campus very much and the UMass Police Department tends not to leave the campus very much, although they do communicate with each other on a regular basis because we have learned that having high level of communication especially when it involves students is a benefit to all the parties involved. All right, so we are coming to the end of our time but I just wanna say to everybody if you did have a question or you think of one later, Sean will be on the line until 11 tonight. So you can, any number of ways, if you- On the Reddit line. On Reddit, they'll be on Reddit until then but if you don't use Reddit or don't feel comfortable doing that, you can send your question to infoatamherstma.gov and I will get it to Sean as well as our Twitter feed or any which way that you wanna get that question over to us and we will get it posted as well as follow up with anybody that we said we needed to follow up with with answers. So any parting words from either of you before we wrap? I'll just say thank you for the questions and we do post a lot of information on our website at correct me if I get it wrong, Brianna but amherstma.gov slash budget. Yes. So there's a lot of information there. The full budget document is up there and then a lot of the presentations, information on capital and the elementary school is the library. We post a lot of information there. So that's a good place to start if you're looking for more information that you wanna digest at your own pace. I would just say that I think that's a really good point because there's an enormous amount of information on our website. We have an open checkbook where you can go in and see what checks we have written as a town. The budget page that Sean referenced has we tried to put all the budgets for all the town entities in one location, make it easier for folks. And then there's a lot of information that the accountants office posts every quarter on all their expenditures during the course of the year. So there's a lot of information on the website and we tried to do it just make it easier for folks to see how we're spending their money. And I just further add to that. There is a budget feedback button and tool there where you can review documents or even ask questions there if you happen to be on that page. And that'll go to the finance team and to the town manager. And you can look at previous year budgets there as well. We'll have the archive. I think it goes back almost 10 years. So yeah, all right. Well, thank you both. And thank you all for joining us. We'll get this recording up shortly in case you wanna reference it. Great, thanks Brianna. Have a nice day.