 I'm going to call the finance committee meeting to order for Tuesday, February 26, 2019 at 2.05 p.m. And thank you everybody for being here. And I guess we need to start by making sure we know who's taking notes this time. Dorothy is going to do it. Okay. So Sean is only going to be able to be here for a portion of the meeting. So we want to make sure that we get the order correct for what it is that we're trying to accomplish. And the things that I would propose from the numbered agenda, which is not a timed agenda. So it's just really just a notice of what is to be discussed at the meeting is to take what's number three regional school budget and assessment method. And the funding for identified major projects number six and number five financial considerations of the one new elementary building and alternatives as the first three items that we're going to do. And then go back and pick up the other items and that way. Sean doesn't can we can use his time most efficiently for the time that he is available. So is that an agreeable plan? Okay. So the reason I put regional school budget and assessment method on the agenda for was it has two parts to it and we'll come back to the second part when we get to the question of the planning for the future. As far as our own schedule operating schedule because we will need to be taking up as I said last night at the council meeting. The region budget in a different schedule than the rest of the budget. And so we'll get to that when we deal with proposed schedule. The other element is is that on Saturday we have the four towns meeting. And one since this is a meeting that not everybody here has been to to give a little bit of a preview and a little bit of an explanation about the assessment method and how that works. And so that was the purpose of putting that on the agenda. And I guess a question. How many of you plan to be there on Saturday? I know Kathy cannot. I will. Saturday shall. Yeah, Saturday. So four of us will be there. And there's others that are still replaying. And but I'm thinking of from our committee. Absolutely. So I had hoped we'd have some copies of the region budget to work from but we don't. Sean, do you want to might be easier to hit just in case the questions that come up. I think that the best explanation is that sort of two things. Sean will explain it in page by page when he goes through it when we get to it on Saturday. But the first part of the meeting is usually the superintendent to talk about educational goals. And then the second part of the process is that Sean develops what is a essentially a level services budget from the prior year. So that what it would be to take the current year's expenses and costs and project them for the new year. There are no other adjustments that you make in that first part of there. No, so the so our budget sort of two pieces as Andy mentioned or Mr Steinberg mentioned. There's the body of our budget, which is the level services. We just take last year or this current year and we project it next year for known changes like wage increases utility increases, things like that. And then there's one line in the bottom, which is where the net of any proposed additions or reductions go. So you can see the sum of that as one single figure. So last year we had a really bad budget year because of health insurance. So that single figure was like a negative million dollars or something like that. This year we're better shape because the health insurance has gone the other way. So it's actually a net addition that's being proposed. And in our budget document, it lays out what all those additions that are there. There's some reductions to but the net is an addition. It lays out what's being proposed for those additions. So you can see that what's being added beyond level services as a single line at the bottom. Yeah, I wish Paul were here because I know his previous involvement with the insurance efforts through MMA. Is that rate every year, it's set every year so it's not something like a two or three year period? So when we first joined Maya, they gave us the rate for the coming year and they gave us sort of a rate guarantee for the second year. That was sort of a sweetener to join. But going forward, every January we'll get the rate for the upcoming year. And that's as of July 1. The rate we get in January will be the rate for July 1 to the final in June 30. I asked this only because my own experience with the state and setting health care and therefore the amount we would have to charge on each things. And trying to predict that as far as three and four years out is just impossible. And often we'd be sitting with grant contract budgets that just didn't have sufficient funds to cover it. Yeah, the nice thing is we will now know the number early enough that we can build it into our budgets for the upcoming year. But in terms of looking out multiple years, you're right. It's very difficult to project. Jeffy? Paul's report last night, one paragraph on it had this year's projections lend an estimate which was coming in really favorable. And so whether that's a future, as you said, we don't know the year after that. It basically announced every year at MMA. Yes. And that's when we heard it for the first time. Yeah, I mean the nice thing about it is it is based on our experience. So the way Maya works as I understand it, as they look at our specific groups experience and we sort of get banded with other municipalities that have similar experience. And then you get a rate based on that. So there's sort of a good rate in between rate and sort of the higher rate. And so we've had a couple of bad years recently, which sort of led to us going to Maya. But prior to that, we had very good experience for a long time. And so far it looks like the experience improved to get us the rate that we got. So that's sort of promising, but it's going to be something that could change year to year. And then the next budget piece is the list of the additions and subtractions essentially. And those are listed line by line and explained line by line. And it's explained both budgetarily and for the educational programmatic reasons and consequences of the changes that are being proposed. And it opens that up for discussion so that representatives of the four towns have that chance to look at it. So those are the essential budget pieces to look for before we get to the assessment methodology because there's two different pieces that go together. One is the budget itself, the total of the bottom line that all the three out of four towns have to agree to. And if three towns vote yes, then it's binding on all four communities. And the reason that we will consider moving our vote on the budget and the council to coincide with the town meetings in the other three towns is that it otherwise puts us in a funny looking position where we would be making a decision on the budget at a substantially later date. And we would always be having budgets that are already accepted by other three towns. And so we make our vote as the biggest town meaningless. And so we want to move to be at the same time as we have been in the past. So that's why you'll see that when we get to talking about the calendar piece. And the other part of it is that there's a second vote that needs to take place. And that has to do with the assessment method, which you've heard a lot about. And that has to be agreed to by all four towns. And if the council was voting substantially later than town meetings meet, and there were problems within this council or a future council about the assessment method, it really would have a great more havoc on the region to have that discussion taking place in the council so much later than the other three towns have their annual meetings, which are one day meetings, unlike our Extravaganza formerly were. So that's the basic piece. And so in a talk for a moment about the assessment method, and then, but I want to see if there are any questions about what we've done so far. You didn't bring along anything on this. You're just waiting for Saturday. I mean, I've got it digitally if you want to look at it, but it's probably better just to look at it on Saturday. So essentially what has happened is since the last four towns meeting where you know that there was discussion if you were there about assessment method is that there was a meeting of one representative from each town that met over a course of 8am meetings, which was a, at least kept us somewhat under control, but actually it was a very good group. And I represented Amherst and there was one representative from each of the towns. Sean was there and the superintendent was there and Eric Nakajima, who's chair of the regional school committee was there. And we have a tentative agreement, which I was going to have to talk with Paul and Sonia and Lynn about later, but we're going to present the two final versions. So we're talked about this morning. And the one that was, we came to as the best alternative. I have to say best alternative as opposed to perfect alternative because if we, if there was a perfect alternative, we wouldn't have ever had these problems all along. The difficulty that comes is that there's variable factors that go into the assessment method and the complexity of the assessment method is really somewhat overwhelming. And so I guess I'll try a little bit and then see if Sean, where he'll correct me or add to it. There's two ways that it can be done. One is that there's a state statutory method that's built into the current statutes. And that is the method that is used unless all of the towns together agree on an alternative method. The problem is, is that the state assessment, state method is really not well designed for our region. Partly because we're such a bigger and different town from our three partner communities. And so in the other, and I think that's probably the major reason that it comes when you come down to it. So the, but the method from the state is built around trying to achieve some equity recognizing that ability for a town to support education should be a factor. And that can work for or against a community. So there's a couple of terms that you hear about the first one being the foundation amount and the foundation amount, I guess, is best described as a, the legislature's attempt to try and define what it is that is necessary to provide kind of education that they have determined should be provided in the community and look at the cost factors behind that. And there's been a lot of in the news at various times recently because the legislature is taking up again a foundation review commission piece that looks at certain elements of the foundation budget. And then from the foundation budget, they try and apply on the other side of it ability to pay factors that include the property, total of property values in each community and the income, the average income in the community is major factors. And as a consequence, those two factors can either work for or against a community in its relative placement with other, the other towns. And that's that defines what is called the minimum contribution. And then the piece that's above the minimum contribution is determined by the regional agreement, which is this five year rolling average. So there's multiple pieces to this that play against each other. And I think that we had a very sophisticated group who had a lot of experience this year who kind of understood all of the pieces and the philosophy behind the pieces. And so we came together with what I said is probably the best alternative we could come to but as far from perfection and it will be explained in more detail on Saturday. I wanted to at least give you a little bit of taste of it so that you could when you hear those terms, at least you'll know what the terms where they lie. And is there anything you want to add? Yeah, the only thing I'll add is so as Andy mentioned, there's two options as a statutory method. And there's what we've used for quite a while now, which is called the alternative method, which is we agree to something else besides the statutory method. And usually it's what's in our regional agreement. And so if you use the statutory method, you don't need to vote on the assessment, you just vote on the budget. And as Andy mentioned, it's three out of four towns would have to approve it. If you use the alternative method, you have to have a separate vote on the assessment method and all four towns need to approve that. And that vote actually happens before the towns would vote on the budget because you need to make sure that all four towns agree on how the budget's being allocated before then they can vote on the budget itself. So when we do the alternative method, which is what we were proposing for this coming year and what we've done in the past, every town will have a vote on the method first. And then after that you'll have a vote on the budget. That's it. When we went to the meeting on December 8th, you showed some modeling results if you did it this way and did it that way. Are you going to be doing them again this Saturday or you've got to, one of those has emerged as the... So we're going to look at two because the working group that... The group that's been meeting has looked at a lot of different options and we sort of whittled it down to two that we think are sort of viable and some people like one a little more, some people like the other one a little bit more. So we're going to present those two and get feedback from the larger groups. So yeah, it'll be modeling, but just on those two. And one of the factors in this is that it's important because we are a four-town community and we don't want to put any town in a position of being financially in bankruptcy essentially by the method that is required. And in order to do that, we have to really be very conscious of each other and also be conscious of the fact that if we don't come up with a reasonable assessment method and then the alternative is in order to not take any town into an untenable financial position, it would require cut in the regional budget, which would require a real substantial change to the regional schools and not a good change. And so it's in order to do that that it's this balancing act that we have been doing on an annual basis for a long time and probably will be doing for a long time into the future. And last year, as I mentioned earlier, so we made some pretty large structural changes last year, which were negative mostly. We relocated some at Academy from sort of their separate space. We brought them into the high school. It's working out really, really well, but that was ultimately a cost-saving sort of initiative like that. We also eliminated a couple programs, the culinary program and an early childhood program. So we're really trying to make this year sort of a positive budget year because last year was such a negative budget year because of the health insurance. And it's set up mostly to do that. If you actually look at our total budget increase, it's going up less than a percent, which is relatively pretty good compared to inflation and everything else. But because state aid is not great, the assessment increase that the part of the towns have to come up with is going up more than 1%. It's going up about 1.8% because state aid is not keeping pace, essentially. So again, it's set up to be a good budget year if we can find agreement on the assessment method. Yes. Just could you clarify what is the role the finance committee will be playing with respect to this budget, the regional schools budget? And do we need to know what are the criteria that are used for deciding that? Whether it's the town's income, is it the number of students, the number of special students? Do we need to go into all of that? Well, I think that our function as a finance committee is always to have a little bit deeper understanding of the financial consequences and policies because it is complex. And to be able to both explain it as best we can to the council as a whole and to give the council comfort in the fact that a group of the council really understands it and has spent some time with it. So my prior experience doesn't really quite work because the finance committee was a different body than the select board. It was a committee of the town council, of the town meeting, but it sort of serves the same purpose. And the larger presentation of the budget was made to the finance committee. And at some point I would assume that in addition to the four town meetings after the school committee adopts the budget, it is likely that we will be asking the superintendent and John to make a presentation of the budget to this committee. And we'll go through it again. But I think, you know, this is such a big piece of our budget and such a complex piece of our budget. It's sort of like a little bit of repetition in order to create that comfort level of we need to present it to the council. That's what the goal was. Yes. The items that were cut, were they cut forever? For example, the culinary program. I think some people were pretty unhappy about that. They sort of were. I mean, I don't want to say anything forever, but the building itself was structurally changed so that it would make it hard to bring those back. So for example, culinary and the early childhood program, where those programs were, that's where Summit Academy is now. So it's not really viable for those programs to come back right away. You'd have to find a new spot or a new location. So at least in terms of those specific ones, which are sort of the bigger ones, it's not likely they're coming back in the near future. So, anything else? Because otherwise I think there were two other topics we wanted to go through before Sean has to go. And the second one is the funding plan for the major projects, which was the presentation we received last night. And it's really, at this point, just an opportunity if any of you have further questions that you would like to ask on Paul or Sonia about the presentations that we received now twice, once our last meeting and once last night, if there are additional questions. This is the time. Yes. I couldn't see the numbers last night. But what I kind of saw, you had, first budget you had two schools, Wildwood and Fort River, and you had a number. And then we have the, we don't have a number, but we have a guess for the 600 student school. Could you add those two? What was the addition of the total of the two small schools compared to the estimated total of the 600 school? So the two, I don't want to call them small schools, but the 465, and we talked about maybe looking at a different number, but those were in the $60 million range. So if you did two of those, again, we'd have to look at the enrollment and what's actually needed for both. But if you just say you did two of the 465, you're looking at like 120 million-ish in that ballpark because each school would be 60 million something. The share to the town, we don't know yet because we don't know the MSBA portion, versus the 600 student school. Again, we're not firm on the numbers yet, but if we say the range is somewhere between 60 and 80, we'll get more refined on that. But if we say it's somewhere between 60 and 80, it's less than doing the two schools separately. The piece that's not factored into that, though, is the cost of either the addition at Crocker Farm that would be required with the 600 student school or moving the sixth grade to the middle school. And those costs would be pretty substantial. So we don't know that piece yet, which would have to be added on to the cost of the 600 student school. But the thing that this goes back to the question. You should microphone. I'm sorry. You just said. The thing that goes back to the question I asked last night, and I think we need clarity through the superintendent and MSBA. And that is that at least it is my understanding that you cannot get MSBA money to renovate a structurally unsound building, which both Fort River and Wild would be considered to be. But you can get it for an addition so that, for example, when we put the addition on the high school years ago, MSBA paid for a share of a portion of the addition. But they did not, but we weren't trying to renovate. And the school itself was quite structurally sound. So what's miss, what I think is misleading about the numbers when we look at the cost of renovating the two elementary schools is the availability of whether MSBA would even consider those as viable projects. Yeah. I agree. I agree with you. I think I don't think the MSBA ultimately has to approve anything that comes out of the feasibility study from when we get into the pipeline. So I don't think they would approve it. They thought the building was not structurally sound under renovation option. I don't think they would approve that. I just don't know if they've made that determination yet on Fort River or Wildwood. They might have made it on Wildwood back when they did the project, but I'm not aware of that. And I don't think the MSBA has seen anything yet on the Fort River, or at least the most recent renovation proposal for Fort River. So I'll try to get clarity from the superintendent on that piece. But I agree with you in general that if the MSBA doesn't think renovation is going to last 30 years because the building is not structurally sound, they want to approve it. I had a question when you're looking at the two versus one. I think it would be useful if you went ahead and did a best guess on, we can only do one at a time. So putting aside Lynn's question of will there be a 50% match on it or not, if we can only do one at a time and you said, well, number one gets funded and started on 2021, 2022, whatever the number is, then is it seven years later for number two? You know, just something that's very clear assumption, you know, like you don't know for sure. Because then you've got to escalate 4% each of those years. So doing them as if they were happening at the same time will understate the project costs? Yeah, we'd only run the scenario of doing them at the same time if one was MSBA and one was not MSBA. Because then you could theoretically do two at the same time if we can afford it. I just think it would be really helpful for people to understand that, you know, those implications. You know, so that the second one, whichever the two is the second one isn't going to be next year's cost. It's going to be next year for seven years. Yeah, again, so when we present scenarios, there's going to be a lot of them. I mean, there's going to be four options, but there's going to be variations on all of them around the timing and the funding. So you'll have a lot to digest. Because that's, and then I know you've brought in and point in the middle of this complication. But the other thing about if one now and one later scenario in terms of the expenses, the one that isn't done now has repairs going on. It can't just sit alone for seven years. So somehow just giving, there'll be guesstimates, but getting nearer so people can say why that option is not being considered. You know, so it's just giving a reality check to those statements. And the school facility proposal for JCPC is pretty much done. So we'll have some of those, you know, if we don't do no building, what are the costs that we still have to think about like a roof or windows or things like that. So we'll have that. And you had comments on a couple other things. I didn't want to shift over to school. I was just going to add in if, you know, just to make it more realistic to also include the infrastructure that we've been talking about. You mean the ongoing? Yeah. Yeah, we'll put that in. And that's what I was going to come back to. We all made that point last night. But if somehow that one slide when Lynn asked about it on a show it shows how much we have to work with for the big buildings if we continue doing X, Y, or Z. So if we put some number in for this much for roads every year and a best guess for other repairs, whatever that consolidated line is, gives you a sense of how quickly you're bumping up on the money we're generating with the capital set aside, even before we've done a building. Yeah. I think that's something we can do pretty quickly is put in some sort of estimate of what we'll need. But it does go beyond just repairs. It includes again new equipment and for fire station schools, police station include there's a lot of things that come out of that JCPC pot of funds. I just saw a couple of surprise faces when it was if we do the first picture, nothing else is done for 10 years. You know, I mean, so something about something else is being done. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that was sort of getting back to the question that you'd raised a little bit. The likelihood of not getting to schools has multiple at the same time. If we did it as two separate building projects. We also have some of these huge capital expenses that we probably would have to incur for whichever building we're not doing. And all of those are cost factors that would be helpful to understand by the time a decision has to be made so that the community understands what the financial consequences are. And most importantly, the council understands what the financial consequences are. Well, and one of the nice one of the good things about the Fort River study is that they actually have all those different six different few will options, including one that basically says you're going to repair what's here and this is what it's going to cost. So, because regardless of, I mean, if if we got a second approval on a school within seven years, we're lucky. And it's meantime, we're going to have to pour a lot of money into one of those schools. Do you have to know whether there've been any experiences where community community has been approved for two entirely different projects and relatively short span. The only thing I've heard sort of anecdotally is that Holyoke was was able to get two projects approved, but it had something to do with sort of a unique situation. And there was some sort of factor that is not sort of applicable to us. But for the most part, what I've heard is that you kind of have one project going at a time. And that when that project is done, then you can reapply for another project. So since we've gone into the school's question, which was the other agenda item fairly deeply and merged the two fairly, which is inevitable, I think. The other question to think about while Sean is still here is if there are other pieces of information that would help you to analyze or you think would be helpful for the council. And you want to at least pose them to see if they're possible. This is the time to do it. Is this for schools or all buildings? Well, let's start with keep us schools for a minute and then we'll come back to the other buildings. I have a question. Yes. I have some questions from last night. I think that I misheard some things. When you were talking about, you talked about debt capacity, and then you talked about debt exclusion. And then you talked about debt exclusion override. And I copied down a sentence, which does not make sense. That debt exclusion override increases every year forever. That the increase stays there forever. But the other one, once it's paid off, it stops. There's obviously a concept there and I mangled it. So Paul's not behind me, but he spoke to that. Do you want to speak to us on it? There's three different kinds of overrides. There is the operational override. If you vote that, that stays on the tax rate forever. That stays in the base. There's debt exclusion override, which lasts for the life of the loan. So every year, we add the interest in the principal to the tax rate above setting the regular tax rate. And that goes away when the debt goes away. And then there's capital overrides, which is usually a one-year exclusion. So you pay for it in one year and it goes away. So the only one that actually stays is an operating override. And what we're looking at under the model is the second one, which would be the debt exclusion override. And that's what that little calculator tool does is calculate what would be the cost, the added cost to the tax bill. So number two is what we were looking at. And as was explained last night, the term debt exclusion I think is always what confuses people because what you're really doing is you're taking a piece of debt that the town might otherwise incur out of its own budget and you're excluding it from its budget and paying for it by an override instead. And so there's a little bit of a funny use of terms in there. I've always thought that confuses people. But in the end, what you're doing, it's not different from what in other states that call bond issues, where a community will decide to issue a bond and then vote on the bond issue and then they raise their taxes to pay for the payback on those bonds. And it will last for as long as the life of the bond, which is frequently 30 years. It's not even, so it starts high in declines in amount. But it does add to taxes and if you do several of them and you do them at the same time, you really then for a short period of time substantially increasing the, substantially increasing the taxes on our taxpayers. And I think that we're all very conscious as people who recently campaigned and undoubtedly had constituents who said to us, our taxes are awfully high right now, don't raise my taxes. And that's what we're trying to be conscious of. But I think I did hear the possibility raised of more than one debt exclusion. Yeah, I think that's an option. It's ultimately sort of a town council discussion around that. I know in prior versions there was discussion of doing the library in the schools. As a potential option to both of those, but I think that's a conversation. So in all these scenarios that we're looking at, that's one of the things you can play with of what if we did more than one. Ultimately, the thing that's sort of hard to gauge until you put it to a vote is how much you're adding to the tax bill and whether that's acceptable to the community. So you'll be able to put that out there and show some charts and get feedback from people and say, you know, this is too much essentially. So we'll provide that data so you can get feedback from your constituents. Just for the purposes of the council and frankly my own clarity. I'm sorry. Just for the purposes of my own clarity and the rest of the committee. This is really a question out to Paul and Andy and Sonia. When you go out for a debt exclusion, if the council makes the decision, we're going to go out for a debt exclusion override. At that point, we have to vote at a two thirds majority. Is that correct? To go out for a debt exclusion override? I think it's majority vote for the council. Majority vote for the council. I think it is two thirds. The last time I looked it was two thirds. And then the question is, at what percent does the town have to pass it? Just majority? Yes, for debt exclusion. The reason I asked that is because in the past, the issue was the town passed it by 50, but town meeting did not pass it by the two thirds. Since we are the legislative body like the town meeting was, we now have the thing where we have to go out at two thirds. We'll borrow the funds. Yeah. To borrow the funds. But we have to decide what we're going out for for debt exclusion. The public votes and then it comes back to us and based on the vote, we decide we would borrow and that's a two thirds vote. You actually can do it in either order. And I actually did talk to DOR about that last time just when we were trying to schedule the override order. It's really up to the council to make the decision as to whether it wants to vote on the bonds first and then go for the override or wants to do the override first and then go to the bonds. And the council is probably less significant in picking the order than it was for town meeting because we thought that it would help town meeting to know what the community thought. And that was the purpose of going forward with the override first as opposed to the other way around. But I think that more communities do the bond vote first at a town meeting. As I say with the council, it's a different thing because it's a much smaller body. I guess one other question and this is again around the whole issue of financing. My recollection is that we have not done a two and a half percent override in a long time. Is that correct? An operational override or? Operational. Was it about seven years? 2011, I think it was. Okay, it was that recent. And we got the override authorization through and then implemented it for two years so that we had the authority to raise taxes by the amount voted in the override. But in the first year after it passed, we only raised the taxes by a portion of it and then raised the taxes to the new limit that was approved by the override in the second year. Yes, that's what I recommend. Have we done a debt exclusion override? The last two that I can recall is the high school addition. That's done this year as our last payment on that. And it was the junior high group. That's done too. Okay. And then on the other one, just the general capital override, we done those? I can't ever recall in my 32 years here that we've done one of those. The concept of override is always tough to grasp. But I just wanted to thank you for the history there to understand. So you said you were raising a question earlier about whether we could ask about other buildings. Yeah. So obviously for DPW and FIRE, the next step is to have land. But once we get to that point, after that, the next step is schematic design, which will allow us to get a much better handle on a building. Is that the way we see it? Okay. Once, for example, around DPW, there's been, you know, conversation here and there about how to stage that so that maybe it wouldn't be everything we want all at once, but at least would be set up so that eventually it could become, for instance, the number of actually enclosed garages versus maybe carports or the minimally heated versus no heated, that kind of thing. Things that, so in the model, the real issue right now for particularly DPW, because I think FIRE, the issue is going to be, you know, things like do we do a community room or not. But in the DPW, I should say community and training room, because the training is very important in that one. But in the DPW thing, there may be a basis of which to say, gee, this building could cost X or it could cost X plus. And that's a little more complicated to put into the model. Yeah. I don't know if the, I'm assuming it doesn't. Maybe it does. The report that we have from Weston and Samson on the DPW, if it got into that level of detail. It didn't. Okay. No, it's only in the schematic design we'd ever be able to hope to retrieve to that. So, yeah, so you'd have to kind of make guesstimates, you know, if it was 10% cheaper, 10% more expensive. You can plug that in and see what that does. But as we go forward and using the model and, you know, a year from now, we want to update the model because we've done a schematic design or something, then we can build that into the model. Yeah, absolutely. That's exactly what I was getting at. I had one question, but I wasn't seeing if there was any others. The other thing, of course, we're dealing with now for the first time as a town is trying to make sure that we're making our best effort to be in compliance with the zero energy bylaw. And when I raised this question of an architect regarding the East Street School housing proposal, I got a very firm answer from her that new buildings are easier and therefore less expensive to make zero energy ready than a renovation. Was there anything that you observed in the Fort River study, since you probably looked at the numbers behind the Fort River study better that gave instruction on that question? So I haven't looked at it a lot because I wasn't part of the group. I've looked at sort of the presentations. It does seem like it's a lot more complicated than just saying X percent. So I did actually this morning get an update from the architect we're working with about what would be sort of a premium to add to the cost, what would be like a percentage to add. And his recommendation was between five and ten percent. So we had ten percent plugged in, but he said it could be as little as five, probably based on what you mentioned, that it's easier to build that into new construction. But his additional guidance was when you do zero energy it's really hard to factor that upfront cost without factoring in the future life cycle savings of having zero energy building. So you have this larger upfront cost but you're going to have much lower operating costs or somewhat lower operating costs going forward since you're producing a lot of your own energy. So he said it's hard to look at just one piece of that without looking at the full picture, which I don't know if we're going to be able to look at the full picture right now because we're not doing sort of the full feasibility study. We're really just focusing on that upfront piece. But I think that's just one thing to keep in mind that by doing net zero that will have implications on the operating cost side going forward which hopefully will be positive. And so, for example, with the For River one of the things I noticed in the presentation that they included was so they have a cost estimate in there for building solar panels but they also said you might not need to buy the solar panels. You might be able to have a power purchasing agreement through the state. There's a way where the solar panels actually somebody else owns them but they install them onto your, there's different models but basically they would own them, they would be installed on your building and you'd get a benefit from that. I don't know if that, how that works with the bylaw if that satisfies it but that would be a way to reduce the cost as well from what's been included. So it's more complicated than I think just adding a percentage which we might not be able to get into that level of detail with this first pass but I think as we do the schematic designs and the feasibility studies we'll get that extra layer of detail that will help round out the decision. I noticed in your estimates at least at this point you were just using the base 10% and because of the way the bylaw is written I think that's a reasonable and about just about the only thing you could do at this point because it, you know, it just is all in the engineering and everything else. I don't think that. Yeah, I mean the point that you were making about that you save money going forward because you're generating electricity and you don't have to then buy electricity in the future because you're generating it yourself. We certainly recognize that when we were looking at the revised bylaw and that was one of the very persuasive arguments that the advocates for doing a zero energy bylaw were putting forward was that the community in the end it would pay for itself largely because the operating expenses going forward would be reduced. The problem with that always was and still is that you still have to build a building and you have to pay for the building up front and so as we're sitting here trying to figure out how to build multiple buildings that are zero energy and you're having to put the expense in up front, you don't get the savings till later, there's a hit on the current taxpayers to the benefit of the future taxpayers. Well, the other piece that I mean I think about the fact that if you start from scratch now building a new building suppose it was a school and because you're going for zero energy you're putting in triple pane glass. Is MSBA going to pay for that triple pane or are they only going to pay for double pane? And it's those nuances about whether they'll support green schools or not that you know gets so complicated in the issue of zero energy. I mean you can build a barn and try to heat it with solar panels but we don't want to build a barn. Yeah, so I'm going to reach out. We reached out to them once, I haven't heard back yet. We're going to reach out to TSKP again to see if they can model some sort of reimbursement rate based on their specific designs that they put in. And they did a very nice job. I went to the middle school presentation then in an earlier one where... You mean the Fort River? The Fort River, yeah, on the feasibility but they did a nice job of showing what Lin was just saying so it's just saying that if you build a more efficient building for starters then you need fewer solar panels. So you can have that be the last thing you add and you can almost wait to do that because that's replenishing a little bit more but they had priced those out so it was nice and a couple of their things where they could show you how much did they have to spend to get the building up to that level and there was a back and forth because people at first saw an entire football field worth of solar panels and said, oh my goodness, what can you do? And they said, build the building better and then it's fewer panels but it was a nice way I think they went through making these points clearer. So other questions on the bundle of things that we're talking about, things that you'd want to know on school building and alternatives and the plan of all the major projects. I do think that at some point on the breakout tax hit it would be interesting to have, you know, if your house is valued within this range it would be this level and within this range because, you know, different houses are going to take a bigger hit or a lesser hit. That was part of the spreadsheets. Yeah, we had the average home value. I don't think it's much more work to make some other assumptions. Just a few variations on that high, medium, and low. I mean, it's just something that gives people a better sense. Will that slide with the workbook be shared at the listening sessions? So I think one's coming up pretty soon, right? Not for tomorrow. And you can tell me if this is not the right priority. So my first priority is to try to start getting some of these scenarios together, like give them to Paul and then ultimately to the finance committee. And then after that, the second priority is going to be trying to get the tool sort of set up in a way where people can go in and play with it. I thought given the timing of the vote on the SOI it was more important to try to get you the data first and then make the tool available because that's something that can be used going forward past the SOI vote date throughout the summer. And we don't want to put that out until we feel like the data has been vetted a little bit more. The planning that has been done, does it include any of the more recent theories on how to make a more shooter-proof building? Yeah, I think the Fortimer Feasibility Study has all the latest techniques that usually bring people. I was pretty impressed by what the Fortimer people had done with their study. I'm not saying I was impressed with trying to remedy an old concrete floor, but that's a whole different issue. I think actually the town got a lot of value out of it for the $250,000 because they also did that Dorothy on where the entrances and where someone can see who's coming in the entrance, but they also looked at building a building in a way that you can close part of it off and open, whether it's the gym or the cafeteria for community space so it could be used in the evening and on weekends without having full component of staff and trying to think of it as multi-purpose. It's an elementary school. It was a very interesting thing to watch on the things that they had built into their modeling. The good thing about the MSBA process is the MSBA looks for stuff like that, so ultimately the MSBA is going to want the best and most effective designs and what they're going to approve. Anything else from the committee? Paul, do you have anything to add? So I take a second. Is there any public comment that wants to be offered at this point? I certainly will. Okay. You do need to come forward because we want to get this recorded for, we're on Amherst Media Recording for future broadcasts. You need to be at a microphone to be heard. Hi there, Maria Kopicki, Amherst resident. I wanted to comment about several items that were just discussed and to maybe help with some misconceptions. When we are comparing two schools to one school, it's important that we don't do the comparing, adding two 465 student buildings together. That's not what we would need. What you would want to do, by the way, I'm on the Fort River School Building Committee. It would be more accurate to look at the cost of a 420 student school and then a 360 student school, which we actually have that information. So that's a very different number than adding two 465 together. You don't need that. The MSBA, in terms of funding renovation, they absolutely fund renovation. They actually give up to five percentage points of incentives in reimbursement rate for reimbursement, for renovation projects, depending on what percentage of your building is renovation. And the study that we've done that we are wrapping up shows that this building absolutely is amenable to renovation. We've got multiple options of how to do that. When we're talking about what to do in the meantime and figuring out what kind of repairs would have to happen with a second building that's waiting, it's important not to conflate the option F, which is a code upgrade that's going to be included in our report with the repairs. The repairs are, for all the buildings, we're talked about at about $12 million, and I think $5 million was what it would be. So that's very different than the $28 million that's being talked about for a code upgrade. So you don't have to code upgrade a second building as it's waiting. There was a question about a history of having two projects by the MSBA, two core projects. That would be a full building project. And in fact, there are 47 instances of two projects happening, and the average and median time between those projects is four to five years. In terms of the net zero, and whether it's easier to make a new building or a renovated building net zero, it's important to remember with the bylaw, the additions and new construction must be net zero. The renovation parts do not have to be net zero, so you have to keep that in mind so it's not so much what is amenable. You can build both renovated and new buildings with different EUIs, different levels of energy efficiency, and it is different in new versus renovated, but it's a complicated picture, so you have to look at that in its entirety. And we are going to be doing some, if you will, life cycle analysis as part of our work. So it's not just the upfront cost, but we are in the next stages going to be looking at what our maintenance costs and what are operational costs. So you will have some of that information as well. The MSBA not only gives additional incentive points for renovation, but it also rewards you for being greener builders and you can get an additional 2% reimbursement points. And when I say these reimbursement points, it's important to know that that's the total project costs at the end. So with the previous project, for example, it was 51% reimbursement, that's the number I'm talking about. So you would get an additional 2% with, if you do, greener building. For example, with the Fort River School Building Committee's options, options A through C would all qualify for that higher reimbursement rate. So yes, you would be putting more money into a better building, but you would actually be getting some of that incentivized as part of the project. So obviously I have many, much interest in the buildings and I would dearly like for our committee to come present to your committee because I think there's a lot that we could learn from each other. So hopefully that's something that could happen in the near future. Thank you. Thank you. Sean, do you have anything to add to what was just presented? Any questions or comments from? Well, thank you. So I think that what we're going to need to do is when we work on our own schedule is to make a determination of when we're going to come back to this particular topic. I assume it was, did Sean just have to go? I assume so. I didn't get to thank him, but I will later. So with that said, is there any other things we can talk about or should we get on to the question of our own schedule and planning? With regard to getting back to this topic, obviously it's an ongoing update based on information as it comes in. Knowing that we have the challenge of the budget for FY20, my guess is we won't get back to this in as complete a way as we might want to sometime this summer. But maybe that's wrong. The goal I would like for the Council is to be out in the fall with a capital plan that we are ready and wanting to talk about with the community. So we have to keep that in mind. Do you have thoughts on what's reasonable? Yeah, go ahead. Is it just going back to the schools? The listening sessions, that I understand is just a presentation by the superintendent of schools, is that correct? Or is there also a presentation by the Fort River project which has been funded by the city, by the town? So it's a listening session. They've hired a facilitator to coordinate this. I think there's going to be small group work. The superintendent will be at some of them, but they have a video of the superintendent describing the project. That's going to initiate the conversation that the president knows this schedule of it. So I think that it's really about the proposal that is being advanced by the school committee. Dorothy, in your packet envelope yesterday, there was a copy of an email as well as our schedule of attending that describes what the school program will actually look like. But Mr. Bachmann is correct. It's only about the proposal for the 600 person school. But it's a listening session. So in getting to the question that you had raised, which was about what our timing is for the capital plan, I think that's very helpful. And I think the next piece that we're going to be talking about is our proposed schedule. And I don't know if that is part of the proposed schedule that you want to present now. And I think before we do that, pause for just a moment. I can hand out copies. Oh, thank you. Sorry, I should have done that before having you come forward. Perhaps one extra one over here. Did I just give up my last copy? Here. Okay, we had an extra. Thanks. So I drifted this up with Sonya. So this is subject to your conversation. And the chair hasn't really had a chance to review it as such. So we just wanted to map out now till you deliver the budget to the town council. And that's sort of the timeframe we're looking at. This will not set a precedent for next year. So I think we're just looking at how are we getting through, doing the work that you have in front of you. I think later on we'll be coming with an annualized calendar. But let's just focus on what our work schedule is between now. And what we've put in is weekly meetings starting, which you've already been doing, up until May, in which case then we look to having meetings twice a week. And the, I'll just walk through these one by one. So the things that we want to accomplish is have the council pull out the regional school budget on a separate timeline from the general school budget. So that, and so there will be a separate, and you'll see that on the schedule. We have some educational work that we want to present to you in the sense that we have our actuary and our debt advisor coming in and that's scheduled for April 9th. And those are our outside consultants who advise us on what are, on those topics. And they'll present their information to you. You can ask them all the questions you want. These are types of things that you'll have to know about in terms of how we move forward. And also to build confidence that you know that there is a team of people that support the town staff as we work through these processes. And then also you'll, if you look at the schedule, sometimes it'll say FY 19 and sometimes it'll say FY 20. So FY 19, we're using that, those budget, those topics to walk through the current budget so that we can talk through about all the issues in the budget before you see the actual budget for FY 20. They're going to be incredibly similar. But we wanted to begin to have become a familiar, have you gained some familiarity with how we develop the budget, how we present the budget, ask any of the questions that you want about any of these topics as we go through that. Then you receive the budget, or the town council receives the budget from the town manager on May 1st. You have to have a public hearing on that budget and you have to review the budget. And you have to do that in a fairly compressed four weeks because you have to deliver a recommendation to the full town council within 30 days. So that's why we ramped up the meeting schedule during that month of May to twice a week. And so we sort of put this together and put in there. And the other thing is you have to look at the capital plan and CPAC recommendations. So there's all these things that have to happen and leading up to a recommendation to the town council on May 28th. So again, this is... And if there are other things that you want to have on your agenda, we can obviously add those if you want to meet with the Port River Building Committee or whatever. So if we look at this and say that, you know, from a standpoint of the finance committee, our really heavy lift is in May. Yes. Okay. So by June, we could be back on the capital plan. Yeah. But by June, you'll have your town council hat on and you'll have a heavy lift on the town council. Oh, I know that. I mean, we've already talked about the fact that we'll probably have to have one or two extra town council meetings. But I'm just trying to figure out when the... When the finance committee... When the finance committee can get back to the capital. So I deliver the capital plan to you on May 1st as well. That's a requirement. But the capital plan you're talking about... I'm talking about the... Oh, the four... The big one. $150 million one. Not the... The little one. Not the six million. Right. I mean, I would think that as we get, you know, as we refine the tool, you know, you know, the chair may say, let's put this on the agenda and let's update us. We take 30 minutes out of your meeting to say, does this tool look right for us? I don't think we're going to be stopping on that part of it. We want that to be moving forward as well. So I don't think it's going to be like a stop on the... Because there'll be new developments over the next few months. I'm convinced that there'll be new developments that you'll want. You'll have to review with you. So I'm just thinking, as Lynn was looking at it, you know, if we are doing something along the way but also targeting June, if the goal is by the fall to have something we would call a plan, you know, would you just articulated, Lynn? I think we need to have something that's interactive enough to be able to ask a lot of what-if questions. So it's no longer just watching it in action and using it as a potential decision-making tool and saying, suppose this happens eight years later rather than five years later and what happens if somehow miraculous so we can lower the price tag by, you know, a feasible number. And then not to have it be imaginary numbers. You know, something needs to happen by, yes, something could be done for that amount. You know, so I just think it's that kind of interaction back and forth that would lead you to potentially having a plan in the fall, you know, getting to a comfort level that we can ask and answer some questions. So we could continue the meetings through June and have that be the focus of your meetings in June, if you'd like. So right now we're meeting every Tuesday at 2 o'clock. It would just be continuing that through June through. In order to add what we just talked about last night and this afternoon. I think that you've scheduled on 2 o'clock on Tuesdays as your meeting time. But this also has a meeting on Thursdays at 2. For May. For May. But you can choose any other day. I put that in there just as a whole. So we do need to talk for a moment about whether Thursday is an acceptable date for the second meetings and whether we can do two meetings in May. We don't do two meetings in May. We're not going to have as much opportunity to interact with staff that the department has about their particular budgets. I have a question about July and August. The Charter says that we may meet only once in July and August. So if we work and do this double time all the way through June, is there some chance that July and August will be lighter or are we just revving up for the fall? We always hope that the summer is lighter. It never turns out to be that way, honestly. We always think, oh, July and August, great. But it never works out to be that way. And of course, it's a different question for the finance committee, however, because once we have adopted the budget for the year, we do have a little bit of a space in between before the next round starts up. And we don't have some of the constraints that we had under our old form of government because the council itself meeting. So the finance committee is really, at this point, under a lot of pressure until we get a budget approved for the next fiscal year. And then we might be separating out to the council and the committee. Is there agreement that we should be doing two meetings a week after the budget is delivered for the purposes that have been described? So we're talking about the month of June? May. Oh, May, yes. Unless we miraculously are. So quick. Yeah. And so just to be clear, the public both here in the room and watching later when it's on Amherst media, there are three public focus things that are very important to note here. One is the forum, which is on March 7th, which is not on this particular, it's the preview for it is, but the forum is not. That is required by the charter that there be a forum before the early, earlier in the budget process before the time manager completes the budget to deliver to the finance committee and to the council. And so that's March 7th. And that's again, primarily for the purpose of making a presentation from the executive, the town manager, but also to allow public to ask questions. So the reason that this preview is there is because we don't want the council to be taking up too much time because it's required that at least 50% of the time be for the public to participate in the forum. And it is the public's forum, not the council's forum. So that's March 7th. And urge people to recognize that. Then after the budget is delivered, and as we said, it's going to be delivered in two pieces because the regional school budget will have to be considered in an earlier timeline so that there's a, we will have to have a public hearing on April 2nd regarding the regional school district budget. And it's sort of a, duplicates a process that the schools themselves will have about hearing requirements, but the charter requires that we have our own in addition to the regional school normal process. And then the second public hearing that we're talking about is May 21st, which is for all other aspects of the budget, including the elementary school operating budget and library budget. So the public hearing on May 21st will be for those portions of the budget that will be approved with the major consideration. There's one other one that's not on here. And it's really a, the council has to have a public forum on capital. And that has to be by, before May? No, it's after you receive the capital budget. Okay, so that's after JCPC has done their job. And after, so the JCPC, so the capital of the JCPC reviews product, it makes recommendation to the town manager. Right. And manager gathers that information, presents it to the town council. Okay. The town council has a capital plan and then it makes, it has a public hearing. I'll look up exactly what that is. So I'm just looking at the, you have to receive a JCPC by May 1st at the latest and then have the forum. Right. It's after May 1st. Right. But that's not on here. No, because that's not a finance committee act. This is just a finance committee schedule. Right. That's another different committee. We have that, I have a more detailed schedule that has JCPC, and everybody scheduled it, but it's pretty complicated. I didn't want to get through this schedule first. Yes. If there are questions or comments about the... The only question I might have is related to districts. You know, I'm not eager to put anything else on this agenda in terms of meetings, but is there any thinking on whether, there should be some follow-ups with district meetings after some of these, and like maybe there's one follow-up that picks up two or three, so questions, people didn't get answered. There's a second time around that we should be thinking about and planning and whether we do that. Each district does its own, or do district one and two do something together, you know, just in terms of North Amherst. So for example, we're thinking in district one of doing something around March 10th as a first district meeting, but we'd pick up on what you just said on the 7th. Okay, just mind to... So March... I want to be clear what the budget forum is about. So the budget forum isn't... It's a budget forum, but it isn't to present the budget because the budget isn't finished yet. It won't be finished until May 1st. The way I interpret what the charter meant is to have the public weigh in before budget decisions are made so that the public can weigh in and say, we really want you to prioritize this or that. And so the town manager and preparing the budget and the council in considering the budget hears that in advance. So you won't hear on March 7th that this is going to be... This is... You'll have more general statements about the condition of the town and where we are financially and what the types of things we can afford to do. And so because we're relatively early in it, then the public... Once the budget is presented to the council and the finance committee starts to do its work, it might make sense to go out into the field and sort of move around and talk to people about... So there's... How we want to engage the public, there's lots of different ways to do that. You can do it early before decisions are made. You can do it later after the budget is presented. You can do it both. It's just a matter of how much energy we want to put into that. But I think it's an important thing because to take the budget to the people is probably an important thing for us to do. Clarification. There's a point at which we cannot increase anything or add anything. That is up to May 1st. Or where is the last minute? This budget form is before that door has shut. Correct. When exactly does the door shut? When the town manager delivers the budget to the council. That's May 1st. But we should be clear that it is still a town manager's decision as to the budget to present and we can make... If we felt strongly about it, a recommendation, but it's not binding on the manager. The manager proposes the budget. And the other thing that we would talk about at that time is the problem that we've always faced with budgets and the town manager faces with budgets. If you want to add something, then you have to subtract something. So whatever we do, we have to pay for. And that was just the experience of town meeting and having been through too many of them. Finance committee. Ultimately, as I always say, we have a police department of a certain size that already exists. And if a number one priority is to maintain that police department without even talking about adding to it, that, you know, in other things, each other department duplicated is already a substantial portion of the budget decision made. I just want to look at the times when we need to do public hearings and wonder if we should schedule those in the early evening instead of two to four in the afternoon. So if you have two public hearings scheduled, one on the regional school district budget and one on the regular budget, if you say we want to do those that night, suppose it's that night, you can choose any night of the week. If you tell us when they are, will we reserve this room for it? If that's where you'd like to have it, because we should get it on the calendar so we can hope in the room they want. Is there a possibility that could be part of a council meeting, but it's called Operated by the Finance? Lynn, I don't know what the council schedule is in going into that. So we are using a place where we would all be, but the first part of it is the hearing. You know, it's just a way of thinking of budgeting our time as well as making it available as an idea. Let's, all I can say is we can look at that and we look at our scheduled meetings as well, but it's, if we took what could be a two-hour public hearing on, say, the budget and added that to a council meeting. It might become the council meeting, I guess is what you're saying. You know, there's not room for anything else. Well, and the reality is that just looking at all the other things that the council will be dealing with this spring, I'm not clear that we can take two hours of a council meeting for that, but we'll look at that. Yeah. And I know, you know, the experience you and Andy had in talking to the people of Northampton, that's clearly been one of the things. The other piece is that we want to make it very clear to all counselors that they're welcome to come to these meetings. And if need be, we will call our meetings committees of the whole so that the council can convene. But the minutes of the meeting, I think, would then be the minutes of the finance committee and the finance chair would run the meeting. So it's trying to remember the budget hearings are really hearings of the council, not of the committee. I think the budget hearings are of the finance committee. I thought so too, but we need to look at my charter. I think we're all doing the same thing, but we better be. It says the finance committee shall hold a public hearing of the proposed budget providing no less than 10 days notice of such hearing. The finance committee will thoroughly review the budget and make a presentation and recommendation to the full town council within 30 days of referral. Right. Okay. So what are the thoughts about having the hearings, what time of day? Day evening. That's, thank you. I think we have to do it in the evening. Okay. So what was just pointed out is that the capital. That's a town council. That's a town council. But cannot be done until JCPC has finished its work. So it can't be done until the manager gives you. Excuse me. JCPC has finished its work and then given it to the manager and the manager presents it. Right. So it doesn't have to take, it doesn't want to be clear about the rules here. Thank you. It's an advisory committee to the town manager. Town manager can say thank you and throw it away. The manager can accept it as whole, can make modifications at it. Just let me, because it's our first time through it, we have to be clear what the lines are. We're here for now. We'll be pros. So we have one counselor who indicated availability to do it in the evening on April 2nd and the regional school district budget hearing and then it also checked on the May 21st. April 2nd is fine with me. Isn't that the regional school budget on the 2nd, right? Yes. We're going to move that one? Well, no. The question is, can we do it in the evening to make it available to a larger number of people? We could also do it at, well, I said late afternoon, but it probably makes it. All evenings are fine with me. You know, the dates we've got, its potential dates. Evenings are fine. I'm just confused. You're saying we're not having the regional school district budget public hearing on the evening of the 2nd of April? No. The question is, can we do it in the evening, because our meetings normally are in the daytime. So that was the question as to whether we wanted to do it in the evening to make it available to a larger number of the public. So we would do that instead of having a two to four meeting that day? Yes. In those days, we would change our time. Okay. Just mentioned one thing, Mr. Chair. Yes. So one thing I think you should consider, and I think it would be the president who would have to look at the calendar going forward for the council, is to do it, Kathy said, is to merge it into your normal council meeting. Right. Because I think you're going to want all the counselors to be present for the public hearing. I think the public would expect the full council to be able to listen to what their public comments are. So it might be something, you know, hold these dates as they are, if you want. And you can have the choice of doing a standalone for, I know the council's meeting on April 1st. Yeah. And that's the day that we vote on the school proposal. Oh, right. So maybe you need another night for that. I think perhaps you don't want to try to do that, Paul. The next one we might be able to work out. Yeah. Because I just can't project the agenda that far. That's a good point. I think we should just go ahead and if we're all in agreement with April 2nd, just set the date so that it's out there. And we'll poll the council and ask as many as can be here to be here. I'll open it up as a council meeting and turn the chair over to Andy. And then look at the May 20th is a council meeting. So the question is, do we, that's the whole budget thing. So do we do a separate meeting or do we do a combined? That's the budget, budget one. I think we could try to do that. I'm just also anticipating. We have a ton of committee appointments coming up. And I don't know yet. I just don't know yet. So sticking with April 2nd for the moment that we would stay with an April 2nd meeting of the committee that will be the public hearing. It is not going to be merged with a council meeting because a council meeting the prior day is already a filled agenda because we have to take the vote on whether we're going to support the statement of interest and have other agenda items already there. And so the, since we have a council meeting on Monday, if we do an evening hearing that will be two evenings in a row. But if there's agreement amongst the committee, then we should do that. What time would you like that to begin? Should we just do 6.30 as usual? Is that a proposal? And the first one is the regional school committee. Regional school budget. Regional school budget, public hearing. It's our public hearing for the finance committee. Town focused. And I believe the regional school district is required to have their own public hearing at some point in the budget process. And I don't know what the data on that is. So this is all predicated on the regional school district. And I don't know what they did last night on the regional school district being able to have the budget to you so you can have these conversations in advance and the hearing and then the deliberation period. Right. Yeah, we should either, we should check with somebody. I think this fits what they had an early date and a late date, but it should be okay. And then the other one is the 21st of May. Unless we can combine it with the 20th of May. Yes. And we would move its finance budget on the 20th. So the same question that arises, did you, in this case of the president, too, is how you feel about having that combined meeting public hearing for the budget as a part of a regular? If we can do it, and we don't have that many other agenda items, we were already talking about the council meeting more often in May or in June. In June. I'm just thinking of all the committee appointments and stuff like that that have to get done, a bunch of other stuff. Yeah. I think we should reserve the evening of the 21st and if we can mesh it with the evening of the 20th, do it. Okay. The other possibility is to add a council meeting on the 13th to relieve the pressure since the 27th is a holiday. What's your preference? You were asking that of the manager or the committee? The committee. The question has to do with having a meeting on the 21st. Scheduling an extra council meeting potential date, asking the council to do for the 13th of May so that there would be, and then giving us the option of doing the budget hearing at a regular council meeting on the 20th. Supposed to separately on the 21st. Maybe what we should do is when I write the report for the next council meeting, highlight that issue, and then the president can ask the rest of the council how they, whether they would like to be a part of the hearing and whether they're, because it's the benefit to them to be at the hearing, it's the burden on them to have the extra meeting. We would have, we would not necessarily have that second meeting then the next night or the next day. Your proposal is that we spread it out a little bit more by having a town council, an additional town council meeting on the 13th so that when we come to the 20th of May, we don't have quite as full an agenda and we can then combine that with the finance budget public hearing. Okay. That's, so that's what we will propose. I will pose that in the report and then we can ask, we won't make it a proposal to them. We'll make it an issue that we would like their input on. Okay. The only other thing I wanted to note for all of you is that the way this stacks up the one date that I'm not available is the 16th of April, which means you're going to take the budget vote on the regional school district budget. Not the council vote, but the recommendation from this committee would be on the day that I'm not there. I don't feel comfortable with that. I'm sorry. I don't feel comfortable with that. I have a new piece of information. Okay. The regional school district expects to vote on their own on March 12th. In which case it would be turned to us to turn to the manager who would then in turn hand it to the council. Actually, the timing still works about the same. I was trying to figure out if that helps us in any way logistically, but I think it still has to go to the council who then has to refer it to the finance committee. I asked the council to just do that automatically on Monday. Just say that it would expedite the process to have the town council just now state that we will, upon receiving the regional school budget, will refer it immediately to the finance committee. I don't see a problem with that. We could do that. And if the council agrees, then we could move the hearing date up one week because the budget is going to be what they present. So we would receive the budget on the 12th. They vote on it in the evening of the 12th. Okay. So we would receive it. And then when would we hold our hearing? Well, if we don't move it up to the 19th, we're not building in the extra week. So we'd have to move it to the 19th. And when are the other towns having their town meetings, by the way, is another question because they're usually at first weekend in May. Yes. End of April, beginning of May. So the other possibility, well, so which council meeting do we need to take our vote on? What's our target date for the council meeting? Bring that schedule. I can get that just a moment. I think either of these lineups allows you, the council adequate time to vote prior, to be the first one to vote on the budget. We need to vote on the 22nd because we, if we don't want, the meetings that we have scheduled are April 22nd and May 6th. Right. Yeah. And you won't be there. Well, we want to be there for, I will be here for April 22nd. You will? Yes. Oh, wait a minute. I'm sorry. That's the one that's close. Yeah, that's one I probably won't be at. But we still have the same problem. We're going to have to be prepared for the. Can I suggest, you know, I know this was not a popular idea, but we may also need to schedule a council meeting on May 29th. May or April? April 29th. So maybe I should explain for the rest of the committee, just so that you know, I feel badly that this happened. But long before we had the election for the council, I scheduled a vacation plan that takes me away for a week in April. And shame on you. I would be flying back international into Logan on the 22nd and predicting the flight being on time, getting through immigration, getting the car and getting out here. It will be very close to where I can be here at 6.30. And participating remotely. And I must have to check into a motel to do it. So I, I'm going to suggest we look at whether or not we schedule. I'm going to suggest that we look at whether or not we schedule an additional council meeting on the 22nd, 29th of April. And that's when we do the regional school budget. That would work really well. Okay. So we'll put that into the report too. Because we want to let them know what our schedule is and what, and how it correlates with the council schedule. And that I think is going to be a major part of the written report to give them for the next council meeting. Meaning the one on Monday? Yes. Okay. I will make the top priority. I think one other option that might be available. I'll have to, we have to calculate the days. If we make March 19th a regional school district budget review, public hearing on the 26th and vote on April 2nd. And that gets that done before you leave town, I believe, Andy. Yes. Can you repeat that? Okay. Looking at March, keeping the dates the same with just different topics. So March 19th would be, we will, if we receive it, if we actually receive it on the 12th, then you would have that to review for the first time on March 19th. Do the public hearing on March 26th. And then, which would be an evening meeting. And then vote on the budget on April 2nd. But I need to see what the, we have to be able to post, we've posted 10 days in advance for the public hearing. But I think we can accomplish that. And then still consider the budget in April on the 22nd. Are we still, that's really a second question. Well, this allows you to be there for the vote on the regional school district budget. Of the. I'm looking at April, I'm sorry. March, March I'm looking at. Now vote of the, if the vote on the budget is April 2nd. And we've moved the hearing to the week, to the 26th. Is that what you said? Then the question, that's one set of questions. I'm sorry. That's the vote of this committee on the second. Yes. And then the issue is when does it come to the council? Right. Then you can schedule whatever you seek that. But the next meeting. Right now we have a period of two weeks because of Patriots Day week. I do not want this to be an issue, but I will not be here. I will participate remotely on the 19th and on the 26th. I forgot about that. And do you feel, I mean, how do you feel about the proposal to have a public hearing and be participating remotely in the public hearing? There's no votes. So it's just a matter of listening. Or watching. Or watching. I don't like it, but I, you know, I'm only one person. I'm only one of 13 counselors. And you're the chair of this committee. But we still could have, I mean, there's still nothing that stops us from having the finance committee vote happen on April 2nd, or on April 9th, rather. That's what I'm just seeing. There's one other date. The 9th is there if you move the others up. Well, of course, the only thing. That was supposed to be actuary and debt, but. Yeah, but we could. But I'm not sure we'll the budget recommendation at that point be a difficult, a long discussion of this committee. I don't know. So you're saying. Do the review. On the 26th to the public hearing on the second and vote on the on the 9th. Yes. Because we will have had substantial discussion of the budget on the 26th. And I think that a lot of questions that we have, we will pose to the superintendent on the 26th. And that date needs to be cleared with him. To make sure this works. But then the. So that will have taken place April 2nd. We have the public hearing to see if the public has any comments that they wish to offer to us about the regional district budget. And then. We, you know, how much. Will we need to discuss after that? Because the budget ultimately is going to be what they propose. You know, it's sort of this. But I'm not sure that what our hearing is going to accomplish, but it's required. The other thing about the 9th in order to fit in the actuarial and the debt. We could go another hour. And just get it all done. Have a hearing and then do the other. The hearing would be on the side. I'm sorry. Have the vote and then do the other. We could do the vote after the hearing for that matter too. Well, certainly you will be able to. Respond to anything that comes. To the extent we can. But I thought that would be the alternative. So I think but you're thinking the better is to do it on the 9th. Yeah. So if we had to, if we do the review on the 26th. We do the public hearing on the 2nd. Which we already had agreed that we could do that in the meeting. Then on the 9th, if we need to go from 3 to 5. So that we can get, do the actuarials. And the debt. And then have our last deliberation and vote. That night. But on that afternoon. Then if we, if the committee wants to take off the 16th and not meet at all. That's what's looking like that we've just read up a week. So we just take it away. Which takes gives us a Patriots Day week. If not only having no. Council meeting bells having no committee meeting. So I think that's, I don't think you're going to see a lot of controversy in the regional school district budget. So I think you're going to see that it's pretty straightforward. There aren't the kinds of cuts that they had to make last year. So I think it'll probably flow pretty quickly. Yeah. Okay. So, so we, so what we'll do is propose to eliminate that one meeting of April 16th, not meet at all. And then the 23rd, you'll be back, tired or back. 23rd, I will be tired. No, I'll be well rested in that. Isn't it the days that you're coming in, landing? No, 22nd. 22nd, okay. If I'm correct that on the April 23rd, you have listed FY19 budget review, conservation and development. Should that be FY20? No. No. What we want to do. That's right. That's right. What we want to do. Let's go back and explain that piece of it. Thank you. The idea was is that to have, to give you the opportunity, and if this doesn't sound like something that would be helpful, say so, but to give you the opportunity to look at some of the budgets from the current year in the current year's budget book and really delve into those for couples, for several departments, not with the, were you thinking of having the department heads here for those or not? I think we had decided not to. I think we had decided not to also, because we don't want to duplicate their time, but to give you the opportunity to really delve into the budgets with Sonia and Paul and get an understanding of how the budget is structured so that when you get the budget document as a whole for FY20, you will have looked at at least a couple of departments and seen how they, how the budget is structured and it will, with the hope that that will make it easier for you to look at the FY20 budget. Yes. This is related, but it may seem off topic. In the new budget, is there a budget line for a finance director? Yes. You just got a preview, none of the rest of us have. That position has been open for a while, right? No, I actually sent it to my son in Switzerland at one point, but it didn't get a bite. We'll pay in Swiss francs. I guess the other thing is as I looked back at this, another thought is for the FY19 budget review, do we really want to spread it over four meetings, or do you think we can do it in two meetings? I'm guessing you can go as fast as you want. If there are detailed questions about departmental budgets that you want to understand in a more deep way, you can do it, but I think, I mean, we're being generous with the time, not knowing how much detail you want to get into, but as Sonia said, she thinks it's, okay, crank through these things quicker than I think you will. So if we're really good on March 12th, we don't have to meet on March 19th. And if we're really good on March, on April 23rd, we don't have to meet on April 30th. Not asking questions. That's my concern. It's doing enough homework before you get in to look at past budgets, so we're really focused. Yeah. I guess the purpose of that is, and you can choose how you want to spend your time. This is about the education piece. And if you say this is not a very efficient way for me to be educated, do something, how about something else, we're open to that. This was an opportunity, without being pressured during that month of May, but delve into the budgets in a little more deeper way. I think it's very helpful. We just see a line and then have it talked about more, or five lines. Much more importantly, we've been carrying those notebooks around for months. I mean, I don't know about you, but I've been building up my muscles, just carrying those things. So we're going to leave it as it is presently stated, with the only changes that we've talked about regarding regional schools. Okay. I guess the only other thing that I can think of in general terms is whether there are other topics that have to do with budget that you feel would be helpful to you to understand where you have come across. Terminology concepts, things that you'd like to have on your Paul or somebody think about how to do a presentation on. I have a couple, but not in an urgent way. I'm not sure where, so we've got enterprise funds. I'm not sure when and where decisions get made on parking fees, on how much we charge for the garage, on rental property permits, and how we oversee those. So the things that we're not specifically looking at, at some point I just like a real briefing on their financial related issues. And do those get reviewed once a year? At what level? Who's making which kinds of decisions? So I just have a better sense of the process. Maybe you can fit that in on March 19th when we talk about enterprise funds. Because it feeds in, well, not directly to buses and how much we put into a bus system. So there's a bunch of things that are relatively small in terms of dollars, but affect people. Well, I think that what we should probably do your point about enterprise funds is a good time to do. Parking makes sense. Other kinds of fees that get charged for inspections and things like that, we should probably just build into the appropriate budget presentation. So when we're talking about the inspections. Some of it I'm not even questioning the level so much as wanting to understand when and how those decisions are made. And then if you wanted to have a different policy, you and I talked about it really early on on rental properties. But where and how are what kinds of decisions being made? Yeah. So as I said Andy, it's less urgent than the big picture budget. But it is a good time to build it in. And I think that it can be. There's a general concept that fees have to be commensurate with the service that is being delivered so that if we're charging for an electrical inspection, we can't price the electrical inspection to a point where we're making a profit and turn it into a profit making enterprise. That would be contrary to state law. But how those fees are set is a different question. And then in investor owned rental property that's being rented out, we're charging a permit fee to have it. But what's also part of financing, making sure they're keeping it up to code. It's an interrelated policy. It's not just like making sure your circuitry isn't going to blow up your house. So there's one other thing that I wanted to do before we go and this is back to education. This is two pieces that hand out some copies again in two different directions. This one you've seen many times, or wait a minute, the other one, this one you've seen many times that I'm handing out second. Okay. This is the one in the other one is the consolidated budget. And Sonia was going to just walk us through and explain what the difference is between these two pages that you're looking at because one is the budget that you've been seeing in prior meetings and the other is a budget that is really the consolidated budget that includes the enterprise funds. We've talked a little bit about how the enterprise funds fit into the whole budget, and I wanted to give you an opportunity to sort of see the entire picture in not just the piece that is funded by the other portions, taxation and state aid. So basically this is an expansion of the revenue side. It expands the revenue and then it, you can go ahead. It also expands the expenditure side. It's all in one page. So enterprise funds are not the same as enterprise zones, I'm assuming. Okay, I thought that's... You want to explain enterprise funds just in case? Wasn't on? No, it was. No, wait, echo. Does everybody get that? So the consolidated budget is what's actually is closer to reality. It's with the, all the numbers in here are pretty much what we ended up with. The only things that change are the revenues until the tax rate is set, because there's always a huge calculation when you're doing the tax rate and there's rounding and all that, so the numbers change a little bit in the revenue side. But all of the expenditures should reflect pretty much everything that town meeting voted less anything they might have not voted. But the other general fund is the revenues and expense projection for this fiscal year, and this is the one that was in the October indicators report. Again, the stress that these numbers are not fine, all these numbers change almost daily now as we get more information. So I'm not sure what more you were looking for me to do here. Yeah, I don't... I think that the thing that was... I realized is a complication and I just wanted to make sure that you had... that it was understood is that what you'd been looking at in that thing that began in October has to do with the general fund. And the general fund includes what the town departments are doing, the schools and the library, and then capital and bond that's not related to other things. Right, so if you look on the expenditure side of that general fund report, you'll see that there is the town operating budget, elementary schools, region, and library tax support. And then we go to the capital section, and that's where we're paying for all those big capital projects out of. And it's 9.5% of the prior year levy that we have, and then we pay the debt out of there, and the remainder is what we call cash capital. Of course, the more debt service you have to pay, the less cash capital you have for cruisers and ambulances and things like that. The second sheet is a consolidated budget that includes everything that the town takes in and spends. And it then adds all those other columns, the Community Preservation Act, the four enterprise funds, which are the next four columns, water, sewer, solid waste, and transportation, and then they become combined. And this one, the way they had set, the finance committee set it up, is it did a comparison to the prior year, which is what those last columns are. But we tend to times to forget that, because we spent so much time talking about the general fund, that there really are other pieces to the budget, and there's a little bit of overlap, not a tremendous amount, but there is an overlap and just wanted to at least start introducing the concept to you so that you realize that the consolidated budget is larger than the general fund budget. So how do, well, we'll get to it when you do the enterprise funds. I have, you know, if I read down, I'll just take the one that has the most zeros, and it's easier to look at the transportation fund, where it's got 1.1 million coming in. And then I can see an expenditure line, and I see a couple others, but they don't add up to the 1.1 coming in. So does it accumulate reserves in the fund? If I just going down, it's 1.1 million, then it's minus 579, and then it's minus, you know, another 100. You know, it's adding up to something less than 1.1. So do these funds accumulate reserves? It should be adding up to the same amount. It should all the way come all the way back up to 1.1. Okay, so I just didn't, I did it too quickly. But there is. There's other amounts of went down expenditures. Yes, so it's just... The other amounts to be raised would be the admin fees that the enterprise funds pay the general fund for a portion of the town manager's time. Okay, so those are, okay. So some of these other things are expenditures. They're just not labeled in quite that way. It's subtracting off the revenues. But there is a, there isn't a, in essence, a reserve fund. It's not called that. Retained earnings. In the enterprise funds? In the enterprise funds. The technical term is retained earnings. It's the equivalent of free cash in the general fund. And so there is a balance for each of them. And in some years, we will have revenue and expense discrepancies and intentionally budget from retained earnings. Yes. But these are budgets. So they have to balance to zero. In's and out's have to balance. But the reality is sometimes we take in more revenue. Sometimes we take in less. Sometimes we spend less. Sometimes we have to spend more and get another... Appropriation, thank you. Supplemental, that's the word. Appropriation on top of that. So yeah, it does end up building reserves. And they have to be isolated for each of the funds. And, you know, one of the problems that we've always been looking at is the smallest one is a solid waste fund. And the solid waste fund has been at various times in precarious state. It is our problem, child, yes. Yes. Okay. So I think we're pretty well done. Thank you, Paul. The only other thing we need to do quickly, Andy, is the minutes just on a... Yes. So we can post them. So I think I'll leave it now for now on this. But when we come back in future meetings, we'll see you have questions. Quick question. I don't know if this is the right time to ask this, but what is the reason for not making our properties that are rented as commercial? I believe everything, even if it's... I think that's a question for the assessor. I don't have the answer to that. Okay. So we'll return to that if it becomes helpful. And at some point, I think that you will want to talk a little bit more about this at least at the time we presented with the Enterprise Funds and also the Community Preservation Act because there's a question about the relationship between this Community Preservation Act and the capital. And that has to be understood. So the last thing we want to take care of is we have two sets of minutes that have been submitted. And I just have to make sure I find the right ones. January 22nd, if I'm correct. February 12th. And I pretty much want to thank both of the people who took these minutes. So it might be worth just seeing if there's a motion to accept the minutes or if there's any... I'll make a motion to accept the minutes. I'll make a motion to accept the February 22nd set of minutes, which was on the station bridge on the road. January. Oh, January. Wrong gate. January 22nd. January 22nd. Are there any corrections, changes proposed for those minutes of January 22nd being done? Then all in favor of accepting the minutes. So it's five to zero. And going to the next minutes. I know there's some changes here that people have written, but we've not made them. Okay, I'm looking to see. This is minutes of February 12th. February 12th. Where are the changes? Kathy, you didn't change anything once I sent these to you, right? No. Okay. So one of them is under item eight. It's Dave Murphy. That was the only thing I told you that his name wasn't right. So I don't think I edited it though. Dave Murphy. Yep. Okay. And then, Shalini, you had something else. And where was that? So do we want to hold the minutes or shall we go ahead with the motion and vote on it? I move that the minutes be accepted with the change to be found at a later date. I'm going to ask, there's two places I had yellow, and I was looking for clarification. One is under E1C. Discuss the overall process of the finance committee in relationship to capital projects. I guess that's three. I don't know why I highlighted it. Take it off. Okay. Are you highlighted? Yeah, I didn't either. Okay. And then the other one was down below, Andy. It's where we talk about the May 6th, and it's actually May 6th presentation to the council. Already referred to the finance committee. I didn't know what I was talking about. Maybe it was, you were thinking in terms of exactly what you said a few minutes ago regarding the regional school budget is whether there's an automatic referral. Right. So it would be presentation to the town council automatically referred to the finance committee. Automatically. Send them back, or send them to Sonia, right? Yeah. So what do you want to do? Turn it into a question? Those are friendly heads. And was there a title for Sean's presentation? Draft Capital Project Plan? Or... He... The actual physical is when Sean said the title of the thing that he... We called it Capital Project Modeling. So I... You know, he's not... He's been showing us the model he's building. This is under handbooks. Yeah. So Capital Project Modeling. Anything else? Yeah. One town... One town, one planned. The official name of the document is that one... You know, I saved it in the drive too. So we have something that if we want to post it with the agenda in the minutes we've got. The interactive... The interactive thing that just has that title, Dorothy, he starts with those first couple pages and then suddenly we're in the modeling. And so it's just... He calls it Workbook. Includes the Capital Modeling. Okay. Great. I move that we accept the minutes. I second it. So we have a motion... It was shown as a motion made vital in seconded by Kathy to accept the minutes. All in favor. All rides and hands. Okay. So everybody has an agreement on that. And the other thing I will note... We do need to make a decision. I think you have to... that the Acting Clerk should decide whether you have comfort level to take up the protocol and that was posed yesterday by Margaret H מס. For a simple five minutes. for future, or whether you are going to use your own format. So I clarified with Margaret, because Shellen and I both used a model of minutes that exactly followed your agenda. So if there was an agenda item, we had that as the topic. And I asked her whether it was OK to use that as opposed to the town council agenda items where we didn't have them. And she said, absolutely. So it's just, you know, topic one, topic two. So each of the, it followed along the agenda. Now, of course, we had kind of easy agendas when we were first doing it. We were talking about the bridge project and then some other things. But it's, you know, members present, members absent, members of the public there. So she looked at the one we'd done and said it was basically exactly what she wanted, you know. So she's not holding to using that model that she presented just so that the minutes cover all of the things that are required by the open meeting law. And I think the idea was the minute should follow the agenda. So if the agenda had those topics on it, it should have a topic line, you know. But it didn't have any of the other things because we don't have new business, old business, reports of committees. You know, we don't have some of the things that town council has. Yeah, because we are committee. Okay, so I think that where we're saying is each person who volunteers to do the minutes should do it in a format that's both comfortable for them to write it in the most efficient manner. And I assume that you know what everybody knows what the open meeting law requirements are for what's included in the minutes at the time. Get a tan. Well, that means we'll save it up and on. It doesn't mean you go tighter. No, you just, we're saying is do it in a manner that's comfortable for the person writing the minutes each and just so that you cover the required pieces. This, if you could give me this redone. Yes, we'll. That would be attached. I think Paul will redo it. Dorothy, once that's redone, I think you can just say we reviewed, you know, an agenda for the next several months and you don't have to go into all the dates and stuff. You know, and then it'll be an attached agenda. That was way too complex a discussion to summarize. Yeah, I think that what we can do is get the rise schedule and see if we can get that to the council. Be useful. And I noticed JCPC posted theirs under the JCPC site, which I think people found useful. You know, it was just a link document, the people could see when are you meeting on what? Well, I think it's not complicated to do the revisions and it's a spreadsheet, basically. So with that, I think we're, is there anything else that people want to mention, anything not anticipated? Well, I still have a question. I will send this to you on a committee. Before the committee was finalized, I send it to you for additions and corrections. Isn't that great? Or do I just send it forward to Margaret and then? No, no, you have to, we all have to all have to see it. So what we've been doing is sending it to Andy first and then. Okay, so it's to Andy, great. Yeah. And if there's a mistake in there, you can finish that. What? I send it to everybody. Yeah, and Lynn sent it to everyone and it didn't, I don't think it really matters. You could send it to all of us and then you can collect our comments. Okay, then once that is done, I put the word approved on it, I send it to Margaret. Then you, well, my request, since right now I'm gonna stay as the keeper of SharePoint, is send it to me so I can put it in the folder called approved because she asked us to have an archive that's always there and Sonya can help do the posting of it but that we have a folder called approved minutes. Okay, that's good. Yeah, Sonya. And that's where they become pieces. I just would like to request it being sent to me as well so that I can post it on the website. Yeah, like I just, because people are used to looking at the website. Absolutely, so go. Send it to the two of you. Yeah, you know, so just it goes into the SharePoint and stays there. Okay, so anything else? I'm anticipated, then is there a motion to adjourn? There is a motion, is that all in favor? Make a motion to adjourn. I think we're adjourned at 4.30.