Town Council - Regular Meeting

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Time being 6.01. I call the May 20th, 226. Reporting in progress. They do that to me every time. I should know that. Okay. A note to residents. All citizens are welcome to attend public meetings. Meetings in person. To view the live meeting remotely, citizens are encouraged to watch the live stream on Franklin Town Hall TV YouTube channel or the live broadcast on Comcast Channel 9 and Verizon Channel 29. To listen to the meeting remotely, citizens may call in using the number 1929- To participate in the meeting remotely, citizens may join the Zoom webinar. Meetings are recorded and archived by Franklin TV on the Franklin Town Hall TV YouTube channel and shown on repeat on Comcast Channel 9 and Verizon Channel 29. Zoom webinar ID number is 837-3088-5535. Any participants who wish to speak must enter their full name and address when joining the webinar. All participants will be automatically muted upon joining the webinar. In order to speak, participants will need to select the raise hand function to be requested to be unmuted. All speakers will be required to state their full name and street address before commenting. Announcements from the chair. The meeting is being recorded by Franklin TV, Comcast Channel 9, and Verizon Channel 29. This meeting may be recorded by others. chair will identify uh council morangelo is a little under the weather so he's he's compete uh gonna be on zoom for the meeting tonight i see him there you're there right max there you go i'm here upcoming Town sponsors events. The Memorial Day parade is scheduled for this upcoming Monday, May 25th at 11 a.m., beginning at the Franklin Middle School and ending at the Franklin Town Common. The full parade route is available on the town website on franklinmass.gov. The Memorial Day ceremony will be held at 12 p.m. at the World War I Memorial on the Town Common, immediately following the parade. In the event of inclement weather, updates and cancellations notices will be posted on the Town Veterans Service webpage. In June, market calendars, so weekly farmers market begins on Friday, June 5th on the Town Common. Farmer's markets are held every Friday, June through October from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. on the town common. Franklin's Restaurant Week is taking place from May 31st through June 6th. All are encouraged to get out, support, and celebrate Franklin's local restaurant scene. More information can be found on the town website. Franklin's third annual porch fest which is taking place on Saturday June 6th 12 p.m. to 6 p.m. throughout the cultural district bands will be performing performing on residents porches in a few other favorite local spots rain date is Sunday June 7th Franklin downtown partnership Annual Strawberry Stroll is taking place in downtown Franklin on Friday, June 12th from 4 p.m. to 6 p.m. Rain date is Saturday, June 13th. Town office hours are being held at the Senior Center tomorrow, 5.21 at 8.30 a.m. Tonight I have one more item to add to the announcement from the Chair. We have a surprise proclamation to present. Council Griffin will announce tonight the proclamation recipient and invite her up front for the presentation. I didn't see her. She hasn't? Oh, okay. Go ahead. Thank you. Yeah, we'll do the play.

Callie Keating, could you come up here, please? Yay!

Yay!

All right. This is a proclamation from the town of Franklin honoring Callie Keating on being named a 2026 Commonwealth Heroine. Whereas being named a Commonwealth Heroine is an honor awarded to women in Massachusetts who are recognized as outstanding leaders and contributors to their community and the Commonwealth. These women don't always make the news, but they truly make a difference by using their time, talent, spirit, and enthusiasm to enrich the lives of others in their communities. And whereas each year, the Commission on the Status of Women partners with state legislators to identify women across the Commonwealth whose tremendous contributions have made a significant impact on the betterment of their communities. And whereas Callie Keating, Franklin Public Library's Youth Services Librarian, was nominated by State Representative Jeffrey Roy to be recognized as a member of the Commonwealth Heroines Class of 2026, and has been officially selected by the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women to receive this award. Now, therefore, be it known that Callie Keating, Franklin Public Library's Youth Services Librarian, is hereby commended and recognized by the Town Council of the Town of Franklin for her dynamism, passion, dedication, and extraordinary service to the Franklin community.

Thank you.

Congratulations.

Before I go any further, can we please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance? Citizens' comments. Citizens are welcome to express their views for up to three minutes on a matter that is not on the agenda in compliance with Chapter 38, Section 20, the Open Meeting Law. The council cannot engage in a dialogue or comment on a matter raised during citizens' comments. The council may ask the town administrator to review the matter Nothing herein shall prevent the town administrator from correcting a misstatement of fact. Is there anybody in the audience who would like to speak on council comments? Please just state your name and address, please.

Good evening. My name is Lynn O'Brien, and I live at 16 Holmes Ave. here in Franklin. As chair of the Franklin Council on Aging Board, I wanted to take a quick moment to share some exciting community news from the Franklin Senior Center. We are three days into the fifth annual Senior Olympics. I know it may seem surprising to already be talking about this event in May. We moved the games up this year to avoid the hot June weather. Apparently just in time for this week's heat wave. Community participation has already exceeded expectations with 102 individual athletes registered for 379 event sign-ups. And participation continues to grow as more residents sign up. Monday's opening ceremony welcomes 73 people under the beautiful new pavilion to celebrate fitness, friendship, and healthy aging together, and to watch some incredibly athletic dogs. There is still time to join the fun with upcoming events including bocce, cornhole, cribbage. That's at tomorrow at 1 o'clock. I'm in that tournament. but I never win because people really know how to play that game. Wow. Puzzle Wars, music trivia, axe throwing, billiards, and the two-mile relay field goal kick, Scrabble noodle hockey, which I hear is the most happiest moment of most people's lives, if you join, and darts. We are so proud of the success so far and encourage everyone to come participate, cheer people on, and celebrate this wonderful community tradition. Thank you.

Thank you. Awesome. Is there anybody else in the audience? Anybody on Zoom land? Okay, moving on. Council comments. Council Malloy.

Thank you, sir. My only comment again is for the last couple of weeks is hope everybody can attend the Memorial Day events on Monday. Wonderful day to be in Franklin and it's a Very powerful ceremony, so I hope to see a big crowd.

Thank you.

In our last meeting, our last session, Cindy Chow brought up the Women's Expo and mammogram availability. Some people know I did get some bad news in my family this week, and I just wanted to reiterate the importance of getting checked out, particularly for women. Yeah, for anyone. But to the extent that you have an opportunity to take advantage of the Women's Expo and get a mammogram or just get checked out, please do so. That's all I've got.

Thank you.

I don't have anything except to remind everyone about the Women's Expo and also... I was going to say that I know everyone is here for the budget hearing, but it's really nice to have a room full of people. It's been very quiet, so I'm really glad that you all are here. And I encourage more people to come and join us, because otherwise it gets very quiet. That's all.

Thank you.

No comments tonight. Thank you.

Max? Max? Hey, just wanted to give a shout out to the Franklin Children's Museum, who's going to be opening a new outdoor space in June, as well as the new Amazing Airways exhibit funded, which is a memory of longtime Franklin resident and volunteer Peter Brunelli. So just a shout out to them. That's all I got. Thanks, Max.

Jane? Only really not too much to say except This is the letter to support trying to get that bill for the SROs back onto the table. Okay. So if everybody will please give me your John Hancock, I'd be thrilled. Okay. Thank you. No problem. That's all I got for now.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. First off, I think I'm concerned about axe throwing happening at the same time. We better make sure to have some paramedics on hand just in case. Although, all kidding aside, it sounds like a great event. Thank you for the update. Wanted to give a shout out to all the volunteers who once again worked this weekend to beautify downtown. The flowers are beautiful. And thank you Corey Shea and the Cultural District and Council for that great addition of the artwork on the fence. I think that's a great way to highlight local artists without them having to sacrifice their work. I commented... a number of months ago about civility and about how sometimes these discussions can be hard and sometimes these things can get emotional. So I hope tonight that because we're gonna be delving into the budget and we're gonna be talking about everybody's fighting for their jobs and fighting for their departments and fighting for what they think is the most important thing that we can just all remember to keep it cool and that we are all friends and we're all neighbors and that we will get through this one way or another and that we're all trying our best for the best of Franklin.

So that's all I have, Mr. Chairman. Thank you.

Okay, thanks. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Just a couple of items. Number one is, again, Memorial Day. Second, what Steve says, hope to see a lot of people out for Memorial Day. this coming Monday. And the second thing is that Jane has talked me into doing the kickball on the 14th, so I will be joining that event.

So that's all for me. Thanks. Fortunately or fortunately, I will be away the 14th, so I can't join. I'm sorry. But I wanted to give... The Ferraro family, I know Mrs. Ferraro passed away 96 years old, and they've had a store in town for I don't know how many years. As long as I've been around, so it's like 65 years. She was a sweetheart of a lady, so I want to reach out to them and my condolences to that family. Okay. Okay. All right. Moving on. Subcommittee reports. Joint subcommittee. Next meeting. Do you have a date on that, Ken?

We don't have a date for the next meeting.

It's all the same with EDC? I don't think we have a next meeting, but we did meet our, I was not there, but the other members did meet last Thursday, so if they wanted to give a brief update, they certainly, I'll defer to Steve and Caroline. Sure.

We had a presentation from the professor from UMass Boston on the potential, for having them evaluate downtown Franklin and applying their urban planning skills and designs and thoughts to ways we can develop that area. It was a bit of an abbreviated conversation. We had some Zoom technical issues, but productive in the half an hour or so that we had, and I think the committee was very much in support of it for both phases. We talked about an initial phase this fall and then the second phase next winter. So by this time next year, we'll have their recommendations and hopefully benefit from the skills and experience and training that those folks have in furtherance of what we might be able to do to further develop downtown and maybe even other areas within that general area. That was very good, good conversation.

Can't hear it. Is that it? Yeah, thank you. So that's EDC communication.

No further updates.

So you have a meeting on May 28th? May 28th. May 28th. uh town charter ad hoc committee we our first meeting will be june 24th at 6 p.m and police station it has to be determined okay town administrators report jamie all good all good that was quick Two of these? A lot of other things to do. Yeah, I guess. Proclamations we already did. It's the new me, Ted. I don't know. I'm a little stumped. I am, too. That's why I'm slowing down here a little bit. Just in case he changes his mind. Approval of minutes, we have none. Appointments, we have none. Public hearing, we have one. On license modification, change of license manager, change of LLC members, and change of pledge of license to Franklin Shed, LLC, Franklin Shed location at 340 East Central Street, Franklin, Mass, 0203. I open up the public meeting. Read the license transaction, please.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. This is a license modification, change of LLC managers, change of LLC members, and change of pledge of license. For Franklin Shed LLC, doing business as Franklin Shed, located at 340 East Central Street in Franklin, 02038. Franklin Shed, LLC, DBA, Franklin Shed, located at 340 East Central Street, Franklin, Mass. 02038 is seeking the approval for multiple modifications of their section 12 restaurant all alcoholic beverage license to include a change of LLC managers, change of LLC members, and change of pledge of license. All town departments have signed off on this application. So the motion is to approve.

No motion right now. No, no motion. Oh, sorry.

We have to go now. Sorry.

Did you declare the public hearing open?

Yes, I did declare it open. They're attorneys. They're attorneys here. Rich, you want to? Sure.

Good evening, Mr. Chairman, members of the council. My name is Richard Cornetta. I'm the attorney for the Franklin Shed LLC. Joining me tonight, we have Saeed Azhar and Mike Barker back there. Those are two of the four owners of the restaurant. For those of you who may not know, it is a gastropub here right across the street. I'm sure you're familiar with. It's been open since 2021. We were back before the council last year with some ownership changes, and that's all we're doing here tonight. Basically, two of the members are... selling and transferring their, or proposing to transfer their interest to the remaining existing two members. So they will be going down to two. So four owners down to two. And we'll be changing the state LLC records to reflect that so that we have four acting managers of the LLC. We'll be changing that down to two, which would be the two remaining owners. I think the only twist for tonight is the third modification. In order to achieve this, the two purchasing members are seeking financing through the Small Business Administration administered through Rockland Trust. That's where most of the money is coming from to make this exchange go through. And Rockland Trust has asked in accordance with Mass General Laws Chapter 138, Section 23, as part of the collateral package to seek your permission to pledge the license as collateral for the loan in addition to the other collateral that is being offered from the restaurant. I would note that this pledge would not abrogate the town's ability or control to revoke, suspend, or otherwise oversee the license as you currently do, but it is a fairly typical request of Rockland Trust, and that's why we're here this evening. Certainly, if you have any questions about the transaction, we're here to answer it, and I have the $2,000 show up just in case it was above my pay grade.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Rich. I guess I'll go to the public. Does anybody have any questions? I'll go to the council. Anybody have any questions?

No, sir. I do have one question. This feels fairly straightforward, if I'm being honest. But I would like to just better understand what, you know, by taking this approach, what are the limitations? How does that impact the town, or does it?

You're talking about the pledge of license?

Yes.

All right, so... If it's being used as security, however, it's subject to town approval. So if they defaulted on the loan and the Rockland Trust found a prospective buyer, it would still be subject to the town's approval at that point. They don't have a right to unilaterally place.

Okay, so I was just saying that Yeah, so it doesn't really change anything, because even without Rockland Trust, they would need our approval. Right. Okay. Okay. And it's just saying that we're going through that route. Okay. Thanks.

All right, so I'll declare the public hearing closed. We're going to go right to the license transaction before we get into the other. So, Mark, we've got to go to... LICENSED TRANSACTIONS CHANGE LLC MANAGED TO CHANGE OF CHANGE OF LLC MEMBERS AND CHANGE A PLEDGE OF LICENSE TO FRANKLIN SHED LLC DOING BUSINESS AS FRANKLIN SHED LOCATED AT 340 EAST CENTRAL STREET, FRANKLIN, MASS.

NOW WE HAVE A MOTION.

Mr. Chairman, the motion is to approve the request by Franklin Shedd, LLC, DBA Franklin Shedd for a change of LLC managers, change of LLC members, and change of pledge of license. It's dated May 20th, 2026. Second.

Second. I have a motion to second discussion. We have to roll call vote with a match.

Councilor Rajuku? Yes. Councilor Marangelo?

Yes.

Councilor Malloy? Yes. Councilor Blank? Yes. Councilor Griffith?

Yes.

Councilor Callaway-Tripp? Yes. Myself, yes. Councilor Grella? Yes. And Mr. Chairman?

Yes. 9-0. 9-0 motion passed. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, moving on. Here we go. I'm opening up the public hearing for the FY27 Town Council annual operating budget hearing. I can read all these. All of them.

FY27 voting document.

FY27 Town Administrator budget message. A town administrator recommendation? You don't need to do all that. I didn't think so. All right, so the hearing is open. We'll go to the public first before we go to... Nobody?

There's a couple of folks on Zoom land.

unmute them get you there hello hello there hi who's it rose go ahead rose go ahead rose just okay just state your name name and address please

Sure. My name is Rose Marino. I live at 26 Madison Ave in Franklin. Okay. I just, I was recently sadly told that the library would not have Sunday hours this summer because it was not in the budget. I would really like the council to reconsider this because the library is a very valuable part of downtown Franklin and being open on Sundays would benefit all Franklin residents and their friends and family. For example, I recently had relatives come from California, and what did they want to do? They wanted to go to downtown Franklin and explore. And where did they spend most of their time? At the Franklin Library, exploring the Benjamin Franklin books and the artwork and architecture. THEY JUST LOVED IT THERE. I JUST THINK IT'S SAD THAT THERE WON'T BE SUNDAY HOURS. I WAS SURPRISED, ACTUALLY, BECAUSE USUALLY EVERY SUMMER THE HOURS GET EXTENDED INTO SUNDAYS. SO I JUST REALLY WOULD LIKE YOU TO RECONSIDER THAT IF POSSIBLE.

THANK YOU, ROSE.

I THINK IT'S KIP BRADY, BOBBY.

WHO IS IT? YEAH.

Am I on?

Yep. Can you state your name and address, please?

Kit Brady, Kimberly Avenue, Franklin. Tonight I commented as a citizen of Franklin and not as a member of the various Franklin committees and boards on which I serve as a volunteer. However, I must say that in my contact with various town and school departments during my service on these committees, and in general, I found nearly all employees to be hardworking, diligent, thorough, and responsive. In my experience, I see our leaders such as Jamie Holland and Lucas Jagir particularly ubiquitous in their appearances at meetings at all hours of the day and night in their various roles, and town and school staff working equally hard throughout the day and night. We're fortunate to have town and school staff so dedicated to providing top-notch services, constantly doing more with less. A good indicator of the worthiness of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable members. Like any community, Franklin's most vulnerable are our older adults and our children. And our senior center and public schools are prime examples of providing great bang for the buck. The enthusiasm and initiative shown by Sarah Amaral and her staff at the senior center are infectious, as Lynn pointed out earlier in the citizens' comments. And one only needs to spend a day over there to see the magic that these folks are producing daily. Likewise, seeing the constant high performance of Franklin's public school students when compared to the peers in other communities is inspiring. Franklin works hard to protect our most vulnerable, despite limited resources. Despite Franklin's town and school services continually giving Great Bank for the buck, we still hear people in the general public and on appointed committees and elected positions telling our departments to cut the fat or do more with less, or that some departments are nice to have rather than need to have. I trust our department heads, experts in their fields, to determine what their departments need and eliminated the wants years ago. Franklin has been cutting the fat for over 20 years, which has resulted in not only cutting the fat, cutting in the muscle and bone to the point that we're now removing entire limbs. These continuing service cuts affect our most vulnerable, particularly our older adults and our children. Franklin, the first of many towns to be named after Benjamin Franklin, is also the birthplace of Horace Manns, the father of public education in the United States. These men tied to our town were devoted to helping vulnerable through their advocacy. I wonder what they'd say about our town now if we could ask them through a magical emoji board. Hopefully, as we start this year's celebration of our founding fathers like Ben Franklin and our own Horace Mann's dedication to education as the great equalizer, our town will draw inspiration to provide our town the resources that it needs to serve us. I hope the Town Council keeps these considerations in mind as we move forward, not backward, as a town. Thank you.

Is there somebody else up there?

No, they're just... No, excuse me. She's taking her hand out.

We can raise our comments and questions in the departments to speak, right?

But you're still going to... All right, so I declare the public hearing closed. Oh, no. I actually do have to work tonight at 11. So we've got to get out of here.

Withdraw that declaration.

I retract. I rescind my declaration. I'm sorry about that. It's death. So Jamie. Quick comment? Yeah.

Thanks, Mr. Chairman. So just going to give everybody a few budget updates. I just thought before we get into things, good evening, everyone. Just have a few updates as the council budget hearings commence. And just a couple of quick comments before all of you ask your questions of the department head. First, I just want to thank all the folks in this room and then all the town staff and school staff who aren't here. Kip Rady could not have summarized my comments, so he's going to save me a minute from having to comment what he just said. I just want to thank our finance team. I want to thank the school business administrator and their finance team, the school and town HR departments. It's a small staff, but we produce a tremendous amount of material. It's been a long process to get to this point. I just want to thank all of them, Carrie, Evan, Johnna, Karen, Ken, Shannon, Linda, everybody on the staff on our finance teams for their incredible job. I want to thank all the department heads, obviously. They do a lot of this work and there's a lot of other staff within their departments that do a tremendous job. It's not just preparing the budget documents for the finance committee or the town council meetings, but it's also their ability to manage the public's money throughout the entire fiscal year. They do a tremendous job. That's why the town of Franklin is a triple bond rated agency. That's why we have glistening financial audits. That's why we have great financial policies and just want to thank them for all of their incredible work. i also want to thank all of our elected and appointed boards for all their diligence this year there's been greater participation than we've ever seen i've seen a lot of faces at meetings i've seen them on zoom i've heard comments i've had meetings with people it just is really really refreshing to see such an engagement from all of the town councillors the finance committee members the council and aging the library board of directors the school committee uh you know all of our boards have been more engaged than they've ever been and so i just want to thank them for all their hard work and time As many of you will probably point out later, many of the people that you see up here tonight are doing this for free. This is volunteerism. They're putting their own hours of their own life and sacrificing time with their families. and just want to thank them for all their hard work. I want to give a special shout out that many of you have given, but I think we're all going to say it a bunch of times, but a huge shout out to the finance committee, the chairman, George Connolly, is here tonight. A 17 and a half hour debate that's not any fringe. It was 17 and a half hours, six hours, four, four, and four, four nights in a row. It was a marathon, and while many previous finance committees have looked plenty under the hood, Okay, we have looked at the chassis, the engine, we've taken apart the car and put it back. What the finance committee did this year was completely next level. They completely killed it. And I'll address another point of my budget revision in a moment of what they did. I want to thank them for their incredible process to go through that incredible week of going line item by line item and asking a lot of questions of our departments. I hope everybody here had some time to look through that. One more point I want to mention is thank you again to all of our staff. Yet again, I feel like I've been here, this is my 11th or 12th budget here, and my first budget was when I was here, the budget was on like two pages. and the budget document was almost nonexistent. Your agendas did not have links, they did not have anything attached to them, they didn't have a website, and every single year what we try to do is continually improve. We hear a lot of buzzwords about waste, fraud, transparency, all the time. I hope that we can come to some conclusion soon through this process that we are exceptionally transparent. For the public that's watching at home, go to franklinma.gov, town budget, every single municipal salary, the base salary, stipends, overtime, hours they work, position titles, comp plans, budget narratives, what the strategic initiatives are. I've put my budget out this year earlier than I ever have. I've given the community more opportunity to ask questions, and they have. But I just want to make sure that I recognize that as we move forward, every year we continue to make things better, make it more accessible, provide more data, and this year is no different than any other. And I just want to thank everybody for their tremendous, tremendous hard work. Over the next couple nights, just a few points. One, obviously as we just heard, these are public hearings, and so one of the goals this next two nights is to hear from the public if anyone has any comments. Number two, just to make sure, because I did get questions before the meeting, there are no budget votes tonight or tomorrow. As I've said many times for the last several months, You know, we anticipate the final budget vote on June 10th. Night one tonight, as Councilor Griffith mentioned, all the department heads and a lot of the support staff and other board members are here from other committees. This is the excellent opportunity for all of you to unpack all of your research, because I know all of you have read through the budget very diligently. You've done a lot of research. Many of us have had lunches together and meetings. and emails, this is now your moment to be able to tap into the department heads tonight to ask your questions and get clarity on any of the ideas that you make. And then also, tomorrow night, in working with the chair, we hope that tomorrow night, many of the councilors yourselves, obviously if there are other questions, we'll answer them, but I think tomorrow offers a really great opportunity for the community and the staff to hear from the town council and how you prepare and look at this budget moving forward. By note, a few dates just coming up, again to be clear and transparent to everybody. As I've said many times, I will have a revised town administrator budget ready for Friday, May 29th. That's a week from this Friday. it will be in the packet for the finance committee for their following meeting on June 3rd in which the finance committee will do another review in one night, not for George, but one night to look at all the updated numbers. As part of the budget process, just for the community, I say probably every year and with a lot of new members, I just want to make sure it's out there. This is the start of FY27. We haven't collected any money yet. We haven't started spending any money yet. This is just a blueprint. There's some ballot questions that are on the ballot in November that could affect the budget. There are state revenue issues that could affect the budget. There are geopolitical issues that could affect it. There could be economic factors that project it. So we're just starting. So I just want to remind everybody, tonight's just the beginning. It's a great opportunity to get an idea of what's coming up. But we have revised maybe about a dozen different accounts. Some accounts went up, some accounts went down. And we have not received the final GIC numbers yet from the state. And so I don't have any specifics, obviously, for you tonight. But on Friday, May 29, next Friday, I will release the revised TA budget. And then on June 3rd, the Finance Committee will review that revised budget, and then within anticipation on June 10th, that the Town Council will review that as well. Additionally, on June 17th, I expect, if there's any excess free cash, if there's an ability to do Capital Tier 2 and Tier 3, and also, because it will be long, the slate of projects recommended by the Community Preservation Committee this past Monday, I expect all of those issues to be on June 17th. There's only so much you can do each night, And so working through the chair, we're just trying to equalize out all the votes and all the material. On June 10th, if you look back to last year's budget, you will also have a bunch of other resolutions on revolving funds and just standard things that you're going to look at. Plus tomorrow night, you're going to be looking at the fees bylaw, which will also have a second vote on June 10th. So just to give you a sample of some of the changes, state aid assumptions will likely change. Huge shout out to Rep Roy and Senator Rauch. They heard your calls, they heard your advocacy, and so state aid will be increased in some capacity, which will help reduce the amount of money that we have to use of free cash. So that's really good news. I don't have final Senate numbers, because Senator Rauch is literally debating the budget, I think, at the State House right now and tomorrow, so we'll have a check-in next week on that. Also, a few counts, certainly you're going to see more savings. In some accounts, you're going to see some small increases like animal control and the MEC that I kind of alerted the community to earlier. And we're also seeing a big bump for the Tri-County School. And then we're going to see, we're going to have revised new growth numbers in that budget as well. I don't expect a lot, but if there's support from the council, especially for the administrative position. for the assessor's office, we're gonna work with them to try to do that as well. One other thing we're gonna propose, just to give you some samples so everyone has an understanding of what's going on, we're gonna propose that if the council will support any of the new restored positions, what we're going to do is propose those to start on October 1st, right? Because there's absolutely no way we can hire any of those positions if you approve them on July 1. So it does reduce the number of the deficit, you know, enough that makes a difference. And so we're going to make some proposals like that. So ultimately, without getting in, those are just some samples, those aren't all of them, but when you aggregate it all up, my hope is, is that by the time the numbers come out, the amount of free cash, that the council will be in front of them on a final budget will hopefully be reduced by about 20%. Probably a little bit more, maybe a little bit less, depending on how some of the numbers come out from the Senate budget today, and a couple other decisions. But we're looking at hopefully about a million and a half free cash that would be needed to plug the budget deficit. So all of that is hopefully excellent news. We are still working on our healthcare deficit issue as we get closer to the end of the fiscal year. Obviously, the elephant in the room is gonna be that deficit, but I will let everybody know that I will have a strategy with the team to present to the Finance Committee on June 3rd, and that strategy will not affect the operating budget, so it will be completely separate. So if people are really out there and want to pay attention to the budget, certainly the next three weeks if you've passed on the previous eight months, this is really the time to get engaged and to try to get community members educated at the Finance Committee on June 3rd. despite all this my hope is is that we will still have an amount of free cash remaining for possibly some tier 2 and tier 3 capital items that were requested by the schools as well as public works and facilities and then finally before we get started tonight which will be my last comment till anybody has any questions Again, I just want to remind all the counselors and all the folks at home and everyone, tonight is just the beginning of FY27. It feels like we've gone through a lot already for several months and a lot of talk. BUT THESE HEARINGS TONIGHT ACTUALLY START FY27 IN OUR MIND, BECAUSE ONCE WE GO THROUGH THE COUNCIL HEARINGS AND WE GET AN APPROVED BUDGET, THAT REALLY GIVES US THE BLUEPRINT FOR THE NEXT YEAR, AND THEN THERE ARE STILL A LOT OF DIFFERENT THINGS THAT CAN GO ON THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE FISCAL YEAR. SO TO FOLK COUNCILOR CORMIER-LEDGER'S COMMENT EARLIER ABOUT about civility, this is just the start. There's a lot of other dynamics that can happen throughout the year, as many people know, so hopefully the discussions over the next couple days and over the next month will be cordial. So thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. I hope any of those updates are helpful. I don't want to get too bogged down with the opportunity for all of you to ask these folks out here your questions, and I hope you focus mostly on them, but if anybody needs any quick clarifications, on anything I just mentioned, I'm happy to answer those. So thank you very much.

Thank you. Thank you, Chairman. All right, so now we go through the... Good morning, Doc. We go right down. Max.

I just had a quick question about free cash. Does it roll over each year if you don't spend it, or does it disappear somehow? Mm-hmm.

Great question, Max. So one of the reasons why you're meeting on the 17th, we'll look at all remaining financial obligations. If we don't appropriate the free cash by June 30th, then that excess then gets rolled into next year. But I can almost guarantee you, based on the capital requests and the health care deficits and issue, you're going to have a need for it. So we'll have a strategy for you. But technically, if you don't appropriate it by the end of the fiscal year, it just carries over to the next year. But I just want to mention, free cash doesn't usually get certified until earliest at halloween so then all of those monies would not be available for july august september or october so that's a pretty big gap given what we're looking at financially and so our recommendation is going to be to consider appropriating all the free cash that may be remaining for one purpose or another all right just one last question can it be rolled over into the stabilization fund you can appropriate it to a stabilization fund, which requires, I believe, a two-thirds vote. Is it just majority vote? So into the fund, it's a majority vote, but to take the money out is a two-thirds vote. So if you put it into a stabilization fund, you also limit the use to exactly that stabilization fund. So you need to make sure if you're going to do that, you're strategically putting it in a place that is either for savings or rainy day or for some other exact purpose.

Thank you. so max i just want to max a few because you're on zoom if you want a line hold just yell out hold okay all right you got it all right and usually what we have done in the past is we call it the big five we hold uh facilities police fire school and um police fire school in DPW. Yeah. All right.

So the court will... Yeah.

Now, Brutus would never get away with it. You know that. He's hoping you won't. You got to read the... You got to read the line. You got to say... You can use this one.

We're just going to do it at the department level. We're not going to get down to salaries or expenses, right? We're just going to say town administration, finance committee. Correct. Correct? Okay.

But if a councilor wants to have it held for a discussion. That's fine.

I just didn't want to go literally line by line. Thank you. Okay.

As they say, let the fun begin. All right. Town council budget account number 111. Okay. Town administration account number 123. Who said that? Caroline. Finance committee account number 131. Finance Department, account number 135.

Hold.

Assessors Department, account number 141.

Hold.

Treasurer Collector Department, 147.

Me, I mean hold. That's going to be a long day.

Legal Department, account number 131. 151. 151. 151. Sorry. Thank you. 151. Maybe it's time for Ted to get new glasses. Human Resources Department, 152. Okay. Information Technology Department, 155. Mike?

Yeah.

Town Clerk Department 161. Elections and Registration Department 164. Conservation Department 171. The Appeals Board, account number 176. Planning and Growth Management, account number 177. Agricultural Commission, account number 184. Public property and buildings, I believe we held already, right? Purchasing and central services. Purchasing and central service department, account 196. Okay, we're holding police, we're holding fire. I'm assuming that includes regional dispatch, Mr. Chairman?

Or should we call that out? I think we call that out, right?

Regional dispatch, account number 225. Okay. Inspections Department, 240.

I'll hold on that one. Okay.

Animal Control on account number 292. Okay. We're holding on all schools, Mr. Chairman? 300, 390, and 395? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah, yeah. Or do you want me to break it down? You can break it down. Just separate. You got to ask each one.

Okay, so we already have a hold on account 300. Right. So the next one would be Tri-County Regional School, account 390.

I'm going to hold that.

Okay. And then the Norfolk Agricultural School, known as Norfolk Aggie, account 395. Mm-hmm. DPW and Highway were holding at 422. Health Department, account 510. Okay, the Disability Commission, account 535. The Council on Aging, 541. Veteran Services Department, account 543. The Library, account number 610.

Hold. Hold, but it's a good hold.

As opposed to a bad hold. Yes.

Okay.

Recreation Department, 630. I'd like to hold that one. Historical Museum, account number 690. Hold. Historical Commission, account 691. Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy, account number 693. I'd like to hold that one, Mr. Chairman. Cultural Council, account number 695. Cultural District Committee, account 696. Everyone's favorite department, retirement of debt, account number 710. Interest, account 750.

Hold on that one, please.

I guess there's interest in interest.

Benefits department, account 910. Liability insurance, account 945. That is the end of all regular operating budgets. Now I'll move to the enterprise funds. Solid waste, account number 434. The sewer department, account 440. The water department, account 450. and the stormwater department account 460.

That's it, Mr. Chairman.

Mr. Chairman, or... Ted, did we put a hold on...

All right, now we go to the holds, right, Jamie? Yep. We bring the people up, so...

The town administrator, Jason Caroline, held that, so who's going to come up for that? TA. TA. No, I don't.

We're going to talk on this one. Yeah. Go ahead.

I want to jump in.

Okay. All right. So I wanted to ask, this proposal includes the deputy town administrator, right? Yeah. Okay. Didn't we reallocate the funds that were set aside for the deputy town administrator? TO PROVIDE FOR THE COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR AND THE ADMINISTRATIVE ASSISTANT, AND WE AGREE THAT THAT WAS HOW WE WERE GOING TO USE THOSE, BECAUSE YOU WANTED, YOU'D RATHER HAVE THE TWO PEOPLE THAN THE ONE SEVERAL MONTHS AGO.

SURE, SO HALF OF THE POSITION WAS CUT, RIGHT? SO HALF OF THE MONEY THAT WAS THERE FOR WHAT WAS AMY'S FORMER SALARY WAS REDUCED TO PATCH THE BUDGET GAP AFTER THE, YOU KNOW, AFTER THE BUDGET ISSUES LAST YEAR. AND THE OTHER HALF WAS USED FOR THE COMMUNICATIONS DIRECTOR AND THE PART-TIME ADMIN. THAT'S CORRECT. OKAY.

ALL RIGHT, SO THEN THIS WOULD BE KIND OF TAKING, KIND OF DOUBLE-DIPPING ON THE MONEY THAT WE HAD, HAD ORIGINALLY BEEN ALLOCATED THEN, RIGHT? OR I GUESS ONE AND A HALF DIPPING.

I MEAN, YOU CAN CHARACTERIZE IT. I THINK ANYBODY CAN CHARACTERIZE IT HOW THEY WANT. I DON'T CONSIDER IT DOUBLE-DIPPING. AND THE REASON WHY I DON'T IS, You know, as I've articulated many times, I mean, you know, a very high percentage of communities across the state have assistant town managers. I'd like to hopefully believe, while I'm very good at my job, you know, the experience that many of you have had, have seen, you know, how limited our office is. There is a bottleneck that gets there. I think there's been talks about investments in this position, and I think you're talking about You know, things from economic development, you know, greater coordination with the staff. We certainly have less bandwidth. It's going to be able to town to coordinate a lot more working to go to the community. The two deputy town administrators you've had here in town history has been myself. I was the first one. And then Amy, obviously, for three years. WE FOCUS VERY HEAVILY ON ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT-RELATED ISSUES. I THINK THE ARTS AND CULTURAL MOVEMENT IN TOWN IS A LARGE PRODUCT OF THAT. YOU KNOW, YOU LOOK AT THE CANNABIS INDUSTRY. I MEAN, THAT WAS SOMETHING I DID WHEN I WAS A DEPUTY TOWN ADMINISTRATOR. GREEN COMMUNITIES WAS SOMETHING I DID AS A DEPUTY TOWN ADMINISTRATOR. SO I THINK THE RETURN ON INVESTMENT FOR THAT MONEY IS VERY CLEAR. YOU KNOW, I'M NOT GETTING YOUNGER. AT SOME POINT, YOU KNOW, THERE'S GOT TO BE A SUCCESSION PLANNING MOVEMENT, I THINK. taking on the data of my experience as well as my predecessor, Jeff, and working with the council at that point. as well as Amy's experience, this is a very large organization. And it may not feel that way. And sometimes we make it, the people in this room make everything we do look extremely easy. And the reason why it looks easy sometimes is because these folks, including our office, Mark, Julie, and now Liz, are extraordinarily good at what we do. You know, in the longer term, at some point, you know, you're going to want to at least have somebody else waiting in the wing and somebody else there to make sure that you have some level of leadership and CEO consistency. I think when you look at like recently, for example, you look at Apple computers, you know, nobody saw Tim Cook all of a sudden resigning and there was somebody right there that was already the heir apparent. When I got hired, by the way, it wasn't a game plan like I was going to take the job. I had to earn that aspect of it. But it took two, three, four years to really understand all of the relationships, build the relationships throughout the community, and be able to really understand the budget and all the different factions and all the different folks that are in this community. This is not a small town. There's a lot of knowledge that comes with this position. And so I think that I don't, I personally, it's just my opinion. So, you know, I don't believe it's double dipping. And the other reason why I don't believe it's double dipping or one and a half dipping is Julie has an enormous amount on her plate. And I see how overwhelmed she gets. I know many of you get emails from her at 10 o'clock at night at 1030. Her and I are working far more than 35 hours a week. And then on top of that, I think the communications issue, as Consular DeLorco and I think Consular Cormier-Ledger very much know, has been a fit and a start for a long time. And I think we had one person that was working with the schools in us, Ann Marie Tracy, and then fortunately, well fortunately for her, she got a great promotion and got another job. And then obviously with the financial issues, the schools weren't able to afford their half of it. But I think you've all heard through the citizen survey, as well as for many people, communication's an issue. You're seeing now most, a lot of towns that are well-managed have a communications dedicated person. in their communities. There's now an association in the MMA of communications directors throughout the state. I respectfully disagree that I think it's double dipping. I think this is a good return on investment for the community. I can tell you, you easily made that ROI while I was the assistant town manager with a lot of the projects I brought to the table. I think what you're going to create is a lot more bandwidth, a lot more executive leadership security and charity. And if you're ever going to recruit in the future, whether it's down the line, whether it's five years, six years, I can guarantee you your recruitment pool will shrink to very little if you don't have an assistant town manager. The schools obviously have an assistant superintendent. I don't know what Lucas would do without Tina. I think it's just part of managing organizations that having a deputy or an assistant TA is just part of, this is kind of the cost of doing business. And we try to do the best we can to maximize that investment through grants, and obviously revenues coming in, and economic development projects, and other ways to try to offset that in some way. The last thing I'll say is I understand that many in the community, and I think I've said it publicly before, but I think this sadly got very politicized last year, and I know that it's a high salary, and I know some people in the community just see it, And they say, you know, we're too top heavy, we don't want any more managers, we don't want any more assistants or that thing. But, you know, all of the other folks that are in the room tonight, they all have their assistant managers in their department. There's a deputy chief, there's a deputy senior center director, we have a deputy CFO, we have a deputy facilities director, you know, we have an assistant superintendent. And I guess I just, as I sit here tonight, I guess I just struggle as to Feels a little bit like I get singled out, and for some reason this one seems to be a political problem, and to some degree I can understand it, but I think historically, I'll speak for Julie as well, we really need the help. I mean, we could really use a full-time administrative assistant in our office. The expectations of the public are high, as they should be, but to meet those, we have to be very responsive, we have to be on top of it, we have to work hours on the weekends. You know, and I know the budget's difficult, but I think this is a strategic investment that's really important for the community.

I actually agree with a lot of the reasons that you said that you need a deputy town administrator. I am concerned with the salary that seems incredibly high. I mean, and my biggest concern is actually, and you'll, you might hear this for other roles that we're trying to add with free cash, is that if we continue to find ourselves in tight financial straits, which at the moment I see no other option, then these are roles that we might be hiring someone and then having to let them go in really short order, as we have really recently. So my concern then is, are we hiring someone and saying, hey, come to Franklin, this is a great place to live and work, and then they make that decision, they come here, they possibly uproot their family and get established. And then we let them go and, and that's gone. Um, so, you know, that's, that's another concern. So you're, um, with just this role, your offices, um, budget goes up by like 33%. And so in the future, if we're like, Hey, we've got to cut things. I can see this being back on the chopping block. And so I guess I'm wondering how do we manage that if we decide to hire this or to allocate the money for this role? How do we make sure that we are not then immediately putting it up because it's almost $200,000 that we could get back? by letting go of one person.

Those are great questions, and I think you're probably, I hope you're articulating many things that you feel, but also I'm sure you hear this in the community, right? Just number one, I don't want anybody to assume that free cash was the source of money for this. I could have proposed cuts elsewhere to have this position. So I think there's an assumption, and it's an urban myth, that somehow free cash, I understand how people kind of maybe correlate that, but just because I added this into the budget proposal, it was not intended to say, oh, I'm using free cash to fund this. Number two, in terms of future fiscal years, how to generate revenue, I can certainly be helpful in that conversation, but I think many of you are the ones that actually have to answer that question, and I'm hoping that over the next two days and the next month, all of the counselors here, now that you've been here for seven, eight months, and even we go into summer and even into the fall and into next year, I hope there's a robust conversation on Are we going to look for revenues? And not just revenues, pie-in-the-sky revenues. What I mean is actual strategic investments that we can really count on that can bring in revenue growth. So as I said in my first budget memo, In February, you know, the use of free cash could be used for a couple years, I think, until this council has a direct strategy on how, and also, the council could also decide they don't want to look for revenues as well, right? And then that would mean a divestment in probably not just the deputy town administrator or other positions, but probably other departments as well. You know, if you're using a million and a half free cash, or two million, or one and a quarter million, whatever the number comes out to be, You know, that's going to be generally around the ballpark what you'll have to use next year. But you can only use that for so long, right, I think, before we have to kind of come to Jesus and say, well, if we're not going to go out and find revenues to sustain the budget and make it sustainable, then maybe the answer are cuts. Maybe we have to have reductions in service, you know, whether it's the fire department, police department, the schools, other departments, right? So I think a conversation I think you are all well aware of, is that there is a small deficit and moving into the future, whether the deputy's here or not, you're still gonna have to have that conversation. I would say that without an assistant town manager, it certainly restricts my ability to do more advocacy, more grants, more creative partnerships, working with the departments to try to bring in those revenues. Obviously, we don't know what the federal government's gonna be and the state government because of the income tax question come November and stuff like that. I mean, those are things that I can't predict, obviously, at this time. But I'm hopeful that there will be a conversation of where you all stand on, to the folks in the audience, are we going to divest from Franklin and try to make cuts? Or are we going to try to find other alternatives on how to try to patch the budget for the long term so that we can sustain, I think, what everybody, you know, Generally agrees the Finance Committee certainly agreed with our staffing with our staffing model And so I would hope that that's going to be a part of the conversation over the next couple months I think I'm good.

I did just you said we were looking at hopefully a 1.5 million dollar deficit right when once things come down or that's that's what you That's what I'm really hoping for and what I'm really hoping to anticipate.

That's right.

Okay Again, Lena, my concern is, again, the price of this is almost 13% of that, this one roll. It's almost 13% of that 1.5. I'm just throwing that out there. Okay, thank you. That's all. That's all I have.

Mr. Chairman?

Ted's first. Hold on, Max.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you, Jamie. For the benefit of the public and the benefit of everybody up here, can you just kind of talk us through what your department in the current proposal looks like? Like talk us through the staff and, you know, sort of a quick, you know, role description because I think people will be very surprised to see how much gets done by so few. And in comparison, when we've done the studies and we've looked at similar size towns to Franklin, similar population, similar budget, we know that their town administrator department has more than doubled the number of folks that you have. So I just want for, for it to be part of the record and the discussion tonight, can you go over that with us?

Sure. I, that's a great question. So, um, You know, I think just to, I think just quickly, there's myself. There's Julie, who's our operations manager, who does far more than operations and is an incredible asset to our office and our community. And I think all the folks here in the room, you know, are very familiar with Julie's work. And then we have a part-time administrative assistant in the office. Mark, our town attorney, who actually acts as an assistant town manager in many ways, and I'm not saying that as a joke, I'm saying that seriously, because he has such a wealth of knowledge. We talk a lot about strategy. So if you were to go to a town like Needham or Natick, they have two assistant town managers each, not one each community. Needham has two, they have a staff of eight. and they're the same population. Now they have a larger levy size because they're a more affluent community with higher property values. But, you know, and then obviously Liz, our communications director we just hired in February, you know, and to your point, in between Anne Marie, Tracy, and then Lily Rivera, and then Liz, all of that communications work has generally fallen onto me and Jewel. So if people wonder why communications hasn't been always as strong, I can tell you it's because the cut to Lily Rivera made a difference for two years. And when we talk about business guides, and on the EDC meeting, Permitting 101, Anne Marie Tracy put together an amazing business guide for our community among many other projects. The social media presence has dipped quite a bit. The ability to get narratives out onto the Facebook page, which Liz has been doing. I didn't even know she was doing it, but I get comments from people that the budget narratives are great on Facebook. I was like, wonderful. But a lot of that fell onto Amy at different times, the former deputy. It's fallen onto both really Julie and I pretty much predominantly. There's a reason why we got good with a newsletter for like a half a year to a year on a monthly basis, and then the newsletter didn't happen. So in the survey, I think the residents were right. Communication necessarily wasn't working right. But I'm not, you know, I can only do so much literally. But as you know, Ted, I think part of it is you're getting texts from me on Saturday night, Sunday. You know, people are asking me to do things. I'm emailing people back on the weekends to stay ahead of it. I'm doing interviews with reporters or, you know, phone calls over the town news and a whole variety of things. So I obviously didn't anticipate Amy leaving last July, but she got married and she was moved to the Cape. And she got an opportunity to be an assistant town manager in her new hometown, which she's starting the rest of her life. So I think we can all understand why she took that position. But between when she left and when Liz came on, we had no newsletters. We did very little communications work at all. So, and I think the last thing I'll say is even among the Natix and the Needhams, I have less staff today in my office than Jeff did in 2001. So it's the similar speech, I think, that the chief of police has given, where we've almost gone backwards with capacity. And only because you have extraordinarily knowledgeable people that are dedicated and that are doing yeoman's work, I think we've been able to keep our heads above water.

So I think if I did the math right, yourself, a deputy, Julie, and a communications director, that's four full-time people, and you have a part-time admin and a part-time town attorney.

Yep.

Right?

And the attorney's kind of the side because most towns spend way more money on legal fees in a different budget, and they have like a firm. So he's kind of unique, just so you know.

Yeah. Okay. So I just think it's important for the public to understand that that's by no means an overstaffing or a top heavy uh, town administrative department. Um, I would say, you know, because it's been, it's been brought up before that we need to keep in mind that we are contractually bound to provide you with a deputy town administrator at some point and that you have been incredibly gracious to defer that, um, but by using other staff to fill in some gaps, but that's only going to be good for so long. My final point, Jamie, when you do the job description, assuming it gets approved, the deputy town administrator, can we put some economic development language and some goals in there so that that person right from the get-go has some targets to bring some money in?

Well, there's a section usually we put in postings about preferred qualifications. You know, kind of like Amy, we didn't know what the candidate pool would be. So, you know, if we get somebody that's really, you know, finance heavy, for example, I can certainly absolve all my responsibilities on that to that person and be able to take over economic development and stuff like that. But we can put in the preferred qualifications

you know something like economic development or land use experience preferred and just try to incentivize that we're looking for that type of we're looking for those kind of skills yeah because beyond succession planning i think that person being focused on driving revenue is uh critical to what we're trying to do going forward absolutely that's all i had mr chairman thank you max

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So I have three questions I'm asking all the departments. So the boilerplate, so they might not all apply to you, Jamie. But I never have departments take notes because I'm going to be asking you these later. So this will be on the test. So the first one is, how has utilization of your department services by the public changed over the last five years? Can you provide specific metrics like visits, calls, cases handled, units served, et cetera, et cetera, enrollment or participation numbers?

Look at the color of my hair, Max. If you saw me five years ago, you would know what the metric is. It's hard to answer that question directly, because my job is so fluid. It's hard to come up with that. But I would say, more appropriately, I think for Julie in particular, whatever gets thrown her way, she's getting done in the office. And she's such a team player. But all of our licensing has been incredibly streamlined. All of our viewpoint and our operations and our coordination are being incredibly streamlined. She has become one of the go-to people for anybody that when I'm not around, she can answer a lot of questions. And just so you know, Julie had no government experience before she got here, and she's grown into that position extraordinarily well. She can provide better numeric metrics. But I would say the last thing, Max, is I'm kind of thinking, over the last five years, seven years since the turmoil of the pandemic, inflation, an endless amount of challenges within this community, One of the things that I'm proud of is that we have been able to maintain our AAA bond rating status. So even despite the chaos that's gone on and the two failed overrides and redistricting of the schools and a lot of the civility issues, one of the things I am proud of as the manager here is we've still improved every department in a lot of ways. You just heard about the senior center. We've done a lot of great hiring. We've got a lot of great staff. And we have a very low rate of people who leave the organization, right, which tells you, hopefully, that the town culture among the staff is unparalleled. And I won't go into some of those details. I'll just ask you, Max, if you want to know more details about staff culture 11 or 15 or 20 years ago, talk to Consular DeLarco offline. He'll give you some great stories. But I hope that answers a little bit of it.

Yeah, yeah. Like I said, these are all the departments. I just want a baseline. So the other one, I was in your office a while ago, and you said, if I cut anything in any department, something's going to break. And so that stuck with me. So my question is, if you cut your budget by 5% compared to level of service, will your department still be able to function? And would you still be able to meet all state requirements or professional accreditations or standards? Or would you not be able to operate properly or risk losing required accreditation or certification? I don't think you have any certifications, but that's just a standard.

Nope. No, we could take another 5% haircut on expenses for sure and still survive. But I can't lose any staff bandwidth. And I would just note that not only did I lose the deputy last year, but also two years ago my expense budget and some of the other bandwidth in the office was cut as well. So, you know, and you can talk to almost any manager and superintendent. I'm not going to speak for Lucas, obviously, but, you know, a lot of leaders try to cut their own budgets before we go to the other departments because we're here to support them. So we could do a little shaving in the expense budget, but I don't think that, I don't think for what you're cutting, you're going to get a really, a lot of savings. So we did cut it.

And finally, is there a new spending in your budget compared to level service? You said yes.

Yep.

If so, if this funding is not included, like I said, will your apartment still be able to function? Will the services funded allow for new revenue or will it be used for preventive maintenance to save more on net in the long run? Yeah.

Obviously, any cuts to my office are going to have an impact on revenue, because we do a lot of revenue generation in our office. In fact, a portion of my salary, a portion of any Mark's salary, Julie's salary, is offset by all the license fees that we bring in. And we're at a near record high, if not a record high, of revenues that are coming in. So I think if you're going to make any reductions in my office, my guess is you're going to reduce the bandwidth for us to be able to coordinate all that in a timely fashion.

All right, that's all I got. Thank you.

Thanks. So the town administration budget reminds me of the movie Jerry Maguire, Show Me the Money. And to that vein, when you talk about adding the deputy town administrator, you had me at hello.

And what I mean by that is... No, that was Jerry Maguire.

I'm keeping it in check. I know that some... Individuals may look at the deputy town administrator as excess or potentially even, I've had a couple of people in town reach out to me and say, why are we going to spend that much on that individual, $190,000 versus $140,000? I think that's also a case of what you get for it. The expectation is if we hire someone that is at that pay rate, they're going to come in the ground running. The only way we're going to get through beyond the next two years and to be sustainable is one of two things. I'm not going to mention the big O word tonight, or it's going to have to be through revenue growth. And that Deputy Town Administrator will add bandwidth to that department to allow us to have revenue growth. We need to grow new growth in this town in some way, shape, or form, whether that's even the existing buildings we have here, how effectively we assess those buildings, all that stuff. It needs to be done. So adding $190,000, which I think is what the budget is roughly for this, I said it when I put my stake in the ground, this to me is a key position. And I will say this to the rest of the councilors. We want to do a lot of things. We can't do those things with only those two people sitting there. We cannot do it. Personally, I want the Economic Development Committee meeting to meet twice a month. And the only way we can do that is to create bandwidth in that department. Because if we do not drive economic development in this town, we are dead in the water. And in two years, because I'm going to support to Council Griffiths, I'm going to support this position for the next two years, no matter what, in the budget. A lot of this stuff I'm supporting for the next two years. However we have to, these people will be around for the next two years. Hopefully in the next two years, just a little side note, the subcommittee, the joint budget subcommittee will come back with their nice five to ten year plan. They'll have a clear vision. We'll know what revenue is going to be. And we'll know if we can sustain this. But for the next two years, That deputy town administrator is here because I need, we need revenue growth. So you have my support, and again, you had me at a low. Thank you.

Thank you. I couldn't agree with you anymore, Mike. I totally agree with him. For somebody that was here before there was a town administrator, assistant town administrator, I should say, and somebody here after, when Jamie came in, It was a mess here between the fire department. Everybody was just, we really needed a lot of help. And two years into Jamie's career, I didn't even call Jeff anymore. I just called Jamie because Jeff was doing all the other stuff and Jamie. Jamie did so much more in that role that Jeff could go out and do more things. And it just created a lot much easier way to... GET THINGS DONE IN TOWN, YOU KNOW? YOU COULD GET THINGS DONE RIGHT AWAY INSTEAD OF YOU BEING UP AT 10 O'CLOCK OR 11 O'CLOCK AT NIGHT TRYING TO DO SOMETHING. JULIE, YOU TOO. SO I'M TOTALLY IN SUPPORT OF IT. SO I COULDN'T AGREE MORE. THANK YOU.

Go ahead.

All right.

I wasn't going to say anything, but I know all of you know that I was the acting town administrator from 422 to 510.

And you quit already.

No, and I'm not going to say it was a lot more than I expected. There were no meetings, thank you, that I had to go to and attend or anything like that. But we're talking about revenue. And things like that, we're talking about succession planning. So I'll just give you an example. So right in the middle of being the acting town administrator, Jeff Roy notifies us that the Joint Committee on Revenue is hearing your... home rule petition related to raising hotel taxes from the mandated capped 6% to 8%. Now, I know, like, I sound like I know what I'm talking about because I had to do a day and a half of research to figure out how am I going to write written testimony related to this. I know a lot. I've been in government since I was 13. I've been your chief for 10. But I'm not a town administrator. I don't want to be a town administrator. And what I'm getting at is they needed somebody, and I think I might have done a good job, I'm not sure. But either way, it wasn't easy. Now, assistant town administrator, deputy town administrator would probably be like, no problem. Especially if it had to be actually oral testimony. I might have just quit as your acting town administrator. But this, I mean, seriously, we really, we've had it before. He did a great job at it. We've had other deputy town administrators. And God forbid if something ever happened, and if he doesn't go on vacation, Thank God we got the third ambulance running during the day, Chuck, because you're going to be coming up here dragging him out because he's going to basically throw up, all right, because it's just too much. So I'm all for it as well. I'm just giving you the perspective of somebody that did it for two and a half weeks.

Actually, the chief called me and asked me for help, and I said, call Amy down in Yarmouth. Are we all set with anybody else? Okay, so it's finance, salaries, and expenses. Mike held that one.

Yeah, I held it only because I just wanted to, just to clarify, and again, this goes back to the Finance Committee. I did watch those meetings, whether they were live or whatever. So, and I know there was talk about this. I just want to clarify that in finance, we're adding a position But also at the same time, we're saving consulting costs. So it's not a net neutral, but that position is to better utilize the software that we have today, Carrie, correct?

Exactly, yes. Okay.

And the benefit of using that software better is? may answer some of Max's question, which is what will be the benefit of adding that position? What will the town get out of using the system better, ultimately?

I guess is my question. So more efficiently, we're not utilizing Munis, the capacity it has, okay? For example, Department of Public Works issues utility bills. The town has their own utility bills. The treasurer collector's office generates the bills, sends them to the printer, mails them to town hall, and the facilities department pays those bills. And now it goes through an accounts payable warrant. This is a whole process, just like you get a utility bill. There's something called internal billing. But I have to upgrade the utility system in order to do that. I have to become a project manager, which I have no problem doing. And I'm very good at it, and I will say that. I have no problem saying that. But I also have to now run all the finance. with all of these people. So it's just an additive thing. If I had a person that was dedicated to doing this, going to conferences. I don't go to conferences on learning units. This is just my piece. I have human resources. Here comes Karen. Here comes Karen. Human resources. I have the school department, Jonna, over there, who also is in support of it. just from the finance, it would be a transfer. We would transfer money from one GL to another. I don't you understand all of this. So that's one piece. The human resources side of it, and Karen can speak eloquently of this.

Are you not done yet?

No, you go ahead. You just want it.

I did speak a little bit at the finance committee. I'm Karen Brad, I'm the town HR director. I've been here for nine years, and there's so much that MUNAS can do that we are not doing. When we see a project, it's a very complex system. It needs full-time technical support. We've had our technology budget and technology employees are already working hard on fixing laptops. They're out in the field. They're doing everything to support technology across the town and schools. They don't have the time to support Munis. It's not something that you can just jump into and figure out on your own. I've tried, if I try to actually figure out a process to do stuff faster, I waste literally a week of just focusing on that and everything else falls by the wayside. We do, all our benefits are in Munis. We're joining the GIC, we have, 12 different plans to choose from. We have to have premium tables for all of those. There's all kinds of stuff that would be a lot easier to do. It's not a system that's easy. It's not a system we can teach ourselves. We're paying a lot of money for consultants right now. The consultants are paid big money, but you're on their schedule. So we're saying, I need help with this. And they're like, okay, yep, let me look out. I can do it in July, on July 12th. And you're like, we're all on vacation. So it's very difficult to get better at the system without that internal support. I think it would be a big learning curve. We'd probably have to have the person go to training, have them watch us, but I think we could improve efficiencies a huge amount, and we absolutely need this position.

Is there anyone internal in the department that you would target for that role and then backfill for another? Is there already kind of a pseudo unit special?

There's people that are good at it, but like my deputy director could do it, but she likes HR and she wants to be in HR. We have people that could probably do it, but I'm not sure if that's what they're interested in career-wise. Okay.

And I only ask the question because originally when I put my stake in this in, this was not kind of the area that said let's growth, but again, listening to what you all talked about at the finance committee, and again, there is a savings from the consulting side. I started in the budget. We're saving $15,000, $20,000. We're spending $40,000, whatever the amount was. So it's a net. It's a position, but it's really not a fully... Dollar-wise, it's not a full position. But I do agree, and myself having a finance and accounting background, yada, yada, yada, I do understand that when you have a piece of accounting software or a software in general, it does require special knowledge of it to squeeze the most out of it. And if you really want to squeeze the most out of it, get the biggest bang for the buck, you have to spend the money. So while it wasn't on my original stake in the sand, I will support what's the budget as it's outlined right now to add that position above and beyond where I was.

Could I add another comment too? You certainly can. Chris Sandini was our finance director for many years. As you know, Kerry was promoted to CFO two years ago. Chris stayed on as a part-time capacity more for transition to assist Kerry and our new comptroller, Linda. So we did cut that position as well. so we've identified other savings that i think it was i didn't it's about 50 out of the hundred thousand exactly would be covered by uh shifts okay perfect thank you appreciate that time mr chairman

I just wanted to support this position. You've heard it's town and school. It's an integrated system. I think there's a major investment in that technology platform across the board and I don't think we're able to utilize it. We don't have anyone. We had a retirement recently and the person came from another town and had the I believe they're utilizing it more. And it was interesting. We were interviewing, but then the questions coming back to us were around munis. And it was like, oh, I hope we don't lose this person. They have some really good knowledge. They're not a munis expert, but just it was an example of other communities who invest. And the last point I would just make is, to your point, and I agree with your comments, Constable LeBlanc, around on getting someone with the knowledge of the platform. But the added layer is they have to have knowledge of Franklin with the platform because everyone utilizes the tool differently. And it's so nuanced. And we're looking at 25 years of usage in different ways. So I just think the way we're organized, it's not like a templated thing where you can just hire someone off the street to come in. The points around needing to understand the systems and how we operate and how we organize are also part of that investment as well. So I just wanted to share that endorsement.

Thank you.

Thanks. No, you guys have done a great job explaining the value of this position over the last number of months. I have no problem with it at all. I guess my only question is just on the software itself. Munis, is that a private? software platform from a private company, or is it somehow state-related? So it's Tyler Technologies.

Tim Raposa, there he is. I couldn't see you. No, no, no, thank you, Tim.

Tim Raposa, Director of Technology for the Town and Schools. So we always call it MUNIS, but it's really called Tyler ERP now, Enterprise Resource and Planning. And I just want to do, I know the word technology has been used in a few of the statements here to describe it. It's not really a technology problem, right? This is an application expert problem. This is an analysis, right? So it's no more a technology problem than you using Microsoft Word is a technology problem. You're using a piece of software. This is a software expert that has knowledge of, in-depth knowledge of this software as it applies to Franklin. So we're going to teach them all about Franklin or her, all about Franklin, and they're going to know exactly how to model Franklin's processes in MUNIS, which that's the piece that we don't know. We know plenty about Franklin, but we don't really know what MUNIS or Tyler ERP can do for Franklin. Whenever we have meetings with the folks from Tyler, they're like, oh, yeah, you have that. And we're like, we have what? So we don't know what we don't know. And that's the piece because it's such a big system. So when you get an expert, what you're doing is you're really wringing out the benefits of all of that. And what's it cost us? $120,000 a year. We're not using all of that investment that we're paying for this really, really, you know. great piece of software, but we complain about it because we're not using it the way that it should be. And once we get a person that really can make it sync, everybody's going to be happier. It will drive efficiencies across the board. Everyone, you know, we'll save, I mean, we just won't even be printing purchase orders anymore, for example. We'll just save in paper. That's just one little example. But these pieces need an expert, and we just don't have that. subject matter expert, software expert. It's not like a technology problem. It's an analysis problem. It's a software expert problem.

Just one little follow-up on that. And I think in prior discussions, you had mentioned we've been using this for 15, 20 years? Munis? Yeah, it's been part of it for a while. Is there any other up-and-coming ERP software platform that's out there? Just my luck, it's going to be like a Windows 95, right?

It is the gold standard. Everyone uses Tyler ERP. I'm trying to say Tyler ERP more than I am Munis, because they don't like us calling it Munis anymore.

As long as it's cutting edge and it's expected to be kind of in that realm for the next several years, I fully support it. I just, in the back of my mind, was wondering if we're going to get caught short.

No, I mean, it's not like it's an old piece of software. It is definitely a current piece of software. They are in, I don't know how many cities and towns in Massachusetts.

Yeah, I was going to add, I mean, they really are in almost, I would say probably 90% of cities and towns. We just started a Munis user group with other towns to try to share resources, but a lot of towns are feeling the same way. frustration as we are of not knowing how to use the system. But I don't see it going away because it's everything.

Okay. You know, it has our... I'm sure of that. I just wanted to ask the question.

Yeah, like the reports that you're looking for in budget, it does payroll. There's a lot of different, like, stand-alone systems. But if we got rid of Munis, we'd be buying, you know, 10 different systems to piece together. So it's not going anywhere.

Great. I just have one more question. How are we going to find this person?

Well, that is not easy to do, let me tell you, because these people are gold for consulting. So what you really need to do is you need to sell the wonderful Franklin environment, and that's how I hire people, to be honest with you. I tell them it's a great place to work. If you're looking for a nice, stable place to work with really smart people and a good environment, come here and work for Franklin. If you want to go chase money, well, go somewhere else and chase money. But if you want a nice place to work, then come here and work. And believe it or not, it works. That works. So if anybody out there is listening that knows Tyler ERP, come frankly.

That was one of the reasons why I said it.

So one of the other things in regards to salaries that Karen and I have discussed, because training this person, we might get the right fit person and they're willing to go to training, we may reduce the salary and put the training in expenses. So, you know, because it's very important. And there is, Tyler ERP has conferences and trainings that someone can go to.

Okay.

Yep. It is available.

So it will be investing in someone.

Correct. Thank you. I'm losing the words.

I mean, it sounds great and I support it, but it was like, where are we going to? Mr. Chairman? I have one question.

I'll get you in a minute. But real quick, you can take me off hold on treasure collector because I said hold on the wrong one. So, this is the one that I wanted. Okay. I just wanted to clarify something because we've had a conversation. So, basically the Munis, or Tyler person, will be about $100,000. And you're gonna reduce the person in your office, which is about 26,000, and then you're reallocating 15.

I'm reducing expenses that I have for consultants. I currently have two consultants helping me with Tyler.

So, but if a Munis person, Tyler person, is hired, During that transition, you might need to keep some of that expense money because you're ultimately not going to just be able to hand everything over and say, go do it, because you're going to have to have a transition period.

Yes, you're correct.

So theoretically, number-wise, for this to come out of the budget would be $67,250 for at least this first year. Assuming that you need that 15,000.

I think, no, I think, I mean, I think, again, like I said earlier, A lot of this is fluid, right? We're actually putting in there and cutting out the consultants. And I think to Tim's point, and he nailed it, you've got to get the right person in. And to Counselor Delorco's point, there is not a munis expert that we're going to pluck off the street tomorrow that's going to walk in here. But what we do want to do, and by the way, this position was in the budget once before several years ago. And we did have a candidate that did decline the job offer at the last minute. And then we kind of gave up and went back to our security blanket, which were the consultants. You know, it's a good question, right? But all of this is transitionary. What we really want to find is somebody that's got local government experience, I think to Tim's comment. We want somebody that's been in accounting or finance, whether it's school or town, another employee that's been in the trenches a little. And then because our systems here are so unique relative to other communities, Karen, Carrie, Jonna, Tim, and a group of people are going to help that individual transition in. If there is money that, expense money in their budgets maybe, that they don't need to spend and we need to have a consultant come in and do some training seminars for like, you know, a couple times to get somebody up to speed that's there. But I don't think we're going to need the whole 12,000. And, you know, I think we're also trying to be good faith effort here to say we're trying to shift some money in the budget to try to get an investment into somebody else that can have a longer return on investment. And just like I said earlier, the budget is fluid all the time. I mean, we're going to have to find out a way to deal with it. But I don't want to commit to the 12,000 in addition to that. And then if we don't use it or we don't need it, we don't need it. So we'll just work as a team together to get the person up to speed.

And I thank you for that. Like I wasn't trying to say this was like any. No, it's a good question. I can't even think of the words anymore. Okay. But anyway, I'm just looking number wise because we are ultimately looking at subsidizing a budget with free cash. Yep. And I'll tell you all about how I feel about that tomorrow because that's way too long to get into tonight when we still have to get through all of this. But if we're going to be using free cash, which is not promised money, and if we ever have a year like 2020 again, there isn't going to be any. So we can't try to count on that. I'm just trying to get a very clear cut of numbers and what, if we didn't use free cash, what we would actually have to come up with to find in order to fulfill this. So it was just a clarifying question. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Max.

Yeah, so one of my questions, I'm not going to give you all three, but if you don't have this position, will something break? And I know there was some discussion in the Finance Committee about these Harmony reports for financial reports for your report to the state. Would those help? What's the interaction between the municipal position and these Harmony reports?

So I just want to make sure I understand the question. The reporting that we do to Department of Revenue, the IRS, et cetera, Are you speaking about those reports?

Yeah, you said you had software that's going to be defunct soon.

Oh, so Crystal Reports is no longer going to be supported by Tyler Technologies. So we now have to, we're in line in a queue to get Tyler Reporting Systems. So all our reports have to be rewritten. And I am working with Tim and his team on that. This MUNIS admin would probably be doing some of the work that I am doing, which is meeting with people, trying to figure out how do I get this done, how do I get all the budget reports, how do I get the reports we send to Jamie on a monthly basis. All the reports that the data that you need and ask for is a report that comes out of Munis and Crystal Reports is how we create them, how we use that software. So this person would help alleviate me spending so much time on that and obviously we would do probably more reporting because prior to Jamie being here he spoke about the budget We weren't using CRISPR reports then. That was something that you really worked hard with Chris Sandini and got that done. And now these reports are, and we improve on them all the time with Evan. So did that answer your question, Max?

So to be clear, if you don't have this person helping you, is there a chance you might not have a report because it just won't have the system in place to do it?

No, I will have to go out. If Tim and his team don't have the capacity to do it, again, that's another consultant. And I have a current consultant that helped us write the crystal reports who is retiring and has given me a name of a few others that are going to be taking over for him. So I would have to outsource some of this.

So it wouldn't be, it wouldn't break it, but there'd be an additional cost borne by the town to convert these things.

Yes.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

I'm all set.

All set, Max. All right. Okay, that answers that line. Now we'll go to the next line, 141, I believe. Assessors. Assessors. Jane, Jane put a move on that?

Yes. All right. With this project, it's for a full-time administrative assistant. And real quick, because I didn't do it before, to the finance committee, I watched all of your marathon meetings in real time, because through time speed, I cannot understand anybody. But what I did hear from listening to all the different things is that your assessors put in about five hours a week each to do paperwork, which takes them away from assessing, correct?

It's probably, it's more than that, but yeah, there are things that would fall under the category of an administrative assistant that they are now doing because there's no one else there.

And I'm just going by the numbers that I heard. So when I heard it, it was stated that it was about five hours each, so it's about 15 hours a week total. This is where my thought process is, okay? So while I understand the need for one, again, to be budget friendly and fiscally responsible, if we hired a part-time person that would free up those hours for them to go out and assess, the salary is half and there's no benefits. That we have to worry about paying out. So I'm wondering if that would be something that would be worth considering versus another full-time employee because a $50,000 full-time employee add $10,000 to $14,000 to that for their benefits. Now you're at like $60,000, $70,000, $74,000.

I think five is a little low, and we can check the minutes, but I think it was more around five to ten. And I do think, and I recall as you were saying this, I think the committee had a discussion that the appraisers would basically equal a full-time position, because I think it was around ten hours. per employee so I don't think it was five but I understand your calculation that's certainly a discussion for the council your math is correct if you assumed five hours a week but I think what the Finance Committee went through was an exercise they want to invest in a part-time inspector for the building Commissioner but also the full-time admin for Kevin because they're intricate they're really linked and trying to make sure they're going out and getting inspections done earlier, which inspections then mean that occupancy gets earlier. That means housing units get online earlier, which means new growth comes in earlier. So they were looking at it from a larger systemic way. You are correct. If you hired a part-timer, you would reduce the benefit. I will tell you, in most cases, recruitment right now for part-time employees is very hard. uh... it's a good job market and people have buying power skills have buying power and the only argument i would say is that uh... recruiting for a part-time versus a full-time uh... you're going to get a better candidate pool with a full-time employee because of the benefits that come with it the job is more stable there's a defined role obviously health care and you know that type of thing so uh... but if the council decided at halftime i think that would advance what Kevin is trying to do but then in two years you may come back and say well now we really do want a full-time person and now you're you know you have to kind of amend that job and hopefully find somebody that wants full-time will you hire two part-time people and save on the benefits twice you could that's that's and then to be honest with you to be very clear that's the Jeff Nutting that's the old Jeff yeah it is and There's pros and cons to both of it. I'm not trying to editorialize one versus the other, but I will say We've gotten rid of almost all part-time positions in our organization, because when you invest in a full-time, you end up getting a greater dedication, and you get a greater worker that does actually more than 35 hours a week, and you typically get somebody that's going to commit themselves to the organization at a higher level. And that's been the strategy Karen and I have employed with a lot of department heads, and I think it's worked out really well.

And that was the only question I wanted to ask.

OK. I mean, I could give you a quick recap. A full-time administrator would cover, be the first responder at the counter, the phone, handle over a thousand motor vehicle abatement applications annually, which is about 3% of the excise tax file. but also handle most of the upfront work for the 300 real estate exemption applications for certain blind, senior, and disabled veterans, which is about 3% of the taxable real estate file. And this frees up the appraisers to be doing their... field collection work, evaluation, qualification of value changes, much of which is going to be the quantifying that will be translated into new growth. They're assisting in many ways all throughout the year in the preparation of the real estate tax file. They'll be more focused on that. They discover more new growth. because they'd be on the road more and they'd be also doing analysis work as opposed to a lot of the generally considered administrative work that they've had to absorb. I guess I could go on a little bit, but I think that probably gives you kind of an idea. Part-time person might be, there's a lot of training gonna be involved initially. but we wouldn't want to have a part-time person and have them go to another town for the full-time, you know, assessment administrator's job. We would like to have someone come in, and if it's a good fit, they'll stay, and we can move on.

Thank you.

You're welcome, certainly.

I know Mike had a question. Oh, Max? Okay. Max?

Ready for me? Okay. So just two of the questions that I had ready. In terms of utilization of your department, how has the workload changed over the last five years and the request for abatements and that kind of thing? Do you have any metrics? As well as you talked a little bit about how you justify this by saying it's going to help new growth and that's going to bring in more revenue. Can you make that a little clearer for people?

Okay, so first part was about the, I'm sorry. Oh, how things changed over the past five years. Yes. Quite a lot. I mean, I can give you a 25-year perspective. Things have changed radically over time. The town has grown, and we've seen the numbers. Also, with the growth of the town, There's more congestion. It's more difficult to get into the areas where we need to gather the information and there's just more properties to review. There's also the motor vehicle excise has grown, of course, because population has increased as more people have cars and that all of that volume And much of it, you know, again, I mean, every decade this has been something that's been occurring. It's maybe starting to slow down in some ways, but not really. I mean, we've got more congregate housing or whatever, apartments, condominiums in more dense developments.

In terms of this position, how much new growth would that bring in? Would it pay for itself, or would it pay for half of itself? It's kind of hard to do that analysis, but you're saying it would bring in more revenue.

Well, what happens is that the admin does the administrative work, and the appraisers are now doing appraisal work. and they're out there and they're able to more readily identify more growth. The more opportunity we have to review the properties and again, as Jamie indicated, we're working on continuously working on improving the workflow and getting the information from inspection, not only that there's a permit been pulled, but the status of it, monitoring the status of it, and making sure that we're recognizing everything that's going on on every particular property that has activity.

And that's not constrained by 2.5%. That's money we don't have to ask for an override for.

Right, right. So by being able to be out there more, there's just going to be more discovery.

Are you all set, Max?

You have them all set.

Thank you. Kevin, how many assessors do we have today working in the department?

There are three appraisers and myself as director.

So if you think about it, we have three appraisers, and let's just say those are the people that are generating the new growth number. And so in theory, those three people right now in the budget are generating $800,000 of new growth. They're doing the evaluations. They're doing all that work to generate that $100,000. Right.

Well, some of it's coming from personal property, too. Correct. Yeah. Right.

The point being is, again, this was not on my list of stake in the ground. But this is, tying back to economic development, this is a revenue-generating department. So to Jane's point, Councilor Kelly-Tripp's point, is... If you're going to add the salaries, and I've had this discussion with Jamie, there needs to be a boost in the new growth associated with this. I'm not saying it's a one for one for year one, but if three assessors can generate 800,000, if you add a fourth appraiser, I'll say appraiser, I'm not saying you're going to add 200,000, but this is the start of generating revenue growth. So again, while this was not on my plate, and I'm looking at my little budget I have here, I got zero dollars added for that in mine. But I am, based upon comments and everything else, I'd be for doing what you're proposing, Kevin, adding more bandwidth for the appraisers to do it. Because I think the other piece is, There has to be a tighter collaboration while I did hold inspection because of that a little bit. There has to be a tighter collaboration between inspections and building permits being closed and the appraisers getting out there and doing the new growth. Like that has to happen. Agreed. Agreed.

And we're working on that constantly. And we're much better off now that we have OpenGov, which was previously called Viewpoint. There's, you know, the information, there's a lot more information in there coming to us. We used to just get a half a sheet of paper that said, you know, there's a permit for some, you know, some vague description. And now we have really as much as the commissioner is getting and the inspector.

Yeah, and I think if we create the bandwidth between Adam and administrative assistant to work with the inspection and we can close that gap, that new growth can come on much faster, gives your appraisers more time to do, like I say, better evaluations. That's a whole different topic, but I do think that I would support this, but I do think If I was to, when the revised budget comes back, right now it says 800, I'm expecting that number to be a little bit more to pay for that. So to your point, this is not adding an expense without adding some revenue because this is a revenue-generating department. So thank you. Okay. Okay.

One more. Yeah. Thank you, Kevin. Okay. Just to echo, piggyback on Council LeBlanc, I think it's important for people to realize that our friend Gus in the town inspection department, he's kind of one guy down there trying to do it all, right? And I work with him a lot in my professional capacity, and I see many projects, particularly from COVID error that just because we weren't allowed to send anybody out there to close out these permits, we weren't, you know, nobody was allowed in the homes. There's just this sort of this gap of stuff that homeowners think that the projects got finished. They, you know, contractors came and went and everything got done, but the loop never got closed with signing off on the permit, which never triggered the stuff with your department. So I'm hoping that this admin can do a little bit of digging and particularly look at that two to three year period and see what maybe some loose ends can be tied.

Thank you. I just want to clarify, though, that we're aware of the issuance of the permit. So we're not... We're making our own visits to the property and as much as we can, of course, inspections are crucial, but if we don't get inside, we still can make some assumptions depending on where there may be other information available or... It's obvious that the property's been occupied, and whatever work they indicated they were going to do on the permit has been completed at some point. It's not ideal, but we can't get a warrant to go into the property. We make the request, and most people accommodate us sometimes by a special appointment, which is fine. But we feel we're not, I mean we flag things that are, you know, that we think need to be looked at annually because they may be like an unfinished second level or, you know, like an attic or whatever that they seem to have framed out. They could finish it. We do the best we can without, you know, if they don't allow us in, then we will make an estimate. That, we have to be cautious, though. You're right. If we see it, We can calculate it in terms of growth, the change. But we have to be cautious because if we don't, we can't really claim it as growth. So it's kind of unreserved. But in terms of a regular appraisal property that's not going to generate growth, but in terms of describing it, If we haven't gotten in, we were making a fairly strong estimate of what the property must be like on the interior.

Yeah, my point was really just that the admin could help. Absolutely. With some of that, you know, maybe backlog or projects that the homeowner thought had been completed and it just, the loop hadn't been tied. Sure. Trust me, I know every project I've ever done at home The permit is done, and you guys are there the very next day. So there you are at the door wanting to see it done, and there my tax door goes up. So I know that that process works. I see. But I just know from dealing with other people's homes that they think the projects are done, and it just didn't.

Yeah, we do look for that sign-off. We're on the list now for an occupancy permit, but for the lesser projects that don't require quote-unquote an occupancy permit, but require closure, we've always watched for that, but we noticed that There are things that maybe perhaps even we found that they were completed, but their sign-off is different because their sign-off saying it's closed means that they've okayed the whole project. It's completed and it's compliant with the building code and the electrical and plumbing codes. So, yeah, there's definitely more. There are always side things besides what I mentioned, the highlights of what an administrative assistant would be doing. But there's always those special projects. We always have those going continuously with staff that's doing administrative work. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Just real quick. It's not a question. It's more of a comment just related to the Finance Committee meeting. Sorry, Shannon Nealon. Related to the Finance Committee meetings we had where we were trying to fill the gap that we had to fill with the free cash and avoiding using free cash. So to Jane's point, I think it's valuable for this budget for now, although it's not the way that we would like to do things. We'd like to hire people full time. I get that. That makes sense. But where we're filling a budget with free cash, which is really dangerous, I think there's definitely more value than we're giving it to look at where we can hire part-time, still add value, still bring in some revenue, but where you can hire part-time, for now, it's the right call. Because we don't have, that would be great for the budget later, for the real budget that we, finance committee was asking for, for later when we say, how would you like your department to look? Full-time position is what you'd like your department to look like. But we don't have money. So I think we really need to seriously consider where part-time can be hired for now and then later you could hire that person full-time. But we have a big budget gap and I just want us to be mindful of that when we're hiring and where we can not spend as much as we'd like to.

Considering that I'm in the public sector at Massport, I'll be honest with you, to hire part-time people is really, really hard. We're the highest in the state, and I can't find anybody. Because I'll be honest with you, the benefits now, They're better in the private sector than they are in the public sector. And that's the big issue that we have in hiring anybody, part-time or full-time. That's the problem. I pay my mechanics, and I don't know who they are, I pay my mechanics $65 an hour. These guys are getting 38. And I put a job out, I get three applications. Three. That's all I get. Because the private sector is much, much better than the public sector. So that's the issue we have about hiring people.

I would just like to add one more thing that the position would pay for itself but even more so I don't want to come up with a percentage but you know potentially exponential because it frees up the appraisers again to do the work they were hired to do And it's not just growth, it's also improving the valuations throughout the town for our goal of fairness and equity. Thank you. Thank you.

Okay, Mike held IT, so it's IT.

I did.

Where's Tim?

He's coming back.

And I guess this also, well, I'll ask the question and then we'll go from there. I only held this because more to make a statement to some degree, not necessarily towards you Tim, is that this is the one last department that is shared between the schools and the town. and everything is shifted to the town, how do we move this to the town side so it's like every other shared service? That's not really much of a question for me. That's why I'm making it more, I held it more to make a statement than a question to you, and maybe if the school committee wants to address it now, we can address it when we do the school stuff. It's just more can, That's something I'll be looking for. Maybe it can't happen in this budget because of the way it was voted by the school committee. Your budget was voted. But I would look, if not for FY27, more for FY28 to bring that together. So if you want to comment on it, Lucas, you certainly can right now. But that's the only reason why I held this. It wasn't about the expenses. Yes, I love a department that has $0 in salaries, but you've got to go to the school side to see the...

So I don't want to prolong the evening with all the people that we have. I'm happy. I think this is a good question and a good comment that I think we could spend some time actually unpacking it. I don't want to spend too much time up here. But I do think the idea of the technology needs of our adults And the technology needs of the students and how they're supported within the school district are just two different needs. So I have already prepared because I watched the meetings. I remember that idea was brought up and shared at previous meetings. So I've started to build out my rationale for that. And I think it'd be better if we had time to focus on maybe that issue and talk about it further. So I'm not... Trying to punt, but I'm being respectful of the group.

OK? Does that? I understand. That's perfect. And it was, again, it was just, that's the only reason why I held it, because I wanted to publicly state that as it relates to, because my goal would be to consolidate those expenses here. Yes, and we'll talk about that. even if it's not in this year's budget because again i think we've kind of settled down that path you guys have voted based upon a principle of technology being in there i don't want to change that but this is more for fy28 more than anything else because all we're going to do is rob peter to pay paul that's that's what we're doing so that's it thanks mike uh all right mike is still up though what am i up for uh inspection inspection oh that was next

Well, I'm skipping the big ones.

Okay. Inspection. I wanted this one. This actually was a question for George from the Finance Committee and as well as Inspection. The Finance Committee was the one that actually recommended adding the position for this. Is that correct, George? Yes. And the rationale was very similar to what we talked about for the assessors. It would free up time, potentially generate more fees, yada, yada, yada. Correct? Okay. Okay. And again, this was not on my list. Not on my stick in the sand. But I'm willing to move forward with adding that role. Yes, it is requiring more funds to fund it, but at the same time, I would also have an expectation that in the revised numbers that we get that the new growth number will increase to support some of that. So I agree with your principles. Again, that's a revenue-generating, anywhere there's a revenue-generating department on this budget, I'm looking, let's add Cogwater. And I say that with a little jest to it. Again, we need to generate... Those departments need to generate revenue. When it's the company I work for right now, sales want something, they get it. Because that's their job, is to get more patients to come in and get their MRIs and PET scans. And that's what they do. So we need more inspectors and... appraisers and everything else. So, Gus, are you there? I am, Mike. Can you hear me? I can. I will say this. I don't think your intention when you stood up in the meeting on that Thursday was the, I think you were surprised in the direction it went. And I think because you were probably the only one there, they said, give it to you. But I agree with it. I don't know if you want to add any more color to that, adding that role and what you think the benefits will be.

Hold on one second, okay? I'm actually on this side. I'm going to mute you just for a second, okay? Okay.

I'm back. Sorry. He's out doing an inspection. Now you know what it's like to do an inspection.

Yeah, it caught me off guard too. You know, I hear everybody talking about what this town needs and what we already have and Jamie got a chance to say what he said about the the administrative assistant or assistant town administrator, I should say. And then there were some other things that were brought up during the course of this meeting that really key in on what we do as a staff. And I think that the amount of work that's put in by all of us And that's why I don't want to minimize what other people do. I want to make sure that I talk about how many other people need this as much as I do, too. And I just want to kind of go off on a little bit of a side note here. I hired someone in 2012 that turned out to be a department head, turned out to be a superstar, is still with us. It wasn't me that did it, it was this organization that did it. And we're always doing more with less, but we seem to get the people that will do more with less. And my fear is later on down the road, as we all start to age, and I know some of us aren't aging, but some of us are. I know Jamie brought up the hair is turning gray, so I wanted to get to that point as well. We may not be able to replace these people with the type of quality people we have now because of the amount of work that we all do. And again, I don't want to minimize anybody. I want to make sure that I answer the questions, but I felt like I needed to say that. I appreciate what this organization does and how we put people in place that get the job done all the time. So to talk a little bit about myself, what we don't have down there and i feel after kevin's going before me um that you know having having more help down there and both the assessing department and the building department is going to help us bring more revenue there's no question in my mind my only fear with my department is if someone is looking for me to bring in, let's say I hire someone and they're making $70,000 a year. Well, I get looked at later on and say, well, you only brought in $69,000 in additional revenue. I gave you this position so you could show a profit, show a net profit with the new person you hired. You know, this time of year, so many other people need what they need. I just wanted to get that off my chest. And I hope everyone understands what I said.

Thank you, Gus. And I hope I answered the question. You did. You did. And again, this is not the slight, as I think you just brought it up, it's not the slight any other department. Because every department has needs. But I certainly have a focus on... for lack of a better term, regenerating departments, and that's what this is. So thank you. I'm all set.

Anybody? All right.

I got a home on Tri-County. I think facilities and police fire. No? Yeah, we would.

Oh, you're waiting until the end? He's kind of moving around. Got it.

My bad. We're kind of moving around just to... Why don't we just go to the library? Max and Jane held the library. Jane is. You ask Chris. Okay.

I just have like actually a very easy question. And I'm going to be asking the same question to some of the bigger departments that we haven't gotten to yet. And it's more so I can have an understanding in the budget we show each department and the salaries, and then there's a column that says other pay. And for the library, that other pay ranges anywhere from $703 to $1,908. I'm just trying to understand what the other pay is. Just one minute, let me see.

I'm thinking, sorry. Felicia Odie, the library director. Let me check the budget, but if, I'm thinking it's the education incentive for staff. So the staff who have degrees in library science, associate degrees, and bachelor's degree in the union contract, they negotiate a little incentive for those staff. So that's what it is.

Okay, so that's for, like, so that's for them to take, like, a certain class or just become knowledgeable about something?

No, no, no, if they have those degrees. If they have those degrees, they get a little added incentive.

Okay, I got it. It's like a little bonus for having those degrees.

Yeah, I'll just jump in.

That's pretty typical in union contracts, so you see that quite a bit, and please fire DPW and the library. So if someone has an associate's degree, they get a, it's a biweekly stipend, but it ends up being $700 a year. A bachelor's degree is $1,600, and a master's in library science is $1,900. So that's just, yeah, it's part of the union contract. That's a negotiated rate.

Yes. That was the only question that I had, so thank you. Thank you, yes.

Max?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So I just had the three questions I had before for the library. How has utilization of your department services by the public changed over the last five years? Do you have specific metrics to sort of back that up?

Okay. So I Before Jamie and Karen helped us go to full-time staff, we had so many part-time staff, and the unfortunate thing about having that is that the schedules were inconsistent. Part-time people don't have the same commitment that full-time people bring to the job. And all the programs that we needed to do, most of them were paid. We had to pay performers. We had to pay people with expertise. in areas like painting workshops, dance and all of that. But when we transitioned to full-time staff, what we did was to look for those specific talents that we needed because we didn't want to be paying people quarterly. What that did was that it made it possible for us to do the programs, to offer the programs to the community weekly. instead of quarterly. And it was much cheaper because we didn't have to pay anything but supplies. And the numbers, Max, speak for themselves in that when we compare with other libraries, we didn't used to talk about ourselves in connection with and Needham. And now we can proudly stand in front of you guys and say, yes, these are the results. has $1.6 million more in their budget. Their budget, as we speak, is $2.6 million. Chelmsford, other communities that we compare with, they have $1.4 million more in their budget. Even Norwood is $900,000 more. need 1.3 million more than what Franklin has, which brings it to 2.3 million. We're talking about a million dollar budget, which again consistently is below 1% of the town budget, 0.78, this budget I speak about. And even Milford next door, we can compare with Milford because we think, oh, they have 500,000 more. But why I'm saying this is that we do more in services than all of these communities combined. 50,000 in program attendance in Franklin compared to 27,000 in Chelmsford, 18,000 in Needham, 15,000 in Norwood, 12,000 in, 15,000 in Norwood, and 5,000, I'm sorry, in Milford. So these are staggering numbers. Any metrics you use, we are really not even saying 1% above. We are talking about huge differences. Franklin only spends $33 per person per year. Nedig and Nedim, they spend $81 per person. Chelmsford, $71. Norwood, $69. Milford, $53. And that's why the community can see the difference. For services, we have increased tremendously. For programming, we're shattering all records. And for staffing, we are the lowest, 12. So I don't know what to say but to say that the library staff really I can't commend them enough. It's the most talent you can find in one room, you know, and we want to give Jamie credit because he's really helped us get there. But for Jamie and Karen's foresight and also the staff's willingness, the union, to make these changes in their job descriptions, we won't be standing here today. So Max, And the other thing I wanted to add was that we're doing this with a building that has increased by 8,000 square feet. So everywhere you carried the library is not only cost effective and efficient, we have really been good stewards of the town's resources.

Thank you. So your utilization has gone exponential over the last while because of all the services you've increased. And it's amazing. Thank you. So the other question I have is, if your budget was cut by 5% compared to level service, would your department still be able to function and meet all state requirements and professional accreditation standards? Would you not be able to operate properly or risk losing acquired accreditation or certification?

Oh, yes, you said it. If you were cut by 5%, we would lose certification. And what that does is if we lose certification, well, I don't want to say it will negatively affect the reputation of the town, because we are the first public lending library in the nation. The last time that happened, I had Fox News camped on the grounds. CBS and all, because of our reputation, it makes for a news story. But let's forget the news. Franklin residents, really, their library use will end at the borders of our town, because there's no other library in this state that is going to sell residents from Franklin. and it will not be wise because at the heart of all of the libraries and the laws and MAR and regulations is the sharing. Last year alone, Franklin residents borrowed 58,000 items. If the town was to buy this, we would be spending $870,000. So why would we even want to do that? And we stand to lose $90,000 in state money that we get every year. So at every turn, it doesn't make sense to even want to cut a budget that is already under 1% of the town's budget. I would tell you that when the master plan committee finished the master plan, the first thing the library did was like, take the master plan, have a meeting, let's see how we can help the town accomplish some of these goals. And we were so pleasantly surprised and humbled and grateful that Goal 5A says to fund the library at a level that's sustainably maintains and exceeds MAR, and that such funding should be over 1%. So they took a look. We didn't even have to make our case. And they saw that, hey, the library really is worth all of the money, every dollar that the community puts into it.

So I guess my concern is that just a 5% cut in your budget would cause the whole system to implode, basically. And I don't think, I mean, I recognize all the great work that you do, but I think that it's pretty dire. I don't think there's any other department that is on the brink as much as the library. Is that fair to say?

I'm sorry, what did you say, that no department is?

Yeah, so if you cut 5% from any department, you cut it from the library, you lose a whole lot.

Yes.

You won't be able to function, is that correct?

Yes.

So out of all the departments, I don't think any other department has the resources stretched as thin as the library.

Absolutely true. Thank you. Thank you. We have no wiggle room in this budget to cut anything at all.

Thank you.

Thanks.

I'm all set.

I just wanted to make a comment. I looked up what the average percentage of the budget is across Massachusetts for libraries, and it's about 1.25%, 1.3%. And for Franklin, that would be $2 million, which is . So I just thought I would mention that.

Thank you. Thanks.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Felicia, as always, you do an amazing job. And your team does an amazing job. And the fact that you served 50,000 people and all of those incredible programs on the embarrassingly low budget that we're able to give you is not only commendable but truly exemplary to your leadership. Thank you. And I hope that you and your whole team know how much we appreciate that because we know that you're making gold out of let's say some not quite so precious metals. Now earlier we had a caller ask about Sunday and I know for the past year because of budget cuts the library hasn't been open. Yes. In this new budget, I believe you're proposing reopening on Sundays. Yes, we are. Can you just talk us through, is the shift just taking existing people and moving them around a little bit different in the schedule, or are you adding personnel to cover that Sunday?

No, we're not. So Sunday is in the union contract, and the way it states is that if staff are interested in working Sunday, we give them first dibs. So that's why Sunday is budgeted in overtime pay. But yes, when the staff's not interested, we use library substitutes, and that's much cheaper. Because now we do have people who come fill in shifts if the staff's sick or on vacation. So we also use them for Sunday when the staff's not interested in working. And I have to say that Sunday is what is wild in gold in that it's only three and a half hours, but it packs in quite a punch. Same staggering number of visitors we see on Friday and Saturdays. So for three and a half hours, it is fantastic to get that kind of traffic. What it tells you is that Franklin is a community where people are working. So the opportunity to use the library on weekends, Saturday and Sunday, is very much appreciated.

Can you talk to us a little bit, Felicia, about what kind of complaints did you and your team get this last year with being closed on Sundays? Just give us the G-rated version, please.

Oh, it's all we hear. The community's been very understanding. They just keep asking, any way you can restore Sunday hours? Any way you can restore? They miss Sunday hours, because most of the community members who work, it was their only day we saw dads with their kids all It was just a all ages, you know, it was that three and a half hours, the libraries just teeming with visitors, with people who just want to sit and read, with people who want to do business. So we've gotten the response consistently, and we just recently concluded our survey for the next strategic plan and it was a recurring request. That in addition to parking, additional parking. So those two things really are tops there. Additional parking we can't do anything about because you're going to be hearing more about it in the capital plan or through Jamie. But some days it's something we can do.

Yes. And to your point, I don't want it to be lost in the community. If you were to lose accreditation, that's a very, it's not just incredibly embarrassing to us as a town and America's first library, but that would prohibit Franklin residents from using libraries across the state?

Any library across the state.

It basically puts a big red dot on us and says, you fools can't go use any other library because you're underfunding your library. exactly and that's the point thank you so we don't we don't want we don't want that thank you yeah as much as we're clearly a million dollars under funding where you should be just to compete with comparable sized towns we certainly don't want to go backwards thank you so much thank you very much thank you major right um actually uh

Councilor Cormier-Ledger brought it up, and it's a follow-up on Rose's. Right now, the library isn't open on Sunday, and you made the comment that the budget includes opening on Sunday. I never saw that in the narrative, that it was going to open on Sundays.

We did tonight. I'm just looking it up now.

So is it opening on Sundays in this budget? Yes. It is. That would have been a big highlight to put in here because that was, again, one of my stakes. That was one of my non-revenue generating departments I wanted to make sure was open. And the fact that I didn't see open on Sundays in here, that's good. So that answers Rose's question. Thank you. She was worried about the library being open on Sundays. So that clears that up. Just one question as it relates to when we talk about towns potentially sharing services. Has there ever been any talk about Medway and saying, no, what, the Franklin Library is going to be the library for the area. We're all going to fund it. We're going to blah, blah, blah. Has there ever been talk, and maybe you can't, but this is more for Jamie. Has there ever been talk about regionalizing and using Franklin Library as the hub and the surrounding towns funding it and going from that perspective?

I don't believe that's allowed under state statute with the MAR. The MAR, the borderline, there's a state board of library commissioners and Felicia, you can correct me if I'm wrong, I bet you the laws around library finance have probably not changed in over 100 years. I'm not kidding. And so regionalization of that has never been discussed. I mean, I'm sure it's been, like yourself bringing it up now, I'm sure there's been some concepts, but I think that's where the Minuteman network comes in. I think instead of having like the Franklin brand, you know the hockamock area library network franklin's the headquarters and you can go to the medway branch of the franklin public library that type of model is probably going to be really hard if not impossible to do people get territorial towns probably wouldn't regionalize it but i think to felicia's point the minute man network the collaboration All of those things are like the second tier regionalization of those issues where you've got, what, 46 library, 40?

37 library.

37 library. So in a sense, it kind of is regional.

Yeah.

But what if Medway said that Franklin will be the headquarters? Would Franklin say yes? Probably not. Correct. So I think, I'm just articulating to your point, the regionalization in and of itself is the Minuteman, is really the Minuteman network. And libraries statewide I think are in similar networks, like the Middlesex network and the Berkshire network.

Yeah, I understand. And I'm just bringing it up because it may be something that we can have conversations with our state reps about introducing that because, yes, if we're going to have an agreement, I want Franklin to be standing at the end because it's the first public library. If anyone decided that, well, Medway's going to take theirs versus ours, it's not a battle they're going to win. The point being is there's only so many. There are 37 in the network. I don't need 37 copies of Catcher in the Rye. We just need one at this point. The point is, there's probably some savings, just like you all did with the regional dispatch. You decided we don't need a million people doing dispatch, we can leverage it. So potentially there's, I'm not, again, not saying it's this year, next year, but we talk about systemic problems, that's a, and I'm not even saying it's a problem, it's an opportunity where if we can regionalize, there could be, and Franklin is standing at the mountain because of where we are and what we represent from a library perspective. I would certainly try and push that initiative and allow regionalization of libraries, because it would, Yeah, just wanted to point that out. Felicia, as everyone else has said, it is a pride and joy of the community. And thank you for putting my three and a half hours I get back.

Is that what it is on Sunday?

I get three and a half hours on Sunday, so hopefully Rose will be happy as well, too. Thank you. Thank you.

So that would be great, but it is... The first public London library, right? Yes. Philadelphia was the first library.

That was, yes, subscription. Yeah.

Just want to set the record straight.

What are you, from Philadelphia?

Jesus. No, I'm a Boston kid all the way. Who cares about Philadelphia?

Yes, thank you. Okay, I think we're good there. Thank you.

Brian, you're up. Thank you, Felicia.

How are you? Good. We can jump right into that.

Sure. I 100% appreciate all the revenue you're bringing. You know that.

Just before we start, I mean, doesn't he look like the rec guy? He's all tan. He's nice and rock.

You've got to have a good-looking tan guy running your rec department.

So are you joining our kickball team? Fantastic.

All right, go. Go ahead.

Would you like to, okay. So, I mean, we can talk about how well we're doing. I mean, in fiscal year 26, just so far to this moment, we brought in 730, we've spent 736,000 and we brought in 808. So we're in the plus about 71,000. We're anticipating breaking 910,000 in revenue this year. And our budget is only $850, so I think we're going to do well. But we talk about field use fees. I think that's what you wanted me to come up for. I just wanted to say that over 90% of our field use is residents of Franklin, and 10% are not-for-profit or non-residents. Currently, the town does not charge our residents a field use fee. Those would be organizations that are not-for-profit, like Franklin Youth Football, baseball, you know, all the youth sports. We also have several hundred high school students that are using town and school fields as well, and then the rec department also has programs. So it's a complex issue. It's not just a matter of flipping the switch and starting to charge people. We have, there's a lot to record when it comes to participation, how many numbers each organization has. You know, there's a lot of questions about are we going to charge the rec department programs? Are we going to charge the school department programs? And I think a lot of that has to be a collaboration between DPW, the school department, you know, Jamie's office, and myself. So I think it's a larger discussion than just, you know, the rec department making the decision to start charging residents. And a lot of them are already contributing. Youth organizations, believe it or not, invest in the fields that they're using. So for instance, if an irrigation system may fail, Carlos might reach out and say, can you kick in money to do this? We anticipate that we'd probably bring in about $20,000, but they're probably spending about 10. So does that goodwill go away if we're now charging those groups to use our fields? They're already paying a fee to the youth sports organization that they belong to for uniforms and for insurance and for all that. It's a little bit of a complex issue, so I'm open to suggestions. Jamie and I have already talked about it, and Mark Sorrell. I think what we should do is maybe as a group, Colin, myself, school department folks, DPW, Jamie, and we'll all sit down and come up with a plan and bring it forward to you guys and see what you think of it.

I think when we start to have these discussions, Ryan, it comes out of an unfortunate necessity, not a willingness to put more fees on people. It comes from where in difficult conversations with every department, right? And we're looking at under every possible rock, where is there revenue that could help offset some expenses, right? I've certainly benefited greatly from Franklin Youth Football, from Franklin Youth Baseball, from using the beautiful facilities the town has. But I got to say, as a parent, I always, and being on those boards and just being involved, I always wondered why We were charging money to parents to be a part of the program, but it wasn't anywhere in our budget to give back to the town for using the fields for the lights, for the various things that go. And I know, for example, when I worked in Needham years ago, it didn't matter if you were a nonprofit, a town group, whatever, the YMCA, it didn't make any difference. If you were using the field, here's the fee, right? And it didn't matter if you lived in Needham or not lived in Needham, here's the fee because there's expenses with using the fields, right? When I brought that up to you in the past and I brought it up to Jamie, it was more can this just be looked at and can we maybe come up with a reasonable number, right? Like maybe it's $10 a kid or something, right? But that adds up, right? Or if we have a group that is using the new cricket field, like can we have a contract with them that just says, hey, it's a few thousand dollars a year to use the field. Or we've talked about over at Beaver having a pass, right, which I think people would support if they knew, yeah, your $35 sticker gets you somebody to clean out the trash every day, which we were lacking last summer, and we got a lot of complaints about that, right? So we were just trying to think of ways to help solve some of those problems and be... Without putting so much money back on the residents, that's certainly not the goal. But I think modest fees to use some of these things and offset them, I don't think people would be that upset about because they just understand this is how things go. But certainly, welcome to disagree with me. We were just trying to look at... And I agree with you, by the way, that this is a bigger conversation. It's schools, it's Park and Rec, it's DPW. I know in Needham, for example, the school department, at 3 o'clock, those schools are no longer under the school department purview in Needham. They shift over to the Park and Rec department. And they use every building and every field as utilization, revenue generation, whatever you want to call it, right? But they're packed and they're used all afternoon and all day, and then it reverts back to the school department in the morning, and that's just the cycle. And I'm not in any way saying that's what we have to shift to in Franklin, but it's not an unprecedented model. No, no, I know. I'm also. Mark?

So I just want to indicate that you have to throw into the mix. Massachusetts has a statute called the Recreational Use Statute, which basically says if a property owner, whether public or private, allows their property to be used without charging a fee, they're basically insulated from liability for injuries for negligence. Now, if you start imposing a fee, you have to take into account you lose that immunity, which would then be reflected probably in some sort of increased insurance premiums based on that increased exposure. So you would have to take that into account in saying the fees. So you might set a modest fee and have a turnout that's costing you more unintended consequences because of the increase

I JUST WANT TO... I JUST WANT TO... SO SOMEONE THAT'S BEEN ON THE RECREATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR THE LAST 20 YEARS, OVER THE LAST 20 YEARS, WHEN I WAS INVOLVED WITH YOUTH FOOTBALL AND YOUTH BASEBALL, I MEAN, WE... I JUST DON'T WANT TO LOSE THAT PART OF What we... I mean, we did those lights down at Pisani Field. We got everything free. I mean, we got the... And you softball contributed to that as well. You softball did that. Now we're going to do it at King Street, right? We're doing it at King Street with the lights. The soccer people, the soccer organization is going to contribute to that. And baseball, when I was on the board for baseball, we put mounds in. We did fields all over. I don't want to lose that part of it because I think if we do put a fee on, they're going to say, oh, well, they have our money now. We won't do anything. I just don't want to lose that part of it. And I don't know how anybody else feels, but I've seen that over the last year that every organization, soccer, lacrosse, baseball, when we ask them at the recreational committee, they always jump up and they're ready to, we can give you this much, we can give you this much. They do work together. We always come up with the money. I think, Ryan, I don't... Yeah, I will always worry about that goodwill going away. Yeah.

For the small amount of money that we would...

So, a couple of comments. First, I want to concur somewhat with my colleague Ted that we love the fact that the rec department generates revenue. I think there needs to be an assessment with the rec department, as with many other departments, just to kind of sit back and think about, OK, What are we doing? Are there other ways for us to optimize? For you, it's likely a revenue growth opportunity as opposed to cost-cutting. But just really thinking about, hey, are we right-sized? What's the right approach here? Attorney Sorrell mentioned the benefit of having no fee, and I think that's a tricky one. That's really important to take into consideration. I think it does make a lot of sense. You had suggested kind of sitting down with your leadership team and helping to kind of define a plan and coming back to us with a recommendation. I love that. But one thing I will say that I struggle with, I struggle mightily, and it speaks to what, you know, Chairman DeLarco had mentioned earlier, is that, you know, I really want to avoid both the reality and the impression of putting more on parents, you know, who are paying for their kids to, you know, participate. You know, I think, you know, I think youth activities and sport remain very, very important and in some ways sacrosanct and, you know, not just in this community but in many communities. And so we want to continue to make sure that that remains accessible. And even a $10 fee on them will start, that's going to impact some people, especially when we already know that many additional costs are borne by parents as everything is getting more expensive. through inflation and whatnot, and whether we're talking about increasing prices for school, for activities in school that were covered before, whether it's football or basketball or other sports or theater, I want to resist as much as possible continuing to add burden to that group. That's going to probably limit what you can increase, what you continue to drive, but I think it has to be taken into consideration. as you think about what opportunities exist for us to grow our top line number.

I was going to say much of what Ken just said, but I think that when we're talking about bringing in new roles in different departments, obviously not yours, that's not what we're talking about. But then when we're in the same breath saying, well, we're going to add these to residents on other things, I think we're going to be met with a lot of pushback on that. I think rightfully so. I think we're going to be adding increased fees on our kids and our their parents on the schools we're you know they're gonna say well then why are you spending more of our money in these different places I also just wanted to mention that you are considering that you bring in a net profit you are one of the small handful of departments that had a like 2.75 or less percent budget growth from last year I mean other than like our committees and things like that. It's really just like seven or eight departments and you also bring in profit. So, um, we are very grateful for both your, um, financial, uh, good stewardship there by not increasing your budget by a huge amount and also for helping us to bring in revenue. So thank you.

So Ryan, you had said about 10% of the activities are non-Franklin for profit. Do all of them pay some kind of fee? So everyone is, there's no one non-Franklin for profit?

The only people that do not pay are residents that are not from possible organizations.

Okay. I agree with what – I mean, it's a fine line, but I think that obviously if it's a Franklin Recreation Department-sponsored event like basketball – I've talked to you about the basketball program. It's one of the – most unique and best that I've ever been involved with. As long as the fees associated with that and you're covering your costs, I think that that's great. Yes, there may be opportunities for the other use for it, but I think that that's farther down the line. But as long as the non-Franklin for-profits are paying their fair share, we maybe could look at that and squeeze a little bit more. That may be the first place that I would start. Other than that, thank you for answering that. Appreciate it.

Ryan, you're the best. Thank you. Thank you, Ryan. Historic Museum, who's up? Jane.

That was Jane, yeah. I just have some questions. Sure. Nice to see you again. And I'm going to start off with, so everybody knows, nothing that I do is a personal thing. to you as people or as what you do. But my job is to analyze what we spend and make sure we're doing it correctly and fiscally responsible. So please don't take any of my questions personally. For the historical museum, I'm a big fan. I haven't been in there in a long time, but I love the fact that we have things that are preserving the town's past history because who we were is who we are. My problem is in an issue where we're struggling with funds, does the historical museum generate any revenue to warrant the salary. And like before we had an archivist, did we have events? Who handled those? How many items do you actually take care of on a full-time basis? I'm trying to justify a $75,000 salary basically. that's not a want, and I need it to be a need. So, I need you to make me believe it's a need.

Sure, I understand. Rowan Lowell, town archivist, for those who don't know. And I would like to start, I do understand the optics, particularly in a budget crisis, historical and cultural resources, as important as they are, their preservation does come with a price tag that it can be difficult to recoup. Previous to there being an archivist, the Historical Commission took care of 100% of the curation of objects, of the recording of objects, which, while done on an enthusiastic basis, was not necessarily a consistent basis. So over time, there has been some information that was lost, and part of my work has been trying to recoup that information. So the Historical Commission does operate the museum on the weekends, open Saturday and Sunday. So if there was no work of this, they would continue to operate the museum on Saturdays and Sundays. However, in addition to the curation of about, I believe it's 4,000 objects and about 300 archival collections, Part of what I've been trying to do is work with the Historical Commission on developing exhibits and programming that not only fall in line with museum and archival standards, but that are appealing to both the townspeople and to people in surrounding towns, including broadening our horizons to encompass more art and cultural programs. We currently have an exhibit up with Franklin Art Association. And that's a recurring exhibit from last year that we brought over 400 people into the museum over the course of one month, which I think was a record high for us. And developing partnerships with other independent artists who want to do pop-up exhibits. We've had artist Amy Adams do about three or four exhibits with us and continuing to do so in that vein this year. which not only sheds light on local artists, but brings more people into the museum who might not necessarily have even known it was there. More times than I can count, we have visitors that come in and say, you know, I've never been here. I didn't even know this was here. And increasing the visibility has been a huge part of my position, in addition to just making the historical and cultural resources that we do already have accessible. The Historical Commission has done an amazing job over the years through its 100% volunteer-led organization to document the assets that the museum does have and does its best to make them accessible to patrons, but they are a 100% volunteer organization. So having a dedicated staff member to take care of those particular needs in addition to helping out with programming and exhibits as well as liaising with town departments and easing kind of that administrative burden has freed up their time significantly to focus on the things that they want to do, which is talking to residents, generating interest in the museum, and calling attention to, as you mentioned, the centuries of history that our town has.

Thank you. So when you have these events, are they generating revenue?

So currently, we don't charge admission. We take donations at the door. at this point, starting to open up to ticketed events. This past weekend, we had an event with the Live Arts String Quartet. It was a ticketed event that the majority of proceeds would go to them, but we would get a portion of those proceeds in addition to use of the space. That amount hasn't been calculated as far as I'm aware. I can check in with their treasurer as to what that figure would look like. That kind of goes in line with our main focus this past year and last year has been looking towards these kind of bigger ticket events that we can, you know, charge a fee for entry and recoup part of part of my salary in addition to other operational costs.

So the ultimate goal is to build up the museum to the point where we can offset some of the costs with the revenue generated and we're in that position now where we're getting there. Yes, exactly.

We're not quite there yet. Currently we're working off of a suggested suggested entry of $5 donation, which is a very common fee structure for a lot of museums to have. But in light of the budget restrictions, focusing on things that can bring in more revenue, more traffic, more attention, really anything that will put us more on the map to have increased visitorship and thus increase revenue is really number one on our to-do list. We recently had a project with Dean College with one of their business courses where two groups of students created marketing proposals for the museum and included a multi-step process by which the museum could start to generate more income. And this included suggestions for long-term in the next five years, as well as things to plan for in the next three years, and some steps that we could take right now. And the Historical Commission and I are actively working on many of those solutions.

Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

Mr. Chairman, really quickly, just to address a couple. I mean, Rowan's only been here for a few years, but this goes back a long way. The Friends of the Franklin Library for decades traditionally kind of raised some sort of money to kind of, when there was no archivist, to try to fund some of the programs that were at the library. You know, I don't know the status of the friends. I know they have some money. I know they're still around. Museum, you mean? Museum, whatever. Yeah. I'm with Bobby. I'm going to declare the hearing closed. It's a couple of brain farts. But the longer-term strategy is there, and what we would likely do is a revolving fund. The structure of it is not ready. There's a lot of different ways we can offset the cost. The first thing we've got to do is create the demand. And I think what you've seen in the last year is record-breaking numbers. And we've had a presentation, I think I shared it with you all last October, where we've had more people and more innovative ways to come to the museum. And I give Alan and the historical commission also a tremendous amount of credit. We're also going to do a little reshuffle down there. We're going to get rid of the stove in the kitchen, and we're going to move the office and the gift shop up to the front. Again, like creative ways, and hopefully if we can create a demand, we've talked about quarterly newsletters, we've talked about annual memberships, but you have to provide something people want to see, and people want to hear the story, right? That's what drags people into museums, and I think I agree with you, you look at wants and needs, right? We need public education, right? This is something that's good, but the citizen survey had a number in there, like over 70% about a rating that people wanted to maintain community character. I think you have an untapped gem over here. Six years ago, we weren't bringing in any revenue, really, to the senior center. And now, five, six years later, now we're bringing in 40%. Ryan, at one point, was not always dollar for dollar, but he's become, as people pointed out, basically dollar for dollar and bringing in a little extra to make sure that if there's programs. The same visions for the museum. And I think the chair of the Historical Commission and the Historical Commission, Rowan, and everybody have a longer-term vision. If you get rid of the position, then you lose a lot of that momentum, and then you're gonna go backward, and I can almost assure you, you'll never get it back. If we lost Rowan, then we've gotta replace Rowan with someone else who has to learn everything all over again, and you just stop that momentum. You're probably several years or a few years away from creating systems that can try to offset 10%, 15%, 20% of the operating costs through either gift shop sales, memberships, newsletters. I mean, there's a lot of creative ways in the museum community. We totally believe this is an untapped gem. We still don't, maybe like yourself, Councilor Callaway-Tripp, People maybe went in once at one point, they didn't go in. I think Councilor Chandler did admit last year that he'd never even been in the building. I mean, we have to get people into the building and that's why we're having more events with Corey's community and the arts community to go in there. I'm trying to propose to some of the subcommittees at some point to the EDC and the downtown project for meetings to be in there. I give a lot of credit to them. They've opened up the space in there. We want to do rentals in there. That's a project that's been on Julie's plate actually, not to belabor this, but this is a project that's been put on her plate that she has not been able to get to about how to organization that because she doesn't have the help she needs because we don't have the help we need. If you want to get to these places the community wants and a point of pride, I think you still have to kind of maintain that investment and that professional staff capacity to try to make sure you don't move backwards. So I just wanted to make sure people knew that there is a longer look at this. You get the World Cup coming, and people around the world love history a lot more than Americans do. And we do, I will give them credit, like they're trying to have the building open so that people when they're visiting Franklin can go take a look. It gets more visitors in, it gets more eyeballs in the building. And they've been doing a great job trying to contribute to that profile. So I hope that gives a little bit shorter, longer-term past context, but also future. And also, this was behind community preservation, right? I mean, we restored the cupola, and the museum looks great on the outside, the Redbrook Schoolhouse. I mean, all of the Old South Church. We're in the golden age of historic preservation in Franklin. We're preserving assets more than we ever have. And the museum is your, for people that don't also know, the museum is your original town hall. It's your first town hall in this community right next to the Methodist Church. That little area right there is really the beginning of your community. And you should really celebrate that.

And just stop in. Just go check it out.

There is all sorts of new exhibits, and there's always things changing. You know, it's not just the annual bridal gown exhibit. It's really all sorts of stuff that they've got going on in there that is pretty fascinating. So I just wanted to point that out. Thank you very much for your time. Thank you.

Mr. Chairman?

I'll go max.

Go ahead, Max. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So probably a little fun facts about me. I've actually taken a couple of dates to the historical museum. They got a real kick out of it. I enjoyed it. Did you buy a Ladybug t-shirt? They didn't buy a Ladybug t-shirt, unfortunately. But I just wanted to say, I did have a question, actually, in terms of the archivistic, the preservation that you do, how much of that history, if you didn't do that preservation, would be lost forever?

It's a very good question. It's difficult to put an exact number to these things, but I would say of the items that I've cataloged and identified, I've been able to restore sort of a chain of ownership and provenance to about roughly a third of the items and collections that are currently just in the building between the historical commission having a return between chairs and people willing to undertake the actual stewardship and archiving tasks a lot of information has been lost over the years so if it stopped today you know we receive maybe 20 25 donation new donations a year so in a month two months you might not necessarily see a giant impact but over time you are going to have that enormous loss of incoming new information that can be processed and fit into the you know, pieces of Franklin's history in addition to maintaining the state of collections as they are.

This might be a little bit of a stretch. When we talk about facilities, we talk about the machinery assets. You know, you're building them, investing in them, they just, you know, they wear out and they disappear. Right. Do you see the history in a similar lens that, you know, keep investing in our history is just going to disappear like, you know, a building?

In me as a personal perspective, As a personal topic very close to my heart, I do. I understand how from the outside, history can just seem like an old dusty book that you go and pick up and read and it's still going to be there in 20 years. But with the amount of technology that we're developing every year for describing and sharing collections and really providing access to those collections, If it's not something we maintain, it is something that we are going to lose and lose very quickly. New technologies are developing, new file types crop up every five to 10 years. In the past 30 years, the archival profession has seen more development and more change than it has in the past hundred. So especially in this kind of golden age of digital information and maintaining access to that while having it be a true representation of the collections that we possess is hugely important in preserving our history and making other people aware of it.

So feasibly, you could be working on a project now that could be seen by someone taking someone else on a date in 200 years.

Oh, I mean, theoretically, the biggest question would be whether the USB drives still work. You know, 20 years ago, we might have been using floppy disks. And I... still have some of those as well but yeah theoretically the the we're working on building uh the access to you know the past and historical resources that have been up until now largely recorded on paper and maintaining um that digital presence is huge and reaching uh audiences of today thank you very much

So, as Councillor Callaway-Tripp said, this is a want, not a need, I think was your case to some degree.

I told her to convince me that it was a need, not a want.

Correct, yes. So, I mean, and ultimately, I side on that. But, however, I do think there's, I think, I look at, the Historical Museum, Corey and the Cultural Council, and the library as kind of a three-legged stool. We've got to find a way. And you just mentioned something we're trying to do, but you had Dean come up with, you worked with kids at Dean, I shouldn't say kids, students at Dean, to come up with a plan of how to generate, so sharing that information, we talk about communicating, sharing that information will help say, oh, there's a vision out there to do that. My point being is, it is, Franklin is, And any place in New England has history, and we need to somehow retain it. So I'm for keeping the position. The one question I do have is we have a Community Preservation Act. Can it not pay for this salary while we're generating the revenue to fill it?

Nope.

It cannot? Nope. So you have a Community Preservation Act and they can't spend money on the position that's to preserve our community.

You can't use it on ongoing expenses, maintenance, operational costs, and stuff like that. The Community Preservation Act are generally for one-time monies. Um, it might be a little flexibility and I'll talk to Mark offline and I'll check with the community preservation coalition. Um, who's kind of a repository of all this to see if there's any other ancillary things, but I just, I agree with you. Um, that is another issue by the way, to bring up to the legislator. As you know, I worked for the people that passed the bill in the Solucci and Swift administrations, and I've seen it all the way for 25 years from the beginning to now. The law has almost never changed. They've only changed it once, which was to allow expenses for recreational facilities as long as they were open to the public. But there's a lot of room for the Community Preservation Act uses to expand. This would be one I think I would put on your list, Councilor LeBlanc, to talk to Rep Roy and Senator Rauch when they come in for their visit. this would be something they may sponsor, and I bet you it would be very popular statewide, and they might be able to file some sort of bill on something like this. I agree with you on that completely.

Yeah, I mean, it just seems like a logical path to this.

Yeah, it's a creative idea for sure.

Yeah, and again, I think, Rowan, anything that you can do with working with the Cultural Commission and the library, because I look at those three things really joined at the hip. And to leverage, I like, Jeff, your idea of renting That museum can generate revenue. It's beautiful inside. Have a nice bridal reception or something in there. It can do that. So if Rowan can spend time putting your business hat on, it may not be historically related, but it's the use of the museum can generate revenue, then you're on your way to paying your salary.

Yeah, absolutely. Just like Ted, I do have constant ongoing communication with Corey, with the library, with the senior center. We have monthly community partnership meetings where we all brainstorm to try to find ways to best support each other in our own projects and in a combined effort of cultural enrichment. So that has been an ongoing aspect for us as well.

Beautiful. Thank you. Thank you. All set. Thank you.

Thank you. Lucas, you have a award ceremony tomorrow night?

I do, yes.

So we better go through you because.

Tomorrow's our award ceremony for our seniors who graduate and awards. So my superintendent hat on. I'm also a parent of a senior this year, so I've been to so many for other families, and my son will be there receiving an award as well. So I have two kind of hats for that reason. Thank you for accommodating me. Thank you to my colleagues for accommodating us too. I didn't know you'd call us now, but thank you.

I forgot all about that. It's okay.

Sure, I'm happy to do that.

I'll do high level.

We'll get right into it. So the request from the Franklin Public Schools was for $72.3 million. That's 2.5% over last year's budget. We have not increased our headcount to the staff totals, and we worked really hard to get to 2.5 by working internally to look at our FTEs and our resources to land at that. I just would point out as well, this budget this year is actually three years in the making. When I think back to the planning and the decisions that the school committee made on votes around consolidation and redistricting, that led to the budget you have before you. In addition, the vote to shift healthcare out of our budget was another strategic move. So I think between some fiscal discipline and strategy, we have landed today at 2.5%. There's a sheet that's just capturing this. It's a one-pager. I know you have budget books, you have documents, you have spreadsheets, and this is just literally one page, and we will post that publicly for the community to review as well and have that online as well. And it just hits on three things. What's driving costs, how have we responded, and then some of the breakdowns. So basically, some of our cost drivers are some of the non-discretionary cost increases. So you look at contractual obligations as one big area. Special education has continued to rise, not only in Franklin, across the state and the country. and transportation, which was a contractual obligation. When we look at avoidance, the district reorganization that we underwent and we're living today allowed us to avoid some costs at the tune of 3.2 million from the budget because when you reduce some of our schools and the structure, it led to that. The second thing I'd mention is our ability to not sit back passively when we look at rising special education costs. We've worked hard to say, well, what services can we provide in district to help support and educate our students? And that has two things. morally the responsibility if we can provide a program that has a Franklin resident student in town being able to take a van or transportation to be in their local community school that's the goal but also fiscally when we pay for the educator and we can group students who have similar needs that's also a cost savings we've talked about that in previous town councils presentations and others but I just would point that out as the philosophy And finally, just pointing out over the last few years between the failed overrides and the redistricting and the consolidation, we've reduced approximately 65.1 FTE over that time period between FY25 and 26. And ultimately what we've done is we've looked at the school system we have, how we're organized, and how can we look to create the most efficient model that provides the quality of services that the folks that are sending kids to school to receive an education. And we've really tried to right-size as we've done this. So when I say it's been three years in the making, that's where we've landed at this. Finally, I added a few things, well, we added a few things, and I should let some introductions happen in a minute. Let me just finish this and then we'll do that. The serving Franklin students, so a question came up around administration. So if you do the math between the total number of staff that work for us in admin, we're about 97% student facing. If you just look at operating, it's about four, so it's 3% total. It's about 4.4% of our staff is in leadership in an admin role. And then with enrollment, we approximate, we educate roughly eight to nine out of every 10 students that live in town. So it's 87 to 88%. And that's been a pretty consistent number over time. If you go online and look at our enrollment information, you can find more information around that. So that's just that in a nutshell. I've talked about healthcare. The last piece was in the bottom left. You'll notice when we did the joint budget subcommittee and we had the presentation, I held up a... I tried to hold up a map. I think they tried to zoom in. I appreciated it. But ultimately, we just wanted to show where we compare in the Hockamock League, including a few others, such as Medway, just because they were a close neighbor, we added, to look at where we fall on net school spending comparison. So how much is the town of Franklin spending on education comparative to the other towns that are local and of the Hockamock? Um, this digitally, um, you can expand it much more, but you can see the towns that are in there as well. We picked our neighboring towns plus the Hockamuckle and that shows you kind of where we fall on that chain. And that is from the most recent data that we have, which is the FY 24. They're always behind because they need the year to end to do their tallies. So, um, I'll just stop there. The last thing was if you turn the page, I won't go over this. I put a line of delineation to just show where we have presented our budget publicly in great detail, and it started with my recommendation in January, the hearings from the school committee in February, the vote that took place, then the FinCom meetings that have been referenced tonight, and here we are tonight for the town council. So with that said, I'll stop now, but I do want to... acknowledge the folks to my right, and particularly our school business administrator, who's done a phenomenal job to help us organize and has done great work. So do you want to introduce yourself?

Yeah. Thank you, Mr. Jagir. Good evening, everyone. I'm Jenna Melotti. I'm the school business administrator.

And I'm Paul Griffith, the school committee chair.

Okay, so question, question. Who me? You can put your hands up.

I have a question. On your little chart at the bottom, right, where it shows like the net spending, now where the insurance is now moving to the towns part of the budget, won't that increase the net spending and does that number reflect that or no?

I can say that the number, whether it was in the school budget or outside of it, would be categorized as part of the spending that goes to it. I don't know the answer to the second question around, and can you repeat it, Council?

Oh, well, I don't remember which one you just answered. It's getting late. I wanted to know, like, before, when you do net spending, if net spending is whatever the town pays over and above your 300 account. See, I pay attention. Now that insurances are no longer in your 300 account, won't that increase the net spending that's being reported so it would raise that percent?

It has no impact at all. Because it's shifting it, but it's still the same amount.

So net spending is the total amount. So whether it's in this bucket of 300 or 910, it's still accounted for as contributing back to the schools as part of what we spend to support schools. So you're just kind of shifting it to a different budget line.

Okay. For this specific question. Every single thing that is spent on the students is aggregated here. So facilities, any of the health insurance, retirement, like all those different details regardless of which line item it comes from in the town, all is counted towards this. So we as a whole, everyone included, every single line item included, spend less than almost every single one of the schools in this comparison.

So I, okay, then I was confused because I, and maybe I still am. I honestly don't know. I thought net spending had nothing to do with the 300 account. It's just whatever the town side allocated towards school expenses. Everyone. And so if that's the case, the insurance was in the 300 account. And now it's not, and it's coming out of the operating expense for the town, so how does that not increase that? I don't get it. It doesn't change the number.

Jane, just to think of it like this, right? Whatever it takes to operate a school district, whatever those costs are, it doesn't matter whether it's an account 300, account 5, account 110, DPW, it doesn't matter. It's an aggregate amount of money that's being spent that goes through the formula. So it has no bearing on that school spending that it's in 300 versus 910. If I were you, I'm just making a point of recommendation, just forget about the, like it just does not have any bearing on it. Okay. I'm starting over.

But it doesn't make sense, and I will have to keep beating this up until it does, but I will surrender for tonight.

Mike? For the upcoming school year, what is the, are you anticipating a decline or an increase in the student population.

Um, we were surprised this year where we saw more students than the McKibbin report had projected. Um, I would say at this point we're projected in Franklin to start to, we'll see declines at the high school as the smaller grades start to move through and then we start to stabilize and then we see a slight tick up probably around 29 or 2030.

So we are, I'm just going to look here to be clear.

Um, I don't anticipate a major increase, but I don't see us, I see us kind of leveling out at this point.

All right. So, in theory, not a jump, flat? In theory, we're supposed to have. From a budgeting standpoint, what is the student population count right now?

Forty, 4396. Okay.

So, 4396. So, 4400 students. Yeah. Basically, you're anticipating the same amount of 4400 students for next year. Yeah. front-facing staff, teaching-facing staff. I see that it's no increase, but there's no headcount. There's no decrease. It's the same amount of teachers last year, same amount of teachers this year.

Same amount of FTE we have in the budget. Okay. FTE and teachers, so positions. And then what we did prior to coming here was try to look at We looked at all of our resources because we had just landed like a big plane with the reorg. And then we started to look at what were positions that we realized we need. And then other ones where if we had to make a tough choice, how would we do it? So when we came to this budget, we basically said we would reduce these and reallocate them to create the positions that we needed for the district. So it's all within a zero sum, if you will.

Ultimately, you have 300 teachers. You just got 300 teachers next year. You got 25 administrators. You got 25 administrators. It's basically a level staff budget as well. So same amount of students, same amount of staff. Yes, sir. Is... from a, this was talked about on the finance committee. Is there opportunities with your revolving slash stabilization accounts where there potentially could be relief to the parents for the fees that they pay, for example? I haven't had enough time to really dig as deep as I wanted to, so I'm just going to spitball. If there was a million dollars in the transportation revolving it, and that's kind of stabilized there, is there a way to say, guess what? We're going to use a half a million of that. We're going to give it back to the parents. Instead of paying 387, I think was the number that was thrown out. It's 387. We're going to make it 367 this year because we're going to try and give back. Can we eke into some of that stabilization to... while it doesn't, the whole community doesn't benefit, but at least the parents and the families that are there. So have you looked at trying to leverage those stabilization slash revolving accounts?

I'll let folks chime in, but I will say just for the... The point around 387, in the second override, we told families if that passed, we had a mechanism to return those fees back down because the request included defraying the cost because each of those programs operates at a deficit now. I'm sure someone was going to mention that. But like transportation, what we collect in fees doesn't cover the cost of all of it, neither does athletics. They're all working at a deficit, but they defray the cost of the program. Correct.

Yeah, so I think the core point of what you're asking is about a stabilization fund or something that is consistent. And the simple answer here is that none of these revolving funds are. We drew from them very heavily in past times when the budgets were really very tight, trying to make sure that we kept those fees down. But as Lucas mentioned, you know, These, outside of a couple of unique situations, such as lifelong learning or cafeteria, which are self-funded, basically they're able to actually give back in the ways you're talking about, where they're able to support some of the different improvements in their respective programs. all of the other revolving funds don't cover the cost of doing business for the entire year. There's large numbers in there, and I think people kind of get lost where it's like, great, there's $3,000 in the revolving funds, but they're actually heavily limited as to which revolving fund has what amount. And then at the end of the day, the costs are coming out throughout the year that essentially eat through all that. And we have to have a certain amount available as kind of that just in case. And also for a policy, we should have roughly a year's worth of costs in there at any given time. We have not been able to do that recently because we've been actually doing exactly what you've asked and trying to pull from it. But at this point in time, we've we've kind of reached that point where we can't we can't draw from them nearly as heavily. So it's one of those things where if there is more allocated. If there's extra allocated, then it's one of those discussion points about how we can try to offset the draw from those revolving funds. But as it stands now, we're not in the financial position to be able to draw more heavily from the revolving funds or to contribute more to them. Like athletics, like Lucas brought up, you know, where it's close to $400,000 that our operating budget is putting back in to support athletics. Transportation, we're covering significantly more as a percentage-wise. So in order to actually try to lower the bus fees like you're asking, what it does is it drives up the draw from our operating budget in order to do so.

Okay. Yeah, again, what I'm... I understand it's a zero-sum game. I'm just trying to pose the question that it's about perception, communication, yada, yada, yada, and that's ultimately what I'm trying to do here. That's a good question. Is there, from a teacher-facing standpoint, what would be... the program that the school committee and the school department would want to add back if they had a choice? AP? What's the first thing on the list of, if we could bring this back, it would really have an impact on the community?

Um, I mean, right off the bat, I would say we've done everything we can to try to stabilize our AP programming where we can, as you may know, if you're either a parent or you've heard over time, we've seen some areas where we weren't able to offer some of those. And I think what I noticed specifically at the high school, when, um, in the past, and I'm looking, I happen to be looking across when we had other grades, we could run classes that maybe had a thinner margin. So right now, If you can't get enough kids in that class, we can't run it. AP Music Theory is a great example of one that doesn't run because we just don't have enough to get the kids. Back when I was an AP back at Franklin High, if we had 12 kids that wanted it, we could run it still because it's an AP Music Theory. Some kids want to go to college for something related. I think as a comprehensive high school, we want to be able to be competitive and offer them. things and that draws people to the town to want to live here and it's just one example um but when it the budgets have gotten tighter over the years the electives go away and we just have to focus on what are the core things you need to get a degree right we're not at that point now we've worked really hard and i think the consolidation helped us reset pre-k through eight so we didn't have to keep um losing that that's one area um i would say two we are in the process of The restoration conversation is very interesting to me, but I would also argue we're looking to innovate. There's so much happening in the world and we want to make sure that we're at the cutting edge of preparing kids as they leave and graduate with a diploma. When I think pre-K through eight. So we have now, we are one of the communities that received a grant for an innovative pathway. So right now we're aligning our courses and we have two pathways. One is healthcare and one is business. Our business department has a big draw right now of students who take those classes. So with the state endorsed DESE innovative pathway, if you align your courses, kids can leave with some accreditation, some micro-credentialing, and try to help prepare them as they move on. There's other pathways we could engage in. We kind of did this while trying to reorg and recover from cuts and all those things but we just kept an eye on it doesn't mean we shouldn't start keep moving forward so you know programs over time like our Franklin Arts Academy as we've declined in enrollment as resources became more constraints a few reasons that went away that was something that was in existence for years the innovative pathway approach allows us to actually think about is that an area that we want to put instead of a school within a school What if that's back on the table, but it's an innovative pathway for performing arts and media? So I don't want to talk all night about it, but I do think, I'm just trying to answer the question around, it's also about not just holding on to what we used to do, but if we're really turning around before we make that leap to the next wall, it's what's in front of us that continues to evolve quicker than many of us can keep up with.

Right. So I ask the question because some of the feedback I get when I was talking about putting my stake in the sand was certainly heavily weighted towards the municipal side. Let's add an assistant town administrator. Let's do this. And I would be a proponent for, and this is going to make people go, where are you going to find it? If I was to say to give the schools an additional $300,000 above what it had today, I'm asking the question, which is, what would you give back if you knew at least for the next two years you were going to get that commitment and you could add something back or cut the fees for athletic? We're going to give you three, and the fees are now going to come down from... I don't even know what it costs for football. I understand the question. Yeah. So if, and in theory, earmark it for a direct benefit, whether it is a cut-in, what a family has to pay to do an activity or get to school, or even just from an educational, for a particular program. Mm-hmm. That's why I asked that question that way, because I certainly would be a proponent. Everyone's going to go, that's another $300,000. I think there's ways to do that, and I will try and convince eight other people here how that can be done. But I would want, I would certainly, the point of that is I want a direct impact. I would either want lower fees or someone's now gonna get their art class that they've been yearning for for the last two years.

So I would just tell you this. One, I think if we saw an infusion, which I also don't want it on the backs of my colleagues, but I will just say an infusion, we would look at one. We have a tremendous need for increased behavioral support with students today in classes. There's a couple areas there. I think the fee conversation, if in the spirit of looking at this, if that was one of the things I would want, obviously the school committee ultimately approves our budget. But that is an area we would look at as well. I would also say, as we look at the middle and the high school program, how are we set up? And I think I brought up the innovative pathway idea in trying to build out that programming. I don't think we have everything we need. And I think at the middle school, there's a need for increased intervention for our literacy, just as we prepare kids for the basic skills that they need. And then programming. I think when we think about the electives and the things that excite, I remember when I was in school, the things that excited me, it wasn't all always maybe my core academic math class, whatnot, but there were other classes that were offered that were of interest that really piqued my interest and really had me learning. So I think those are the things that would be on the table, but certainly I'm answering that hypothetically in the moment, but yeah.

Yeah, I certainly, and then the other thing, and Councilor Moore and Jell-O may like this, and we will talk about it when it comes to fire, I'm going to try, I've talked to a couple of councils about that, some of those recurring expenses, like Chromebooks, I want to get those added to the actual operating budget. Again, someone's going to say, we're coming up with this money. There's a method to the madness here. The last thing I have for now, because I probably could spend an hour talking about this, but I'll just keep it short, everything is all about perception and and da da da so from uh from my personal standpoint when i look at well i it is not our responsibility to figure out how to spend 72.3 million dollars it's the school committee and the school departments has the privy to determine how they spend it it's all kind of in the minutia and this is Whether you agree or disagree, there are people, individuals that will go, well, they spend too much in administration. So I've just put that out there, that that is the perception. So whatever we as a group can do to fight that, we'll try and do that. And even I, personally, even I ask that question at times. Why do we have yada, yada, yada? So I'm just, what I'm speaking of is from the heart and more from probably the... Most residents ask that question. And it's something, as we talked about, we talked about strategic aligning. And I will say this much. When you're on this side of the wall, I think probably a lot of these have a different perception because now we see more things than we did before. So it is... It gives you a different perspective, so we just have to take what we're learning here and convey that to the community. But I just bring that up only to, if we've got to figure a way how to communicate that, maybe we have to use Liz on the town side to figure out how to communicate that for the school committee and the school department. But for now, I'll use my time, but I appreciate the comments or the answers so far.

If I could just, I will share with you, we have a staffing report, state comparables for admin, and our ratio. So what I can do is, it's very small on this, I'm happy. It's posted online publicly now in one of our budget documents, but I can certainly rise that to the front and email that out to you just to give you a sense of where we fall. And we're under the state average, and then within town I mentioned the percentage.

The only pushback I will ever give to that is, While we compare, comparing ourselves to other communities are great, but we still, for the dollars that we do, we offer a world class, we offer a class education. World class is maybe a little different. My point being is, We may have the lowest police officers. They still come. We pay the teachers the lowest. They still come. So I even do it with my own business. I compare myself how much we spend in this area compared to others. Well, we only spend two and a half percent. Other companies spend five to go collect their money. Well, guess what? That's great. I do it with two and a half. That's a win. So I do take when people start using, oh, no. 13.2 compared to 36.5, I could go, that's great to do the comparison, but it should actually, and you're touting it, that we're able to do with 13. And I think that's where we have to tap. We're able to do it at 13% versus 36%. And we're able to have less administrators than everyone else. But I'll just tell you, while it's less, there's still people in the back of my mind go, can it be even less? So just remember that. That's all.

Thanks, Mike. I will totally agree with him. If you're out near the public, that's all they're saying. Why do the schools have so many administrators? That's crazy. That's crazy. It's just crazy. But not my view. And I do agree with him that I mean, there's a lot of us, Mike, Gene, myself, Steve, we all, our kids are all graduating, and they're all doing great. The kids are doing great, so we got a good education, we got a good bank for our bucks. You know, I hate to say that, that's it. But to the revolving funds, I mean, I understand, have you guys... Got any fuel costs? That's probably going to come into effect pretty soon. So that would be something that's like factored in through transportation, but we don't. Yeah. Would that come out of? Transportation would be higher.

For big yellow buses, it's in the contract for transportation.

And they wouldn't even add that with the price of gas? Because I know a lot of people are doing that.

They wouldn't add it separately. They would just update the contract and make the transportation cost higher. You wouldn't see the gas by itself.

You wouldn't see it. Because I know a lot of companies, Boston's doing that now. Like surcharge? They're asking a surcharge. That's why I was just asking. Mr. Chairman? Yeah, Max, go ahead.

Yeah, so I just want to ask the three questions. I know you already touched on utilization with regards to enrollment and with regards to special education and transportation. I didn't know if there's any other utilization aspects like mental health or any other things that you would want to point out with regards to your budget.

We've prioritized our mental health supports for counselors through the work that we've done over years to build it. I know Mrs. Marano's in the crowd for our as she's in charge of student services. And we have worked really hard to build up the appropriate staffing levels for counseling. What we're seeing is the need and behavioral need has certainly risen. Every school has school adjustment counselors in there to support students across the board. We've worked hard to look at those ratios. The benefit of having a consolidated middle school is now where you used to have maybe one counselor At each school, now there's a team of three that can actually work. There's teams of folks that are together to work and support students. So those are just areas that continue to be a need, and we just have looked to, when we right-sized the district for the students we had and the spaces that we'd be working in, we really took a keen eye at that, and I think that's how we were able to put the budget forth that we did.

So even though you expect enrollment to be steady, the level of need from each student has increased.

Needs have increased. If you're going to ask the five-year question, that's definitely something I would point out too, Max. It's just student needs continues to increase.

OK. And the other question to ask some of the other departments is, if your budget was cut 5% compared to level of service, would your department still be able to function, meet all state requirements and professional accreditation standards? Would you not be able to operate property or risk losing the required accreditation and certification?

Yep, we could risk, I mean, we did the street math on a napkin. We're looking at probably about 30 to 35 more reductions after we just finished consolidating. And I'll give a few examples. You lose your NEAS accreditation at your high school if you don't have a certified licensed librarian. If you don't have the right nursing ratios of one to 500 kids, you could end up at state law. So you could end up in trouble there. Those are just two examples. Within there too, just the ratios in general, I think we'd look at if we lost programs, but also losing staff, look at class sizes. I think when we'd spread our student services support across the needs of kids, I think those would be pretty detrimental. And over five years, just thinking about The kids that are enrolled in our school over the last five years and the extended school year, we've educated over 25,000 kids. 25,000 students were educated over that five-year period. So they've obviously moved from grade to grade. But if you do the math on that, plus the extended school year, plus the work that we do to try to educate kids after school.

So there would be a risk to accreditation. What would the consequences of that be for the school? Would they be able to go to college still? What would that look like?

It would definitely put a mark on Franklin Public Schools if that was the case. So I don't want to create a doomsday scenario or lean into that as a strategy that I'm threatening. But I'm just being honest with you. Not having that, if kids do apply to college, to not have a NEASC-accredited high school would not be good. IT'S NOT A LOOK. IT'S SIMILAR TO OTHER DEPARTMENTS WHERE IF THEY LOSE AN ACCREDITATION, IT'S FROWNED UPON, AND IT'S CERTAINLY NOT SOMETHING I WOULD FEEL COMFORTABLE ANSWERING THE PUBLIC WHO HAVE KIDS IN OUR SCHOOLS NOT GRADUATING WITH THAT.

AND TO BE CLEAR, YOU'RE NOT PROPOSING ANY NET NEW SPENDING. YOU'RE JUST RESHUFFLING THINGS AROUND, BUT IT'S BASICALLY LEVEL SERVICE.

RIGHT, AND IT'S 2.5% REQUEST.

OKAY.

ALL RIGHT, THANKS VERY MUCH. THAT'S ALL I GOT.

Is it the case for a student in Franklin that they may not be able to participate in a particular activity, sport, or music or something like that because their parents can't afford the fee?

That was a good question. So students who qualify for either a free or a reduced lunch like that program, They are also eligible for their athletic fees, transportation, discounts, or free, and also Chromebook insurance, those things. So there's other pieces beyond school lunch that we all kind of know or might be more familiar with. So there are mechanisms for that. It's all based on the state's threshold for how much income a family makes. For them, they determine who is eligible for that. But ultimately, do you want to add on that, Johnna?

If I may add, if a family does not qualify for free and reduced lunch program, they can always apply through my office. We do have a financial assistance application. It's a simple Google form. They would just need to fill that out, upload their information, and I review it every week, every Friday, and I let them know if they qualified or not.

Okay. We work payment plans. There's different ways to try to look at doing things to try to help him.

Do you know how, like, Franklin does as compared to other towns with regards to those fees? Athletically? Just kidding. But for those fees, yeah. Okay.

Our fees are higher in certain sports, for example. Our bus fees, we have a whole comparable. I think our bus fees two years ago, we reduced them. They were high. We reduced them to 387, which was right around what they, it's a little bit higher than what it was. Yeah, it was 360, it's 387. And that's over, that was an increase It was at 360 for a very long time. It never was increased. So that's pretty much in the range of where it was, athletics depending on the sport. We ended up having to do a really deep analysis of how much does it cost to run a hockey program with ice time and transportation and buses, a football program. And then what we did is we started to look at what would a fee structure look like. And when it got really hard and we made the cuts that we made, we had to increase our fees in those areas to try to supplement that. And that's, I think, still a sore spot for many people who pay those fees, including myself who has a, I have a daughter who's an athlete and I pay those fees and I pay the bus fee and whatnot. So I wouldn't make a recommendation I haven't had to live with myself and hear about in my own house, but certainly it's a good question.

Thanks.

Steve, did you have a question, Steve?

I do, but go ahead, Ken. I just have a couple of questions. The chart you shared, maybe I just missed it or I'm not understanding. Why is Attleboro negative? What does that mean?

They're not reaching the state required net school spending.

And what happens to them?

State tells them you can't do that. There's quite a bit that goes on there. This was actually the big presentation that we had with Desi. Sorry, I didn't know what happened.

I just wanted you to say it, yeah. Okay. They threaten your local aid. Yeah. So you'll get a, they'll see a deduction.

Okay, so thanks for that clarification. My second point is, you know, kind of speaking to Two things that have just been running around in my head. One of the things, and Ted, you've probably seen this, many people who choose to move to Franklin are choosing to move to Franklin in part because of schools. One thing that I will say I'm pretty positive on is when I look at school rankings now versus when I moved to Franklin, they're not at the same place. So I think the The reorganization has certainly helped kind of stabilize the approach. I think it becomes very important to kind of stay where we are and see if we can halt that decline. And to me, that sounds like part of what we're trying to do here. It's like let's at least make sure we know where we are, and then we can figure out, you know, make sure we're on stable footing and then see how we grow from there.

You're absolutely correct. I'll just say in short we've really worked I think our collective goal as a community is to stabilize so we're not living in budget situations The other thing is I would mention and I was thinking about this when Jamie was talking about having an assistant a deputy town administrator the cost and bandwidth to have to cut your way out of your budget every year can't be understated the amount of time we had to spend generating letters hand delivering news to folks and go through the reorg and then redistributing responsibilities for people who aren't there. That's like a cost that it's not really something I could tally or calculate, but spending a lot of time on that area while also trying to think about innovative pathways and apply for grants. And so I just think stabilizing allows us to shore up what we're doing, why we're doing it, communicate more effectively in areas where maybe there's confusion or there's disagreement. People might not agree after we communicate the best we can, but I think there's a cost there to that type of work. So I think the idea of, for all of us, it's about can we stabilize the ship in some way. I'm not asking... I'll just stop there, but I think that's ultimately what we're trying to do, to get into a budget year where we're not laying off multiple people to try to make it work. Those are tough.

No, I appreciate that. Finally, my last question, the other part's running through my head. One of the things that I said earlier, and I think a couple of us said it, we've asked a lot of the different... leaders who have come up to speak is, OK, how do you make yourself profitable? What do you think about the future? How do you actually make it so that you're bringing in revenue? A school, a school system, like any school system, is not designed to drive revenue. And I think it's important to recognize that. But we still have metrics. We still have things we have to look for, goals we want to achieve and growth. Yes, and some of it might be helping kids get into college or whatever their ultimate profession is down the road. But I'd like to hear from you a little bit how you think about those metrics. How do you think about what does winning look like for Franklin Public Schools?

I think instead of revenue generating necessarily, I think it's about offsets. I think if we're offering really good programming and the fee is appropriate, I think that's just a comment on one thing you made. Winning for Franklin, I think, is being able to have a budget that is supported, has the pieces in it after the feedback we receive from our families, from our students, how we prepare kids. I want my son, who happens to be graduating, but to have the same experience that the kids when I was an AP at Franklin High had. I have very fond memories of that, what we were doing and what we continue to do. What I won't do is sit here and say anything about Franklin public schools, we are a great school system. And I think to your point, Councilor LeBlanc, we are doing, despite the metrics, and I appreciate the comment around how we compare, we use that as a market analysis, just like other pieces. I don't lean on that as a crutch, but certainly we're doing a lot like every other department with the resources we have. Winning is about being able to stabilize and really look to grow in areas that meet student needs and be really fiscally prudent and responsible. I'm also a taxpayer in this town. I'm a homeowner. That's part of my life, too. And eventually, I won't be in this role, but I probably will live in town. And I just think I'm sensitive to that and really wanting to make sure that we're offering the brand that we are so proud of. And I think Jamie wrote about it in his budget report for all the departments, and I think we have something to really be proud of, and we don't want to lose it. We don't want to have that continue to erode. So I think coming in and having the support we need for the kids, the teaching staff that we need to do the work, and the leadership is really where I would say we would be winning.

I appreciate that. Thank you.

Steve, close up.

So thanks for this. And when I started tonight, I had five different questions than I have now. So maybe to just kind of take this at a higher level, I mean, I don't want to speak for anybody else up here, but I think we all share the same desire that you have is to have really outstanding schools. and to get past the pain and the struggle that we've all been through the last couple of years. And you mentioned stability, Lucas. I think that's really critical in terms of how we fix our budget process. And we need to recognize that right now we are in a budget deficit. So we have to kind of act within that and show a way forward to get that resolved, however that's going to kind of work out. So just without any kind of order to this, but... Your budget book, the initial summary in there showed a salary request of $60 million, rough numbers. You'll remember the chart here in a second. And then non-salary request of $12 million. So that gets you to the $72 million and change. Can you classify what the... $12 million in non-salary requests are. I mean, I've tried to go through the different line items and the budgets in different departments. And at first, I thought it was expenses. I said, well, there aren't any expenses, because there's a lot more than that. And if my arithmetic is right, that's up 5 and 3 quarter percent, or $700,000 for the year. Does that sound right?

Five and three quarters percent increase. Right. Are you talking for non-salary?

Non-salary. Yes. Arriving now at $12 million, up $5.7. I think it started at $11.3 million. And again, not to get too granular right now, but even if it's tomorrow, to have a more detailed answer to generally what those costs are.

Can you answer generally?

We can provide that. So those $12 million requests for non-salary, they include transportation costs, special ed costs, tuition, special ed transportation costs, and other expenses, which are contracted services, materials, and supplies to run the schools and other departments, dues and memberships, and mileage reimbursement.

OK. My computer keeps switching screens on me here.

Sorry for that.

OK. Is that different than expenses within particular line items in the budget? It must be because the numbers.

So there are collections of those different line items. So when we put this in front of you, it really splits it into salaries and everything else. Right. So that's really kind of how it builds out. In the line items that you're looking at, different departments within the schools have salaries and then different expenses. And then certain groups are essentially just solely an expense. So that's where it's going to be tricky.

You're going to find both answers in every one of those lines, which is probably when it... Well, that's why it wasn't kind of adding up to me, and I just wanted to make sure I understood what the distinction was on that level, because then if I look at the expense budgets kind of line by line as we go through this, you know, my thought to you is... And we have some more work to do as we kind of map out what this year might look like. But I think it's likely that I would advocate that you would make some reductions in your $72 million budget. I know the finance committee was looking at $60,000, I think was their suggestion. I'm going to suggest more than that. I'm not sure what the number will be over the next 24, 48 hours, but I think it will be higher than that. And I don't think that needs to come from people. I don't think that needs to come from those core mandated programs, but just whatever the discretionary spend is within your expense lines, your professional services. I saw a couple of line items in the budget that were, again, I don't know them, so I don't want to be presumptuous, but...

Yeah, so the one comment I would make on that is the vast majority of those non-salary expenses are mandated. So really, when it comes back from that, you know, you look at kind of where everything sits, We have cut so heavily from everything that we could flex into over the past two years that what is left are those things that essentially we don't really have control over. You know, like special education costs, they're up over, you know, it's 1.1 million this year.

Increase. Increase.

Yeah. 1.1 million increase. And you think about, you know, our overall increase that we're asking for is, you know, 2 million and change. Yeah. So 1.7 is our overall increase request. 1.1 is mandated increases by one line item. So now we're down to, you know, $600,000. And even out of that, we have things that are mandated such as transportation. Some of that transportation is not just the big yellow bus, but we have special education transportation that has also stayed mandated at the rates that they are able to put out. And then it really started becoming a very, very narrow window of things that we could possibly cut. But most of those, like if you go through some of our different line items that we've got, we have some really, really fun numbers where it's, you know, Where we've cut some things by 75%, 70%, 16 and a half percent. I saw a lot of that, yeah. But the problem with a lot of those is that there's nothing left. Like now we have, it's like 20 bucks in that line item. I can cut 50% and save you $10. Right. So there's really on any of those little kind of negotiables we've cut so heavily. that it's tough. I know from personal experience, when it comes to the supplies that we ask for for our students, We consistently, you know, we have teachers sending home, you know, emails to the parents saying, hey, can we get tissues? Can we get some, you know, can we get some hand sanitizer? Can we get, you know, paper towels or napkins? Like, we're at that level of we don't supply much of anything.

I remember those days, and that's 20 years ago. We were bringing napkins and paper towels and stuff. So I take your point.

And I really want to work with you guys on trying to understand and get through this.

But if I look at, and maybe you can explain a little bit, but some of the numbers are just large. Like instructional coaching, 2352. Is there a line item?

That's the line by line item. Line by line? It's 1.83, 1.8 million. Isn't this part of the required?

Oh, so instructional coaches that we have within our school. So we have students. It's a teacher support but a student support as well for people who come in and work with students on their literacy skills and their math skills particularly are the two focus areas that we use. So these are folks that aren't the classroom teacher but work within the school to help develop and build student skills in those particular areas and help train the teachers. So that would be a... Just in the spirit of time, that's what they're... No, no, we can... Okay.

No, that's fine. And we can go back and forth on some of this as well. But my thought is to be thinking about what margins you might have and whether there's 16 of those people, according to the budget, for $1.8 million. Yeah. $72 million total. I'm not talking 5%, like Max was saying. I'm talking, you know.

So some of the tricks with the, or some of the details with some of those lines are that they have interesting ties into multiple different facets of what we do provide and what we have to provide. So in some instances, if students are requiring additional supports, we have to provide extra layers of education you know educational tools to them whether it's having certain certain individuals working with them one-on-one such as is fulfilled in that kind of role or you have to have in some instances certain programs that we have actually have a very large number of ftes required for an individual student so that's where it gets really really tricky to say like great we have one line item that on its face like It's very logical. I think your question is very logical, but then when you look at it where how those intertwine with legal requirements that we have for supports provided to students, it starts getting very, very difficult where a lot of those aren't nearly as flexible.

Those were also our department heads. So the high school department heads that you have for each year, subject areas, those are also included in that. I referenced earlier the elementary, but there's middle and high school as well.

And again, over time, and this is not going to be I understand. As we talked about, you know, kind of working together and really sharing the goal of getting the schools to be as great as they can be in a fiscally responsible way. I really want to spend a lot of time on that with you all next year, trying to figure that out. We've just got to figure out where the starting point is going to be for this year. So I think we're going to ask, I'm going to ask for a little bit of money from it.

Are you all set? Yes, sir. So it is 10 o'clock. Yes, sir. So I'm going to need to obtain a motion to extend the meeting. Mr. Chair, I'll make a motion to extend the meeting by one hour. By one hour. Second. All in favor?

Aye.

All right. Don't tell me we need a roll call vote because the match was on line. No.

I say aye. Everybody's in agreement. We're good.

All right.

having been engaged with the school budget conversation for the last couple years, I think I'm going to take a different perspective than we've heard. So I just want to say that, you know, I mentioned, I said this to the recreation department, right? They, they bring in revenue profit. You guys can't because you are, that is not something that you do. But you did save us $3 million annually by redistricting. And that was an incredible feat on, the administration on the teachers on the school staff so first of all you know as the parent of some children who went through that redistricting and are just as happy as they were before this and love making new friends and love the teachers that they didn't have access to before I want to say congratulations on that, and thank you, and also thank you for saving the town $3 million by doing that. So you did that, and then you also kept to 2.5% budget increase. As I mentioned with recreation, you are one of a very small handful of departments that managed to do that. And which is even more shocking when you look at the fact that your required costs went up by significantly more than that, right? Your special education services went up by 8.25%. Your transportation costs went up by 6.88%. As you said, your non-salary pieces went up by 5.75%, which I noticed meant that your salary increase went up by only 1.88%. So after all the work that our teachers did, they also were, I think, the only or one of the very few departments that didn't have an overall 2.5% increase in their salary in general. So anyway, I'm just saying you all have taken on a lot. And I think you have been incredibly fiscally responsible and have done some really amazing things with a small increase. And you're looking to have another small increase this year. All right. I did want to ask. Kind of off of Jean's question earlier, did you see a drop in students participating in athletics after the fees went up? Do you know?

I don't believe that we did. OK.

Well, I mean, that's good news, right? We heard about it. The fee increases. I'm sure you did. Hopefully that means that we haven't priced students out of it, which is really important because that was one of my biggest concerns when those fees went up was that we would have neighbors who all of a sudden they're above that threshold, but they're not able to participate in those things. So I'm glad to hear that that wasn't. quite as maybe realized. I did have a, oh, I did also want to mention like special education, you know, the reason, I mean, we hear from people all the time who come here because we have such a great special education program. And, you know, you kind of, You kind of got this catch-22 where you do it so well that people come here to benefit from it, and then because your resources are limited, you end up being able to to support some students and other students have to go outside of the district, which leads to another increase in special education costs. So you are a victim of your own success there, I guess. But I think you're doing really important things as a parent, as someone who is around a lot of other parents here. really great things about that program. And I do think, you know, ideally we would have fewer students leaving the district. We could save money there and we're able to support kids here in their own town. And I would love to see, you know, how we can manage that. I did have one question that might actually be more for Jamie. So this budget, all the budget was based off of the governor's proposed budget, right? Okay. So obviously we don't know what the final budget is going to be, but I know that between the House and the Senate, there's a possible $300,000 to maybe even $500,000 in extra Chapter 70 funds, right? So given that Chapter 70 is how schools get their funding, and that is meant for students and supporting the schools, would that money, if that is increased, since the budget is based off of the governor's budget, would that extra funding go to the schools?

It would just go to offset the amount of free cash that would be used. Okay. Don't forget, once you see the final revised Budget 2, the tri-county assessment has gone way up. There are also many other items that have gone down, like property and casualty insurance, like a lot of other accounts. I mean, you're going to probably see a couple dozen accounts shift. In accounts, by that I mean generally the voting dock line at the bottom line of each of the departments. So if you look through here, however many there are, you'll see about a third of them or so will probably switch. Franklin, unfortunately, due to the history of Chapter 70, at least since I've been here, because Franklin was receiving way more than its fair share for a long time and then it kind of leveled off, I don't think we've, and because we've always, we've always at least, I believe in the 25 years I can speak for myself and Jeff, we've always maxed out the tax levy. You know, we just plug the numbers in. You also got to kind of look at the holistic amount of aid, right? Like the assessments, right? The charter school or school choice and those other things. I haven't analyzed the House budget and where all those are versus the Senate budget. We'll do those on Friday. But we've never carved it up to say, you know, you'd essentially, I mean, we always look at it as a net amount. We've never had a discussion or really have been carved up and said, well, if Chapter 70 went up, But school choice and charter school reimbursement offset some of that. What's the net of it? We just take the cherry sheet, plug it into the budget, and look at it in the aggregate. We've never said, well, if it went up here, because if it went down, right, then we also wouldn't say, do we want to take away money from the school's mid-year and stuff like that. So I think it's never been something that we've done. at least in my experience in 25 years, said, well, Chapter 70 went up a couple hundred thousand. We're going to give that to the schools because ultimately you're going to have to raise that money somewhere else or cut other services, right? So if you make cuts to other departments, you can maybe do that.

Okay.

I hope that answers your question. It's hard because I think there is a desire, and I respect it and I understand, like, If you're pro-school in some ways, and you want to invest more in schools, and the press release comes out that Chapter 70 went up, there's an initial reaction to say, well, let me put that money directly to schools. But then you really still have to look at the bottom line number across the board, and somewhere along the line, if you increase the school budget, like if you went from $72,341,000 and you increased that by $500,000, right, then you'd have to cut somewhere else to probably make that up.

Sure. I find it funny that you said pro-school. I feel like in the hometown of Horace Mann, I hope nobody would say that they are anti-school. So I don't think, like, that's just kind of a funny distinction. But anyway, my whole point was I was just wondering, you know, I do know that when the budget does go down, whether it's Chapter 70 or otherwise, it certainly is the schools that often take the majority of the hit. But I did think, you know, to Counselor LeBlanc's comment earlier about if the schools were to get an extra couple or I think he said $300,000 as a number he just threw out, how they would use that. I mean, this looks like that would be a place where that money could come from. And it's earmarked from the state for schools. So I just thought that was enchanted to know if that was maybe what he was thinking about when he threw that number out. The last thing is I kind of thought that that graph about how Franklin compares to peer districts for net school spending was shocking. You know, I'm looking at some of the districts that spend significantly more than us was I don't know, just it was sobering to me. So thank you for this. I think this is incredibly helpful and I'm glad to have that as we're having this conversation.

Thanks.

YEAH, GO AHEAD. YOU HAVE THE LAST ONE, RIGHT? I THINK SO.

I think everybody might be kind of asleep at this point.

Try to wake them back up. I just need to go around the hall.

First of all, thank you for everything. This is incredibly helpful. And more importantly, thank you for the great job that you guys continue to do each and every day. The teachers, the administrators, the staff. The volunteers, as a dad with kids in this every single day, I see the impact. And we might be critical every now and then of something stupid, right? But the overall impact is that our kids are getting a great education. I have a couple of questions though. When we did the union contract negotiations and we agreed on the COLAs, right? You guys did the two and a half, two and a half, two and a half for going forward, right? For this year, next year, and the year next. So if, and I just want some clarification. So with that being said for our teachers, our union teachers, when you factor in steps and lanes and all these other things that the contracts require, how are we still able to keep that number to two and a half percent? That's where I'm sort of scratching my head.

You want to answer that? That goes back to the . Yeah, you can say it.

You can just . He usually does all the talking. I know.

I'm trying to share the mic here. So in order to be at the 2.5%, we had to remove the grant paid positions from the operating request. That's one of the reasons that we were able to stay at the 2.5%.

Grant paid positions? Yes. Okay. So because you guys talked about, you know, forward facing staff that there wasn't a reduction. grant-paid staff would be for what?

But we are receiving that grant in FY27, so we do have a funding source for them.

We didn't remove the FTEs from our budget. We didn't remove the FTEs. We still have those FTEs, but they're paid through a different mechanism, not part of our operating budget.

So we didn't ask for money from the town for those jobs because we're getting it through grants. And they're removed. I mean, that's what allowed us to have .

Okay. That's great. It just helps be able to explain the narrative, right? Because we know some other departments you know, where they've had to take into account those 2.5% COLAs, but then they've also had to look at, okay, our union contract says this, this, and this for their equivalent of steps and limits, right? And it makes their number look so much bigger when in reality they're just doing what they have to do for their union contract just like you guys are doing. Yeah, other contractual obligations. You know, contractual obligations I think are critically important. To the point that Schools are not revenue producers, right? I 100% agree. It's never been my intention that they be revenue producers, but I do think there's opportunity for some revenue to come from various programming and various use of facilities. And I know, Lucas, we've had the discussion of expanding lifelong learning and expand, you know, not just for revenue, but to really meet the need of the community because those wait lists are so long and the literally solutions fills within 24 hours and then we have hundreds of parents saying they want more after school. We did.

We fixed that this year.

So can you just for the point of for everybody's benefit and whoever is going to watch this video in their pajamas, like what have you guys done to expand that and what can next year look like?

So when we, through the consolidation, that was one thing. What Councilor Cormier-Ledge is referring to is when parents would look to sign up for before and after school supervision for, like, solutions, those would fill up like a Taylor Swift concert. People would get online and go, and they'd be filled in seconds. And what we found is we couldn't keep up with the demand, and we couldn't staff across each of the elementary schools and do that in a way. When we consolidated... We worked with our director of lifelong learning, who is Patty Gay, who worked hard to look at, well, if we were to look at kindergarten and then take, you know, to do look at grade bands differently in different configurations, increase some staffing, look at ratios, she was able to fit more students. So that wait list this year, one of her goals was to try to, and that was actually a school committee desire as well, to look at how can we solve this problem. And she worked really hard with the resources we have to... to make that happen where we were able to decrease that. So that's an example. And to tag into the budget part of that, lifelong learning is one of those examples of they generate revenue to cover their costs, which include their health care, is also covered through their generation. So that is a fully funded Same thing with cafeteria. Their costs, their healthcare, everything is fully funded within the cafeteria line. Those are the two that were referenced earlier from Chair Griffith.

Thank you, Lucas. Can people expect in the next fall that there's going to be more after school slots in solutions or did it stay the same?

So we increased the slots to get the wait list down. I think we're going into next year with a model based on what we have today, but it's more than we had the year before. So we're, um, and then we're also always looking at what is the need and the demand and how can we help me make it. I don't want to say that we would increase it from what it is today now, but the, the intention would be to try to, um, provide that service to families who need it. That would be ultimately the goal within the constraints we have.

Yeah, thank you. And to Councilor LeBlanc's point, I would love to see us eventually get to a point where recurring operational expenses don't hit capital, right? It's the same thing we've said to police and fire and to other departments too. So to his point, if we can ever get to a point in the conversation where some of those things can be built in so that the capital program can truly be for one time special use projects or helping with the light problem at the middle school. It's like a perfect example, right? You need it. At one point it was 40 grand, now they've added some things to it, you know, to make it 100,000 but that's because there's structural needs that the building needs and there's lights and there's other things, right? So to me that's capital. To me that's why we have that free cash funded program, right? Unfortunately, over the years we've sort of put you guys in a bind where you haven't been able to fund Chromebooks or fund curriculum through operating. So you've had to come to the capital program and, you know, so I agree with him that it would be great to see us get to that point of truly capital being capital. And if there is some getting to the fees situation as a parent who pays the thousand bucks for football, I can tell you it hurts. And I do, I know from the, maybe an unattended consequence, but many of the parents that pay that high fee then don't feel the need to volunteer. So I don't know if that is ever factored in, but I hear it all the time where parents will say to me in the stadiums, I'm not going to go work concessions. I'm not going to go help sell sweatshirts. I'm not going to go XYZ because they're paying this three, you know, in some cases, three times higher football fee than a neighboring town, right? So they pay the fee, but then they say, You're not going to get any more out of me. So meanwhile, I'm still down there selling hot dogs. I'm still down there missing my kid out in the field because I know it's important. But we should really be thinking about some of those other things with those fees because I think there are ripple effects.

I think we share an interest and it ties into what we heard about what would winning look like in the sentiment around stability would be around having fees that are within the range of what neighboring communities pay for those. I think that's a goal, but ultimately I don't think it's, it's lost on us either. What you're saying.

Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Thank you for everything, but thank you for tonight.

THANK YOU, GUYS. YEAH, I KNOW THAT YOU GUYS DON'T MAKE ANY REVENUE, BUT IN A ROUNDABOUT WAY, I THINK YOU DO, BECAUSE WE GOT RYAN JETTY OVER THERE THAT WAS A FRANKLIN HIGH GRADUATE. WE GOT A BUNCH OF FRANKLIN POLICE OFFICERS, AND THEY'RE THROWING EVERYTHING BACK IN THE CIRCLE. SO THEY'RE MAKING MONEY FOR US, AND YOU GUYS DO A GOOD JOB IN THE SCHOOL. SO THEY'RE MAKING MONEY FOR US. THEY'RE GIVING BACK. THEY'RE GIVING BACK. SO IN A ROUNDABOUT WAY, I THINK YOU HAVE, YOU KNOW? Lucas is giving back. He's a product of Franklin Public Schools. And I start seeing some of the kids that are my kids' age start to move back to town. You know, AJ and Martha just moved back to town. Vince Jeremy just bought a house in town. My daughter bought a house in town. So you can see them starting to come back. And they're coming back because of the schools. And they had such a good experience. Let's keep it going. Yeah.

It's so good. do Thank you.

You're listening to 102.9 WFPR-LP, Franklin Public Radio.

you

Bye.

We extended it to 11. I'm going to call fire up. Everybody else can go home. They're last. Come back tomorrow night. DPW, you guys are gone. See you later.

It's late. Mr. Chairman. Yeah. Yes.

That's good. Max.

Recording in progress.

When you're ready for me for the... Oh, questions. All right.

I thought you had some other question. I'm sorry. Go ahead, Chuck.

Chuck Allen, Fire Chief. I think we covered this in some other when we gave our presentation. Our budget is a level service budget. We're not adding anything to it. That's pretty much it, so... to attend any questions you have. It doesn't increase any staff. It keeps us exactly the same as we are today.

Mike? So we say level service, it's only level service because this past year we added back the two additional office, two additional person. Correct. Yeah. Okay. I just want to make sure everyone understands that. Yes. Yes. And all kidding aside, when we added those people, there was a revenue benefit associated with that. Yes. We were able, and we talked about mutual aid last time you were here. If I added two more people, wouldn't they technically raise more money? We'd actually steal some of Medway's.

Technically. I mean, it's hard to say over time. You'd have to have years of data to say that it would make, I don't know if it would ever make money, but I think it would probably pay for itself at some point. Probably wouldn't be immediate, but yeah.

Yeah. I mean, we talked about where, I mean, there's been a lot of conversation about revenue generation. Technically, the fire department, as we talked about, you're not fire. You're really more of an emergency department than you are. We're an all-hazards department, so we handle everything. But the point being is, and I'm not necessarily proposing it this year, but if you were to add two more folks and we added another ambulance, technically we'd probably pay for itself and pay for the personnel, pay for the cost of the ambulance, and provide that aid to other communities that we would... Personally, I think it would actually benefit the community and benefit the surrounding communities.

I agree with that. I think as... As a fire department, our responsibility is to take care of the residents and then make sure my responsibility is to make sure the firefighters are safe. I think adding more firefighters would make us a safer department. I think we'd be a safer community for it. I think the fact that the ambulance generates revenue isn't aside from that. It's a bonus and a benefit. But the need to protect the community is always the same, and it's always going to increase as the community grows, as time goes on. So I think I agree with you. If we had more people, eventually it would pay for itself.

And two questions, particularly around revenue generation. One, I think you're becoming or will be coming forward with changes in the fees, correct? Yes. That will be coming to us fairly soon. So as someone who works in the healthcare arena, I certainly will provide my two cents and provide some additional guidance on that. The other thing is I did see that we put out to bid within the last month, the contract to actually collect those monies. Yes. Is that an annual contract, or is that three-year?

I think it's usually the last time it was three years, and there were some options, I think, if I remember right, to add a year on. I believe they went from year to year, but I think this is a three-year, if I'm correct. That's what we're requesting.

I see Carrie jumping up.

But you're correct. I can sit back down, but I'll be closer.

Cool. What is, do we pay them a percentage of what they, how is that contract? It's a percentage of what they collect. Okay.

What is the percentage that we pay them to collect our retail? Right now it's 2.9. 2.9.

Okay. That's not bad. Yeah. Very good. Okay. It was, you get into the threes and a half, fours, I would have started raising questions. But 2.9, that's not too, too bad. And again, it's only on the money collected. It's not on the money bill, correct? Not on the bill, yeah, correct, collected. Just on collected, okay. All right. That's it right now.

Thank you.

Just a couple of quick questions. We've been through this a few times, so I kind of get it, and I'm supportive of the third ambulance and having that crew back on. But just on the ambulance, are they daytime tour only, or what hours is it?

So the way we staff A3 is currently we have to utilize a daytime captain when they're available. But our shifts are staffed at, it's a little complicated because we're not consistent as much as we'd like to be. Our shifts are staffed at 14. And then we have a minimum staffing. So our maximum staffing is as many people as the shift has. And the shift has a minimum that we don't let it go below before we order people to stay so they don't go home. That staffing is typically 11. So what we do is when we're staffed at 12, we're staffed at 13, that ambulance is in service, we're staffed at 12, we use the EMS captain's position that's there during the day when they're not doing other programs for the community, we'll utilize that position for that. When we're staffed at 13, we have the staff to be able to do it. When we're staffed at 14, we have the staff to be able to do it. Right now we have three firefighters out on injury, so we have one going on the fire academy, so it's a little tougher to get to that point. But that's generally the rule.

So the driver really is not time of day, it's just how many men are on duty at that, for that particular shift? Yes. Got it. Okay. Just a couple of questions, and I think maybe Jane asked this before, and maybe this is something similar, but there's a line item on here for EMT and para additional pay.

Yeah, so that, so like, you mean other pay, or?

It just says additional pay.

Additional pay would be, that would be stipends, you know, EMT stipend, education stipend, education pay. That would be that. That would be that.

Yeah, because I think stipends is listed in there differently. It's just a big chunk of money. It's like $250,000. The paramedic stipend.

That's the paramedic stipend.

Yeah. Okay.

Yeah.

So that's incentive or stipends to them per contract that they are entitled to for whatever that they want.

So you know we only hire licensed paramedics. Right. So that's a contractual issue too.

It's kind of what I thought from some of the other discussions, but it was a big number. I just wanted to make sure I understood it. Otherwise, no questions. I'm great. Thanks.

Just one. Yeah. And I already asked it to somebody else, but I'm going to ask you guys, I'm going to ask Chief Lynch tomorrow. Other pay in the thing, what, just, I'm just trying to understand it, because I'll be honest, the first time I ever looked at it, and I saw things like that for any department, I'm like, but they're getting this, and now they get, what is going on? So what is exactly the other pay?

It's exactly that. So it's going to be, you know, college courses, you know, education.

So it's the same thing as before?

It's contractual items. It's the same thing. It's in a lot of the talent contracts. It's in the five department contract, too.

So this would be similar to the library, that there's stipends built in across the contract. They get 5% of their base pay for being a paramedic. That's something that's been in place for a long time. Over the years, we've reduced that. But at this point, I don't think we're going to be able to get that any lower. There's also educational incentives similar to the library where they get credit for having a degree. We did split it out several years ago that they get less money if it's not related to fire science. If it's related to fire science, they have an annual stipend. These are all per pay periods. I don't have them. off the top of my head. We built in a lot of stipends when we left civil service years ago to really incentivize people to go back for formal education. So there's something called a Pro Board, which is a fire certification where they can go back to the state fire academy. You can become like a fire officer, several levels of fire officer, instructor, fire, yeah, there's a whole bunch of these pro boards. So they can get more courses and get an additional stipend for that. So those are all contractual obligations that have been negotiated over the years.

Okay. I just wanted a better understanding of what that column stood for.

Max?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So just the three questions. I said just two because you answered one of them. But how has the utilization of your department services changed over the last nine years?

It's increased. I think that's evident in the call volume has increased. It increases year over year. Our necessity for mutual aid from our surrounding communities has increased. That increases year over year, and it's just part of the driver of the department.

And if your budget was cut by 5% compared to level service, would your department still be able to function? And would it still be able to meet all the state requirements and professional accreditation standards? No. Or would you not be able to operate properly or risk losing accreditation?

All of the above. We would have a hard time maintaining our ISO rating. There are portions of our budget that are for training. You can't take away anything from our budget. Otherwise, we can't really serve the community.

Okay. That's all I got. Thank you.

I don't. I'm glad that we brought the third ambulance back. I think that was a great choice. On a other note, I've had so many emails about what a great hire you are. School committee members as well. People are very happy with your leadership. So I thought I'd throw that out there.