Budget Committee - Regular Meeting

In 601, I'm gonna call this meeting to order. Will everybody please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance?

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

All right, I will open it up to public comment. Seeing none, can I have a motion to close public comment? So moved. Second. All right. We'll close public comment, and now we will go on toward the police department. So we're on agenda item number five, new committee business, which is the fiscal year 2020 budget schedule. So Friday last week, I had a meeting with Ron Dunn and Sean Faber from the town council. We had representatives there from school. We had Dan Black and Amity. You were there, Tristan was there, Justin and Sarah, I think that was everybody. And we talked about what we want the schedule for this upcoming budget season to look like. And so what we're looking at right now is, I'm assuming because of Monday's meeting with the town council that the budget will be due, will be going for fiscal year, not May 22nd anymore, that will be, or?

He is actually gonna put it out tomorrow.

Okay, great, perfect. So Justin's gonna put that out tomorrow. And what I was thinking is now that they'll have that, we had talked earlier in the year about us meeting with our respective liaisons applicable so fire police DPW and start talking with them about their budget process how they're planning about building their budgets because that was something we were interested in talking about how do you build a budget what does that sort of look like and so they'll get that tomorrow sorry when you say I missed what is that the budget is that what you mean like yeah they're gonna get yes yeah so just it'd be given basically like Here's the parameters for the fiscal 28 budget.

OK. Gotcha. Thank you.

Yep.

They'll get the forms and all those things, and they have to justify the new positions as a whole form that you've seen before. Yes. OK. Got it. Thank you.

Yep. So they'll get all of that. And then we can't actually have any pre- because I know in an earlier meeting we had talked about pulling back the timeline, maybe having them do their big budget presentation maybe in September. We can't do that because we do not get rates for insurance until mid-October. And because that's a big budget line item, we can't actually say what the budget's going to be until we get those rates. And the earliest we can do it is still the first Saturday in November. It is what it is, right? OK, that's interesting. Yep. All right. But we can certainly work with the departments to figure out things that aren't insurance. We'll figure out what that's going to look like.

When it comes time, you can adjust.

Not necessarily, because it is such a large line item. And we have seen such wild swings in it. Like last year, I believe it was 3 and 1 half percent increase. A couple of years ago, it was almost 20%. And so because we have such wild swings in the cost of it, it really does need to be pulled together as one cohesive package otherwise i don't i i in my opinion we don't get the full picture so um so let's see here um in september bill we can at least start talking about the warrant articles so we will be meeting with our respective departments the town manager and the finance department will be working with their respective town departments to figure out what warrant articles might be going on the ballot this year um so we can at least front forward load that aspect of it so we don't have to do a lot of the warrant articles towards the back end of things. The budget kickoff meeting, that big Saturday budget where we go over everything with fire, police, DPW, and the budget as a whole, I believe. Yes. That will be on November 7th. So that will be when we do that big budget kickoff meeting.

Saturday meeting.

It's an all-day Saturday meeting. This year, we met at the end of the meeting to go over what we thought of the presentations. It was a very long day. I'm not doing that. So what we'll do this upcoming year is we can maybe have a meeting that Thursday afterwards to discuss it. But we also will start kicking off our meetings with the meeting with the different departments on the, I believe it is Tuesday, November 10th. So that's when we'll start meeting with our departments. So we are separating the budget committee meetings and the town council meetings. So we no longer have to go to a town council meeting to get the budget presentations. They will be presenting to us Tuesday, the following day after the town council meetings. So we don't have to sit through any town council meetings that we don't want to unless we have comments or we want to bring something to the council's attention. They'll be giving us a similar presentation the next day. And so what I'm thinking that we ask for is, because we talked about different types of budgets and things like that, what can you do with the default budget? What did you ask the town manager for? And if there's a difference between your budget and the town manager's budget, what is it? And what does that look like? Um, the other thing that I'm thinking about is what are you not asking for this year that you are probably going to be asking for in an upcoming year. Um, so again, it's more that forward looking approach to things. Um, and then I was also thinking, cause we've, we've talked a little bit about strategic budgeting. Um, if. Maybe the departments don't have to do this, but we could maybe ask them, because I know we aren't implementing strategic budgeting, but thinking about the strategic plan and also how some of these things that they're asking for may align with that. So I want us to get us in that thought process of thinking about budgeting and implementing it in the way that, as we have heard from the community, what they want to see in the budget, if that aligns with that. And so, you know, it's not something we have to do, but I think it's something that would be good for us to think about and consider in the back of our minds, if that makes sense. If I could just comment. Sure.

I super, I very much agree with that because, I mean, what's the point of having the strategic plan if, I mean, I know there are other points to having it, but right, but ideally. Yep.

ideally anything especially anything significant is going to somehow align with something in there right i mean right you would hope so anyway unless it's an emergency which of course is different yep yep yep and as we've seen and you know i've seen i've been on things for my fourth budget season um one of the things that i've seen um over the last several years is like the library is a great example of what happens when you don't make the investment now you pay for it later um and so i think another for us to consider when people are saying, hey, I want $50,000 for X. What's the cost of not doing it? And that's what I was talking about in the investment in our community and the hidden costs of not, like, yes, it's $50,000 to replace it, but I'm spending $10,000 a year maintaining it. We will need a new one in five years anyway. It's better to make the investment now because five years from now, this will cost $80,000.

And in that example, I would expect to see that if it's needed in five years to be at least presented on a CIP plan.

Yep.

So we can, you know, not prioritize it for year one, prioritize it for year five.

Yes.

Saying this is coming down the pipe. This is what we're, you know, it's not going to be fully baked. Numbers will change, but we have to have that understanding that it's coming.

Yes.

And the library is a perfect maintenance. Yes.

um police department yes yeah fire department you know all these were yeah like and i think just having that culture yeah just saying we have to maintain these and we have to yes especially these big ticket items yes yeah and the library is a great example of what happens when that doesn't happen yep um you know i'm not placing blame anywhere but i think when they presented last uh on monday's meeting it was what 900 and somewhat thousand to replace the hvac or something like that Yeah, so $865,000 to replace all the HVAC. There's roof work that needs to be done. I guess the roof kind of slopes in a little bit, which allows water to sit. It's more of a bowl than it is a roof, which isn't obviously great when you live in a place where we have weather and it rains and there's snow and it melts and it just kind of accumulates. So there's roof work that needs to be done. So, you know, taking in consideration those kinds of things, you know, for the future so we can plan for it better, I think would be helpful. It's much better to save $5,000 for five years than paying all that money up front if you can plan for it. Let's see here. But yes, that's that. And then we will do the school district meetings are going to start right around. The first one for school is Tuesday, November 24th. And then we will be meeting on the Thursday after. So starting after.

That's not Thanksgiving, right?

No. It's the week of Thanksgiving.

Okay. But we're not meeting on Thanksgiving.

No, we're meeting the Tuesday of Thanksgiving week. And then we'll meet the following Thursday. Yes. Okay.

I thought you said the Thursday after the 24th.

No, she did, because I wrote it.

Yeah, I did, too.

But it's OK.

Sorry, I assumed that it was a given that we were not meeting for Thanksgiving. I know. I planned it through.

I'm doing the turkey.

But yeah, so the Thursday after Thanksgiving.

Oh, yeah, I like the commitment, but family's family.

Yeah, I host, so I can't do that all. But yeah, so the Thursday after that, and that's the four Thursdays in December for the school. as well. Those tend to be a lot faster. They're pretty well organized. When the cafeteria presents, they bring cookies. It's very nice.

The Thursday after is December 3rd for anybody writing.

So after Thanksgiving, it will be every Tuesday, Thursday that we have a meeting. Because we'll still have our budget committee meetings with the town departments that Tuesday, and then that Thursday will be school board. which hopefully should be a lighter lift. I know it's still two meetings a week, but because we get to set the agenda, we get to determine what boards we want to meet with, if it's worth it for us to have that meeting or if we feel we've heard enough from the departments, because my hope is working with some of the bigger departments like DPW, fire, and police right from the very beginning, we'll have a better understanding of their budget and what's in it and why, rather than going over things over and over and over again. It gives us that little bit of freedom and ability to say, you know, I don't think we need to meet this week I think we've heard enough from these departments and then we don't have to sit through meetings that we deem unnecessary because we feel we've gotten what we need from these meetings and they'll just be shorter It's not a whole town council.

Yeah, right. So they're exactly shouldn't be five Four or five hours. Right. Hopefully.

I can't imagine that we would have that number of questions. Yep. Because they'll probably give a much bigger, potentially a bigger presentation at town council. What I'm really looking for are the numbers. While it's nice to hear about everybody's accomplishments throughout the year, I'm focused on what is in the budget, what is this impact, what does it mean, what are you asking for, additional staff, equipment, things like that, and why. What's your reasoning for it? If I'm assuming they may talk about those things in a town council meeting. So, um, if you want that information, it's there in another place. You can go watch the videos for it, but for us, it's really just going to be very, very, very numbers focused. Um, either the numbers work or they don't. So.

And vice versa, council members could come to that meeting. Correct. Yes.

Exactly. Yep. Yep. So I can leave Sean Faber as our liaison to the budget committee. Um, so he. I think may or may not attend these meetings. I think the idea was he would, or?

In the statutory budget committee, the town council rep would be there, and the school board rep would be in your meetings. They're part of you. I'd actually vote in those cases, but it would be appropriate to do that. But what he chooses to do, I'm not sure.

Right. Yep. And that's why we have recorded meetings as well. All right. And I think that covers that agenda item. Let me just go back to the agenda. Does anybody have questions about that budget schedule?

Do you send a schedule out? It was linked in the agenda.

So the schedule is linked in the agenda that was emailed out. Yep, exactly.

Yep.

Okay, cool. Liaison reports. So school board?

Yeah, so the school board, since our last meeting, met on two times, beginning of May and this past Tuesday. One of their, I'm just going to focus high level on the numbers here. I did have a note that there was a withdrawal from the Jacob Nair Scholarship of $15,554, but that doesn't necessarily impact their school budget. But for their capital, There was four capital reserve accounts that were drawn down. Building grounds had a $368,900 change for roof repairs at North School, door replacement and HVAC work at the middle and high schools, fire alarm work. bathroom floor refining, security updates, and field improvements. It looks like the remaining balance is approximately $368,000, and there was some savings with the roofing work. Also, with capital reserve accounts that were drawn down, information technology, infrastructure, $133,000 and change was expended for network switches, network upgrading, and Aspen scheduling system updates. And Matt, I will send you these notes for the minutes so you don't have to type profusely.

Sorry, go back and catch them through. Go back and watch it on YouTube.

The remaining balance in the in the technology information infrastructure fund is 77,000. Small equipment for classroom furniture, musical athletic equipment, Drew down $92,000, remaining balance $47,000. Vehicles and machinery, $68,000 for expended that covered a new box truck and a zero turn mower for grounds. If folks that have been following the zero turn mower Debate over the last few years. Looks like that's, you know, they're excited for that. Remaining balance, $23,000. Dining services was also a very large part of this past Tuesday's. meeting um outstanding negative student meal debt stands at 63 700 and change as of may 5th um which is approximately you know they're estimating about 2500 higher than that same point last year so you can see that you know that's going up um balance carries over year to year um The paid lunch equity tool that they use actually recommended a 35 cent meal price increase. However, the director actually is proposing a little more of a modest increase of 20 cents per meal and 25 cents for teacher's mail and the board did approve that. For exciting fringe benefits here. The department also plans to reestablish the frozen yogurt partnership, expand snack room hours at the high school, and adjust vending machines access to improve a la carte revenue. So there's some revenue kind of generation there, and I wish I had frozen yogurt in high school.

Is it with Stonyfields?

i don't know it must i hope so frozen yogurt when i was in high school so it was nice i hope they get it um they uh you know really kind of quickly they um transportation costs um they there are definitely savings with um middle school and high school combining the bus routes um there's but you know they are seeing obviously the cost of travel and the, and, um, you know, gases starting to really kind of eat into some of their budgeting. Yeah. Um, from a capital planning outlook aspect, um, As we know, the district completed three major capital projects over the last three years, mechanical system upgrades at South School. I don't have it written down, so it's not on the top of my head. Launch a full-day kindergarten and the district office part project The district office is expected to break ground in early June so coming up in a week or two The board You did express some hope with a quieter capital period over the next three to five years So that's definitely worth kind of monitoring and watching. Well, we'll see that through the CIP I Capital reserves are expected to address more ongoing roofing and mechanical maintenance needs. They don't anticipate a major public ask for the roofing and mechanical maintenance needs. Long term concerns flag includes, and this has been on the for a number of years. Um, the high schools, 100 wing, which will. Be approximately 50 years old in 2 years, heat and humidity conditions in part of in parts of the Matthew Thorne elementary and the need for a gymnasium calling for, um. to really kind of focus on the district's emergency center facility. Other items in the past that have been on the CIP from the school had, in addition to the ones that were approved, but ones that we'll definitely see is the high school gymnasium and pretty much other long-term kind of impacts. So that was that.

Great. Thank you. All right. Next up is town council.

I do not for town manager or council. I will have it for the next meeting. That's okay.

Town hall. So DPW, we wrapped up the DPW and the DPW working group. We wrapped up our interviews for the owners project managers for the DPW facility. We interviewed four firms. The interviews went well. There were two very clear frontrunners out of the four. So we've asked them for a pricing sheet on if we were to select them as the OPM, what would that look like in terms of costs to hire them and what are they forecasting to get us to basically the March of 2028 ballot. The plan is to put the DPW facility not on the warrant articles for fiscal year 2028. It would be for fiscal year 2029. So not this March, but next March. And so we're hiring an owner's project manager with kind of a keen eye on socializing the project in and of itself, but also somebody who has the experience to really make sure we're doing right by costs and the architecture firm and things like that as well. So we'll get those pricing sheets back tomorrow and we'll start reviewing those and then we'll select a firm sometime either next week or the week after. Cool. Bye.

So that's DPW.

CIP is also me. The town council approved the CIP board members on Monday night's meeting. And we haven't had a kickoff meeting or anything like that yet, but at least the town council's like, yes. So I'm in. All good. Fire.

Yes, so I went over the warrant articles that passed this past election season. The assistant position is... They hired someone. She will start July 6th. The fire truck reserve, they were excited about. He did say, Chief Young said that we'll need more in the future because the fire trucks are crazy, ridiculously expensive. The two fire trucks are on schedule to come September, October. OK. And then I did ask about future warrant articles, if he had an idea of what they would need. He said he has some in mind, but one in particular was right now we only have one dedicated staff member for an ambulance, and we really should have three. Okay. So that probably will be a future warrant article. He also brought up some new revenue ideas. There's one town that... They don't have an ambulance. Some towns we do provide ambulance services, but they also provide services to us, so we don't charge. But this town in particular, they wouldn't be providing us a service, so we would be able to charge. So that is a possible new revenue. He said as far as the budget, we should be coming up. under, below budget, actually, for this fiscal year. However, Young Station, there's water leakage, so that'll be about $800,000, but we should have $400,000 from this year to help with that. So, yeah, that's what I have. Great.

All right, police. We just talked to Chief Bernard while we were over there. Do you have anything else to report beyond what we chatted about?

No, I mean, I met with Jason for an hour earlier this week, and that was productive in just getting me up to speed. I bet you guys all know more than I do. And then I just talked to the chief about just meeting up some time. I told him I wanted to kind of get a download from you on how you do things and whatnot, but then once I was up to speed, I would reach back out. But, you know,

with so yeah yeah he's easy to get along with um planning board i'm looking on jeff for this one just because

Next time I won't, because usually he and I meet up for a period of time beforehand. But this month has been very chaotic for me.

Yeah, no, and I'm trying to think what... Yeah, so on Monday, the council approved the revised ordinance for PUD, for the plane unit developments. There's a lot of work that the planning board put into that to get it to the council to hopefully have put some more input into it. So it still allows us to control where PUDs in the town can be. It allows us to have a lot more control over the overall look and feel of the community, the ability for the developer to pay for private road maintenance and such. PUDs also will require public water and sewer. That was a long time coming. Last night, I wasn't at this meeting, but I do know that there was a conditional discussion for a PUD in the Auburn Road area. um that you know that occurred um a conditional discussion you know allows the developer to get input from the board on what they on what they and the community would like to see um so now it's up to the developer to kind of take that input back and kind of frame it It's going to be a fairly substantial one. It's on the border of, it's in North London, around the border. It goes through my neighborhood. Yep. So Matt will absolutely have something to say. I'm going to have a lot of luck to say.

They're expecting a 2,000 car increase, and part of that's going to go through the first phase of our neighborhood, which is going to get a lot of people up in arms.

Yeah, so there's a lot of... Down the road by Poor Boys.

Oh, by Poor Boys.

Old Derry Road and Auburn Road split, and it kind of goes back into that corner.

So the developer is definitely looking at it from that standpoint. One of the benefits of having this as a PUD, it allows the talent to have development agreements, which allows us to have, again, the control aspect. We do know that that entire area, with or without a PUD, does have traffic concerns, major traffic concerns. So it's definitely...

It was kind of wild. This morning, everybody was like, why are all these cameras around our neighborhood? And then by the end of the day, they were gone. They were all remote cameras that went up and then came back down. And I'm like, they're looking at the morning traffic.

Was that on Facebook? Because I think I saw that.

Somebody started asking me, Matt, what's going on?

Oh, I saw somebody post it on Facebook and then everybody was like, you know, bugging out. And I'm like, guys, I think that might be just traffic. A traffic monitor or something. Yeah.

Um... Yeah, I mean, hopefully got good data, because we can't make any changes to traffic without good data. So it's all ancillary and kind of at this point in time, so. Other than that, don't have any other planning board updates. So that was the big one. Yeah.

Can I just ask one question? Maybe you guys are. I was trying to follow the meeting, the town hall meeting, and like, What is the advantage of having, like, if you don't have the PUD, then... they can develop anyway? I understand why they might want it, but what's the trade-off?

That's a good question. The way I look at PUDs is a developer is going to have 200 acres of land anyway, and they can put single-family homes on there. Great. Everyone wants single-family homes. However, those single-family homes will also kind of you know, may or may not require public water, may or may not require public sewer, may or may not be privately, unless the developer's like, yeah, we'll maintain all the roads, don't worry, town of London area, you can't do that, you won't need to do that. We all have more control over the PUD. It also allows, you know, if you think of a plan unit development, the major marketing aspect of it, the optimist view of it, if you will, is that it has residential units. It has commercial units. So for jobs and or an industrial kind of component. So there's three different components in there. Ideally, if these developments are constructed appropriately then you'll have the ability to kind of have you know a live work play type aspect in a community that all of their amenities their major main amenities are central into that development the development also has you know the town also can put different types of phasing requirements. So it's not like here's five, you know, 100, you know, if the developer wanted to put 100 single family homes on or whatever the number is on 100 acres. developer could do that in two years with a phasing component the town could decide saying yep this looks like this is going to be we have to have should have a 10 15 20 year build out on this so it so it reduces the amount of traffic because like when like there's one speaker that came up and maybe a couple people also echoing like we should just get rid of the pud and one of the counselors said that too but

Wouldn't that, like, if you don't have it at all, doesn't that mean, can they build, if there's no PUD, could they build what they built up by Market Basket? No, you have to have some agreement with the town. So, like, both sides have to, if the town were to... scrapped the PUD and said no, then they could never have built what they built. So both sides make some concessions. So it would be somewhat effective if you scrapped the PUD. It would stop that kind of development. It wouldn't stop single-family houses being built again.

as much if somebody owns the land and it and say if that land is all residential you can put on you know single-family homes on there sure if it's commercial and you want to put a residential you can't necessarily there's some you know nuances but the overlying zoning would take precedence there the other kind of main component now then you know is the ability you know to have different, again, commercial, industrial, residential zoning aspects that are there. It's very nuanced and Interesting to kind of sit through it all and because I hear all that Like I'm opposed. I'm like, okay. Why do we have do we need a PUD? sometimes the policy debates get Drowned out by the personal components of the debates as well people say things You don't know like is that right or not, right?

I go that one lady was very passionate She came up and but she was saying like they don't have a playground. I said they have a playground And then like the rep from that whole organization came up and made a whole speech, but he didn't address like, where's your playground? Like, are, were they, do you know it? Were they supposed to build a playground? Is it coming in the 20 year plan? Is it they, we don't know yet.

It's something like a playground that is so like, I, you know, if, if when I'm looking at that unit, I'm just like, there's a lot of other stuff that kind of want to do that.

And if you think about the fact that they can do whatever they want with the land, if they build a hundred families, single homes without the PUD, we could put in the PUD that You want to build this? Fine. You owe us a fire station. You owe us this. You owe us that. And if you don't have that, they can build all of those homes, putting increased pressure on our town services, and now we have to pay for that. That puts the pressure back on them, the developer, to pay for it.

Yeah, and actually, that's a great point, Kate. the existing PUD up by, you know, Market Basket, Woodmont, it does have, you know, triggers. If it hits a residence at a certain number, a certain level, you know, they have to provide, you know, additional funding, you know, for those services and such.

Like an annual, like a recurring revenue stream?

Yeah, so there's a... And last month, Woodmont did come in and did provide a fiscal update to the planning board. what they've projected is that it has been revenue positive for the town. So, you know, everything that's being built up there is not, isn't, is, you know, putting in, you know, obviously revenue here. Now perception is definitely kind of, you know, does, there's a lot to kind of think through there. So it's fun.

Yeah.

Sean, did I kind of, any corrections that I?

Yeah, there's some more nuance to it, especially on the muddy side. We should probably, with this time, go in and talk about the muddy piece, which is really your area that I think you'd find more interesting about some an issue right now. You and I have a meeting, as you know, next week to deal with the development side of that, which was never in our rules and regulations that we're doing. I'm really pushing them to do things that we should have done a long time ago and that taxpayers are stuck with. Pushing them. Who's that? Woodmont to say that, no, you're going to pay for these upgrades on Pillsbury and Gilchrist. You should have been made You should have been required to do that before you didn't. So if you want to build another single structure on there, you're going to pay for that. And I've been very hard with them on that. In terms of a traffic corridor study, it's going to be $120,000. They're going to pay me and we're going to use our engineer to do it instead of theirs because you get a totally different story. So we're changing that dynamic. I got a meeting with Jeff and there's a couple different methodologies to do that. I need them to agree what that is and the council to implement that so that I can... enforce that part so this we should spend a little bit of time on it because it does fit within your realm both the money side of that and we have not done such a good job with that

Is it the fault of you to follow up on their side of what they were supposed to deliver in the PUD? Is that on the town manager to follow up with?

I'm the person who enforces it. I'm the person who negotiates the development agreements at the end of the day. And we already had this discussion with La Montaigne about the fire station. The response time up in that area is 9 to 10 minutes. It's supposed to be 4. And they're going to have to bear some of that cost. I do mean significant, that whole corridor, Old Derry Road and Auburn Road, to be able to deal with that, to allow a single additional car to be put on that. That is an expense that I don't think they're going to be able to afford at the end of the day. Otherwise, people like you trying to get through there are going to be even more miserable than there already is at times.

It backs up to Wilson Road on a bad morning.

It dumps out at Poor Boys. Yeah, it's a mess.

They said 2,000 extra cars a day. That's what they estimated. And I'm like, right now, it backs up the most amount.

Yeah, I don't know. So, okay.

Actually, to the town manager's point about how, could we put that on a future agenda? I just wrote it down. Okay, perfect. We'll draft a presentation. Yeah, because I think that would be great.

I'm like, where does the money go? How does it work? You know, like, what are the financials of it? So, yeah.

That would be great.

Yep.

All right, library. All right, I can be fairly quick because I'm still getting my arms around all the details going on with the library. So I have a smattering of information from the, they've had several, like a bunch of meetings since our last meeting. So I'm in contact with the treasurer. We've gone back and forth a couple of times. She did let me know that they're already working on their budget discussions a bit. And she's asked for, advice basically around coming up with their numbers for heat, electric and water expenses. So I might reach out to you separately on that one. I've gone back to ask some additional questions and I'm trying to schedule a call with her so that we could just like Verbally, you know live have a real discussion about because I wanted to understand the context of the ask a little bit more But anyway, it sounds like they are aiming to have Some of their information together in July. So Anyway, so more on that coming They're aiming for August to reopen the building now, at least that's what the note said for one of their meetings. So that would be They approved, they accepted the estimate from RE-ARC for $494,000 and change. So that's happening. They have some open, there's been some discussions about making other changes in light of the parking lot expansion. So they were talking about some stuff like rearranging the reading room, changing one of the entrances possibly, creating a second entrance to the library, things like that. Didn't sound like anything was fully approved. They did say the entrance work would be a CIP submission, but that's just some discussions, which, quite frankly, I think is smart to just, if you're ripping the place apart, it is smart to think about is there other stuff we want to, I mean, there's scope creep, so you don't want to go too far in that direction, right? But it's worth looking at that stuff. They had some finances approved. I won't go through every single one, but a few notables, the teen area furniture replacement for $4,400 and change. They're having, it looks like there's an issue with a boiler. So that will have a cost associated with it that's larger, of course. And then there were some smaller things like additional pest remediation and some extra light batteries and leadership conference, things like that. They got a whole ton of donations from NH Float, Friends of Music, Backyard Brewery, Max, Derry Medical Center, it goes on and on. So that seemed like they've been, yeah, Black Dog Car Wash, Rap City, O'Shea's, so they had a big long list some donations from or they were accepting donations from and then The amount of

Those might probably be things that are being donated for the summer reading program, like raffles or things.

Yeah, I think it's the actual movie tickets, as opposed to straight money. No, I wasn't clear about that. All questions are good here because none of us know everything. And then it also sounds like they're having a discussion about being more deliberate about breaking out what the town pays for versus the library. It sounds like that came up in one of the meetings as well. So just having additional clarity around that. And then I actually didn't get to see the very last meeting they had, which I think was like yesterday or the day before. Okay, great. Yep, so that's all I have for today, but hopefully I speak with Azra before our next meeting.

Perfect.

Okay. Old committee business. Last time we said that we were going to discuss some goals this time. And so what do we want our goals to really look like this year? So what are we hoping to accomplish? I know one of the things that I think would be good this year that we haven't done in prior years is getting more involved in the budget process, especially building those budgets much earlier on. I think even if we can only accomplish that with one or two departments, not necessarily all of them, I think that would be a good goal for us to have. And then one of the other goals I'm thinking would be starting to kind of, again, dip our toes a little bit into seeing if their budgets kind of align with some of the pieces of the strategic plan that align with those particular departments themselves. Again, we're not fully implementing it yet, but I think it's a good idea for us, if this is going to be implemented, for us to start getting used to thinking that way. I think that would be good. And then I think the other goal is really keeping the meetings budget-wise as tight as possible. Um, because it is a big commitment. It is a lot of time. I'm thinking that having the budget meetings separate from the town council will certainly help with that. Um, but you know, I think I would like to be more respective of people's time and maybe doing a lot more of that. I think that upfront planning stuff will help with that as well. Um, but seeing what that, seeing if we can, we can do some of that. Um, but what, what else would people like to see?

As your second one about the strategic plan, could you say that again?

Yeah. So the strategic plan, I think I sent you the presentation on that. So there are certain parts of the strategic plan where the budget committee input is going to be welcomed. And so what I'm thinking of is those ones that specifically involve us. We start looking at when we're going through budget season saying, oh, you know, Let's say fire department and remember policies and procedures wasn't one with One of the strategic plans is having written policies and procedures or updating policies and procedures And they have their new admin assistant who they're bringing on part of their budget could be Allocating her time to making sure these policies and procedures that's in line with strategic budget or you know if we want to have a DPW for an example, if we want to ensure that our roads are clear, that we're doing road maintenance on a good schedule and things like that, my job as the DPW liaison would be, does your budget support that? So are we investing in equipment that is good for paving?

So just watching where the budget is going, making sure it's getting as close as it should be.

Exactly. So like if paving and let's say road maintenance is the big thing that we want DPW to focus on, we don't want them to get a snowblower for sidewalks because that's a sidewalk, it's on a road. So we would recommend that they invest their money somewhere else or cut it from the budget in its entirety, that kind of thing. So yeah, you're welcome. That was just my thought on some things.

I do like the, I mean, I like all three of those, Katie. So the budget process involvement, right? That's, I think, it's appropriate to focus on maybe one to two, maybe three departments, because then you get a kind of, then we start to establish a baseline of what this might look like, because this would be a change for the departments to kind of have this type of level of involvement. You know obviously attacking all of them at the same time Yeah, you know it it's probably it would be frustrating for us because we wouldn't have a framework to kind of go on but at the video for year one tackle two to three Year two will show what the successes players make some adjustments expand that a little bit out and then kind of it then it starts to become part of our overall operating procedures. So I think definitely focusing on two to three would work.

I might be not getting this right, but the chief was, I guess he expressed like some I don't know if the concerns are at work, but just some hesitation about how the strategic plan is going. He was like, I really like the way we do the budgets. I'm open to trying new things, but I'm not quite sure. So I mean, maybe when you guys are talking about we're going to tackle a couple, one or two or three of... of integrating the strategic plan and the budgeting. I also wondered just like how receptive the different department heads might be just to have someone helping them.

Yeah, and that wasn't something I was thinking we would work directly with the department heads with necessarily until it got to that like, well, why doesn't this align type of thing? I'm sure because he was a part of doing the strategic plan, so I'm sure he knows what aligns with what. But you know what? That's also our job and our role to push back on those types of things as well. So I would push back on Dave if I saw something weird in his budget too. I'd be like, come on, Dave. But that's part of our job too.

You know, Kate, as I'm thinking, as you guys are speaking, I'm thinking about how you said keeping the budget meetings tight and all that. And there are a lot of newer people here. And I mean, this is only my second year, so I still feel new as well. But I know when I started last year, you helped me. You sat down with me and I talked to you a little bit about the how. Or if you remember, you and I had a few private discussions where I was like, help me understand how to do this thing, right? And so I was thinking, this year, maybe we want to talk about the how a little bit in this meeting. like, hey, everyone, at this point, you should be reviewing last year's budget so you have an idea of what it looks like. And for our next meeting, be prepared to have some idea of what this thing is. Or just like, how can I prepare for the next meeting to be ready for it? And maybe we can be a little bit deliberate about talking about that. Just so like, I mean, everybody doesn't have to do the same thing, right? You don't have to listen to what I do. But I think it would be helpful for everybody to kind of be on the same page to think, like, at this point in time, here's where we should be trying to focus.

Yep. Yep. And the other thing, too, that I'm thinking will be helpful as well is that budget that the New Hampshire NHMA does about how you're supposed to be doing budgeting. I know I'm going to be attending that. I... have never attended any formal training for this before. I guess I've been flying by the seat of my pants for the last four years. And so, because I didn't even know that was an option. So now I'll have formal training. And some of you will also have formal training if you want to go as well. But I think that also kind of helps to, you know, like for people who can't go, I could come back and give a brief presentation about what I learned and things that are important, stuff like that. I think learning about stuff like What is a PUD and how does that bring in revenue to the town? That's important to know as well. You know, things like the Baldwin and they pay a pilot payment. What is a pilot payment and how do you negotiate pilot payments and what does that mean to the town? You know, the agreement with the airport, what does that look like and how do we form those different types of agreements and how does that also bring in revenue or at least be revenue neutral in the case of the airport? Those kinds of things so, you know learning more about the different components of that and how that all kind of works You know, what what do you do with them designated fund balance? And why is it important to maintain a certain balance for bond ratings and things?

Yeah, I think that's actually critical just to have because there's I Yeah, 80% of this room is first year. Okay.

I'll put you in there, too. I would love to get a download from anybody who would want to spend an hour with me, and I could also maybe write up, like, I don't know if we have any sort of an onboarding FYI document or something.

Nothing whatsoever.

So I'm happy... I'm having to take some notes and start to draft some first iterations of maybe an onboarding document. If someone's going to invest the time with me, I'm happy to take the notes and provide them to the group.

I think that would be good. Okay, so I think for our goals, it's kind of really heavily focusing on two or three departments and helping them with building their budget, trying to see if we can dip our toes a little bit. I won't say dip our toes in the goal, but I'll figure out a way to phrase it appropriately. Um, and then, um, for number two, for number two. Yeah.

What about, um, would have, when you were talking about that, I was thinking preparing for strategic budgeting.

Yeah.

Maybe throwing that in because I think that's what you were, I think that's, Potentially what you were saying, because we're not doing strategic budgeting this year, but we are potentially going to do it next year. Yeah.

And maybe it's to say, if we were doing strategic budgeting, this is what that would look like. Like maybe seeing how we would apply it.

Right. Yeah, exactly. So when we get to actually doing strategic budgeting, um, we know our brains are already be in the right place.

Yep.

I did speak to Chief Young about us being more involved in the budget, and he's completely open to that.

Great.

Love it. So I'm sure they would be one of the departments. Okay.

I'm sure Dave would be happy to do it, too. And then the other one was keeping meetings.

Having Jeff talk less.

No. Yeah, keeping me on topic and short wherever possible. And I think that's really by doing more upfront work so we can spend less times in meetings and do more away. Because I think if we can do that, then maybe what we could do with some of our meetings that we would have had to meet to meet with the different departments, that's when we can talk about PUDs and pilot payments and things like that. We can use that for more topical kinds of things that I think are important for all of us to know because it's part of how this town operates and brings in revenue and also pays for things. And I think that's important. OK. And then the last thing under old committee business was discussion on slash updates on the creation of bylaws and rules of procedure. I can't remember. That was you. That's right.

I have a draft. So I'm going to email it to you guys right now. I'm going to CC you in it. Is there anyone else that I should CC for the bylaws draft?

Kirsten.

OK. OK, great. Perfect. So then what we'll do is we'll review that for next meeting. And then we can bring it up for discussion. Because per 91A, we can't talk about things unless we're all in this room together. But we can at least review the documents in our own time. Yes.

I do have a question for you. I guess I could email you separately. I have a couple questions. There's some highlights in there.

Those are just for me and I. Yeah, yeah, yeah. If you want to clean up before you send it out, of course, by all means.

But I just sent it out. It's just the draft. Okay, great.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Okay. Um, and then, um, did everybody get a chance to read the April minutes?

No.

Okay. What might've happened is, is you sent them to Tanya and then maybe I was supposed to send them out and I didn't because I thought they were going to be linked to the agenda, but now I can see that they weren't. Cool. We will approve May and April minutes in June.

Yeah. I sent them in, but then I was like, in the future, I plan on copying everybody. on the draft, and then when everybody says that I'm good with it, then I'll sign them in.

You can't do that. I can't? 91A violation. Yeah. Is that crazy? Yes.

Wow.

Send it to Tanya as a draft, and then we all approve the meeting minutes in the next meeting. Okay. Yep.

Wow.

Yep. I felt the same way when I joined. I'm so used to being in corporate America where you're like really inclusive and collaborative, and I'm like, we can't all be on an email together? This is so weird.

Just write your draft, send it to Tanya, and we'll review it and approve it in the next meeting. Yep. Exactly. Yep. Okay. Um, meet the next meeting will be on June 18th. Uh, Dave Wally has offered to do a tour of the DPW that day as well. Um, and so what I was thinking is we would do this rather than meeting here and then going over to the DBW because we can't walk there. We would just start the meeting over at DPW at 6 PM. Um, and then we would either, he could, he's, he's offering up the DPW for us to have our meeting and what we wanted to talk about there and then do the tour or do the tour. And then we can come back to Sunnycrest. But he was concerned about if we start the meeting there, we briefly meet and then we do the tour, that they don't have the recording equipment there.

Right.

So I wanted to talk about what we all preferred as a board before giving him the thumbs up or thumbs down. So do we want to start at 6, have the tour, and then come back here? Or do we want to start our meeting at 6, have our meeting over at DPW, and then do the tour? What is everybody comfortable with?

I will not be here for that meeting. Okay.

I mean, I just want to meet there and then come here.

Okay.

Especially if it's going to be hot and humid or something like that.

Okay. Great. We'll start over there and then we'll come back here. Yeah, I'm fine either way.

Yeah, I just... Mainly just for the recording.

Exactly. Yep. Okay. Perfect.

I'm going to be selfish, yeah. So then when I go to do my minutes, I can go back and look at it.

Okay. And then we typically don't meet in July. Yep. So we usually take that month off. I'm thinking... We could meet with our respective departments That's kind of when they're really in the meat of trying to build a lot of these budgetary things and stuff Jeff and I will also be like elbow-deep and CIP So, you know, we typically don't do a July meeting, but I wanted to make sure It's all okay with you if we don't do a July meeting Well considering on Monday

mentioned to the council that it was ridiculous for them to have summer off. I would, I would be for a July meeting, but I wouldn't be able to make it anyway. Okay.

That's perfect. So I should watch the council meeting you're saying?

No. Don't do it. Okay. Well,

You can't make it. I think it's okay to be out.

You know what?

There are some traditions that I think we should keep. especially because it's right on my wedding anniversary. So if everybody's cool with no July meeting, I mean, we've got a lot that we'll be doing on our own anyway, and then what we can do is, I was thinking early August, in August we'd probably have two meetings because we would have our regular August meeting, and then I wanted to get another tour in. I was thinking it would be the fire department in August.

And the school tours are?

And the school tours are also in August, yep.

Yeah, so we actually have three or four meetings.

The school tours are two nights. We do three and three. And then there will be our regular meeting and then the fire department tour. But I'm trying to get everything in as soon as we can because when the library reopens, I'd also like to do one in the library, and that would be the September meeting. And then we're in October, and then we start budget season. So that's where I'm trying to, like, figure out how this all squeezes in. Okay. And the fire department tour, because there's three different fire departments, we go to each one. That kind of needs to be its own night rather than trying to squeeze it in with another meeting. Yep. So, okay. Cool. Do we have to vote on that or if we all came to a consensus? Yeah, that's fine. All right, fine. Cool. So no pending vote. There is nobody here from the public, so there will be no public comment.

I just have a couple of lines to a few communities.

What? Yeah, of course.

New York. will yield somewhere over $300,000 in that. I plan to turn that around and replace the roof at the fire station, station number two that was talked about, as well as the fascia that's all rotted. And the year surplus, if the council be any surplus left over to speak of if they approve that on the 15th of June we talked a little bit about strategic priority based budgeting if we want to do that with our window is we have to start training in January okay that's only six months away yep so I have no commitment from the town council at all but I would be very interested to see if you to do that. So I need you to think about that. Even if the council chooses not to do that, if the budget committee chooses to do that, then I will train my people and we'll use the forms and we'll use the processes in which to create priority or strategic based budgeting because I don't want to train them for nothing.

I agree.

And the council can do whatever it does and you folks can look at a budget in a different way. So it's We have two Congressional Directed Spending Grants and both of them have made it through the process with Senator Cheney. Great. I say the process, I'll explain that in a minute. And Congress from Pappas, they get all these grant applications and they narrow them down to these. We got down to these, so both of them. Those are water projects on Calicourt and Iris, the Cal Lane and Iris, PFAS contamination off of High Range Road. Okay. And then Senator Shaheen approved this one. So now they're in the Congressional Spending Bill for the next budget. Usually if you make it this far, usually you get it. So we're looking at, you know, probably $3 million worth of grants for water projects, which is big for us. Yep. We have 12 projects, and this would be two out of the 12 knocking them out. We also apply for an SS4 grant. It's due next Monday. Okay. And that is for and we're trying that uh and it should make budget training as kate talked about uh it's coming up in the fall here and we pay for you to go we pay for mileage for you we also pay per diem so we cover the cost for you if you would like to go it's during the daytime during the week it's an all-day training it's an in-person training so if you want to go to that we cover I sent it out earlier, but some of you were not on the budget committee at the time. I'll have to find that again and send that back out to you to see if there's an interest in that. And then I'll sign you up because it gets sold out. So the day it opens up sometime in June, I'll be sitting there on the computer to hit the button to get all of our people in first. on a moment where you're going to get it anyway. So, those are the things that I have for you.

You had asked us to decide as a group whether or not you wanted to move forward. Maybe, again, I don't want to hold the meeting.

We've got to send the information to you so you know what we're talking about.

What do you recommend? What do you think? Because it sounds like, you know, what do you think? Do you have any recommendation on what you think we should do regardless of what the council decides?

The rest of the country is changing how it does budgeting. Instead of just this incremental, you have decisions and a process by which you make the decisions. People in the private sector do this all the time. They've been doing it forever, right? We don't do that on the government side. You just keep adding on.

And I watch the meetings and everything. I'm just asking you, like, do you think we should try to move forward in the training and process this year?

Yes, I do. Okay. I think because it takes the time. We're talking about now the FY29 budget is the earliest opportunity to implement priority-based budgeting. We already lost a year. We've got to change the way we're doing things. the rest of the country is making this move on the government sector. It's more similar to the way the private sector does it. But I need to get people, I need buy-in, I need support to do that. It makes department heads make difficult choices. You have to justify why you're spending the money and what you're spending it on. You have to look at alternatives and you have to justify the return on investment for those. work they didn't have to do before to justify why they're doing what they're doing and I do recommend it but again I need buy-in from the players otherwise it'll be a flop and that'll be a problem then before we adjourn does anybody have any other business that they would like to discuss

Seeing none, I will make a motion to adjourn.

Second.

Great. This meeting is ended at 9.39 p.m.