Borough Council - Regular Meeting

Oh, see it's live streamed. Okay. Oh, here's Jeff. I'll admit him while you're doing that. I I had a popup. Come on. So, so he should be coming. Get off YouTube on my website here and And I'll I'll make Jeff a co-host and then we're ready to go. Okay. Okay, we're good. Great. All right. I will call the meeting to order. Roll call, please. Mayor Kenos here. Mr. Rivero

here. Mr. Ruse. Still signing on there. He's here. Mr. Here. Mr. Trainer here. Miss here. Mr. Zazarino is absent for now.

Notice of this meeting was provided to the Burnersville News and Courier News filed with the municipal clerk and posted on the municipal bulletin board on December 4th, 2025. 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. Thank you.

All right. Welcome to the March 16th, 2026 meeting of the Burnsville Burough Council. Members of the public will be allowed to speak during the open session. Comments will be limited to three minutes per speaker, which will be monitored and enforced by the burough clerk. Failure of the governing body to provide an audio recording or even a Zoom recording of this meeting will not invalidate this meeting or any action taken including but not limited to the adoption of any ordinance, resolution or motion. Um so the first thing we have is an open session for any comments from the public. Um I guess that's the only one we have, right? No. Yeah. So

we only have one. Yeah. Yeah. On a work session. So would anyone Oh, I see um Fran. So you just need to unmute her.

Hi. So I just wanted to check in and say thank you for the roof progress. We're excited that those repairs are being made and they were out there in all kinds of weather. So, thank you to them and to your team, Kevin. Um, and I understand that the meeting that I missed in February, there was some parking discussion. Um, and I've just been asked to to share that there's concerned. I know that the the spots are chopped up by by signage. Um, but there's concern that there's just also not enough spots because people don't listen to the signs anyway, or at least with the library staff parking portion, they don't. Um, and there were some concerns that patrons shared with me about uh an app would be hard for them to use on the type of phone they have. So, I just wanted to pass those on. I know you guys are working with the study and maybe we can talk when you you work more on that, but I was asked to share that. So, thank you everybody. Good to see you.

Thanks, Ryan. Um, anyone else in the public wish to be heard? All right, I'm not seeing any, so I will close the public session. Um, we have a several discussion items and Kevin Murray is here to give us a public works update. Uh, good evening, Mayor. Uh, how's everybody doing tonight? Good. All right. So, Anthony, let me share. Yeah. Let me uh enable sharing here. Hold on. I think I got it. You got it. Okay, perfect.

Yep. Says I'm sharing. Everyone see the spreadsheet? Well, not yet. Just says you've started. Why is it double double clicked enter? Uh start sharing. There you go.

There we go. All righty. Uh so just a quick rundown of this year's uh snow events. Um, what I ended up doing was I did a comparison of where we were last year with subcontracting out snow removal versus what we did this year since we moved the operations for sidewalks and parking lots in house. If we were to stay with the same subcontract option, our grand total for this year without an increase was would have been build out to us was $80,260. Um, I added a 3% increase just that's kind of how pretty much everything's been trending. So, uh, with all the snow totals, with the plowing, putting the calcium down, shoveling sidewalks, our bill for, uh, subcontracting would have been $82,667.80. Um, from the public works additional labor and expense costs, if you took the the pelletized calcium for the sidewalks, that's something that we never really purchased in bulk before. We'd have a couple bags on hand, hit some spots, you know, just to keep business, you know, business uh as usual open. Um doctor's office down below, library, burrow hall, police station. Um so we bought it and booked this year. It was just shy of $10,000. Um we did the capital. We were trying to realize that over 10 years. So with that, it was $5,500 was our estimate for the capital expenses. Um and then labor for our plowable events. So this was the additional labor it would have taken to do the sidewalks and parking lots. Uh the employees were still here helping on roads throughout the storm and then at the end they would go do their respected routes um for sidewalks and parking lots. Uh since unfortunately for uh for budgetary purposes most of the snow events came on Sundays. I calculated the average overtime rate or average double

time rate throughout the year. Um, so plowable storms, that was the cost per storm of just over $8,500. Then we had fuel and then maintenance, which is the wear and tear, cutting edges, you know, shovels break, etc. per storm. So my estimated cost for our snow removal operations for sidewalks and parking lots is $25,580. Um, so we're showing an avoided cost of $57,0008 $57,86.92 this year. that's carrying the capital over 10 years. Um, the other thing I wanted to touch base on was savings, Kevin.

Yeah. Yeah. No, it was uh the guys did a wonderful job this year. I really listen, this would not be possible if it wasn't for the crew that I have. Um, so thank you for all your support in this. Uh the other thing was the snow cleanup downtown which I know was, you know, highly requested um from the businesses uh pretty much right after the snow stopped. Um in 2021, I'll highlight right here. We did a snow cleanup. With that, we hired two different contractors. Those were the bills for the snow cleanup for each one. And we still had Burnersville Public Works employees working that evening. So, if you take my estimate of $4,000 for labor uh for that, our 2021 snow cleanup cost was $18,140. Adding the 3% over the five years will put us at $21,2923. public works did the entire downtown cleanup without any subcontracting over the course of

Did everyone else still off Kevin? Yeah, we lost him. Yeah, we lost him. Power just went out. Transformer blue. Yeah, if he's out he's in uh the DPW building, so there's no generator there. This whole side just went black. Oh, there you go. Right. I made the right call. Definitely. So, maybe we move on and come back, mayor, when he joins or something. Yeah, I'll text him. Maybe a little bit. Right.

Nancy, does it um does it make There were a couple things we needed we wanted to um you know, sort of get the council's um read on in terms of decisions that we need to make. I think one of the big ones was the was the sidewalk um situation.

We're not ready for that yet. What I'd like to do, um, it's way more complicated than I, um, than I thought and it is, you know, there's a lot of engineering things and so I would like to ask that uh, at the next meeting that they come that the engineer comes to the meeting to explain it to all of you and then you can make a decision. And if they need a decision prior to that, then maybe we just have another public works committee meeting and you guys can make a suggestion to the rest of the council um or something like that. But it's just it's there's a lot more involved than I thought. Um

no, that makes sense. That's fine. I was just gonna say we could talk about it now while we're waiting for Kevin, but since he's we can just move on. Um, we lost the mayor, too. Oh, we did. Good. Oh my god. Lost the mayor. Oh, no. I heard like a huge boom outside. So, things are booming and going out. Oh man. Glad I'm in Chicago, I guess. Transformer. Geez. Well, Christine, the steering wheel next. We still have quorum, right? Do we? Yeah, we do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Um, Kevin's back, by the way. I do want to say that. Oh, Kevin Murray is coming back. Finish saying what you wanted to. Christine,

I do want to say what a great job our public works is doing. um a lot of the stuff we we talked for hours on the at our meeting on the 12th and um I'll let Kevin go back to his report. But in any case, there's um no shortage of projects going on and the fact that he's able to manage all these things, you know, superbly in my opinion. It's just a a very good change from years past in my opinion and I'm very happy about it. So Kevin, I think your transformer blue over there.

I heard it from my house. If you're back, I'll let you go back. Can you make him co-host? Thought I did. Let me see. Um,

yes. I asked him to unmute back. Yeah. And mayor's back. I'll let her in, too.

You guys hear me? I'm sorry about that. uh lost power and everything a little crazy. We open the spreadsheet back up. Hey, you're muted, mayor. Yeah, it's May. There you go. We just lost our power. Do you hear me again? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Uh sorry about that. Um, so like I was saying, public works did the entire downtown cleanup between two evenings and throughout the day uh this year to avoid having to hire the additional cost of subcontractors. So our overtime costs for those two evenings were $9,000 $9,000 just about 10,000. Um, so our avoided cost there was $11,11427 versus if we had to hire subcontractors based off of because it would have been done in one night opposed to two.

That's really impressive, Kevin. I mean, I think there's less snow in 212 if I'm not mistaken. I I didn't look to see what the what the total was for that for that in that actual storm, but so between the $57,000 in avoided costs with just the parking lot and sidewalk removal and then our snow cleanup, we're close to 68, just shy of $70,000 in cost avoidance this year. I don't truly view view it as a savings. Um but I do it as a as you know as an avoidance that we wouldn't have that we didn't have to spend.

Excellent. Thank you. Um real quick when you say avoidance um we would have contracted for that you're saying right like we would have Right or Got it. So we would have gone out and got local um filing companies or others to help with what the DPW did. Correct. Right. Appreciate it. Thanks.

Uh so just to talk about this the snow cleanup really quick. Uh my recommendation, I've talked to Nancy about this, is is there any way that we could possibly extend out to the county to see if they would be responsible for Mendum Road and Mount Ary just for their snow cleanup so it wouldn't be on the burrow to clean up the roadway. I know we're never going to get the state to bite uh for down a true downtown cleanup post major storms, but if we can get the county to at least chip in and supply something, I think it's worth the ask personally. Yeah, even um Claremont. Yes. You know, there's there's those uh parking spots along the sides that they left. That's why Claremont. My apologies. Not me.

Isn't there I mean, it's fine to ask, but I would assume that this is regulated somewhere. It's deter, you know, it's sort of been determined somewhere in terms of what the county, what the state is responsible for for each town. And if they're not, so either they're responsible for it and they're not doing it, um, or they're not responsible for it. So if they're responsible for it, not doing it, we should send them a bill. I I believe I believe it was an agreement between the bureau and the county at some point a long time ago, but I may be wrong about that. That's my recollection

stating that we would be responsible. Yeah, that you know I could be wrong, but I seem to recall that there was an agreement at some point in time the bureau said they would plow those roads, but I I don't I wasn't involved in No, they actually the the county does plow them. It's just that they don't do a good job. Oh, okay. In other words, they just go down the center and there are parking spots along the side that they don't do. So, um it would be worth I don't know if there's is anything written anywhere, but it certainly would be worth talking to their um engineering department or whatever and see why they're not doing it. And if there is something written that says they don't have to, then we'll know. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Never hurts to ask.

Yeah. Um, so another snow removal topic I'd like to bring up is a mailbox replacement policy. We have one on our website. U Anthony Man did some research. He can't find anything going back if there was a resolution or an ordinance uh pertaining to this. We did have a resident with a more expensive mailbox come through this year. Um, I believe the mailbox itself was $740ome dollars. our current policy is capped at $100 or I'm sorry $50. So just to have the conversation of where our policy is and that we actually don't have a policy and I guess it's up to you know Jack would recommend if it had to be a ordinance or a resolution um for reimbursement.

What's the recommend I think you said the recommendation was to raise it to like 100. Yeah. Yeah, I think 100's fair. I'm looking at neighboring towns and kind of like a just a quick search between uh you know what's kind of normal throughout the state. That seems reasonable to me. Yeah. I don't know. Is it in an ordinance, Jack? Well, I don't think it is now, but I think it would make sense to put it in an ordinance so we could find it in the future. Where is it now? Do we know? I don't know. on the public works website with a just a form. Oh, just kind of a policy. Yeah. I don't know the source of that though. Yeah.

Okay. So, let's do something formal to memorialize it. Yeah. Would you like me to do it, Nord? I can have it. Yeah. Let's do that. And uh then we can change it on the website. Okay. And Kevin, you said there's a form, right? The one Christine sent from Menum. I think it was Menum. Yeah, Mendum has a standardized form, which we could do a standardized form. I actually like that. So, it's kind of a little bit easier to track. Um, so I don't know if that would have to be part of the ordinance or not, Jack or if that's just something we could reference to based just a form for the res. You mean the form of the application? No, you can do that administratively.

Okay. So, that's something we'll do uh once we have the ordinance, we can reference the ordinance number off of it. The next item I have is New Jersey American Water. Uh working with American Water. Uh their construction team's been fantastic to work with. We were able to come upon an agreement for a payment in le of paving. This is for most of the roads that they've worked in uh throughout the burrow over this last project. The only outlier is boiling between Mount Ary and Center Street because there's a 30-foot pit and I want American Water to kind of own that pit for the next, you know, 5 or 10 years as it does settle out. Um, that number that American Waters agreed to give us is $161,000. So, that's money that we could put into a pavement management plan to either offset the project that we have going on there, do additional roadways, save it for next year, um, whatever, you know, council decides. So, there will be a resolution that we're going to have to pass. I'm waiting on the sample from them uh to accept the payment and uh, we'd be able to move forward from there.

And which areas would it cover? This is for the West Boiland Prospect Center water extension. Okay. Not the train station. No, they're going to pave the train station lot. Okay. Because that's also another deep pit that I want them to take responsibility of. Good idea.

Would you know what the cost of us doing it? So like, you know, paving those areas would be. So, it's it's a it's a what they're reimbursing is is a half lane um based off based off square yardage. So, I've I had experience with this in Beminster. We were going to pave a roadway and the American Water thought that they would be absolved of having to financially uh comp compensate the township because we were going to pave the road anyway. Wasn't necessarily the case this way, but I did remind them that we would like to be paid for it. Um, and it covered about 55% of the cost of the road and it was half the lane. So, based off it all depends what the Morris County co-op pricing is. That's who we do most of our mill and pay projects through. I I would say it's probably a little more than half because we get a little bit better of a price than what a private contractor will.

And normally they would have paved all of it themselves. Yeah. But they also were aware of the project that we had on Weston Boiland. So, I don't know if they would have necessarily paved those project up upfront because we were we were in communication with them throughout the process of their project because it was going to affect how we proceeded with ours. I I think what you're saying Kevin is we would have not had that paved because the West Boas basically get this 161 that otherwise, you know, we may not have um you know, we would have received the benefit and and just had a paper anyways. So yeah, that's possible. It's 161 sort of net to us basically.

Yes, correct. Okay, sounds good.

Uh so I have just one more thing that we spoke about the other evening uh public works committee was and I know this has kind of been a sometimes a hot topic is the trash cans throughout the burrow that we have subcontracted picked up uh with IWS. Uh I saw the letter last month saying, "Oh, your rates going up." And I never, I'll be honest, I never looked at what we were paying monthly for this until they said what our new rate was going to be. It's almost $18,000 a year. Just just over $18,000 a year for garbage can removal. Uh they're billing us for 50 cans. I'll be honest, I don't have an exact inventory. That's something that, you know, we'll do ourselves. And I know there's I've seen some throughout the burrow that are in very odd places. I don't think we need to have and maybe they'd be better, you know, utilized elsewhere. Um, so I'd like to re I did make a recommendation the public works committee is moving that to an in-house operation. Our employees are already out twice a week picking up recycling at all the parks because this contract does not include the recycling. So to us to put, you know, black can liners, bags in all these cans and grab those as we're doing the recycling can, which is right next to it, which is shouldn't really add much time uh to their workday. They're there anyway.

And then where do they go with the bags? So, we have a we have a dumpster for bulky waste at the pill facility. Okay. So, we would just take them right up there. I I think a conser a truly conservative cost savings on this is probably $10,000 a year. I don't think it's that much weight in garbage. I think there's a volume. Um not that not everybody recycles properly. So, you know, there's cans and bottles don't have a lot of weight, but and an audit of those cans would be awesome. So, thank you for that recommendation. Yeah. Like you said, 50. It's hard to say. Yeah. Just so we know where they all are. Y Yeah. So, we'll inventory with locations just so we know. Sounds good.

That is all I have for tonight. Any questions or anything about what I spoke about this evening? That was a lot. Thank you, Kevin. Thanks. We should have every month. You you save us you save us hundreds of thousands of dollars every time you you report on something. an extra 161,000 I just heard. Keep that keep that trend going. Yeah. All right. Thank you. Thanks, Kevin. Thank you so much, Kevin. Much appreciated. All right.

How does that funding work that we just accounted for? Like I I know some of it it sounded like was savings, some of it was like money we wouldn't have spent. I'm just interested in how much like I don't know if it was 161. said, "I think you calculated that number, Charlie, but I'm just interested to know, is that money that we're saving on the budget now or the It's less than we spent in 2021, so we haven't had big snow years." Um, okay.

Right. So, we just didn't spend it. But comparatively, he went back to the last time we had any significant snow. So it's it's not like we budgeted for that amount for this year and now we have that savings in the budget. Got it. He's just saying the money we by prioritizing um supporting DPW we actually would have outlaid more with external vendors etc. based because it's a 2020 using the 24 rates I guess. Okay. Yeah. The 161 I was referencing was his comment from the American water not on the snow. Y the other was I think like 80,000 or something.

Yeah. So that's I think Al that's why he called it cost avoidance rather than savings. You know it's a it's a minute point but it's true because we didn't save it from last year. It's just we didn't have to put it out this year by not contracting out. And if you I'll ask him to add up um he he made a similar presentation I think last year about the um bringing the grass mowing inhouse. So right I'll ask him to combine both of them. Yeah that was a savings too. I mean it's it's great that we have the manpower to do that. Yeah.

Um okay moving on. 5B, the mobile MVC unit. Um, is that going to happen on April 2nd?

I don't think it is. Um, I talked to them uh earlier or last week at some point and they said that they did not actually I think Fran's still on the call. They said they they did not um think there would be enough parking and they were looking for a day where the library wasn't doing anything. And I mean frankly the library is always doing something. So I know I said to Fran, is there any day that would work? So um you know I guess we're waiting to see if there's a better day. But we've had them there before and they

I know I told them that. I said you were there before and everything worked out fine. So, I'm still waiting to hear back from him. Our only program during the day then is one story time that she thought she could do in half the room, but we have our regular traffic and sometimes Community and Crisis has big events. But I I think they'd be able to have for the pace of clientele they have. They've they've made it work before. No, it wasn't in the building. It was the parking lot. He said he was worried about that there wouldn't be. But that's when the parking lot's full. Um is what I was trying to say. Sorry, I didn't mean to be on. Oh, I think men inside. Okay.

Yeah, I that's what he said that there he didn't think there would be enough parking. So, um I I wrote back to him and said, but you did it before with no problems. And so, still waiting to hear back. Yeah, it is a nice service. Yeah, when they do come, they were pretty I think they had all their appointments filled when they came. So,

and I mean it's it's difficult to find a different location because you know last year you guys had suggested all right then go to Bernardsville Center and they wouldn't do that because they didn't have dedicated Wi-Fi or or dedicated bathrooms. um you know, so I couldn't send them to like the polo grounds or um Yeah. or the the swinging pool parking lot or any of those. Yeah. Right. Right. All right. So, the library is it. So, I'll let you know when I hear back. But it's not it's not happening on the second.

All right. So, we can take that off. Um they tell Yeah. Raren Headquarters. They do this every year. They sell the uh well testing kits. It's just a week, right? Like five days, Monday to Friday. It's a week and then they come the week after to u accept the uh pick them up. Yeah. To pick them up and and then they they send them out and they and they test them. But yeah, it's just a week and then another day to pick up. And they usually get I mean they seem to be busy. They or they wouldn't keep coming back if they didn't sell enough. So, we got like approximately like 15 or so a year.

Yeah, that's good. Okay. Um, we do have we had the um a little agreement that was in the packet for the historical society of the Somerset Hills. Um, someone has donated a portrait of Frederick Alcott, who is one of our town founders. And um they don't really it's probably as big as the other picture we have in the courtroom of the center with we whoever it is Woodro Wilson or with that big pole there. Yeah.

So it's about I think Anthony and I figured it's about the same size and it would go on the opposite wall because there's nothing there right now. And what they want they were looking for a place where it would be seen. they didn't want to put it in the brick academy um you know because they're not open that often but you know there's always people in Burough Hall and we meetings in the so um they'll probably do a little ceremony a little PR thing when we get it hung but we just had to sign this agreement that um there it's on loan to us indefinitely and we're going to and we have to take care of it make sure it doesn't get damaged. So that's what that's for. Uh just to approve that agreement. Um Nancy, you want to say well uh I think you who else knows? Um Nancy and I met with um Ross Traphagen who is a councilman in Clinton probably. I think he's running for mayor next year. Um anyway, he we met with him about his communication business and an Nancy, you want to explain better than I am?

Yeah, I I think you had something in your packet, an example of the kind of thing he would put together. Um I think a really good example came up um the other day. Uh the New Jersey American Water had changed their schedule for the work in the um train station and it was due to weather. Um and there were some other factors and some a resident went up and talked to them and you know put it in the bubble and the mayor said is is this accurate information and I said yeah as far as I know it is. The last I heard from New Jersey American Water had been like the day before um when they said DOT would not let them work and um they still had about you know two weeks left is what they said at the time. Um I have not had the time to continually update the website with you know little blurbs about their ongoing project. This would be the perfect kind of thing that um I think a communications um consultant would would be great for to keep people up. One of the one of your goals this year was to improve communication with the public and um they could do it a lot more than we can. Um and they, you know, they know the they know how to make it succinct. They know how to, you know, they really know how to hit the points. Um, we had talked about trying to get an employee to do it, but this is what the company does and and we could do this for about $2,000 a year, which you're never getting employee for that. I'm sorry. A month. Sorry. Sorry.

I was like,

yeah, you're still not getting an employee for that. But um um I mean so I think so I would love to try it for a year um or even maybe for the rest of the year and you know see what you think. Uh we talked about things like um the mayor and I had seen uh a company you could you could subscribe to. Not that I'm suggesting we do, but I'm suggesting that this this company does it where they take like this meeting and they put little bullet points like I mean, not that you're voting today, but ordinance 1 2 3 4 was passed. Here's what it does. And they give like a couple of layman terms um you easy to understand. This is what it does. This is what the impact is. And so like if there's a possibility they could do that because there's a lot of confusion. Not everybody watches the meetings. Even if they do, you know, a lot of these things are, you know, hard to hard to understand. So I think just from a uh maybe even put out like kind of a a a monthly um e-news kind of thing, newsletter. Um, I just think that there's a lot of opportunity there to increase communication and make things more visible and understandable for residents. So, I'd love to give it a try.

And we talked about with Ross about, you know, getting things out ahead of time, you know, before it becomes an issue so when we know something's coming that they he could, you know, get it blasted out before all the misinformation gets started. So, I think that's a positive. and even just having a monthly summary of the key points of the council meeting, you know, what got decided, what's going to what's coming um and kind of stay ahead instead of being reactionary to be a little proactive in getting the issues to the public. So, um

what's the Nancy, what is what do you anticipate that $2,000 equates to in terms of like hourly like an hourly rate? Um, I think he did he give us an hourly rate? I I have to go back to my notes. I don't know. We were more talking like we didn't get I would ask him now for a formal proposal at this point. Um, and have that all kind of written out for next week maybe. Wouldn't that make sense to accept to have some kind of a contract? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm gonna guess like typically $150 an hour, you know, I would think. Seems about right. So, maybe Yeah.

Yeah. I just I don't I mean, I was just trying to do the math. Like $2,000 a month, like if it's 15, that's about um what is that like 15 like 12 15 hours a month? I don't know if we necessarily need that much time. Um my sense is that I mean, I'm all for more communication. I think I put it on number one on my list of, you know, goals for the year. Um, but I really think there's probably like every year there's probably three or four big issues usually around development or, you know, something like the dam or if it has to do with the the um, uh, sewer sewer plant. So, there's, you know, there's usually like half a dozen issues that seem to generate a lot of um, interest in the community. So, I don't know if we need to do like an update on every little thing that we pass like on a given on a given meeting. I mean, you can always use AI for that and just do a, you know, a bullet point summary of of the things that we that we did. So, I I think it's good to get a proposal. I'm I'm all in favor of getting some some help. I just don't want to, you know, sort of create, you know, create this make a huge huge job out of this. Well, I think we were thinking too in terms more of information that normally we don't put out there, like things about your dog license, like I didn't know you had to pay 25 bucks for a dumpster till I got fined for not getting a permit for a dumpster.

So, you know, if we could take some of our ordinances that where there's the most common abuses maybe and kind of say, did you know that, you know, and get that kind of information out? I think that would be really helpful.

There's a lot of there there's a to me there's a lot of things that, you know, something will come up and I'll say, "Hey, Anthony, can you put this blurb on the website real quick?" You know, and and it doesn't get the attention that it really needs. And there's a lot of things like it's not just about ordinances. It's about a New Jersey American Water project or, you know, a paving project. and and this is what happens when you know we put in sidewalks in your neighborhood or you know things like that. Like I really think like to me in the time I've worked here that's probably the biggest frustration that I've had is not being able to communicate to residents before they get upset about things.

Yeah. And listen, we're already a third or a quarter through the year, right? Like um it's probably 18K for the rest of the year if we did it. And um Nancy, I remember you said you had cost offsets. I think you were not hiring something to be able to pay for it, someone. So replacement. Yeah. Yeah. So like I'm I'm definitely in favor of it and obviously see what it says. And like I think to Rich's point, we would just want to make sure we're getting our money's worth. So whether it's we we can assess if the we decide it's we don't have as much, you know, a little bit into it and not do it the next year. But

to your point, like if if it's updating the website or getting old information out there and new information on there or maybe you've making recommendations to us since we've been successful in putting out some FAQs, you know, on key issues, there might be good things. But in all the surveys and among every council member, it's number communication is our number one issue and um I think this takes a nice step step in the right direction.

Yeah, I'd also like to get their opinion on. So I think content obviously is important to to have content and and you know updated and have everything um you know on important issues but also sort of how we get that information out. So the website obvious is sort of the obvious um answer but unfortunately a lot of people just don't think to go to the website or they go to the website and they can't find it. So, I'd love to hear their ideas on like what what is another way that we can get information out there, especially on critical. I mean, obviously the bubble putting links in the bubble is is pretty effective, but um you know, if they have any other suggestions on like um you know, an easy way to get certain key messages or information that we think is important for the community to know, what's the best way to get that out there? Well, and he also was recommending the um I think the one of the companies that we were interviewing for um communications.

He did, but um I explained to you, right? I had a meeting the other day, so I will have another proposal for you coming up and I think it's a lot more cost-effective and does the same things. Um but so I think Rich in combination with uh what I hope to be the, you know, upgraded improved website and those little tools. Um there are ways to, you know, geoence an area like boil and terrorists like that area like those. Yeah,

the police did it with for the smart 911 for me the other day. But um there there's ways to send a message out to just to those people. There's like I'd mentioned um a monthly newsletter, right? So, we send something out to everybody. Uh, please sign up for the newsletter. There's there's things you can there's like boxes or choices you can make on the website that uh or there will be hopefully where you check the things you want. You want some the agenda automatically sent to you every week. You can get that you want message. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's good.

So, yeah. So I think that is the way and I mean people have to be a little proactive. Um they have to sign up for the newsletter, the text messages or the you know the emails. So you know short of mailing things to people's house which is just not financially feasible. Um, I think that's, yeah,

what we have to do and, you know, just continually put things up on our Facebook page that hopefully, you know, the bubble shares because everybody reads that and say that where they say, "Hey, sign up here for, you know, whatever the whatever it's called." So, um, I think it's just a way of saturating people with different options and ways to ways for them to get information that's comfortable for them. Yeah, Nancy, I think you've done a good job on, you know, with both the tech effort and this effort. So, there are two different projects everyone's clear. One is the consultant, one is a technology platform. And I think, you know, this would be the basically advice and content that goes through the platform that Nancy helped interviewing several one one of several platforms for. So, and I think, you know, given as as Al said, this was the budget space for this was originally created because NY's assistant moved to a different role and Nancy had done a great job of updating the FAQs. You know, this makes sense to have someone else help with that. Obviously, a more economical rate than hiring someone full-time for that. Okay. So, we will uh get something for a contract or a proposal for next week. Um, and Nancy has a got a proposal for we talked about digitizing a certain percentage of the records that are stored everywhere.

Yeah.

So, this actually to me goes with what we were just talking about. It's an overall um just way to improve uh technology that we're using. And um I think that uh a very timely example um I don't know if any of you have heard on Super Bowl Sunday uh Warren Township's municipal building had a 2-in uh water pipe leak and they are out of their they've been out of their building since and they're probably not getting back in for like a year. Um and they're renting space in a office building. But relevant to this is that they lost so many documents. And you know that could happen at any time. And ironically, uh, you know, the tornado threats today, the the first time I brought this up was in July or whatever the summer of 2023 when the tornado went right past our building and I talked about what if the roof came off and the attic is has millions of documents. So um it is not only good to safeguard the documents from flood or fire or whatever mold any kind of water leak um but it's more efficient and one of the ways you know better communication one of the ways to do that is to make opra requests easier and um this company offers a public facing um option where people could access certain documents, right? Certain public documents without having to make over requests. So, um, even if we didn't go that route, it's easier for employees like Anthony would take could take him five minutes to do an over request where now it could take weeks because he's got to go up to the attic and search through files and whatever. So, um, to me, this is a really key component to making to

bringing all the technology together. And uh the proposal I had I had put in a request for $200,000 for to start this process and I got the second proposal and it was it is 113,000 for um the 200 planning um construction boxes and it is um about $86,000 for the zoning planning and zoning documents. So that's all of the documents over in the library. Um all the other departments that they looked at all have their own um costs. But just based on my really quick math on the number of boxes, the number of documents and what they have char what they have proposed to us so far. I know I'd said it probably cost a million dollars. I was a little high. I believe it would come in around 700 to do everything. Um, so what I'd like to do is chip away at it, you know, each year. And this year, that's why I put in the request, um, for 200,000. Um, there are almost 4 million pages that they would scan, but more importantly is the indexing. And um before you commit to something uh I would love to bring them in to do a presentation for you because it is I mean it the the OCR I think it is recognizes handwriting right when you search for a word. So you know they've really integrated AI and um I think it like honestly I think it's something we have to do. there's just documents everywhere aside but aside from how much

room it takes, how much space it takes is, you know, to make it more efficient and to to protect the documents. So, I just want to let you know that I got the I got the, you know, quote for half the documents and um if if I get the 200 probably my first would be PL all the planning and zoning construction question for you. Oh, sorry. No, go ahead. I was just going to say we don't need to do anything on the agenda for this. No. Okay. Go ahead, Ross.

Uh, really quickly, I just wanted to, so let's say we do get, you know, planning, zone of construction, those documents digitized when we process stuff now. I mean, is there would they come in with a process to digitize all the new documents from last 3 months, for example, or is that another trunch of I mean, I know a lot of it is, I guess, digitized anyway. I guess what I'm asking is do we already have a system to actively digitize our current data data going forward? You mean like for how about tomorrow? How about next week? How about the day after they're done digitizing the 200 other?

Yeah. I mean what all the companies do is they will give you a quote for you know they could come pick up documents monthly quarterly you know annually whatever you want and there's a charge for that obviously because there it's very time consuming to index all that so it would be an ongoing thing um there's also the possibility of you know okay we're all caught up now employees you know here's some scanners scan them yourself as you go forward so that's also um and I believe that planning and zoning is moving towards making everybody provide digital documents as well. So that would make it easier if they already came that way. Interesting. No, I just think, you know, if we do this, it would also be good to like Yeah.

You know, good point. I just wanted to um you know, update on update you on. No, I appreciate you. Great. Thank you. Um Nancy, how many boxes do we have in total? Do you know? Good question, Anthony. Did I count about 1,500? Was that what I said? I think that's what you said. Yeah, they're 1500. Okay. And are these like standard legal size pieces of paper? Are we including like large plans maps?

It's it's it's all of them. It's it's the, you know, 8 and 1 half by 11. It's the legal size and then there's the giant maps. Um, you know, the oversized. So they obviously charged differently, you know, for those, but they included they estimated as much as they could because they went into every space and looked at all the maps and all the planning board documents and blueprints and things like that. And then I assume after we digitized everything, we still have to hold on to the originals, right? So like their storage costs and all that.

No. So the there are some documents and Anthony could speak better to this. There's some documents that you have to keep forever no matter what. But um the the good thing about this com one of the good things that I like about this company is they work with um it's not it's doors d o res right Anthony the doc document document records

yeah right it's the state agency that um governs retention of documents so this company has an agreement with that with the state and they have once they've shown that they have I guess like triple redundancy the state gives them the ability to um destroy them destroy the documents and they give them the list and everything. Did we lose Jeff? No. I don't see you anymore. Um so, uh meeting in Chicago, right?

Chicago. So they could be destroyed and um and I mean for we we have two vaults for the things that we have to you know that we have to keep. Um but they and they actually do the destruction as well. Yeah. And usually they'll when you can destroy them. I think it's minutes that you can never get rid of, right? Yeah. Yeah. Minutes. Yeah. Minutes, ordinances, resolutions. Th those are the things you kind of have to keep forever. Yeah. Yeah.

Nancy, this um it seems like that this technology might get more efficient in future years. Like I know you estimate 200k, but is a chance that it's less next year and less the year after that. In other words, um, you know, like I just kind of thinking through the full project life and it just seems like an area where it's becoming more efficiencies, not less efficiencies.

Um, I mean, I don't know that the price is going to go down. Um I did I did I met with these kinds of companies um in the last place I worked and they were you know they were expensive now they're expensive then expensive now. I couldn't compare them because I don't remember the number of documents they had in the last town. Um but I don't know. I mean you could also I guess argue the other way that as technology improves it cost them more. So maybe the price doesn't go down. I don't know. I I mean I would think I kind of agree with Al like the to me and I'm no expert on this there's there's two types of costs right like there's the capture cost of capturing the data in a digital file and that's one cost right and then you have like you said the indexing and the the you know where AI would obviously help you know in the past 10 years like that cost is definitely going to get cheaper I think in the future. Is there a way that they can break out in such a way that they're like, "Okay, here's the cost for capturing all your data. Here it is. It's on a drive. It's backed up. It's, you know, all those costs." And then break out the other costs of, "Okay, this is how you search your data because I just I'm curious. It's just it seems like an exorbitant amount of money to me just, you know, and again, not an expert. It just sounds like so much money to to capture." and um store this information digitally.

I mean, I could I don't know if they break it down like that. I um would have to go back and look. Um I think like I I said earlier, I would love to bring them in to a meeting and they could give you a demonstration because I think you'll get uh a much better idea of um and I also invite all of you to come up and go to the fourth floor and look at the attic and You do not want to go up there. I've been there. Don't go there.

I I I'm happy to go up there. I'll just echo, you know, I do do a decent amount with AI and this is one of those areas that even over the last six months, the costs have shrunk um dramatically because of image and language recognition, which are what large language models are and AI is is very good at. Um so, you know, I think it'd be great to get the breakdown as as Jess suggested and then we can query them in greater detail. And you know, Nancy, I like your point maybe on the chipping away. So maybe if they came in, we could think about a smaller number to start and then, you know, then at least we're starting the the you know, the work, but then if things get dramatically cheaper um a year from now, we haven't committed to the full, you know, 700 or or whatever. We can kind of pay as you go, so to speak.

Well, this would be year year to year, right? Each year. Yeah. I mean, I was thinking, you know, 200 a year, but uh and I don't know how that works. Um Jack, they're in a co-op, so I don't know if that I guess that helps from a purchasing perspective, but Yes. makes it easier. Yeah. So, but we can only do a year a time.

Yeah. You can only do a year. And I would think so I would think that what would happen is you wouldn't want to sign a contract like okay you know it's going to be $700,000 over the next three three four years. You would say okay this year we're doing $200,000. This is it. Right? If we never go back to them we never go back. But then next year you say okay now give me uh what it cost to scan the police department and the clerk's office. and now they're like, "Oh, instead of being 200, it's 150 maybe." So, I think if if you go year to year, if you believe it's going to get less expensive, then you know, that's the way to do it. Yeah. But let's schedule them for next month.

Okay. To come in and do a presentation and then you can get those answers from them.

Okay. Moving on to the chef request. the Somerset Hills Education Foundation. It is their 30th anniversary and they are want to use the I guess it's the lower polo for um for anybody that went to the um food truck event that recreation had. It's going to be kind of where that was um last year. And they want to have all kinds of fun things. I know they checked with recreation for the availability, so they they do have the date locked in that, but they do need permission. I think they also wanted to do a beer garden, so they're going to need to do those permits, too, right?

Yep. Yeah, they need a social affairs permit. They want to do a 50/50, I think, or some kind of raffle. only a raffle license but uh for permission for the field I guess is what is what's uh on the agenda here is other things yeah that they want to do so that's the first step right is for next week we would approve them using the field right everybody good with that should be a nice event and then recreation doesn't have to have one

because they'll do one for us that's great Um, Main Street is asking and what they were trying to do cuz it's gotten very expensive now. I think originally you had approved closing uh that section of 202 for the street fair um based on DO's approval and evidently DOT has changed a lot of the regulations making it much more expensive in marking out detours like you have to have you you need like 10 detour signs that like it's 287 and miles away and so they felt like this is getting too expensive and maybe they're going to move it into the train station and just use the whole train station as a fair rather than trying to close the highway. Um so they're still trying to work that out with the fair organizer, but they wanted um council to give them permission to that if they end up moving it off of the highway, could they use the train station? And it's a Sunday, so there's nothing else going on there in the parking lot in June or September. But is it

where where do they propose every I mean presumably a lot of people are going to come to this? We want we want the whole town to come to this. So where would people park, the library? Yeah. No, but I mean office. Yeah. It's I mean you're you're sort of bringing you're the intention is to bring a lot of people to an event and you're eliminating the largest parking lot in town. So it's going to be there's going to there's going to be an issue like I think we need to come up with some sort of excess parking scenario like whether it's temporarily allowing people to park you know on side streets where they normally can't park or something.

Yeah, they can do that. Um, but you know there is um there's the I want to say the Joe Rossy lot. There's the the lot up Claremont that on a Sunday nobody's in. Um there's the one behind, you know, up the side street. Um that runs behind. We just they just need to think it through and like come up with like and probably sort of like put that out there with the whatever the brochure or whatever flyers they send out just like let people know where you know give suggestions on where to park.

Yeah. Maybe maybe the maybe the advanced guys will let us use the Palmer lot if they haven't started construction. So, um yeah, and they have they have been allowing that for especially now with um American Water in the parking lot. They have unofficially given permission for the store owners to use that lot. They just didn't want it advertised. Yeah. Yep. Makes sense.

Um and also that weekend, it's interesting. This was supposed I think they're talking June 13th, that's the Sunday. Uh Bernard's Township is doing a giant actually that whole weekend they are having um what is I never can get. Is it FC Berna is this soccer group? Yeah.

They are bringing like a hundred teams for a big championship thing which is the same as the FIFO weekend game start. So Bernard's Township is doing a big street fair on the Saturday with a watch party and all kinds of things. And I mean there's going to be a lot of people all around this area on that weekend. Um, just a heads up that that's going to all happen because actually two of the teams, one team is staying I believe Venezuela is staying at um what was um you know across from Verizon that hotel that was there.

Oh yeah. Yeah. That's where Venezuela the I think is now. Yeah. I don't know what they call it now but owned by Verizon I think. No. Yeah, it is. Used to be. And then another team is staying at the Somerset Hills Hotel on the far end of Burns Township almost in Warren. So, we're going to have a lot of a lot going on in this area when all that kicks off. And the watch black watch party is in Bernards. You said Mayor

Bernard's Township on the Saturday is doing a big thing. Um, and FC Burna is looking for fields for these these playoffs. And I don't know if they've reached out to recreation um or not to use our fields. Not that I know of. And I think they were going they wanted to see if they can get the high school turf field, too. But they usually don't they use our turf field regularly? They do. They rent it. Yeah. Thought so.

They're our only paying customer. But, you know, it should be a good a good weekend for our businesses with all those all the people in town. So, that's good. Uh, tie the town pink. I do this every year. It's just for u October for breast cancer month. We put pink ribbons around town. So, um, general business, we've got presentations. Poor Sergeant Luke back. We've put him off two months now, right? Yeah. Another meeting tonight that got to go virtual. Like, it's just not

I know. It's like every Monday we've got these storms. We should change the days of our week of our meeting.

I know. And then um I we were asked to do a uh proclamation for Parkinson's disease, which I have no problem doing those um ordinances. We're going to have a public hearing. Oh, and this is for when we reertify our affordable units. They have to be inspected and we don't think it's right that they should pay for the inspection. So they will be exempt from the inspection fees. We have Jack's report. We have any other reports.

Do we have any Did I miss resolutions here? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I did. Okay. Um what is Defense Logistics Agency? This is the um federal government surplus where we got the Humvees and other things. Uh I know the chief doesn't really want to get anything because he's actually getting rid of some of the things that we got, but I think it's a just in case kind of thing. Something comes up. Yeah. Every town does it every year, I think.

Yeah. and Jeff Horowitz, um Dan Lincoln asked if we would appoint him to the historic preservation committee and um they still I think they're still short a few members anyway. So they could use the help uh the contract for the police vehicle. Do we are we getting insurance on this for the accident? Yes. Um we're hoping to get about $60,000 from the um insurance company. I think. Isn't that what it was? 16 Anthony. Yeah, it was about that. Yeah. Excellent. Okay.

What are we changing on the scope of West Street and Boland? Oh. Um, this is uh we had talked a long time ago about um which side you wanted the sidewalk to go on and you had all said it would be on the south side which is where the houses are. uh the plans when um Boswell put them together, they had the sidewalk on the north side and the train track side and the current engineer and and I know you didn't want them there and the current engineer said that there's way too big of a drop there anyway. Um plus people park on that side. So, uh they just want DOT to change let them change the scope to move it back. I mean, the sidewalk's already there on the house side. It's just falling apart. We have to redo it. That was what we were supposed to do is redo that to connect it to,

you know, then you cross um center and go down Prospect. There's already a crosswalk across Boland at Mount Ary. Mhm. So, this is just to take it out of the north. Take the sidewalk off the north side and let them south. We're fully red we're doing the south. Okay. Let's see. We got a tax refund escrow. the body cameras. And I think you were telling me this is the new body cameras actually have the license plate readers in them and they connect directly into our current license plate reader system. So yeah, is that how cool is that?

Creates more of a coverage for the burrow. Yeah, that's awesome. Yep. Um on on the Western Boiler, I'm not sure. Have we done the recent and maybe Ross you're going to say something on this but um have we like canvas the street recently and you know see what folks there I know I mean I'm new to the project but you know just in terms of what folks there are seeking in terms of place we've already awarded the bid on this right in terms of the location it sounds like there's some discretion we have at this point or unless I'm mistaken no there is no discretion question. There's no way we could put it on the north side because of the steep drop.

Okay, that was my question. And you guys have talked some like west and everything before. Sorry. I I know I missed the first 15 there.

And the south already has a sidewalk. We're just improving it. Um, we did send out a notification the, as I mentioned earlier, the police did a smart 911 to let people know that, you know, in the next couple weeks that they're and they targeted that neighborhood that um, a project was happening. Um, but that is the exact kind of thing that I think we can use this communications director for because not everybody signed up for Smart 911 to get those notifications. And while yes, the contractor does handel letters to every house and our engineer is going to write letters to I think it's five residents who are going to lose some of their landscaping in the front. Um, you can never do enough communication, especially with a big project like this. People are going to have sidewalks who never had sidewalks before. Like I want to give them as much of a heads up as possible. like we've been talking about it, you've been talking about since before I started working here, but there's people who are are going to say they never heard of it and it impacts them directly. And so, um, that's the kind of thing that I would love to use this person for.

And to what extent if we, uh, like are removing landscaping or fencing, do we put it anything back? Do we are we responsible for any of that? we're not responsible because it's in our rightway and like every homeowner knows if you put something in the rightway you do it at your own risk. Um so, you know, I want to take a look at them. I don't think that there's anything. It's not like on Bernard's Avenue where people had retaining walls and things like that. Um you know, that was kind of a mess. So, um we can talk about it. I'll I'll show you pictures of the five houses. Um, I haven't looked at the pictures yet. Um, well, I don't have them yet. The engineer supposed to send them to me and we could talk about it. Um, but like for example, um, Mr. Richardson, we talked about at the last meeting, he has a dog fence underneath, you know, the the grass and, um, sprinklers and, you know, we we we're not going to replace those like they they're in the rightway. So, what we're going to do is give people the opportunity to have things moved before we go in there, right? So, if you have, you know, rose bushes or whatever, you can have like your landscaper move them. You could have, you know, so that they're not dug up.

Yeah. In the process. Yeah. And just get ruined. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Again, the more we communicate, the better. Yeah. Yeah. Um Okay. So, we got the body cameras. Um, Garrett Buchanan, unfortunately, has resigned. So, we'll be looking for a new recreation assistant. I already got We have the You got the applications. Or did you hire one? I got like now I got like 15 applications so far. Wow, that's good. Okay. Um

and for the for I don't know if you're well he's not in a plane anymore so I can um he the commute he drove like an hour and a half each way to work and he had intended to move up here um but that just didn't work out so I think that was part of the reason. Yeah. Uh the recreation camp vendor fees I think you said there was a 3% increase. Yeah. Okay. uh emergency temporary appropriations we have to do till the budget's passed. Yeah. And then we have introduction of the budget. Al, you want to Yeah.

I'll kick it off and you know the nancy the mayor and Charlie to add in. So um next week you'll see the introduction of the budget uh which has to be introduced next week and then passed in uh by the end of April. Um, first of all, I want to really thank Nancy and Leslie for all their work. You know, uh, they do a yman's job of going through every single dollar that's in the budget and really be thoughtful about it. Um, then having to deal with, uh, the finance committee's ideas and trying to accommodate it. And what I like in particular is that they try to anticipate our needs and what's important to us and genuinely listen to the goals that we set as council and try to build a budget accordingly. Um and you know from that we've had a really strong budget over the last few years. In fact, every year that I know I've been involved uh we have we've had the year been flat or um even decreased a few times in our overall tax rate and it's due to the hard work that they put in all of it. And uh want to thank Mary Jane and Charlie as well, my other uh colleagues on the finance committee for their work on it. Um so I you know I talked about this last time but there were a lot of challenges this year. Um 23% increase in health benefits $216,000 increase in just that additional sweet sleeping requirements by the state that we couldn't avoid. 45K full repairs painting tiling supplies etc. increase in liability, insurance, and workers comp through our GIF, contractual salary increases, almost $400,000 in that reduction in interest revenue and reduction in pool revenue, which we've had a lot of details of that. Um, in spite of that, where the budget sits right now, and there's a couple points that we not only want to take you through, but maybe have we're going to try to have a discussion here at council about is right now the re the municipal tax rate would reduce um year-to-year

from 469 to 467. So, we'd have a reduction and um as it sits right now. Um even with that we have a six 6.12% increase in the total amount to be raised by taxation mostly due to the increased valuation in the bureau which I think we're all aware of which I would like to say is due to the um I think to the guidance and the investment that we've been putting in as a municipal body as well that have led to this being a more desirable community visa the other competitive community that um people want to move here increasing values is in the waiting room I'm sorry um oh

is here Uh and that just in comparison in 2024 we had a 5.66% increase. In 2025 an 8.78% increase. Um the overall increase in the budget was 1.73. Last year was 16% but that was due to the one-time selling of the Audi dealership I believe which really increased the amount there.

Um additional 230,000 to pay for cash and capital items which we'll come back to in a second. flash use uh use of fund balance and $1 million appropriated from open space trust to begin payback of the master plan improvements. You know, one thing that I think was particularly difficult this year is we we we tried to balance the requests that came from all segments of the community and including you know areas of the bureau. Um but not everybody got everything they wanted right and uh we we tried to be diligent listen to the request fund areas we could as best as possible particularly among the priorities but not everything could get funded in fact I don't think anybody got all the funding that they asked for so something that we balanced and something that you know if there's uh members of council uh that have questions about that and want to know details you know I think all three of us would be happy to talk about it. Um the one last thing I'd say is and probably want to have a little bit of discussion on this point. You know, when we got the um additional valuation, it it re it resulted in about $230,000 which right now sits in the capital budget. You know, we we debated as a finance committee because we could have taken the tax rate all the way down to 4.6 with that, right? So, we could have gone from 4.69 down, sorry, yeah, 4.69 down to 4.6. 646. Right now it's 467. We could have gone down to 046 with that. That would have resulted in um a pretty about $80 in savings per household. Probably just a little bit more than that, but about $80 in savings per household. And so I think, you know, we were kind of went back and forth to that as a finance committee and wanted to kind of get some opinions from council here. You know, the advantage of that is obviously giving it back to taxpayers and um if we have addition a little bit of additional incremental being able to provide it back. The the the advantage of going into capital is I think we know that um

as a bureau we have a lot that we've had to fund between ambulance. We just talked about police car additional debt requirements on the bureau and that allows us a little more flexibility to pay things with cash rather than debt. Um, so let me pause there before I know we'll probably want to talk about that last point, but Nancy, let me just go to you. Anything you want to talk about in the overall budget process or anything that I maybe missed or contextualization that you want to add?

No, I mean, I think you summed it up pretty well. Um I I just want to say for you know uh on behalf of Leslie and me for the um matter of the additional capital I think the best way that I can just um that I could try to explain our viewpoint is if you compare it to your budget at home right and you have the ability to save money because you don't know what's going to happen next year or the year after you don't want your savings account to go to zero and That's what we've been trying to work on is making sure that our capital does not go down to zero because we don't know what's going to happen, right? We don't know next year, you know, a big piece of equipment breaks or whatever. And so to have that extra money set aside is always helpful. And so, you know, I know that I had a conversation with one of you who said, "Well, you know, if we're not we don't know what we're going to do with it, then, you know, why should we why should we save it?" I mean, that's why we're saving it is because we don't know where we might need it. But we do have, like we talked about earlier, like the scanning, there's always a need. The all of the things that people ask for, and I have to say that the employees in this town do not ask for things frivolously. I've worked in towns where they will just ask for the moon and you just hope you get something. You know, they hope they get as much as possible. They only ask here for what they need. So, um you know, there's always a need for extra capital and what we're trying to do, like you mentioned, is avoid um interest in the future by having to borrow. Because at some point what I was trying to hit home is that we've been lucky. Our assessments have been really high, but it was only as recent as 2020 when we had a big drop in our in our

assessments and they've been leading up for 5 years to that. And you know, nobody knows when that when that's going to happen again. So we're trying to prepare for that so that when we don't have as much money coming in. So, it's like it's like if you got a bonus one year at work, you're like, "Let me put that away because I don't know if I'm going to get a bonus next year." So, it's kind of the same thing. So, that is why we are advocating to put that extra $230,000 in um capital. I don't know if that's what you wanted me to talk about, but Yeah. Yeah, it's great. Perfect. Anything. Mayor, did you want to go then? I can add. No, go ahead.

Yeah. Yeah. So, no, this is uh yeah, I really want to thank um Nancy and Leslie and and and Al, the mayor for welcoming me into finance committee. Um it's a lot of fun uh first couple months uh to dig into all this stuff. Um I've learned a lot. Um you know, when I think about finance, um and I think both Al and Nancy brought up important points. I think, you know, finance is never about one thing. It's never about in in this case maximi minimizing the tax rate or maximizing capital or you know minimizing debt. It's a balance of all of them. Um you push on one thing too far and you're something's going to pop out of alignment uh on the other side. So you know the fact that you know when we originally kind of started with a budget we we had a lower assumption for assessments and the assessments came in higher and we ended up with this extra 230,000 that that Al mentioned. Um the question is okay what do we do with that? Do we use that to uh to invest in cap to save in capital? Do we use that to to pay down debt or do we uh return that to the to the taxpayer? You know when I think about capital I really want to commend the council um and Nancy and Leslie um because many years ago it was pretty small. The capital fund was really small. It was basically ne negligible like five years ago. um two years ago is uh roughly 800,000 and I believe the latest version of the budget has it about 1.5 million. So I I think we've done a really good job of investing in capital um which is important because we need to invest in things that will ultimately as Nancy said there are things that come up and there's things we need to care for now that you know as Kevin was going through earlier right some of those were capital requests that ultimately reduced operating expense. Um, so I think we've done a very good job. We've put a lot of emphasis on capital the last few years. Um, on debt, which is the second of my kind of uses of cash area. Uh, again, I think Leslie's done a great job there. There's obviously some stuff that we

recently had a couple meetings. We're passing additional bonds, but she has a long-term debt plan that goes out into the 2030s that I think if we follow and we're diligent and us and our successors follow, we can get to a much better debt position in the mid 2030s. So, I think we have a plan against that. So that leaves the burden on the taxpayers. Um you know as Al mentioned uh the burden increased by about 8 n% last year. Um our municipal taxes have actually increased as share of your overall taxes over the last 5 years. They've gone from something like 22 to 25% of your total taxes. And some of that's funding capital. So it makes sense. Um other towns have taken the opportunity with higher settlements to lower their rates. uh we've kept it flat due to the need to fund capital um and the school district has also decreased um their right so I think in weighing all these things we have to think about how much burden are we putting on the budget how much burden are we putting on debt how much burden are we putting on the taxpayer it's like the three-legged stool and recently given the increases in the last couple years to me there's a lot of logic in increasing capital uh which I think the current budget uh even at a 46 rate would do by at least 50 or 60 or 70K um over 20 25 um but also giving capital back you know giving funds back to the taxpayer because the way I think about it is this I think NY's point on the savings is a good one uh I guess my point is we've put a lot in savings so we we can always put more and I think we should continue to put more but the way I think about it what we're trying to do is with property values and assessments in towns we're trying to increase the size of the pie and the less we burden those properties with addition taxes, the more folks can invest in their properties, increase the value of their properties, the more the more attractive those properties are to potential new, you know, new residents coming to town, which increases the value. So overall, we increase the value of the pie. Uh we

increase the size of the pie the less we tax it. And that's the way I think about it in general. Um and you know why I would argue for you know a rate maybe closer to the 46 um which still funds sort of the 50 70,000 increase in capital. Um if we had a hard number of something we wanted to fund for sure next year um then I'd say sure let's increase the capital by that amount. But it sounds like we do also have some flex in here. You know Kevin came up with something earlier potentially you know if we don't do the full 200k on doc scanning there's some flex there. So, I think we have some enough flexibility while we're already increasing the budget. And I think, you know, our our taxpayers um given the increase this year, we should try to give as much as we can back to them while being financially responsible over the long run.

If I could just reiterate, it's $83 a house for the year. For the year. No, I look I agree it's 83 bucks. you know, it's not huge, but there are folks on, you know, fixed incomes and stuff and and people in town and and you know, there's people who that in town to whom $83 is not much. There's other people who it matters more to. And um I just want to and every little penny counts.

It does. I'm not saying that it doesn't, but I mean, I think it does for us, too. And you know, I we're we're trying to be responsible, right? Because when that bottom when the bottom does fall out and we don't have money to do anything, people are still going to want their leaves picked up. They're still going to, you know, their houses may be assessed less, but they're still going to want their leaves picked up. They're still going to want their roads plowed and, you know, municipal, you know, ball fields uh cut and police cars to show up and fire car fire trucks to show up and to have hoses and ambulances and we still need to provide those things. So Leslie and I are trying to prepare for the future and trying to make the most of the the highs when we have them. And

wouldn't you use that extra money then to pay down debt then? Because your argument is let's put money aside to save because we may need it in the future and if we don't have it in the future, we're going to have to borrow money for it. So rather than just having cash sitting in a cash account and not knowing what to do with it and sort of saving it for rainy day, why not just pay down the debt now? Well, there's a long-term debt plan. I mean, Al, you could speak to that way better than I can. Yeah, you can't really pay more. There's a challenge and I believe some of that debt and Leslie could answer this better. I believe some of that debt is callable. Um, as in you can't prepay. There are prepayment penalties. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If I could just say um

to

having done school budgets for over 15 years um and seeing this process, it's always finding the balance. The temptation is to say, well, let's give it back to them this year. And then what you don't you have to look at keeping it level because at some point if you reduce it now it's you're going to have to increase it later and then the shock sets in and it's it's not don't think of it as a savings account. It is a capital fund and a capital fund pays for roads. It pays for uh you know a new plow. It pays for a pickup truck. It pays for a new fire engine. And you know, just meeting with the fire company, we know how extensive their needs are and what they've they're asking us to support and we want to support it. And also, you know, if you pay cash, you don't pay the down payment. You don't have to pay the interest. The down payment comes out of the operating budget, doesn't it?

I just I don't like the idea of having this like open-ended like it's just sitting like if Yeah. If you want to say like we're going to take this 200,000 and put it toward, you know, sort of down payment on a future fire truck or something like identifying what that need is, I'm okay with that. You know, if it's something that the town needs and I can sort of look at it and go, "Yeah, this is something that we need reinvest. If it's not, I can't get behind it." But you don't know that the next storm, one of those trucks is going to completely fail. And then what do you do? But we do have fire trucks on our long-term debt plan. We do have we for this year we have a down payment on a truck that cost a million and a half dollars.

Yes. Um you know we have an ambulance coming in that plan in two years. I mean the the point is I don't think the point is about spending it right now. You know, it's about having it there so that like I I couldn't tell you right now what truck is going to break next year or what new requirement the DP is going to come up with that Kevin has to then buy some, you know, $300,000 truck for. It's a matter of having it there. It's a responsible way to budget. Yeah. I don't know. Hey, don't we don't we have the fire truck in plan? I mean, that's part of the depth the long-term debt plan. That's the one plan. That's the one truck. They have others. Yeah. Yeah. There's more coming up.

Well, yeah, but I mean it's all part of the multi-deade plan. If you look at, you know, Leslie's great work. Like, so that's budgeted at four is my point.

Rich said, "If you can tell me it can go for a firet truck, then okay, I'm for it. If not, no." I mean, it can go towards police vehicles. It It's going to go towards um We just bought new radios for the fire department. We just bought new radios for the police department. We just um bought new body warrant cameras. I mean, these things all cost so much money. And we don't know. We don't know what the AG is going to come down with next. The new requirement that the police have to get this or that. Um we're paving roads. You know, I like since I have been on council, you know, council people all come up with great ideas for things that they want to do. And they are like most of them are great ideas. They all cost money and it has to come from someplace. So when I look at returning $83 to for the year to the average taxpayer who isn't going to notice $83, especially with when county and school budget,

right? Right. Uh to me like to do it at the detriment and to be like penalized for having having built up the capital over the years to be penalized by saying well you saved enough you don't need anymore to me doesn't seem um rational. What's the what is sort of the best practice in terms of as a percentage of a municipal budget to basically put in reserve for capital? Is there like a some best practice or standard out there

there? Well, it definitely um yes and I will ask Leslie what that is, what the exact amount is, but your bond our bond rating. So, one of the things I was going to save for next week, but we got an amazing rate um when we uh had our band sale the other day and the um people on the call said that they had we had people bid on it who they never saw bid on a mun on a government um ban before. and they said a lot of it had to do with our excellent um rating and our excellent bond rating. Part of the things that those raiders look at is how much money you you have saved. I know what you said, mayor, but part of the and I don't know what the exact amount is. I'm asking Leslie right now, but it is it definitely comes into consideration when they look at your overall fiscal health. It definitely is something they they look at. Um,

I know you're I know you're listening. I don't know if you uh can answer Rich's question or not. She's not on there. No, she's watching. She's texting you. Oh. Um, so yeah, she brings up a good point. We cut how how much did we cut out of um people's uh capital requests this year, right? Hundreds of thousands of dollars. That's true. We did look at that. Yeah. I mean, if you want us to spend the money, we'll spend it. But that kind of defeats the purpose of what we're trying to do.

Just want to It just seems a little bit arbitrary right now in terms of the number. Like, why is it two what is it 200 and something thousand? Like, why isn't it 20,000? Why isn't it 2 million? Like, I don't understand. where we came up with this number of like 200 and something thousand because that's how much valuation higher than what we would have than what we planned for. You know what I mean? There's an original budget rich that that called for where we would have come in at the 467 rate um which would have fully funded a capital budget of 1.5 million. The Sessence came in higher which gives you an extra 230,000. So the debate is do you put that towards that capital or

but sorry guys that quite honestly is meaningless to me like the rate nobody cares about the rate like I I keep saying that people care about the the dollar amount that their taxes are going up or down and I think someone said it was about what about five or 6% based on this budget. It was 8% last year. That's the that's what people care about. I I totally agree with you. So again, like if the best practice is and we're going to get better bond ratings and we're going to save money and it's the fiscally responsible thing to do and that number is 4, you know, it's like I don't know, whatever that percentage is is $400,000. I would I would support $400,000. I just want to understand like that just seems like

well the assessments went up a little bit so now we have like 200 and something more than we thought we would have if we keep the rate the same. That to me is arbitrary. I I believe we have the highest bond rating similar to our neighboring towns that we can get. What Nancy? Yeah. She says we're supposed to have a reserve of 1 to 3% of our budget, which is how much? She's 190,000. I think off the top of my head, she says we'll have about 80,000. It would be 540. Well, that's 3% I think. Al, right? Yeah.

Yeah. If we had 3%. Um I think the question is do you again? Do we fully 1%? I'm sorry. 1% of our bud budget is $200,000. Yeah. Right. So triple that is at five. That's what we're doing. I mean we're I believe at 1.5 million we're or at whatever four four even 46 we'd be adding 70,000.

So like I I don't want to get too theoretical but while I agree with you Rich that the average taxpayer does not know what their tax rate is. They only know how much the sheer dollar that they amount they pay. It's what we can control, right? And like similarly like when you pay your federal or state taxes, you may you may know what what you pay like at a high level where you really like if your salary goes up, you're going to pay more taxes. If your salary goes down, you're going to pay less taxes, right? Fact of the matter is this based on property values. Your property values go up. Hopefully, you recur that benefit when you sell your house and the property values continue going up as the growth of the town happens. But like there's three rates, maybe more if you include open space and library, but like for the for the most part, your municipal rate, your county rate, and your um school rate, right? The school rate being the largest percentage. So like in my what I've been trying to accomplish in the years that I've been finance chair is, you know, flat or lower overall rate, but with the hope that over time what you're growing is a through like you're growing the percentage of um income as far as from taxpayers is getting less and less. Right now it's about 93% based on resident households, right? And to me, like that number needs to get into the 80s. And we're on a track to get there based on pilots that'll come in and additional commercial development. And like it would be great in my mind, like getting that ratable lower and lower. And right now we're below where it was in 2020, which I think is a really positive thing. Like we're lower from a a tax rate percentage now than we were in 2020. getting that to a a lower portion will be most likely achieved as like a percentage of our overall budget when we get the money funding coming in pilot and more commercial development. I think we have should have a goal of having it sometime in the 80s. So like I

do take NY's point that like you don't want to just press really hard on the tax rate because maybe to your point Rich like people may not even necessarily notice it and then all of a sudden we have a down year or recession and we have to really boost right back up. We want to be, I think, diligent almost like you're controlling like the federal interest rate, if you will, on not moving too quickly one way or the other. At the same time, you know, um we there are things like I I mean I sort of two minds of it, but I'll sort of give you one idea like I think I've been trying to we've been trying to accomplish giving funds back to taxpayers as much as we could. We got these, you know, increase in valuation. At the same time, I think all of us want to see our debt lowered. If we could pay more things with capital and less things with debt, that's a good thing overall. And to the point that Nancy made, um, the total request came in at well over $2 million, I believe, maybe even something closer to like 2.4 2.5. And in that budget right now is 1.5, right? So you could see how much we decided to not things that departments and others were requesting to be able to put into to be able to try to have a reasonable budget. I mean in the spirit of making everybody unhappy um what I had proposed is maybe putting it splitting it right like you come down to like465 or something like that that still matches the largest straight decrease in probably burrow history that we have. we'll look at the records um and then you can put the rest of the capital so we could fund some additional probably at the 140 150 range to be able to or 130 to fund the rest you know to accomplish some of what we wanted to do is pay stuff with cash and not so much with debt. So that's sort of what I throw on the table. Um

I think that I mean I I I don't disagree with you on either. I think that's a good way to think about it. I agree with you. I just on this one issue about like do we need this much sort of and I'll call it excess reserve c I don't know what you technically call it is like reserve capital for unexpected you know unanticipated expenses during the year. My my only point is is um you know what's sort of the standard like what what should you have like what's a good practice to have that and if it's 200 great it's 200 if it's more than that I probably support going more than that and raising the tax rate. So like that was my only point was just like I I don't know if like this number it just sort of like seemed like that was what was left over.

Well and the other thing is though this doesn't go away you know like you don't have to spend it in this year. Maybe nothing will come up this year and that's fine. If we don't maybe next year you don't have to do that as much. I just like seems like I didn't finish. Um like Bernard's Township has no debt. That's one of the things they're proud of because they have capital that they pay cash and they have no debt compared to us who have a lot of debt. So I think the goal is that at some point I I mean I would love to have no debt and the only way you can do that is by building up capital so you start paying cash every time you pave a road every time you buy a piece of equipment. That that's to me is is the goal.

I agree. My only question is how much is that per year?

It and that that's kind of my point is mayor I agree. I think Leslie has a great plan to get us to no debt. My point is there's an upper limit on how much we can charge people. And to Rich's point, it's not even the rate, the percent increase per year. when you don't have inflation that we had 2 years ago when it was more normal to expect you know 6 8% kind of raise uh raises in in the taxes there there's an upper limit of which you can keep the tax at a certain level while as Al's basically pointing out reduce the burden on the tax payer keep within sort of acceptable levels while paying as much as you can into capital to fund that debt reduction u machine longer term because I and I think Nancy you said even at 80,000 was that with what rate was that that Leslie said? We have 80,000 in the reserve. Um, is that the 46 rate? Do you know

or is it I'm asking her now. She said 1 to 3% 200,000 minimum, right? But um at which rate would um we have 80,000 is my question. You said 80,000 was in reserve before.

I believe that's what she said. Yeah. Um, also if I could just uh I I just want to explain something like the way this all got started. So Leslie and I have to start the budget process, you know, a few months from now after we right after we pass, right? We started maybe not that extreme, right? We start in the fall and we have to start someplace, right? And so what we do depends on, you know, what the assessments end up, what the val total evaluation is. So, we ask the assessor, "Hey, what's it looking like this year?" And he does not know until February, beginning of March. So, we start with a guess and we get a best guess from him and we started with five because he is very wary. He doesn't want to say too high. And then we put a budget together and oh, now you got to cut out 400,000 in your budget. So he started at five. It came in higher. It's not some magic, you know, money that we just found. It's just that when he was all said and done, we were working on a guest. We have to otherwise we'd never get the budget done. We can't start the budget at the end of February. So we were working on his guess, his best guesstimate. And then we had a higher assessment than he had estimated. And that's where this money, this $230,000 comes from. So, I just want to explain that this isn't some switch. It's not it's not money we found. It's not arbitrary. That's how the money got there,

right? But my thank that's good explanation. But my my point still remains like for every item on the budget, there's sort of a justification for each one of those things. You would say, okay, well, we need this line item because health insurance costs have gone up 16%. we need this much money because we know we have to pay for a firet truck in the future. And you go down that list and like every single one of those has like sort of a justification as to why the town should spend the money. My only point is like for this amount of money, what's the justification? And it sounds like Leslie has said it's like 1 to 3%. Is is sort of best practice to have a capital reserve. And I'm all for that. And I just want to know is that 200 and something thousand is that too low or is it too high or is it just right?

I'm asking her. And my point in asking Nancy was just it's the minimum. So I Yeah. So if it's the minimum of what's considered best practice, I would support that. Sorry, Charlie. Um I would even probably support higher.

Yeah. My my point in asking what the 80,000 reserve ties to is because I think based on the helpful Leslie and Nancy did some helpful work earlier and I think you know it's basically every it's 20 20 every move from 463 to 462 gets you another 30,000 right so my point is we could probably get to that 200,000 at some number some rate level in the low 4 sixs and then it's a debate of how much you know cushion you want basically Like if it's if the number is actually like if we get 80,000 at 459 rate the 463 adds another 110 in capital. So you're basically you're at that 1901% rate. It's all a balance, right? There's no like this is the best answer, you know, this is the best number. You know, my only point is is I think we we've done a great job on capital and I don't want to I wouldn't say we shouldn't be penalized, we should be rewarded. It's kind of like we've done this great thing, you know, we also need to pay attention to the other side of the equation um at the same time and and not full attention by any means, you know, let's not we said take the rank before and cut a bunch of services. That'd be insane, you know. So,

I think right now

Christine, can I I think we've heard from you two guys. Can I hear from the other members? I I was going to say I think Rich makes a great point. You know, we do want to see, you know, what the kind of recommended fiduciary, you know, kind of responsibility is there for the town. Um, but, you know, I think, you know, with with Charlie's point about, you know, maybe trying to gradually bring this rate down a little bit, you know, and paying close attention to that like and what you were saying about which numbers get us what what would a 65 get us to try to again place it in the middle somewhere. Um, I do agree. I think was you Charlie said you know we had inflationary years there was you know kind of expectations you know involved with the with the increase and you know if we can I I think it's just simple for me like you know Richard if we can bring it down a little bit more and stay within that recommendation by Leslie I think that that's the right thing to do. Um if that brings us closer to the 467 you know I think we're also again bring it down a little bit you know um

making a plan 67 it's going from 469 to four absolutely and I you know that's great and so obviously a step in the right direction I think your heads really you know are all together on this and so yeah no I I would just be curious to see what the other what we said the other rates like what a 65 465 would get as far as capital and if that's inside the recommendation there. Christine, you got something to add? Where' Jeff go? We lost Jeff.

I just One of the questions I get a lot from residents is the assessment and how that works. And I typically um you know let them know that it's not us that controls the assessments. So maybe Jack, can you help? because I know that um people are getting those now. I just got mine and the value of the the assessed value of your home is based on different things and why it's going up.

Yeah, we have an annual reassessment program in the bureau and what it's based on is comparable sales. Uh so in in good times like this where property is appreciating in value, the values go up. In bad times, the assessment the assessment total assessment of the whole barrel goes down. So yeah, when your neighbor sells their house at, you know, 20,000 or 100,000 over asking, that's driving up the assessments. Exactly. So that's the environment we're in now.

And in the past, that has not always been, you know, it's a cyclical thing. So in come it's possible maybe not in the immediate future but probably down the road at some point

should this be a way for us to prepare for when that happens having a capital fund because when assessments go down then what happens like is it is it a good idea for us to use this even though it's not a huge amount but use this to say you when the assessments go down whenever that may happen at least we'll have like more of a capital reserves the ants in the grasshopper the assessments aren't going to keep up I hope

I don't know so that was my one question and then the other thing was about the items on the capital budget request that we did not um do cuz none of the budget committee saw those but none none of the rest of the council did. So, I'd be curious to see what those were and what what we basically said no to and determine is if it's really like something that is a need.

Well, we were going to go over that. We don't usually do that this early. Um we usually introduce the capital budget um on the second reading of the regular budget. Um I can give you some examples. I don't have it in front of me, but some of the examples are um two pieces of equipment that Kevin wanted. Um there was actually three. it didn't make it to the capital request, but one as Al mentioned about the increase um in uh street sweeping. So, the D came up with a new rule and we have to sweep the whole town three times a year. Um Kevin looked at the idea of buying a sweeper. That's like $350,000. Um we decided we could not fit that into the capital budget. So, we put it in operating to, you know, hire a company or rent a sweeper three times a year. Um, the, uh, police, um, I can't think of what they asked for that they didn't get. Uh,

I don't want to put you on the spot about it, but I think I remembered in past years we did see an entire or what items and what weren't. So, that would be good to know before we make this decision is what I'm trying to I mean, I could bring it up now. You know, rather than keep talking about um Oh, pool covers. Recreation asked for pool covers. Yeah, that's like $35,000. We decided we could get it, you know, one has a big hole in it, but we decided we're going to get, you know,

get rid of it. Um or not get rid of it. We're going to use it again. Um police asked for uh ballistic vests and cradle point um cradle points for their cars. Ballistic vest we decide we can get through a grant rather than, you know, use our capital. cradle points for the car, you know, nice to have, but you know, we put them off for another year. Um, the fire company asked for gear that we decided they should buy with the money that we give them instead of using it for capital, uh, taking it from capital. Um, so there are things like that. Like I said, I could put it up here if you're if you're interested, but it kind of goes against the conversation that's happening here because um you know, if I put that up there, I'd be asking you for more money, not less,

right? And then the last last thing that I hear a lot from residents are happy to see those push button crosswalk beacons like the ones that just went over by childs. Um and prospect.

So I know and prospect. Thank you Rost. So I think you know in my head the 230,000 I could spend it like that just based on what people what people are constantly asking for. Not that I want to do that, but you know, we do get a lot of feedback from people about things that they think would improve their quality of life and we just say it's not really in the budget, whereas maybe it is. Particularly, you know, the crosswalks, the blinking things for pedestrians, we always get people asking for those and we just never budget for them.

Yeah. They're like $12,000 each. I mean fortunately the ones that we got were from the county those two they the two that you mentioned but they talked you know get Claremont now that we have the five stops which actually seems to be working most of the time but definitely needs uh pedestrian improvements. But thank you all budget committee. This is very helpful. I don't know what happened to Jeff. We lost Jeff. So, where are people? I wonder if he lost power. He's in Chicago, though. Chicago. Oh, that's right. I'll text him.

You all make great points, you know, with the with the budget here. Um, and, you know, I think, you know, Charlie definitely, but everyone also, you know, just kind of, you know, realizing that we do want to bring the rate down, you know, to be a little bit more comparable over the next several years. um you all working hard on this. Thank you. All right. So, moving on. But, um the only thing about moving on is we have to introduce next week and I don't think we have a decision yet or giving guidance. That's why I'm waiting for Jeff. I think we need another opinion here. Um

Nancy, what do we or I'm or Charlie um sorry, mayor. Do we know what a 0465 gets us as far as capital? We put 100. I mean roughly if I just look at what Leslie had done, it's going to end up being roughly60k into capital if we did the 0465. Okay. Which is which is less than the recommend recommended. I thought it was 110. No, no, no, no. But 63 was 100. 63 was 463 was 110. No, that that's additional capital. There's a reserve. Isn't there already? There's already an 80k reserve, Rich. Yeah. Yeah. He's recommending at least 200k as a minimum up to 600k based on best practice for other bureaus.

Right. So my 164 gets us over that 200k that I'm proposing. Yeah. It adds 140 on top of the 80. That's the math you're doing. I see. Got it. Got it. Got it. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. At four at 464. And that's also assuming we spend our entire capital budget which is not a presumed thing. Sure. For sure thing. Make it over the bump there with 464. Now what does that get us to? Just over the two. Yeah. 220. We said

I mean I'll also say as Al said you know what really moves a needle longer term is more commercial ratables which you know and that's why do a while yeah we're trending that way are people go with that if we end up with like 464 44 465. Let's do this. As long as it gets us over the 200,000 reserve in total, we'll put the rest back into the rate. I'm fine with that rules-based kind of approach shell. I like it.

So, that's going to be 140 or 160 in that area plus Yeah. Plus, is Leslie doing that? Are you good with that? I know. Okay. Where are we? So like 465

465 or 464 depending on what gets us over to K. Knowing that we already had 80K in reserve. We know the best practice is between one and 3%. We want to hit the 1% of the budget which we estimated to be about 200K. Take the 80K off of that. It's probably a little over 200k. So, we want to make sure it's probably 140k back into capital or 160k back in capital. Leslie says she'll get you the numbers tomorrow. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate the guidance.

And Nancy, please thank Leslie for um sending us all these text messages to update us. She can hear you. Oh, she can hear us. Oh, thank you Leslie. Thank you Leslie. Yeah, awesome. Amazing. And and thanks and this is you know a really good discussion. Thank you all. Thank you.

Okay. So that will be to we'll introduce it next week. And now we've got a contract for janitorial services which I think you got several prices. Um, yes, we did. We we uh we reached out for uh proposals. Um, we got, I think, three or four people come in. Um, Kevin reviewed them all and he's making a recommendation. It is, uh, I believe $8,000 higher than who we had this past year. Just the way the contract goes for this somehow it goes April to April and um

so the contract Sorry, there's a butt though, isn't there? But uh well, yeah, the other way around. It's a good butt. Um so it's going to be $8,000 more than the current u people that we have. But uh kudos to Kevin again. He decided that rather than pay for um people to uh clean the carpet

um several times a year, he bought a carpet cleaner and he did the math and that will save us about $5,000. So the cleaning contract, you know, if you take that, you know, do the do the math, it was only about $3,000 more than um what we're paying now. And uh I'll be honest, I hope that you know, sometimes you get what you pay for. And uh I'm optimistic that these people will do a good job. And you're not real thrilled with the last people we had. Uh not with the last two people we had. Cleaning companies are hard to find.

Yeah. Um okay. Sewer bill adjustment, transfer of reserves, those are all pretty standard. the um community project funding. Oh, is uh for the dam, right? Is that what we're looking for?

So, the other day I saw um or um a couple weeks ago I I saw a um there's an email from Congressman Kaine and an email from um Senator Booker's office that they have uh federal funding available. And I read through the different categories because they're very specific and I thought that we our dam project would fit into the interior um and environment uh section. So I asked Mary Pace Goldman our engineer and she believed you know she said yes uh taking the damn down would qualify. So I reached out to because we didn't have a meeting like I couldn't ask you but I mean we're asking for money here. it's not, you know, it's not like you're going to say no. So, I reached out to Millennium, asked them to put the grant application together, which they did. Um, it was a very quick turnaround. Uh, it was due on Friday to the congressman's office and on this Friday to the senator's office. um he asked for I believe it was um 2.7 million I think and um because we asked for 700,000 from Green Acres and I didn't want to be in the position that if we got Green Acres we'd be overfunded by the federal government right so we asked for the difference and um no matter what we get it's a win. Um so we will find out um later in the year. Um it might delay the uh the beginning of the dam project by a month or two but to me if we get a couple million dollars or even a million it was worth it. So um I believe we will have to do a resolution right Anthony

next next week we do we have to do resolution to authorize Millennium to apply for the grant that they already applied for sounds good you don't know you don't know unless you ask so um and then we're accepting the resignation of our construction official which means we need to find one,

right? So, he is the construction official. He's also the electrical subcode official and inspector. He would like to stay on as the electrical um sub code and inspector. He just it's just too much for him to come in every day for the construction code official. So, um I do have that on for executive as well to talk about salary. Okay. Um, committee commission reports. Before we go there, we have five more resolutions that were prepared by Matt Jessup. Oh, okay. All of which pertain to affordable housing. Three are authorizing escrow agreement.

Three redevelopers and sending two of them for June and Dan Bro to the planning board to determine whether they qualify as areas in need of redevelopment. Um, don't we have to do the it's the the study first to before they can say it. Don't they have to review the study to determine if it's an area? Well, they can do a study. So, I think that's the way he's proceeding. Matt Jessup will do the study. No, the plan board would do the study. No.

Well, what if they want their planner to do the study? I I think we can tell them we'd rather have our planner do it. You know, if we authorize Jess Jessica to do it, we've done that in the past. Okay. I think the idea is to get, you know, everything moving. Yeah. So, they'll you'll have them all for next week. They've all been submitted, Anthony. I think I copied you on them all. Matt, I did. Matt Matt sent them to me this morning and I All right. Okay. Committee commission reports. Anybody?

I had board of health at 6:30 at the library. Um it was actually the reorganization technically there. Um but we are I guess there's six total members right now instead of seven. Uh just a request that we get that seventh spot filled if possible. Uh and then also um just you know moving forward to the next year. And I was kind of thinking, you know, as well with um you know, talk about website changes and um you know, a consultant especially just um they were just looking for additional ideas or additional events where they could maybe um the health department of Burns Township that is to you know administer their services, have their events and just get more people out at those at those events there because you know they offer um you know a lot of different you know tests and services there. So, um, but then I'm good for board of health and I just got to dig out my Rex stuff.

Uh, well, you Nobody else want to go? I can go quickly on EC very short or environmental commission very short. Um, green fair at the library, April 25th. Um, I brought brought up again, you know, the green fair is usually it's always Mother's Day weekend in May. I believe it's April 25th as Okay. I have it as April 25th as well. Well, I want to get a full list from Okay, so Oh, that's a Detroit station

that confirm. No, I think it's at the library, right, Fran? We're right. April 25th. Fran's nodding. So, um, thank you, Fran. Um, the uh, it came came up slightly again. This environmental commission nonprofit. I think we talked about this in our last working session. I assume the best method if anyone if we wanted to solicit donations for the dam eventually, you know, I think it's been Rich's idea um to do like auction off head, you know, the bricks or or whatever, right? That there'd be some vehicle that they people just donate directly to the town. There's not, and this is really a question for Jack, you know, a method by which they would want to, we would want to have an environmental environmental commission nonprofit that would accept those donations and then on behalf of the town, but

similar to the friends of the library or that sort of thing. They could do that. There is a a merit in that was what you're Well, our commission our commission could become a nonprofit. No, no, no. We we'd have to start a nonprofit similar to the friends library or friends at Bernardville or you know 50123.

Okay. Then I will explore that then to greater I believe there's some kind of pre-existing but I'll follow up with the commission on that then. So it would be like a friends type setup. Um awesome. Um that was point two and point three is um Rob uh Wil prepared a um kind of delineation of the open space um split of responsibilities between enviral commission and wreck. I'm going to work with him this week um to kind of uh simplify that a little bit. And I think I'm not I believe he's supposed to come to council at some point. Uh I'm not sure if that's been scheduled or not, but um if I could just comment on that, please.

Uh in what I saw um it was not what the council had agreed to. In fact, we never discussed it that the environmental commission gets all of the money out of open space and then recreation gets the interest on that money. never I want to work with him on that those my reference to that Nancy I agree it I believe what we originally discussed was um basically having a split between the environmental commission continue to look at properties that we've acquired for open space um wreck any funds that post referendum can be applied to wreck that's still responsibility of wreck there's no principal interest you know split Okay. Because that was in the proposal.

I I saw that. Yeah. That's I have to edit that with him. Okay. And it all has to be appropriated by the council. Exactly. Yes. But there's We don't need to go to that bubble. Yeah. Understood. Yeah. I mean, I think the idea was that it had nothing to do with like, you know, funds. It was all about making recommendations as to, you know, what those two committees thought the priorities were essentially. And then they would be up to the council to decide, you know, to to fund whatever those recommendations are in the future. That's not what it said. No. Yeah. Not even. That's going a little a little further than we talked about.

Yeah. It could be very very general or more general. Less is more. Anybody else? Did you get your wreck? Ross, no. Did you have recreation?

I had wreck as well. And I was just thinking because Charlie mentioned and I have I think two more of these dates. One of the there's like six events all related to the parks and everything, trails, all that stuff. Um the one was the green fair on the 25th, but I want to back it up one week to the 19th there's a tree walk at the Cross State Garden. Um April 25th green fair. April 26th uh there is a Kirkpatrick cleanup there. And I uh do want to get the exact times here. Um, also a tree walk, a trail walk rather, sorry, at Kirk Patrick Park on May 2nd there. And then there's two more events that I accidentally destroyed with my notes. So, I do want to circle back next week and get all of those um announced there. But then otherwise for Wreck here, um I was going to say we have um Tom mentioned quotes coming in for the um you know, paint and tile of the pool. Kind of a you know, restoration of the pool plan for this year. Uh he's working to get the fence at Claremont finished up by April 1st, head of the baseball season there. Let's see here. We have uh there's one thing. Oh, so the deal with uh the pool this year, and this is interesting, is that I guess Priscilla is actually going to be um stocking the pool house there. It's it's a bit of a kind of a hybrid situation. Priscilla stocking the pool house or the snack shack, I should.

Great news, Ross. and Leler will I guess man the or I should say the lifeguards will man the shack as part of a rotation. So it seems to be kind of Nancy's excited. Contain your excitement until we get confirmation. N how many sandwiches Ross do I individually have to buy for my kids to make it work for Priscillaas because tell me that number and I will go like 70 per day. So, it's kind of like it'll just be like at Priscilla's they have that like to- go like um area like pre-made sandwiches. It'll just be like a that kind of stuff about what the choices. Um

it would be like a grab and go like if you see on that the shelves in her store, if you've been in her store, it' be like that. Salads and sandwiches and stuff. That's good. It's a good idea. And then we could supplement that with like ice cream and soda and candy and some you know the bad things. Uh and then also that uh Tom Sylvia is getting started. Just one last thing here on the uh parade planning for this year. He's got a nice head start there. Yeah. If there's any recommendations that can we I guess we talked a little bit about it. You know, we do have uh one thing because it's um Bob Oh god, I forgot his last name again. Walsh. Bob Walsh's 100th birthday, one of our vets.

Oh, wow. And so, uh, we talked about Heartworks is doing this big event and we talked about having a special float in the parade for Bob, you know, with maybe the kids on it and things and something that really recognizes his uh hundredyear birthday in May. I think it's May something is his birthday. Um, early May. So, yeah, we're going to add that, too. We have a meeting um Wednesday, Memorial Day parade meeting. So, I could bring that up. And we thought Kevin would get real excited about making a float, right?

I'm sure he would love it. He'd start tomorrow. Okay. Anybody else? Um just one thing I want to say on

tree committee their their main um what they're working on is revising the shade tree current ordinance. So should be um getting to us at some point. Right now they're just having it reviewed. I think Nancy saw the draft. So once they once they have a a draft for us we'll see that. Um, right now I asked Kevin to review it and then um Jack, it'll go to Jack. I haven't read it yet. Good. Yeah, it needed it badly. So, I'm glad they took that on.

I was going to ask, is there something briefly that, you know, they're reassessing it for or just it's it's it's just kept getting added on to and, you know, like it was just needs to be kind of contained. I'm awful. Yeah. the um library uh board did meet as well and um really the the main thing and I see Fran is still on so but it was mainly um discussion about sort of her annual review and feedback um so I don't know if she's gotten that feedback yet so I won't get into any detail uh but just generally speaking it was unsurprisingly you know stellar

excellent okay I just want to say we are doing the um outstanding community volunteer awards on Monday, April 13th at the library. Um, I've already gotten eight nominations and so I would like one or two of you to help me decide which because I don't want to do eight. I think that's a little too many. like maybe do four to kind of review the applications and give you recommendations if um what we try and find is it's not just you know yes they they're a good volunteer. It's usually more of you know they've started a program that's never been done before. Um they've invested you know a lot more years than a normal person would. you know, it's something exceptional, not just, you know, a simple thing. So, um, they're all good, all good nominations, but I think some are a little more meet those criteria more than others. So, whoever would like to help me review them, let me know.

Volunteer to look at the volunteers. Great. I can help. Who just said that? Ross. Ross.

Oh, Ross. Okay. I will send you copies and uh let me know your feedback because um usually what I we try and do is you know then I I'll let them know that they're a winner. I'll get more of their background you know and then I'll write up something for the presentation. So yeah, eight would be a little bit much a little too much prep and then we'll do a little ceremony and you know and snacks and it'll be nice and then we put them up. you've seen in Burl Hall the big plaque that has we put their names on there for each year that we've done them. So anyway, that was my report piece. Um I think that's everything. Are we done? New business, old business? No. Motion for executive. We have uh contract negotiations, personnel matters, and pending litigation. And we will not be coming back out, right? No

motion to move to close session. Second. All in favor? I I Okay, thank you. Thank you, Fran. Thank you, Michael. Take a uh a short break. I look at us off