Budget Committee - Regular Meeting

All right, it is 7.02, so I will call this meeting to order. We'll stand up and do the pledge. 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. Okay. There is no public. So I will skip public comment. New committee business. So school tours are next week on August 26th and August 27th. They're at 6 p.m. They'll be at North Moose Hill and the high school on the 26th and South LMS and Matthew Thornton on the 27th. Even if you've done them before, I recommend that you still go because the kindergarten is in the elementary schools now. That's right. And that's a big change and we should all go and see that. Um, and I'm also really curious to see what they've done with most Hill now that kindergarten is not in there. So even if you've done the school tours before, I do recommend doing them this year.

Thank you for the reminder. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I was like, wait, I'm not going to email her cause I'm just going to mention it in the meeting.

Um,

and then we'll go through liaison reports.

And so one of the things we talked about when we broke, oh. Yeah.

So school board, I mean all public meetings are open to the public. So anybody can go to these school tours, but they specifically put them on for the school board, the budget committee, And any other interested parties so like new members and you know people do administration type things like anybody can come to them Of course, she's more than welcome to yep So yeah, anybody can do the school tours. Yeah So yeah, okay. So liaison report so we talked about budget development and in June and how we would try to work with the independent departments over the summer. So if you've got a department that was talked about that was DPW, fire or police, we'll talk about that too on top of everything else. So we'll start with school board.

No updates.

No updates. Okay. Town Council. Okay. I spoke with Sean today. We were talking about the legal budget. And they discussed it at Monday night's meeting. And apparently there's a breakdown. And when I went around to look at the video, the ZBA meeting came up. So I can report on that next meeting. Okay. That's fine. I don't know if we're going to have budgets by then. Usually by October. It's October. Okay. Yep. Okay. Yeah, maybe. Okay. And then, um, okay. And I'm also, let's see, Sean. Yeah. So Sean, um, sent me an update on, um, taxes collected was 98%, which is really, really good. Um, he says they're approximately 500 in tax liens, 500,000. That's not terrible.

Yeah.

You know, considering the size of this town. Yep. So that's good. And then the school district office is, as you saw, it's up. And he said that they are three weeks ahead of schedule on that and within the budget. Yeah. Wow. Also, he did send me something. It's called a rescission. Did I say that right? A rescission. And it was a memo that was sent out if you watched the meeting. The DPW. Yes. So he's going to be keeping track of that because the legal line could potentially be spent because from what I understand it was not... probably adequately budgeted for last year. Did they drop it by $95,000 or something? We cut it by $75,000. Sorry.

I told everybody we need to play nice in the sandbox, and we have not.

Although we did start this budget cycle. We've just started it. You must foresee it. potentially.

And I do have a question about that. And I'm not saying I want this, but is this something that the budget committee may be, because we are advisory, discussing? So there was the pause on the paving to pay for more of the legal. Is it one of those things that would the town council or the town manager ever come to the budget committee and say, hey, we're thinking about this? But is there anywhere else you think that we may be able to take this from instead or is that more Sean Mulholland's the town managers, you know purview and we're only concerned about Forward-looking budgets as opposed to what has already been budgeted So for the most part once the operational budget is actually once we're in that fiscal year the management of it is By statute by charter delegated to the town manager got it certainly Sean Mulholland

solutions than anything from anybody and everybody, especially from you guys. One note about the rescission memo too. I think it might have gotten a little lost in that meeting. Each year it doesn't mean that no paving will happen. Each year we encumber money from the previous year to pave so there is money in there for paving simply because of the fact that we're on a fiscal year and paving season bridges two years. So it doesn't mean that nothing will be able to happen. The point of doing it right now is taking out one thing that, because we, and also depending on the fiscal management and what comes up during the year, how many vacancies we have, all of those things, there's sometimes money left over at the end of the year anyway, so they might be able to take that money and put it into the paving budget and the encumbrance is everything. Um, it's just rather than planning on it at this point in time, it's basically the rescission means where they're putting a wait and see and it moves it kind of to not the back of the line, but it is that, that particular money is kind of one of the more flexible discretionary areas where it would compensate enough for the legal fees. Um, you know, one of the big reasons is, um, the legal fee hours. Our cost per hour is up, it's up about 30% for our general representation attorney. And then we also, you know, we've always had several law firms working for us, to give you a little idea. You know, she and Finney's been our base law firm for general representation, and they also represent us in most matters of litigation. So when somebody sues us, they'll represent us. We have Brachion Pignatelli that represents us for the Auburn Road landfill.

Okay.

that is because um technically you know how we have the tinkham site and there's another potentially responsible party for that superfund site yeah well the potential the responsible entity for the auburn roadside is the town of londonderry generations before us of town employees but it was the town dump so we have that firm that works with the epa on that we have drummond woodson who works on code particularly library issues and code enforcement issues. And some of those code enforcement costs are recouped through fines and court actions, but not all of them. And so now we also have the two law firms retained by the town council, which is Shaheen Gordon and Brentis Ayer, and I forget the other two names. And the costs for those firms range from There's some of the attorneys for Drummond-Woodson who are in the 270 to 290 range. And they range all the way up to 500. Gordon is 500. Brad Pignatelli-Young is 500. So there's quite a range there. And now that it's difficult to plan adequately when you don't know where the bills are coming from and how much is being spent on each one. We've tried to project, we're working on projecting more Accurately for next year, but...

In the meantime, I haven't watched the whole thing yet.

bills from like attorneys there are they like delayed by four like is there like a delay in getting them or is it like a known delay like oh it's 45 days until you get the bill from the previous month or something or like what's what is the hold up and is it just like an indefinite unknown hold up or so customarily we get the invoice before within 30 days of the close of the month so most of our attorneys bill us on a monthly basis sometimes if there's a very minimal work in one month like they have like an hour of work they won't send us a bill for 27 if they have 15 minutes They'll put it on the next one. But generally, we get a bill from each firm within 30 days of the close of the month. Shaheen Gordon was a new firm. So when we received their bill, it was for the month of July and also part of June. Part of the challenge of that, though, is that it did span two fiscal years. So it needed some separating and recoding out on the parts by finance. So that's probably why there was the delay in receiving that is because it was a new account. It was a new attorney. You know, to date, we've gotten a couple of the Drummond Woodson ones. I know those have come in. And then I have not, I personally have not seen the She and Finney ones for July yet. I have not seen those come through yet.

It's a firm out of, it's out of Boston, correct?

They're a large firm. They have offices in different places. Our office is in Manchester. It is in Manchester. We use attorneys in Manchester and Portsmouth. Yeah.

But the bottom line is that they should all be reporting within 30 days of closing.

Yeah. Generally, they do reply within 30 days. I haven't yet to see a bill from them, and I'm not sure why. I know that some of the people reference investigations, there was one that was done by Donahue, Tucker, Is that it? Yeah, I can remember the C in that one. DTC. And that one was done as a subcontract by Shee and Finney. So that didn't show up as a second invoice. It shows up as contracted services on our Shee and Finney invoice. But all that was in the prior fiscal year. So we received as what I believe is full billing for any services that were rendered by DTC on those Shee and Finney invoices. That's where I think we're at right now. But what we're working to try and do is kind of project out with the new hourly rate what a realistic legal budget is. I want to be really clear about legal services are necessary for a town. We do things like if you look at the bills, you see lots of things about, for example, tax-gating, sale of tax-gated properties. We have things like changes in legislation that impact our personnel policies. We have to deal with kind of lots of different complicated labor things. We have so many different unions, and there's lots of labor things that come up that require.

There's a lot of new building codes and things that have passed pretty recently as well.

And those don't even go to a lawyer. We do that in-house. Oh, wow.

Like, when we did the charter number, we did that in-house.

But there's a number of things that, you know, the punishment grade case, PFAS, those things, they're normal expenses. Code enforcement, it's normal to have legal expenses, and it's normal to have fairly substantial legal expenses when you don't have an in-house counsel. So... But there has been some proliferation of costs that we can't accurately project at this time, hence the recipe.

There was a comment by, I think Ted had said he went through the numbers last year and was like saying that, I think his point was that like, for non-town legal expenses, like legal expenses coming directly from town council were, like, on track. Is that something that, like, is there, is that, I would just be curious, because it seems like the town, there's a lot of talk from the town about concerns around these expenses, and I don't really have my, I can't, Based on what people are saying, I'm still confused. Is it a problem? How much of it is a problem? So when Ted made that statement, I was curious.

So the bills last fiscal year varied greatly. And I will say, while I'm unable to give a final number based on the fact we haven't received our interest bills yet, it's very much on par with what we spent the year before, but you have to remember the year before we were without a town manager for, um, we had two interim town managers. So we were out of full-time town managers. So there were some of those months, but those bills were extraordinarily high, more than 40. And we were negotiating with five unions, six unions. So there, there was a couple of months for those bills when we're up to $45,000, um, at least one month that was that way. So last year's bills, I'm not done breaking them down. So one of the things we're working on is breaking down the bills more. So we can better project what kind of categories, what's more those routine legal expenses, and what are maybe the ones that are less routine. It can be difficult, because if you look at the legal bills, you see they break them down by time windows. So if an attorney works on three different matters, we don't know exactly how much of that hour and 15 minutes was spent on each one. So it's only best guess, really. I don't, I can't speak to if that number is accurate or not, but again, there's a lot, if you look at the itemized bills, there's a lot on there that is, um, very routine, very normal, normal things. You'll see talk about military leave policies. You'll see talk about the sale of 10 beacon street and all those things. So I'm not done with that yet. It's something that I'm working on because I really do think it's important for us to understand. our legal budget and how it balances out with the firms that we contract, versus in the past, we've used in-house counsel, too. So it goes back and forth. So having a good hold on those numbers, particularly as we move into budget season, is going to be important. We're certainly not going to cut that this year.

Fool me once. Nobody has a crystal ball, Kate.

You never know what is going to happen. There's a number of things, honestly. We could have gotten sued by somebody in a massive, like something horrible could have happened and we could have gotten sued and that would put us over.

So it's not like a... We could have had several blizzards of like 2015, you know what I mean? Budgets are always projections and some things you can't help but have to pay.

Right. Also, I just wanted to mention, in that memo, it said something about trust fund support is discontinued, the expendable trust fund for winter maintenance.

Yeah, so in the past we've relied pretty heavily on taking winter maintenance funds out of the expendable maintenance trust fund. We're looking at realigning where we put how we manage that money. It's not that we're not going to spend the money on winter maintenance. It's that we're going to budget for it differently and put it in different lines because it is an expected expense.

Is it a healthy budget? I couldn't find the number for what was in that. It looked like maybe $2.8 million. Is that?

Yeah, so the Expendable Maintenance Trust Fund is an interesting one because that's what's paying, for example, for the library. That's what pays for major repairs of boiler breaks, even just routine maintenance. repairs that are planned out so winter operations because it's kind of so predictable and you can take the money and if you have a bad winter you're likely going to have a you know, sometime down the road, you're not going to have a bad winter. So it's looking at, and I don't want to speak to the details of this, because this is something that's been worked on between Dave and Sean, and they'll talk more about it. Do they have a trust fund that's specific to? I think it's going into the budget, and that is, I think, that is what it is. And again, I don't want to speak to the specifics on that. But yeah, so it's going to be actually put into the budget, I believe, rather than... It's definitely something you'll hear them talk about when they come to present, though, because they are changing the way that we budget for it.

Yeah, absolutely.

That's all I had.

All right.

Then we have town hall. Probably the same as town council. Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I'm sorry, yeah, town council was, I can get back to you on the breakdown of the legal. Yep, yep, okay. And then the town hall, I just gave you both the building.

Yep, town council and town hall are very similar. Yeah, they're kind of intermingled a little bit. They do intermingle a little bit, yeah. The only thing town hall related that's not necessarily town council related is, I know Justin's on paternity leave, and so, and you're short-staffed, and so it's just mostly Sarah. Sarah's a rock star. She is a rock star, yeah. Um, so, um, I don't want to like bother Sarah, but, or put too much pressure on her, but when can we expect to see how everything went for end of fiscal year 2026?

Likely I, um, right. So right now she's working in the audit. That's I keep getting the audit started. Once the auditors are in house for provoked shifts, I will say in September, we have lots of meetings set up or around that's round two of our department meetings, um, where we meet with our departmental budgets with Sean and finance. Yep. My guess is that they're probably going to come forward in October with the final reconciliation report. That would be my guess about when it's coming forward. So if it comes forward earlier, it's a shiny, happy surprise.

Okay, great. Yeah, because I just like, Sarah's a rock star. She's great. I don't want to put extra pressure on her, but just like, just curious.

Yeah, until everything's good. Until everything's from the auditor, it's difficult to say. So that's what she's working on right now, the absolute final closeouts and everything to get that to them. Great, okay. And they should be taking over one of our conference rooms very time soon.

Woo-hoo!

in time for uh the they're really good yeah

So DPW, so I know Dave Wally, when I called him towards the end of July, he had gotten a late start on things because I believe his mother passed. And so we said we made the beginning of August and I just went on several business trips. I've been traveling for business.

Dave was gone too, so not just you.

And he was on vacation. I've been traveling for business. We haven't been able to touch base on the DPW stuff. But I was going to give the update about the memo, but we already went over that so we can move on. CIP. So for CIP, we've seen presentations from the police department, from the rec department. We did library on Tuesday, which I couldn't make that meeting. Before that, we did fire. We've done public... So we've seen a lot of different projects. Some of them have already gone through. So, you know, like the roof for the police department, that was their big one. Because we're going to redo the roof because we're also going to do the solar panels. And it doesn't make sense to put solar panels on a bad roof. So a lot of these things are starting to go through. And we, you know, we're going to probably in the September meeting, I would guess, start talking about how we want to prioritize these projects and things like that. But in sum, I'm looking at the total of all of the CIP projects. It looks like $175 million. So all in all, it's about $175 million of projects.

Over a period of six years.

Correct, yes. Thank you. Plus. Plus. I was like, wow.

I'm going to make another six years. Thank you for that. And they're not all going to be prioritized high.

Right. It's not like, let's do them all. Yeah, exactly. And some of these are... we'd like to fundraise for these. So turf for the school, for example, they're going to start looking at sponsorships from different corporations, fundraising, things like that.

The broader projects are likely substantially going to be funded by grants.

Yep, exactly. Like the redoing of the tennis courts, I think they said that USA Tennis might be able to, apply for a grant to pay for half of it, things like that.

Yeah, I think the important part too is to have all the projects on the list so when these opportunities do emerge, there's a quantifiable need and there's a um a list that can we you know that's being reflected towards so i know that yeah through you know definitely some you know with grant opportunities state opportunity and not the um federal opportunities those are all important kind of barometers that do make us kind of help um as well as i think there's a um I believe this is true. Kirsten, you can correct me if I'm wrong. I will certainly try. But it does help with our bond ratings as well. So if you're having an active CIP list, it does play into that.

I know having one is required. I'm not sure whether the level of detail helps. I know that in order to get a top rating, you have to have one. You're required to have one anyway. I'm not 100% sure on that.

But yeah, it's going really well. It's been really interesting to hear from the different departments and what kind of projects they want to work on, how they're prioritizing things, stuff like that.

Can I ask a kind of probably rudimentary question, but I just don't know the answer, so I'm going to ask. How do... Where does the money come from for those projects specifically? Like, is it coming from each department, or is there... Like how do they get paid for it that go through this process? Is it the same as everything else or is it a variety of ways?

So depending on the value of them it would get voted on by the voters as though it was a worn article Okay, but whether or not it makes it this year next year the year after those kinds of things That's one of the things that we talk about so you don't want to throw all all of these and be like you pick and choose no yeah yeah yeah that's we advise on what we think should go forward and you know or maybe these this year these the following year that way everybody's not overwhelmed with all of these things okay so it's just going through the process that I already know basically yeah so it's yeah it's definitely like you know it's creating the process creating the document that document will go to the school board and we'll go to the town council

As an input to the budget season, we'll obviously have eyes on it and insight there. If there needs to be a warrant article to fund it, we have a civil conversation about it. So yeah, that's kind of how that got. Yeah.

Okay. Got it. I just wasn't sure if there was some magic budget line for that, but yeah.

And some of them, I think so, but I want to just, yeah. Yeah. And some of them, there's like extra, like the extra money at the end of the year you can use for those things and just pull them off the list because you know, they don't like the roof or the police department. I think that was, you know, like 40, 50 grand and we had enough money left over to be able to just do it, pay it and do it. Yeah. And then it comes off the list. Yeah. So, you know, again, it depends on the value, right? Like the new DPW facility, we're never going to have several million dollars just laying around at the end of the year to put towards the DPW. Right. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. And then after CIP, it's FIRE.

So I'm actually hoping to meet with Chief Young over the next couple weeks in person to talk about next year's budget and the process. I did see that $345,000 from last year's operating budget, is that correct, was given to them for the Station 2 repair? And then $125,000 was given from the... maintenance trust fund for that. Okay.

That was, it was split. Um, I'm, I don't know. I'm assuming your exact numbers are correct, but yes, there was a split between fiscal year 26 funds and the expendable maintenance fund.

And so that tracks from my previous meeting with him. He said about 400,000 from the last, um, fiscal year. And so he's still estimating about 800,000 for the total repairs. So that gets us a little over halfway. But that's all that I have as far as the budget. But there is an open house Saturday, September 19th. Oh, great. For the fire department.

They're really fun.

It's like a family event. Yeah. They're out front.

I know that we were talking about touring.

So we could all go to the open house. Yeah. Yeah. Is it at one particular? Is it at all the stations? Is it the one next door?

I think it's at the main door.

Okay.

Yep.

Yeah, so if we all know the open house on Saturday, I could talk to Phil and ask him, who's the deputy? Deputy chief. Okay. And see if he might be, we could do like north and south that Thursday at the budget meeting or something like that. Because I do think, or maybe we could even wait until the spring when some of the repairs in the north are done. Because, you know, I don't want to, you know, while things are going on, right, we don't want to. Yeah, I don't think it's that. I'm still working statewide, so it should be, yeah.

But I mean, I would definitely, yeah, I think Deputy Chief LeBlanc or Chief Young would be great contacts for when they want to do that. I'll check with them on that.

The only other thing for fire that I want to mention is on Monday, they did pass. Are we still moving forward with exploring it? No, we did pass. Great. That's what I thought, yes. So we did pass the dispatch and communications and emergency services to Litchfield. That contract did get signed.

um yeah so it is specifically for dispatch services and ambulance transport services yes so which field does have their own fire department they have their own paramedics who work in their fire department they're the first responders but they do not own their own ambulances or have a transport service so those are the two services that we'll be providing um they're working on finalizing the actual um memorandums right now and they should be They have to go to, because they're inter-municipal agreements, they have to go to the AG's office for 45 days, but that's why time was of the essence at this point. So everybody's working on that right now. They're with Litchfield at the moment.

Okay, great. So will that give us an extra revenue source? Yes. Perfect.

It's an additional source of revenue, and I think it's a really great one, honestly. I sent an email to the town council on Monday voicing my support for it, Um, I, we've been trying to push the departments to think creatively on how to bring in additional revenue. Um, and this will bring in fees for the dispatch services, um, and also for the ambulance services because we get money from, um, people who pay their ambulance fees from Medicare, you know, those revenue streams will come in. Um, and we, we, we are net positive with that even after hiring additional staff to support this. So it is a good deal. Um, and I'm very glad that passed. So good. Yep.

So it's a way to get additional staffing and no additional cost to the taxpayers.

So we get to their hours 83% of the time. So it's basically getting a 100% discount. But even if it wasn't 100% net revenue positive, again, to be clear, it's revenue positive. But even if it weren't, it's like... buying a summer house, living there 90% of the year, but happening to not, you don't get to use it 10% of the time or something like that. So, um, but they're, they're basically hours at a very, very for free. So, but yeah, um, I thought, I thought it was a really smart move on their part and it was, uh, it's good that we're having, we did that. So, um, yeah, please.

Um, yeah. So, I had a really great opportunity to sit down with Chief Bernard. I had scheduled that in July and then I went in and thought I was going to get like an hour's time, but they brought me to the conference room and I had Deputy Chief Breen and Kara, which is their executive admin. I was there for almost, I think it was like three hours. Yeah. Which was helpful to me, I'm sure. Maybe some of you guys know.

That does not surprise me. They are very thorough.

When you said, yeah, if I scheduled an hour, it's like, oh, I know where this is going.

That was the take. We really like that conference room, too. It's a good conference room. It is. It's really cool. Yeah. I like that conference room. Me, too. Yeah.

So, yeah, so, I mean, my general takeaway is that, and I sent some notes over to... Can I ask you a question?

Do you know where a lady would be that takes care of the polls?

Oh, are you looking for voter registration? Yes, I'll show you where that is. I'll be right back.

I sent an email to clarify some of these notes, so I will do that, but my understanding is basically the... number of uh like the minimum required patrol officers that the town's had has been pretty consistently around 68 for like 20 years uh obviously the town's grown um the consensus numbers are something like and you guys probably know this is like 10 or something in 20 years and households up like 20 so like my main takeaway is uh you know they haven't as a department they haven't grown like at least their core staff that matters the most um and This year their budget doesn't look like it's gonna increase too much. They have a meeting I think It was mentioned already that one of the things they're gonna be doing is meeting with some of the department heads over the next like 45 days And so one of them is the police department I did get notes that were caveated that we haven't talked to the town manager about those notes yet Yeah, but if you look at their notes, they're basically only increasing And this doesn't include salaries, so I'm not sure how salaries might impact this, but about $130,000 of increased expenses, which is about 1% of their budget, so nothing too crazy. But those numbers, they might shift. So, like, big picture, I don't think there's a lot to talk about there. You just had mentioned the roof, which I was .

That's already, and that was out of fiscal year 26 budget, so that would not be coming out of this year's budget. Okay. Or fiscal year 27, 26, sorry.

Yeah, so bottom line is I don't think there's a lot to talk about there unless something comes out of the meeting that they have with the town manager. There was one issue that kind of came up that I just wanted to make us all aware of. Maybe we are. I don't know. But it seems like they have 13 lockers for the women that are there, and they have them completely filled. So I think we heard about that on the tour a little bit. They're gonna cannibalize their own gym to like expand and create more lockers for females. And they're trying to hire. So my understanding is that over the last like, Decade, basically the way they funded a lot of the things they needed was by not reaching this full 68 staff members that they needed. Right. So they were spending money on, they were taking like money that was allocated for salaries and using it. And I talked to the chief about like, well, have you kind of addressed that? And they say they have. So they say they've adjusted their, with the, with the, the town staff, uh, and the, and finance their, uh, their non, they moved these expenses that they were kind of pulling from salaries and expanded their other line items on their budget so that they should be able to hire up to the staffing levels that they actually feel like they need and still be able to pay for these expenses, which was all good to hear. So I don't know if, I'm not sure even how it works within this committee, but I don't know if there's any thoughts about, you know, cannibalizing the gym and making sure that there's enough lockers for the females that they might want to hire, but it just seems like an issue I wanted to bring up. But the chief obviously has the option to bring that up too in some of these other meetings. So

No, I think they're right. It is the right thing to do because it basically means that if they hire more female officers that they either need to make people share lockers or use the locker in the men's room or they just simply don't get one. And none of those options seem like good options. So it's like, what's the best of the worst options? So, you know... Yeah, I would say that that's probably necessary.

I guess, but when do we say, you know, let's explore, I'm not saying it would be the best option, but what would be the cost of some sort of alternative solution? project for them. Because cannibalizing the gym for the police department, those are the people you want working out and whatnot.

And so what we could do is we could recommend, let's say they've increased their maintenance line by $20,000 to help support this or something. During budget season, we talk about it. We can say, yeah, we don't think this is really necessary. And we can say, we're going to cut $20,000 in the budget now. The thing is, we can say from this line item, but at the end of the day when the budget passes, it's the town manager's budget to dole out as he sees fit. It's not like we say the police department has $11 million and they only get that $11 million. Yes, ideally that's how that works, but it's still the town manager's responsibility to administer it to a certain extent, correct?

Yeah, I will say that that administration is the need where you see something like this rescission and this thing. It's rare that you see a change that significant? Correct, yes. So usually when money is allocated towards that specific purpose, particularly if it's allocated, if money is put into one of the relevant funds like the police equipment capital reserve fund, It's very, very rare that it's used for a different purpose than that. Yes, exactly. It's generally, like I said, that's part of what makes this conversation so unusual is to hear this at this point in the year. So if it was put in the budget for that, it would be, and if that was what the budget committee and the council and the town manager and the police department agreed upon at the beginning of the budget process, Highly, extraordinarily likely, barring catastrophe, that that is what would move forward. Yes, exactly.

Yep, yep. And that's where that would come in, right? The whole thing with the legal fees and so the DPW, that's where it wouldn't happen. But again, we can make recommendations to the town council and things like that. But yeah, we can weigh on it on anything if we want.

Encouraged to weigh in.

Yes, encouraged even.

I'm just wondering, like, what is the cost of some alternative that might add, like, a little bit of a room off the side, you know, expand the building a little bit? I don't know, like, you know...

long term you cannibalize a gym maybe you pick up a couple locker rooms we're going to have you know kick the can down the road type of thing right so i'm just curious as to what the alternatives might cost but anyway that's kind of the that is what that cip not to you know be a little tongue-in-cheek but that's what the cip yeah that's what bringing a project like that to the cip and encouraging them to look at what that would cost because i think you're right we're not getting smaller as a community we're not having fewer residents it's unlikely our police force is going to constrict So that's where you have one of those conversations about, okay, so that's something like that belongs on the CIP. Right.

And I think another argument for that too is, and yes, absolutely on the CIP, but you've got to kind of also remember, I would imagine that when the police department was built, it was built with the majority of officers being male. Now there's a significant, thankfully, increase of women officers, so that building may not even, probably actually does need more More value.

Chief Bernard might have mentioned that. Did he not mention putting maybe a small addition on for a women's locker room? They were going to move the wall over.

They have gym equipment in their stairwell right now. Oh yes, the rower. They're going to move more gym equipment into more stairwells. and cannibalize the gym. If that's what we need to do as a town, that's what we need to do. But I just think it's worth considering that they're trying to recruit. We're trying to get up to that 68 number. And when you bring people through the station, you say, well, what's left of my gym is basically a closet. And right now, especially, they have a lot more women that are applying for things. And that's great to see, and I think it's tough if you're like, we don't have a locker for you, but don't worry, we're going to cannibalize the gym. So it's just, maybe it's worth considering. So yeah, just wanted to put that out there.

Yeah, and then I could get into a bigger discussion of just now, do we need to add an addition in and put a woman's locker room and those types. But again, that's more of a CIP thing and a discussion of how do we want to build

town services for the community yeah for sure and then then encourage the um the department to bring that project forward yeah through you know kind of that process so um but yeah no i think that's a good call it i mean the gym also was another kind of thing when we went on that tour i was just like These are police officers. I kind of want a good...

I would like my police officers to work out. Right.

So there's that aspect to it.

And they did talk about some departments have their officers go to Planet Fitness or whatnot, but... I do think there's something of convenience to having the gym in there, but also just like culture and having your guys.

Safety too, right? You know, like you want them to feel safe and they'll probably feel safest with their own folks. You know what I mean? Absolutely. But yeah.

So after they meet with the town, I'm sure we'll get an update, but that's where that's at.

Okay, great.

And then the planning board.

Matt's not here, huh? No.

His flight's delayed. Nice try, Mr. Berman, nice try.

From a planning board, last month we had a public session on PUDs.

Okay.

And that went well. I thought the town manager did an excellent job presenting what a PUD is, how it's impacting the town, the potential one that's currently In the process of seeing if it makes sense, that's right off of Auburn Road. There's going to be a significant investment for the town to make. From that aspect, the town and the developer are working to ensure that the neighbors are very much apprised of what's happening and kind of being involved with that before it becomes an official plan. So that was definitely one of my biggest kind of comments during that session.

We talked about having Sean talk about PUDs. Could you see if Sean could come to the next budget meeting and maybe give the same presentation to the budget committee? Certainly, I would. I think that would be excellent.

Yeah.

Sorry, didn't mean to interrupt.

No, I was pretty much kind of done with that.

Okay, great.

Library? OK, so much has gone on in the library. Oh, has it? Yeah, no, nothing. OK, so they've been working on their budget. I did see a version of their draft budget, although I don't know if it's the most updated. I know they turned it in. It looks like they're looking at a slight increase seems reasonable a lot of what they're doing it looks like they're trying to right-size and recategorize a couple of of the items in their budget let's see by way of example like printing services increases by 44% which might like raise eyebrows but it's really that wasn't right to begin with so we're gonna see some of that in their budget when it comes out Let's see.

And I think we also have to be cognizant of the fact that last year, as part of the $400,000 in cuts, we did cut $50,000 from their budget. And so if it's an increase of more than $50,000, we're just making them whole for something that was meant to be a temporary decrease. And so if they're like $75,000, it's really only $25,000 because we're making them whole from last fiscal year. because they did not hire that part-time librarian that they were supposed to. They cut the museum passes and things like that. And in order to bring that part-time librarian back that we did pass, it is going to have to bring back that. We're going to have to bring back that increase. We have to pay for it, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, thank you for that reminder. They talked a little bit about furniture, fixtures, like for instance, the insurance claim for the building is gonna pay for some stuff, but it's not gonna pay for everything. They have a lot of, even in addition to whatever they're replacing in the building as part of the remediation with the issues with the building. Um, they just have old stuff there. The furniture is old, you know, things are getting older, so they are going to want to be a little bit more, um, or at least it looks to me like they want to be more careful in, um, being prepared for maintenance and replacing things and stuff like that, um, in the future. Um, They are working on the opening. I won't get deep into that, but it's been like new carpet and cleaning, painting. They're trying to get the elevator back in service. They've got new toilets and all kinds of stuff. So roof repairs. Looks like they had some electric work done that came in under budget. So that's exciting. A couple thousand dollars under budget. Nice. Yep.

Do they have a target reopen? I'm sorry.

Yeah, mid-September is the target. It looks like what they're waiting for is additional mold testing. And there's still, I think there's still some issue with potential leakages at the roof, at the entryway. They had some repairs, but according to the stuff I watched and read, it looked like there may have been a leak.

a recurring issue they need to address um and i know there's some discussion about the rooftop units i assume that's ac but those seem to be potentially causing some major issues so my understanding with those two is those did not deal with moisture and humidity um and so and they are well past their lifespan as well um and when we replace those there's also the discussion of the roof itself it's kind of does a bowl so the roof does goes it's like holding the water yeah it's like a bowl um so i don't know who was the architect and did that but that seems like a really poor way to design a roof yes correct dave raleigh and i we were talking about that when i was meeting with him about dpw stuff and we were i was like i'm sorry what like not not that that sounds fake and he's like It's very real.

I know. It seems crazy that anybody would decide that. Yeah, exactly. On purpose. Yeah.

Unless there's, like, some sort of drain in the middle that, like, that is actually not the case. So, yeah. But those will need to be replaced, and they'll probably want to figure out how they redo the roof. Right. Because you should do that before you put the rooftop units back on. And there's, like, a phase two. two, three, four, whatever to that.

Okay, yes, that seemed to be a big topic in here. So they're aiming for mid-September, but there's additional work as Kate alludes to coming. And then related to that, there was some talk about different stuff they may, this is just a sneak peek, so it's all a maybe, that they may bring into for warrant articles like this year. Things they've talked about were things like replacing the rooftop units. They've talked about the union contracts, exploring a maintenance trust fund, so potentially standing something up to, again, better handle maintenance in the future. And they're talking about potentially asking for additional staff members. Related to the staff member I will mention, thought this was interesting. They were floating the idea of having the library become a U.S. passport acceptance facility. So just the concept that if they got this role and then did that, they would create revenue. Oh, that's great. So I have an open question out to the treasurer to ask a few more follow-up questions about that specifically, like what do you think it would cost versus what do you think the revenue would be. I thought it was just kind of made my little antenna. I was like, oh, that's interesting. That is interesting.

You keep a significant portion of the fee when you do, of each one you do. Question on that, because you mentioned additional revenue and things like that. One of the things we talked about was hiring a grant writer for the town, because most of the time, I don't think I've seen a case or I've heard of a case yet where hiring a grant writer, that person doesn't bring in more money in grants than we would end up paying them in salary and benefits. Is that something the town might be entertaining this year, or no?

As of this point, there's been no... plan to there's no some there's no staffing request submitted for grant writer okay that's not um you know there's a couple other ones that sarah's putting together and organizing but as far as i know there's not one for a grant writer would like they've come from our office okay got it thank you

And then, in addition to that, just a few more quick notes. Some of the things that were approved in their meetings, flagpole repairs, tree trimming, the janitorial service they're using, they really like them, so these things have come up. And then, Kirsten, I might ask you about this one, but there was something about VMware license renewal, something about how they maintain their own servers right now at the library. They've been invited to use the town servers. Is that basically accurate?

As far as I understand, that's something that Jeremy has been working with them on. So they're trying to figure out the best way to be more efficient. Yeah. So I thought that was good. Under the terms of the MOU. So I'm not really sure where that's going to end up. But it's certainly something that reducing the... Reducing replication of costs is something that we're looking at across the board.

Yeah, so that might be a savings because it noted that their servers were quite old, decades old, and so would ultimately need replacement in a reasonable amount of time. Yeah. Um, and then the final thing is the only, one of the only issues, not, no, not the only issue, but an issue that they're still dealing with is, um, there are missing like checks slip and bank slips from last year and they're trying to. They've been, it seems like, struggling to get that information. What's the impact of not finding that? Does it go against audits? I think that that's the answer.

It is. It would affect the audit. Every year, honestly, there's a couple of receipts that don't end up there. Deposit slips are a little bit more serious, but they're working. They're trying. They work on memos. Yeah.

Is there a threshold that if it's tagged in an audit, do we get fined?

That I don't know. That would be a conversation with Sarah.

Okay.

Yeah. My understanding is that when the... library trustees switched bank accounts, there were some missing deposit slips from that transfer. The money's all there, they just don't have the slips that demonstrate that.

We don't get, as municipalities, you don't get fines, you just get your hands slapped.

And they put it in their little write-up. I just wanted to ask if there was any financial impact there. You mentioned the unions. Is it FY27 that they're entering?

No, we are an FY21. I actually don't have the details about it. I just saw it mentioned.

Before you answer that.

Go ahead.

How many unions, this is a rudimentary question. How many unions do we have? And what is the cycle of going through and going through negotiations with them?

And yeah, so yeah, there is, we have two police unions, one for supervisors, one for, um, officers. We have two fire unions, one for leadership and one for, um, firefighters, paramedics, and lieutenants. So that's four. We have the executive employees association, which is a bargaining unit, not strictly union, but as a bargaining unit, we have. town administrative personnel. We have 1801, which is DPW and mostly frontline personnel here. And we have the, now we have the library. So it used to be seven, I believe we're at eight now, plus non-represented personnel. They're governed by the personnel policy. And the cycle is not necessarily predictable because the length of the contract is determined during negotiations. So for example, right now we are currently in year two of three years for 1801, town administrative personnel, executive employees association, police supervisors, and public safety supervisors, which is fire leadership. Five of those were in year two of a three-year contract. So those negotiations will start probably early next year in order to have that contract done for the budget cycle. And then it's a matter of whether it's a three-year or five-year, you don't know. You can have a lot in one year. This year, there will likely be that there's two that are ongoing right now, which is library and... 3160, which is the firefighters. Those are the two that are in negotiations right now.

So with the unanticipated legal expenses, how is that going to impact our ability to negotiate with these unions?

It doesn't really. Town leadership team approaches and every general every, you know iteration of town leadership approaches negotiations differently for these two negotiations that we've done They were actually handled very differently library Particularly because this is the formation of a union relied heavily on legal counsel as they needed to right the vast majority of negotiation is with firefighters has been handled in-house. So the legal expenses for that can vary. I think Sean has said that he intends to handle most of the negotiations himself for the next five that are up, for those five, because those ones will be entering fiscal year 27 is the, no, fiscal year 27, no, fiscal year 28 is the last year of that contract. So you'll see, I don't think you're going to see it as elevated legal expenses. That said, there are some additional HR expenses that, you know, there's some part-time expenses that will be incurred to help out the HR department because simply they can't handle it with, there's too much to do. So there's going to be somebody who's going to be helping out with documentation, note-taking, managing, editing, Revising that's what I'm looking for. Sorry agreements No, thank you That's very different, you know part-time HR Assistant is very different than the legal counsel that we use I Want to make sure I'm not I definitely don't mean to impugn the council on that when we were between you know, permanent town managers, there really was no other option than to have our legal team lead that because there's nobody else who could do that. The council can't really do that themselves. And it was simply, you know, you already had finance.

There's too much risk by not doing it.

And Liz was a delight.

It was really fun working with her. And that's about it for the library for today.

Great. Okay. Old committee business. So the update on the creation of bylaws. We did not make any changes. I did not get any feedback from anything that we wanted to add beyond some of the edits. Sean's edits that we sent to you, yeah. That we sent to you, yeah. So can we say, you know, we're okay creating the bylaws, you know, with Sean's edits in there and then we're good?

Would you like a clean copy for a vote next time? That would be excellent. Let's do that. Okay, so the edits that Sean sent you, create a clean copy, and then you can bring them to a vote next time. Let's do that. Perfect. That was easy. Yeah? That was easy.

Me too. All right, we're moving on to other business. Does anybody have any other business?

Is this appropriate?

That would be, yes, that document that you sent me earlier today that I did not get a chance to go over because I was traveling today.

Don't worry. I just took a stab at creating an onboarding checklist for new budget committee members, and with the help of Nicole, obviously, we went back and forth, so I don't know if we could share it. I don't know how to share it without breaking protocol, so what's the right way to just sort of send it out to the team?

Send it to Kate. She'll Um, send it to the chair, she'll disseminate, and then you would talk about any revisions to it in a public session.

Great. So I will take your link. I will send it out to the group. Um, once I've actually had a chance to do that. Um, and I will talk about it in September's meeting.

Great. Nothing urgent about it.

Yeah. Cause onboarding won't happen for another six months anyway. And it will be me. I have to, I have to run. And then I think you.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I might need it.

You who created the checklist. And I've been here four years, so I guess there really is no rush if both of us are running again and we win. So, if we win. Yeah. No pressure. And we run. Anyway. Okay. So, approval of minutes. Did everybody get a chance to review the June meeting minutes? Okay. I will accept a motion to approve the meeting minutes.

So moved. Second. Second.

Second?

Second.

First and second, okay. All in favor say aye. Aye. Motion passes. Meeting schedule, so our next meeting, the third Thursday of the month would be September 17th. And then in October, that would be October 15th. And then after that, the first Saturday in November is the big budget presentation. And then we are right smack dab in the middle of budget season, which is why I didn't put any of the November meetings in there. But the meeting calendar for budget season is up

on the site um on the legendary site right we're working on finalizing the budget page now tanya's working on that as we speak so those dates and that budget page much like last year's budget page yep but the budget schedule was approved by the town council it is yeah it's just still linked to the agenda so yeah it's in there somewhere um but that is but that was approved if you want i can send you out another

send that to you so we can distribute so the next meeting is september 17th 7 p.m and are you thinking of doing the fire departments i'll chat with phil and see if he wants to do that um because they are north or sorry south and then north um and they're in two different places um we could either the way we did it last time is we did it i believe after the budget meeting but i guess if If we're going to have Sean do his PUD presentation, and doing that and the tours might be kind of a really long meeting. So maybe we could do the tours in October. Also, October has really nice weather, so going outside and walking around, that seems better anyway.

I have one other thing for you, Kate.

Yes.

One of the things, as you know, mentioned, Jeff mentioned the PUD session. We're planning two more sessions like that, public engagement sessions. The next one is going to be on September 30th, and that's going to be focused around traffic. I haven't published the location yet because I need to kind of think about how many people are going to attend and if it's still big enough. And then the next one we're looking at doing is a budget one. Whereas a lot of times these engagement sessions are listening, like the PUD one was mostly listening, answering some questions, but mostly listening. Same thing with traffic. This one we're going to view as a little bit more of a question and answer. So people can actually ask their questions about the budget and get some answers. And so we're looking to schedule it that week after the initial budget presentation.

Okay.

So I'll be reaching out with, I'll look at the global schedule of dates and then kind of be putting some in there. We'd love for attendance. We'd love for participation. So just kind of putting that on your radar. We have been toying back and forth between it before the budget, but I think that based on the way October is looking right now, we're really not going to get much movement on the budget until November anyway. So because of the way the meetings fall. So we'll be looking at doing that. So sometime in November, you think? Probably the week of the 9th.

Okay.

That'd be great. Okay.

And that kind of falls in line with one of the things we want more people to get involved with the budget, talk about the budget, those kinds of things. It was one of your goals. Yep. It was one of our goals. Yep.

Maybe we can hype up that meeting once it settles down.

Come talk to us.

Yeah. All right. These are all the things that I need to get, that I can get squared away while Sean is on vacation.

I also like when my boss goes on vacation, so I get so much more work done. Hope you're enjoying your flight, Sean. Yeah, I hope you don't get delayed, like poor Matt. Oh, no. Okay, and there's no more public has come, so we'll also skip public comment. And with that, I will take a motion to adjourn.

So moved.

Second. Second, great. All in favor? Aye. Aye. Thank you. Meeting is adjourned at 8.03 p.m.