City Council - Regular Meeting

Great. Well, thank you all for our final budget workshop. And I think I was looking at its 27 total meetings for the internal side of things. I think we had the full schedule going all the way back to November. And thank you to the whole budget team, all the department heads, the city councilors. I think we had seven workshops or eight? What did we have?

It feels like more than that.

It felt like it. It felt like it. But I know it's a lot of due diligence with this group going through line by line by line by line and really appreciate everybody's efforts. The last couple years I've noted Nate Burkhart, our deputy IT administrator, has just been absolutely essential to things. Again, he played a huge role in this, especially without a finance director. We're very close. I'll probably have an announcement next week on that so we can have a little more firepower coming here. But this year, the critical person was Ashley Brown. We would have been completely lost without her on this entire process, not just the... keeping the log of all of the pieces and the good edits that the city councilors have made coming through here, but she's keeping the bills and the team of Deb and Leah. Um, I've said it before, it's like a walk-off factory over there. I mean, they're just the busiest. It's just so much activity. She's up late. Um, she's always super responsive and, you know, and it's, uh, just, we're so lucky to have her in this role in this department. So thank, thank you, Ashley. Tonight, as I noted at the beginning, I've kind of updated my memo on where we're at in the organization, in the budget process, some of the main cost drivers. What we're seeing here, not just for this budget cycle, but the previous one and into the future, I think it's always really important to have context and really kind of analyze not just the budget itself, but how it's stacking up over time and where it's going. So I'm going to try to put up here the... Sorry, the budget memo I have. And I passed out a copy to all of you. I'm going to see if I can share it so that at least folks that could make it and some city councilors that they can at least watch online. So just give me one second.

All right, let me see if I can open this up.

I apologize. It's obviously been an extraordinarily busy time, but I haven't quite been able to get I usually like to do a triple check of the math and figures, but after I do my kind of general budget memo, we're going to go into some of the final figures. The last cut exercise that I did with the department heads is just to whittle down anything that could be even remotely discretionary in this budget that's not in the restricted accounts for TIF and economic development. You know I and then what the will go through that Scott's got a fire department potential request that we'll need to consider and I think kind of in some ways is like a microcosm for this entire memo is That is the issue that we're facing in the fire department for staffing and then all the cut exercises I just spent, you know an entire week with staff and another pass of a 500 page line by line going for so I call this memo boom and gloom and Because that's really the story of where Ellsworth's at right now. The boom is real. It's growing at a rate that very few communities in Maine are experiencing, especially rural Maine, especially northern rural Maine. The tax base is expanding dramatically. New housing, new businesses, new hotels, new commercial activity, massive state and federal public investments in the city, renewed interest in developers and employers. incredible amount of momentum. But the gloom is also very real in the kind of pressures all that growth is putting on city staff, city resources. And it really kind of affected this year's budget. It was not like, let's take a list of the new discretionary programs, what we want to invest in. It was really saying no to everything, cutting even previous year's yeses even further. And we're still at like a 7% to 8% increase depending on where we fall here. So a little bit of a broader kind of look back on, you know, yes, 36% population growth since 2000. That's one of, if not the fastest growth rate of any city in Maine, three and a half times the statewide average. A $700 million valuation growth since 2021. And that's after almost a 12-year anemic growth cycle for the city of Ellsworth. So that's what this... taxable value and rate table kind of shows both the tax rate and the dotted line and you have the mill rate from 14 to 19 on the right here and the total taxable value of the entire city back to 2009 so this green line you can kind of see 2009 to 2021 pretty much no valuation growth whatsoever in the city. I might say no, $100 million over a 12 year period of time. Effectively, that's not very much growth at all. And then the pandemic hits and we see an explosion in valuation growth. And this is based on our assessor, but also the state's valuation. of the city, so $700 million increase in a very short period of time. And correspondingly, you have some pretty substantial drops in the mill rate, down to 15.66 from a high point of almost 19 just a few years ago. But that's not the whole story, obviously. The cost of government, the levy, has also been fluctuating a lot. You know, you really, the taxable value, you can see kind of changes happen, and all of a sudden you really start to see like these kind of heart attack shocks in value and kind of levy changes. You know, you have 2023, the year before I arrived, it's probably FY24. You see a 17.5% increase in the tax rates, an enormous tax change that year. I think Steve was probably the only counselor that was here at that time. And it's hard to say, though, that they were just wildly spending. I think, actually, if you look back, how did they have almost no tax rate change in the levy from 2022 and 2023? And the answer is during the two highest inflationary years since the 1970s in an entire generation, and not the cost of everything didn't increase. The answer is, and I think we've talked about this in the past, Steve, and I think a few other counselors, is just if you take a longer look back evaluation of these spikes of 17% in one year, so the rate of increase has been slowing um i came to the first about halfway through the budget cycle it's about seven five that year last year and this is the combined school in city side here you know we're a little less about four percent category um and that's comparatively pretty um pretty favorable um in a few ways. One is Ellsworth at a percent of the median tax burden is about 4.73%. You know, the service centers in Maine, that's a pretty low level.

How is that calculated, Charlie?

They take the median income for the city and then the median and the percent of a tax on the median home value. The Ellsworth American did a pretty good story on this last cycle. Obviously, we're waiting for a lot of it. We'll be able to refresh this data at some point in time. But this is as of last year? Yeah, and then I have one for the mill rate, too. I think I might have accidentally taken that slide out. But the mill is pretty low, too, in terms of the 1566. I think we're like second or third lowest of any of the service centers in cities in Maine. So that's kind of the boom part. You're looking at a pretty comparatively low tax rate, a ton of growth, adding about $500,000 a year just in new businesses, commercial and residential being built, new homes being built, new businesses being built. new hotels being built, new tractor dealerships being built, new gas stations being built. There's just so much being built. And I did an analysis previously for the chamber. It's about three of the last three years, it's been about half a million dollars just in new tax revenue from the new things being built. That's not the valuation change. That's just those new things. The valuation changes have been a different story. I think one of the things that I found interesting, and I read the Elders with Americans story recently about 31% increase on property taxes for waterfront and 18 residential, and it seemed to be Yes, that's the assessment change that happened, but that's not a tax increase of 31% that the council or myself, we don't have any control over that piece. And it got me thinking, if there is a 31% tax valuation change, what is the effect on the overall tax base of that? So I worked with the assessor and just said, hey, can you pull those rates for me? And it was kind of shocked. For the 5,500 tax bills that went out for 4,000 unique owners, 75% of the tax bills went down last year. So out of the 5,500 tax bills, 75% was a tax decrease. And it wasn't a big decrease, like $15.

But it wasn't an increase.

No, 75% of the tax base in Ellsworth last year had a tax decrease on their bills.

But, you know, that's also not a good thing because, you know, the city costs, you know, for schools in the city were about 4%, up 4%. I think it was about $1.5 million in total of that new cost compared to the previous years. And that was all placed on the 24%, 25% of the highest value in the valuation change. So you can see why that would be like, you know, and again, that's the city council, the city manager, I'm not able to, if I had my druthers, I would not have a tax system that allows for that type of unanticipated valuation changes. And, you know, that's been borne out. That's the assessor. You saw that. $700 million in growth. I think there was sort of a, hey, is this real? Will this last? Will it stabilize? But if you don't keep up with your valuation changes from the state, the state claws back funds for, you know, a variety of things because they look at you as a growing tax base, a growing revenue base, and that other states that are not growing or cities and towns that are not growing as fast as you don't deserve as much revenue sharing, don't earn enough school sharing. And so they can claw those pieces back. So I thought that there might be 5% of the tax bills went down last year. I was not expecting 75% of the tax bills in Ellsworth last year to be a net decrease. We're going to get into valuation. We split that as part of the process this year. I think that was one of the tough things. Last year, we were expecting a 5% across the board valuation change. We kind of based, put some initial mill rate assumptions into the budget, and then it turned out to be 31% of the waterfront, and it just totally skewed the distribution.

So we've worked really hard this year just to, hey, you know, notice it would be 3% across the board.

We'll see if that ends up being the case. And, you know, the mill on a 7% change in the budget, if that moves forward, you know, that would probably be up a little bit on the mill, but still in the 16s range. But until that... If a commitment is finalized, and we are on track to get the commitment finalized very soon, we'll send out bills ahead of time so people know their valuation changes before they hit their tax bill, because that's what's happened last. The tax bill has been late six years now. We're going to get those tax bills out on time, and we're going to have a, you know, beforehand we're going to send out notifications that your valuations, which the commitment would be based on, are now live, so people can... Okay, this is how much my property changed in value. I do feel like I know our senator has been looking at the property structure in the system in the state of Massachusetts, but the system is, to me, being able to have that type of thing is that kind of change and that it affects just a quarter of the tax base has that kind of addition versus the 75% that are effectively flat. I think that needs to be looked at over time so that people don't have these fluctuations. And also the gloom is about the growth areas. Where are our biggest growth areas? Hits to the budget. It's one of the things that's been tough this one, saying no to everything, not backfilling two employees, one in code, one in the parks and rec slash public works area, pulling back. Everything I possibly could that was discretionary, that's not in a restricted economic development account, we're still up 70%. So the big piece is in the public safety area. That's up about $600,000, $660,000 or so. And that's not with adding anybody in public safety. That's just true costing what the public safety departments are costing. We went to a full EMS service. So the fire department has been diligently adding two people a year, I think, for the last five years. Last year was the last time to have the addition. We're seeing a lot of the pay structures and the collective bargaining agreements. And this is what it costs. We're not trying to add anything there. And this is best in class service. I think that's one of the hard things about this. These are collective bargaining agreements. We are a massively growing city. We need fire and police to continue to grow, but this is a big part of where our costs are. Same thing goes into the employee benefits. Just for the people we have, actually two less, Due to the collective bargaining increases and just employee benefits across the board increases, you're up $500,000. Just a couple subcategories. These are not additive, by the way. They're just... Oh, I had questions, so that's good. So health insurance is up about $200,000 as part of that employee benefits. That's 17%. The main state retirement is up $100,000. There was some state reimbursement corrections issues which we talked about. We had some mistakes in the assessing of some personal property tax or maybe some business property where essentially the state had to claw back almost $200,000. So that really, we're also down negative 5.9% on our revenue expectations over the previous year. So with increased costs like this, revenue expectations are down 5.9%. And part of the reasons is that they're clawing back some of the money we did with them, but there were mistakes. And again, as we talked about a lot when we talked about the revamp of the assessing department and the need for a consultant and where we've gone there, that's a big part of it. A lot of valuation growth, a lot of change, a lot of pressures in the system, and mistakes start happening, and they can be of that category. Road debt service, so all the roads we really needed, probably three or four years of backlog and not a lot of roads being done, and that's something we paid for. We had a long discussion on don't do debt service on them for longer than, um their useful life um i think uh counselor harrigan you likely know that it's about seven years and we put it in there for a seven year repayment we would have done this over 30 years we could have had a lot less of a debt payment but you know three five city managers from now would still be paying off the debt on those two million roads so It's the fiscally responsible way to do it, but that still meant a $400,000 increase. That's in the highway budget. We're actually looking at next year. That's not exactly a highway expense. We might pull that into a general area. And a lot of other things I should note here, too. Salt is up, I think it was... 13%, and we buy $170,000 worth of salt. Plow steel, steel is up. So all the inflationary things that we're seeing that are climbing up, like governments are even more prone to some of those items. Gas, we buy a ton of gas. We buy a ton of health insurance. Health insurance is up 17%. Salt, even liquid calcium is 100% increase this year. The road striping, which we have to do, and we did get a lot of bids, is up 47%. for the road striping over the previous year. These are not things that I want to, if I could cut any of that stuff without pretty dramatic service or lack of stripes on roads during the year, I would love to do that type of thing. I would love to not have to salt the roads or to pay that amount of increases. But these inflationary increases that we're seeing... Pretty dramatic. We also said no to just about everything. No to the Emerald Ash Borer pest management plan deferred. No to the new IT position, despite the fact that they have enormous pressures. No to council chamber AV upgrades, even though we get complaints about it all the time. No to any video conferencing. A lot of our systems are pretty old, and they don't really work anymore for video conferencing. The televisions, we didn't backfill a code enforcement assistant. We didn't backfill a parks or rec slash public works employee. In fact, we added a public works director last year, but we really just shifted resources from highway to parks and rec. So public works is down a lot. And parks and rec still doesn't have enough manpower for a lot of the different things they have. We cut heavily, and we'll go through this My last round was on HR training, professional development. It really hurt me to do that because we have such a new staff. We had so much turnover. I did this with the department heads less than a year, probably six months ago. Who's been here since 2019? It was one person in their role. And that some people have been here longer than that, but they haven't been in that role as a department head since 2019. So cutting people's training who are pretty new to really important jobs. And we talked about planning. Yes, we had a title change for one of the planning, but there's been two people in planning for a while. There's two people in planning now. Bar Harbor, I think, has five. So the staff is under real growth pressures in the smallest parts of government. That's kind of my next piece. Cutting the smallest parts of government, general government, training budgets in the smaller pieces to try to slow the increases of the largest parts of government in the public safety departments and then even bigger increases in the school side of things is just not sustainable. It's not a good math equation. This is a breakdown just so folks, you know, know what makes up those tax bills that get sent out. You know, roughly, you know, and this is from last year, we're looking at around $17 million for the schools, you know, when you get your, you know, there's around... 29 million in liquid the total tax taxes that are collected each year 17 million is is out for the schools and about 12 million is for the city side and you know I think I have that chart here I had another chart of school versus city spending and percent increases over the last six years. And the city's been underneath the school increase every year. That's why this is growing, this pie in the school side of the contribution. And also, I looked into this. I was kind of hoping that, wow, school spending is just really squeezing out the city. But we spend some of the lowest per-pupil spending on the schools. in the state and the region. It's not that. It's just deferred investments in the schools and their stuff is costing a lot more money too. So it's really hard to take the smallest portions of city government, squeeze every penny out of them, and make up for increases in the largest portions of city government. infrastructure. This is something we're going to continue to work on. We have this new SIPP plan that we're working through for the city not having really a full inventory of all the different maintenance on infrastructure that's happened over the past six years, which is really the last time they had a comprehensive capital improvement plan. Sarah has done an initial presentation. We're going to keep that. Unfortunately, this budget meeting, there's a little bit of a break in July. We don't have workshop the first week in July, but August we're going to be back into it for capital improvement planning and a lot more activity there. But it's about $20 million in year one deferred maintenance. It doesn't mean we're going to go on ban for $20 million. We can't. But we're going to have to do some really hard decisions there. It's tough, but now we know all the cans that have been kicked before and the cans that we're going to kick and the cans we're not going to kick anymore. And those are hard conversations. They're going to need to be honest conversations. Financial controls and modernization not being optional. We're continuing to make this a much, much more robust system. As those who are here, I think Steve and I guess, I don't know if Nancy and Patrick were here when the first Was this your first budget or had you guys been here the year prior? Oh, I guess you were here.

You came into our first budget.

We were experiencing it ahead of your arrival. That's right.

So you guys were already halfway through your budget cycle where they were just tossing Word documents and random pieces of paper at you.

And getting mad if you asked questions.

Getting mad if you asked questions and, like, no tracking, no prior action.

I have that same problem. People get mad when I ask questions. Imagine that.

Just the way you ask them, Steve. Yeah. So we continue to move forward on a lot of these pieces. Transparency is a big part of it, and it's a value of mine and the entire team. Sometimes you get punished for transparency, and that's okay. We publish a draft version of this budget, all 570 pages, every single line item, every single year-to-date actual. I've done that in my last three cycles. We get tough questions because we provide so much transparency on the data, on the projects we're doing, on the workshops. It's interesting to me sometimes, you know, sometimes it can be a little boisterous and people can, you know, yell about different programs and different things.

And like, you know, for me, I love it.

I was actually talking to somebody recently. I'm like, how do you stand that? It's like, you just got to be the chair. They're not yelling at you. They're yelling at a chair named city manager. If you can do that, you can still listen to somebody when they're yelling at you and be like, yeah, you know what? Maybe that downtown restroom. isn't a good idea for TIF funding and economic development. Maybe it is. Let's hear from some more business owners. Maybe we should spend more of that on roads. Not every road is eligible for TIF funding, but some of our roads are. We're doing Bayside Road with a $750,000 match. And those are the types of weights with those funding projects we need to think of. What does make me upset is when people sloganeer and say, oh, well, this thing's a slush fund. You're using that. It's like, well, we have to spend those on economic development activities. They're restricted funding for those purposes. That is the law. And we can also change that. But that takes a city council eliminating those TIF districts. So it is not spend $39,000 in a downtown restroom or lower people's taxes by $39,000. Honest answer there is it's either $39,000 of that tax-sequestered funding that's $0.59 on that project or another type of economic development project. But it has to be things that continue to grow the tax base. While there's a lot of gloom in here on those types of pieces, we have a pretty full stack project some through TIFF and economic development funding ordinance rewrites so we can be more business friendly and continue this growth pattern is on digital modernizations of systems that have been paper-based for decades and really create issues when you have critical staff turnover The water treatment plant replacement work, which is just coming at the proper time, which is fully funded through grants and low-interest loans that people have been working on for quite some time now. The assessing modernization, which we started up last year and is really coming to fruition. Capital improvement grant, Bayside, our great, very small parks and rec team. Patrick, when you joined, the slides were years before they could fix. The splash pad, they didn't winterize it, so we lost a bunch of the jets. That stuff's happening now. I was walking out there with Roddy at the splash pad this year, seeing his opening plan. We're going to take care of our assets. We're going to take care of our parks. The park does not look like a completely run-down facility anymore. The marina is looking a lot better. We take real pride in these places, and our teams take a lot of care of them. I think at some point in time, revenue options for long-term sustainability has to be looked at. You see those costs increases, and I sure as heck don't want to cut police or fire. They're absolutely needed. I was actually talking to some people in the library today because I go hide there because when I really need to do a project and I don't want staff knocking on my door. And then I can't help myself. I talk to them. And I was talking about some of these problems and increases in public safety and some of these other things. And there's nothing left to squeeze. We just did a cut exercise, by the way, to have everybody take any training piece, anything that absolutely required your license to pull it out, except for the library. They are very, they pinch every penny over there. They are extremely fiscally disciplined. They were the only department that was exempt from that exercise.

Did they still?

Yeah, this is the kind of teams that we have over there. And then I was talking about some of the costs, and they said, oh, that's really tough. And they're like, but we can't cut fire police. Even the folks that don't make a ton of money, then they're probably some of our lowest paid employees over at the library. They understand how important our public safety groups are. They're best in class. Every second, we've had a few tragedies and emergencies. both on the police and fire side lately that have really shown me that these folks are more expensive, but they are worth it. So if we're going to look at some of those cost increases and how we're going to get tax bills back down, it's not going to be on the general government side, on the smaller side with the least amount of growth. It's going to have to be some more structural changes looking at At fees, which we've already started doing in the short-term rental area, solid waste, that's a $400,000 loss to the city every single year. It should be an enterprise account where the users of, just like water, just like wastewater, where the users of those services pay for them.

That's why I mentioned that we should have increased the tickets and the scales. We did. We did. It was supposed to be pay as you go anyways. Yeah, I think we are going to. And it needs to be that way. And it's just like the water department. You know, when they took that over, really, I remember when they took it over. And it was like, huh, you know. And that's supposed to be rate payer. driven. That's what it was supposed to be. Bad problem is they didn't wait until finally the water company says, here, take it. We're not even going to sell it to you. Here, just take it. You know? They had to jump on the gun and buy it back then. So there's a lot of mistakes way before any of you get a chance to get into playing the game. They've done a lot of things over and over and over the years.

Yeah, Sarah actually talks, we talk about that a lot, just like how much of this deferred and just like how long it's going to take. We're two years in, at least from my side, to... This turnaround, we've made a lot of accomplishments. We've got a long way to go. There's a guy named Pavel in Yugoslavia or something. He gave a speech when he became president there. And it's a famous speech because he basically said, hey, we have real big problems. A lot of politicians will just come in here and just sing you sunshine and fairy tales about how easy it's going to be to just make everything turn around. No, that is not the case, I think. That's kind of one of my pieces here, too, is just this public process, some of the misinformation I'm seeing out there, and the need for seriousness in addressing these problems. I can't tell you.

You know, I know that there's going to be a lot of department heads. I know there's going to be a lot of employees. And I know that there's going to be a lot of people out there in general that are going, look, if you don't want to cut staff, We've already made improvements in the equipment the staff has. You see what I mean? Where else can you find a little bit more time?

And the thing is, it's not a little bit more. If we're going to get it down to more inflationary levels...

But there are departments out there that we can make changes.

And that's kind of the piece, too, to me, that having been through this budget four times, having gone through it with you a fifth time, having worked with all the department heads to try to find every piece, saying no to absolutely everything and to still be at this level is... is disheartening. And some of these revenue pieces are going to be politically fraught as well to look into, whether it's parking kiosks just seasonally for non-Ellsworth residents, some of the larger state and federal grant matching, which takes time to really figure out and to get them on board and isn't guaranteed. There is, Georgia has a floating local option sales tax, which the floating part of it is that you could do a 1% sales tax, that was worth just 500,000, 500 million, sorry, in retail sales, the highest per capita in the state. A 1% floating option sales tax on that would deliver about 5 million a year into city coffers. But the floating part is it has to go directly back to the property tax owners or the payers. You can't use it for new things. And I would only consider something like that if it also was matched to all that revenue generated from local option sales tax, which is a lot of tourists, would have to go back to the property tax owners. And it would have to be matched by any city or town that would do something like that, that they'd have to be at a 3% level and are never allowed to without losing that option. Because that's the only way I think you could actually have true fiscal responsibility for that. But in the latest tax reform agendas, nobody's considering that. I heard that the last time they looked into that, a bunch of state legislators got unelected. And I know a lot of business groups know that.

The business community was opposed to it. Yeah.

So that's likely not there. The data center is another area where if a $500 million data center came into town on a 1566 mill rate, we're talking $7 million a year in tax revenue on that. Yes, there can be a lot of environmental impacts. But those kind of things, 1% local option sales tax, $7 million increase to revenue from a data center, you're talking $1,000 average tax bill decrease. Those are your only two silver bullets. And they might not even be silver. They might be rusted. People are not going to be happy about them. But if you're looking for the... one option that's going to solve the whole thing. It's going to have to be a ton of different things. And that's why I'm going to talk about seriousness and misinformation. And I've been there. I used to work in politics. Just cut the waste. I used to work for a politician. The State House in Massachusetts, we got all these cans of fluff, peanut butter fluff, big things of fluff. We've got to cut the fluff from state government. And it was a fun event. But I think from a federal level, if you just kind of have this Republicans, we cut the waste, and we'll all be in a low tax paradise of government spending. And that's wrong. and Democrats have it wrong, you just tax the rich and we'll all be in a paradise of land and plenty and there won't be any economic development, business growth, no way, both those things are lies. It is much more complicated, much more collaborative, much more weighing tough trade-offs, much more, and I hate to say it, but when I worked for Governor Baker in Massachusetts, this was one of his biggest successes as a Republican, was no drama, no blaming the other side. If I'm going to take some tough things on my side as a Republican, and I was a Republican political appointee and spent a decade in Republican campaign politics, the other sides, if I'm not denigrating them, they'll give some too. And when you're in that kind of environment and you're collaborating and you're having honest questions and dialogues about where we want to go as a community, you can accomplish something. If it turns to sloganeering and tax the rich or just cut the VAT and its slogans, you're out the window. Which is why I also think that we need some talk to a few people about this. Not actually in Ellsworth, but friends of mine are working in other municipalities. And I think we need some sort of audit or budget commission made up of business owners in Ellsworth and some very expert financial people to really start looking, not just this year, And hey, we'll cut all these things this one year, and then all the inflationary things we just talked about, all the collective bargaining increases that are locked into our laws, we'll wipe out that decrease from that year one. It can't just be a year one discussion. It's got to involve a much more holistic approach of people that can look at this. And I hate to say it, but outside of even the council, because that can be a more apolitical analysis that moves forward. i don't know exactly how to operationalize that i'm going to look into that more but i really feel like something like that is going to be needed if we're really going to look towards long term with all the gross pressures on the city with some of our major cost centers increasing to levels that are really not sustainable and the solutions the easy solutions of you know cut around the edges to to keep up and don't touch the big cost centers. It's just not gonna work out. We gotta figure out different things.

But I also have, I'm very optimistic, I think, in that same piece.

These are problems because it has opportunity. These are being created by all these opportunities. This is not on track to be Millinocket or some of these other places where they literally just start cutting everything, and then it creates a vicious cycle where the roads fall apart. That really is the true cut scenario that will really save taxpayers a lot of money is, yeah, cut the police, cut the fire, cut general government, cut investments in roads, cut investments in schools. Those are all things that those places in rural parts of Maine have had to do, and go drive around those cities and towns. And see how many of those people's kids and grandkids are coming back to those cities and towns. And what are their population levels looking like? What are their schools looking like? They're considering some places like we don't offer a bus to school anymore. Those are the types of things that would have to be under consideration if you go that route to just have a massive tax decrease. So we have a lot of growth. We have a lot of great... local organizations that are willing to do whatever it takes to kind of come together to meet this moment. And I'm super excited about that, even with a lot of this kind of gloom and the budget pressures this year. It's an honor to be city manager here. I'm excited to hopefully have a new finance director so I don't have to do this process for the fourth time. And, you know, could maybe a... You know, the final scores just came in from the committee. So I'll talk more next week. But I hope to have an announcement. Once those scores come in, I obviously have to talk to the final list and then see if we can.

You're going to be happy about it? Okay. Well, she's not going anywhere.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And Charlie, I think just to reinforce your point about finding solutions, there was an economic development plan for the state of Maine 10 years ago and it talks about silver buckshot. There is no silver bullet. It's silver buckshot. It's a little bit everywhere. So that's what we're working on here.

You know, oddly enough... I'm sorry. I don't mean to giggle. Oddly enough, one of the jobs I turned down to come here was in the final round of interviews to be the Economic Development Implementation Director for the State of Maine. They showed me that plan, and the question was like, you know, hey, how can you operationalize tracking if this plan is actually working? I actually met with some of your DCD, and they asked our mill rate, and I said 1566, and literally that person's jaw dropped. And it's like, I thought you were going to say 24. And that's another big piece of this. The way the school talked about school revenue sharing might change That could be a silver bullet, too. I mean, so you saw the school growth increases, but if that dynamic changes and how the state does revenue sharing for our schools, that will really help make these more inflationary levels.

I was reading about that today. So it's not in effect for 2027, but it is for the following year.

Yeah, so that one I'm really, really hopeful for. I know I think it's a massive, not just in the schools themselves, but the buildings and how those investments go from the state. You know, it's very interesting. But yeah. So now we're going to switch to the details.

Is this available to the public, Charlie?

I'm going to, my one last thing is I always like to quadruple check all my dates and figures and make sure I didn't carry something over. I just saw a couple mistakes I already made. So yeah, I've got to do that. But for the final budget, I'll put it in there. And also I want the actual final figures too that we decide on. With that, any more questions about kind of the macro before I get into the micro?

That's a good interview.

Thank you.

I have a few comments that I'd like to make. You talk about where do you do income, where do you do expenses. Probably the city of Ellsworth is not facing anything different than other cities. Everyone's household income is strained. Every government budget is strained. Every need is strained. But eliminating paperclips out of the closet isn't gonna solve anything. Just sitting here thinking, on the agenda you have many positions that you're going to appoint. It's number 19 on the agenda that came out. You need to cut those positions. You've got to take a hard look at that. You've got too many people steering the boat and not enough people rowing the boat. You want to get into the meat and get rid of the personality things, it's very simple. Personnel is the biggest place that you can make an impact and cut. Is it fun? No. But sometimes it has to be done. And number 19 on the agenda talks about city manager appointments. There's some big numbers in there that need to get looked at about eliminating some management positions so that you can have more people rowing the boat. It's not a fun topic. Nobody wants to say that. You talk about getting business people together, they're gonna tell you that. That's where the big thing is. You have to eliminate positions to make a difference in the budget. It's not fun. Who wants to lay somebody off? Nobody wants to do that. But we have too many positions that have been created in this city that we could try and get done without. I know that's not popular, but you're talking about... You're talking about Mr. and Mrs. Ellsworth's money. That needs to get looked at very hard before all those appointments are made. Eliminating some tough positions. More people rowing the boat. Also, since I've been here, This sewer fiasco down on Water Street, you get all kinds of trucks delivering sewer from out of town. There's a great chance to take in some money to benefit the city of Ellsworth and not cost the city of Ellsworth money. I'll repeat when I got here, I was told this was an enterprise account and they were making money. I cracked the books that was two years old and they were losing $460,000. Trucks coming from Milo, an old town, driving right by the brewer facility. How come they're driving by that facility? They're driving by that facility because they can pay their people to come to Ellsworth because the tipping fees are less. You need to do some market pricing. Everybody dumping sewer at the sewer department. Needs to pay the same amount. All these side deals that some guy pays this amount, some guy pays that amount, some guy pays this amount. That needs to get regulated.

You want to make sure. There's no side deals.

You can look at a video. There is all kinds of side deals.

Not everyone pays the same to dump a gallon of sewer in that plant.

You're just making stuff up.

No, I'm not making stuff up. If you look, find enough, you'll find, and there'll be a recording of a meeting. When I question that, why is this guy paying X amount of cents? Well, they're giving us more. Everyone that dumps sewer at the city of Ellsworth out of a truck needs to pay the same amount. It should not be all over the place.

Does the sewer enterprise account impact our budget in any way?

No. And, you know, former city manager and former city council chair, Michelle Beal, tried to explain this to Steve previously. As I've talked to our wastewater superintendent about this a few times, they also, at expense and per Steve's request, they did an analysis on this. You guys align to yourselves. He doesn't believe these things that were said by

Read the financials. You pay someone 50 grand to do a set of financials, and then you say they're not the truth. Let me talk. You've talked for half an hour. Let me just continue.

Steve, let's have a civil conversation here.

I'm trying to, so stop interrupting me. So there's a great chance for you to reanalyze that. Got to cut positions at City Hall.

Which positions, Steve?

Give me the list that you're about to appoint. I'll be happy to make some suggestions. It's not fun, but we're talking here wallowing in all of these problems. And you gotta throw some mud on the wall to try and make it stick. Outsource is an option. Sometimes you need to take a department and get it down to its core value and supplement it with outsourcing. My final question is this. When is this budget being voted on? The GEO meeting. It's not on the agenda that I saw.

Is that last year's agenda that you saw? I don't know. I haven't seen the agenda.

The agenda's posted, and I believe it's the 20th council, number 20 and 21.

It just came out, right?

Yeah. So it is on there.

I didn't see that on there.

Because it's the TAN that we're voting on and the budget. So it is on there. It's 20 and 21, I believe.

The $3 million tax anticipation note. Okay, so it is in June. You can't be giving these big tax bills to these people. They're in the same boat we are. You've got to make some hard decisions. And you can't do it by counting paper clips. I'm sorry. You've got to start with the meat.

Yeah, just note, this is, like I said, the 27th budget meeting internally and externally, the 8th or 9th. I know you've been pretty quiet this entire time. And obviously, always good for the data. I think that's not accurate about the rowers versus managers. I think as I pulled up here, too, on just honest conversations about where the budget and what's driving cost increase, you know, the last few years.

What page is that in the workbook?

You know, I don't have a page on this because it's like we do the page numbers last in the finalization piece. In your workbook, though, it might be yours has page numbers. So if you go to city budget overview expenditure breakdown.

That's actually city budget overview, right? Yeah. Oh, I think I see it.

So, you know, you look at general government, 3.1 million at Y25 coming in. Page 19. Page 19. FY27, we're open at $3.47 million. That's three separate budget cycles. That increases by about a third of as much as a single increase in the public safety departments in a single year. So you could try to take down the smallest part of government, or you're talking about police and fire. And I know nobody wants to say that, or they want to make it seem like you can cut the smallest part of government to save everybody's tax bills without cutting into safety, which I think would be a terrible idea. So either there's not going to be a lot of long-term savings in the biggest parts of government that are growing, or you're going to have to make cuts in those areas and you're not telling people you're going to.

um i don't have any problems making a few cuts in the police department i mean they get they got a fairly good size staff of officers and sergeants but they don't need to be utilizing every police cruiser that we lease plus the eight we own they can rotate 12 vehicles between the 21. And only the chief can work it out on the two vehicles that can go home, one being the canine officer and his cruiser. And that would cut down on maintenance costs, fuel costs, tires, and the chance of liability, insurance of accidents, and better utilization. unless equipment being utilized, you know, extra equipment we've had to purchase to put in these cruisers. None of the eight cruisers I asked them about, if any of them were special units, special purpose vehicles, no. So that tells me, huh, it's just a regular standard police cruiser, whether it be a pickup truck or a car. kind of special purposes you know the chief the fire chief i think he'd be pretty pretty tickled pink to just keep the two least pickups he's got and that poor excuse for a forestry truck because it wasn't heavy heavy duty enough to carry water in the first place so typically they've had one ton single wheels or one ton dual wheels as a forestry truck and times will be better off, you know? And unfortunately, when you have employees that are soldiers and they reservist or guardsman and they get sent away for deployment, Unfortunately, the employer has to maintain their records just like they're here. So they gain their retirement and their sick time and their vacation just like they're here, but you don't pay them unless there's an agreement that, you know, you pay them their two weeks vacation that's due to them or something like that in between to help make things up. Because some people in the military and the reserves don't get the big dollar amount. And they have to make ends meet for their wives and kids at home. I was one, got deployed several times. So, and as far as someone that got injured on a job, yeah, he's there. But, you know, that's why we have or should have on-call firemen, reservists. Police departments nowadays really should have reservists, social firemen. Look at the on-call firemen that fought the fire over there at Robin's Lumber Company. Those people are well-trained and work their butts off. The image of a lot of equipment gets staged. And, you know, as for public works, I really don't seem to understand why we need two excavators. But then again, some organizations, and I've seen it, think that they've got to have all the toys and balls and whistles. I don't really know how many times they've used that fusing machine that I urged the council before I got on the city council not to buy it. Sometimes you say going after paper clips, Steve, is not the true answer, but if you've got this box of paper clips, this box of paper clips, that box of paper clips, this box of paper clips, this pile, that pile, that pile, you put them all together and it's like, shit, I could get by with just one box of paper clips. You know what I mean? And also I do kind of agree with Steve. You start out with a small department. You should start with a small price for a department head. But you also have to look at it, it's like, huh. That's why I'm saying no giving any taxpayers money. to nonprofits. You don't pay somebody this amount and then you pay something else for this amount and you call it the same thing. You know, I have... And people still are going to want the best service that we can possibly offer, you know? Be kind of interesting to see how the vote comes out on the school department. I wish them well. I would really like to see the budget pass on the school department. But I don't know how people are going to vote. I was really surprised that I won.

I would say thank you for that, Pat. It's not an easy job.

That's what I'm trying to say. We can all work together and cut things, and sure, there's going to be a lot of people that are going to be PO'd. I can't make them all happy, and I have no intentions on making them all happy.

You know, the lease pieces, I don't know, I was really, especially upon arrival when I saw that all the police had the leased cars and the take-home vehicles. But, you know, and I think I would have opposed that decision when it came forward. Also, I don't think that's, you know, You see some of these areas that really is in, as part of the future increases, the solid waste, as we talked about, that would be a magnitude of, you know, 4x of a savings if we could solve that piece. And honestly, I was looking into this because I like to double check things on, all right, well, when we did the last negotiation with our unions, which I know Councilor Howler and you led each of those pieces of those negotiations. You know, we had some pretty big increases. You know, police are up, I think, 9% a year. The previous collective bargaining increase, you know, over three years, it was a 27% increase over that period of time. We grew up to 4% to 6% for this last round of three increases. There's also a lot of benefits. We see these benefit changes. Those are contractual obligations that would take opening up those to really... get to them. But I was also, you know, double checking these things and gosh, well, you know, it's competitive recruiting environment. And like, what's Bangor do? And like, you look at the Bangor job description for a police officer, and all the bells and whistles are throwing this and that. And, you know, you see, like, they're even offering more generous than ours, because it's a really tough thing to recruit for police and fire. And also I think the issue with cutting those folks especially is the morale in those areas that are absolutely key pieces of our organization. And they have the opportunity if you cut those aspects of police and fire to go to other nearby departments that can't find enough people to sign up for those positions even though they're fairly well paid and they have good equipment and they're offering all these things because they're extremely competitive. The other piece of that is if we create that kind of turnover in the organization, that happens too. We've already invested a ton of money into these organizations and those people and that level of destabilization. I know just on the... the size of government as if we were going to not do any police and fire and just try to cut salaries or maybe we could you know furlough and shut down city hall for a couple weeks can't do that with police and fire obviously but there's just you know you look at these numbers you know the the cost increases are in different areas it's not going to actually save you the huge money in those places And I think there's also – I know it's not popular to talk about equity issues, but a big cut to the general government side and not touching police and fire because of – when we looked at the 2025 wage scales, Sarah was the – first non-union or deputy city manager the first non-union woman on the salary list or the top of that at number 28 so if you cut one side and not cut the other it's effectively a massive decrease to the majority of the women in this organization who are much less paid than the men on on average so i have some And in a place that's already had, like, 50% turnover over a three-year period of time. So it's just getting back to institutional levels. I think we talked about the rowers versus oarsmen or the steersmen. You know, that's not accurate on hiring. There's an addition of a... Of a facilities assistant, that position used to exist in 2019.

They went to a contract model.

That wasn't working out, so that was a savings. The deputy city manager's position used to exist in 2019. The public works director's position used to exist in 2019. The city was really just backfilling very needed positions in the fastest growing city in Maine. Yes, we added a parks and rec director after the parks and rec department pre-funded that the previous year to lessen the financial impact. We didn't add any big amounts of people to that department. It's just the parks and rec director. Roddy's out there working, too. Every single person that's in management is also plowing.

Isn't he also the facilities director or manager as well?

He manages the facilities department as well. Our clerk is also our tax collector.

All three of her.

Yeah, so one of the major, bit largest unions in the state of Maine, their head calls Ellsworth the slashers because there are so many people that are just this slash this. Our public works director is also the wastewater superintendent. Our tax collector is also the clerk. The city manager is also the finance director right now. These departments are oftentimes departments of one. They are not, you know, they are not big departments with tons of cost savings at that level. So, you know, that is kind of where we're at. Should we get to some of the final paper clips, as you've noted, Pat? The final Do I need to stop? Maybe I'll just leave. So this is, after doing one last round with all the departments and one personal round looking through everything, we were able to get the city side as a percent increase to get a little bit lower than the schools, to 7.65%. A lot lower as a dollar figure because, again, that $12 million in city tax contribution to the $16 million. So even though the percent's a little bit lower, the actual dollar figure is much lower. But if you go down to the budget growth trends in the city, it's been lower as a percent each time. They were much lower last cycle.

Can you clarify which line is which?

The teal line is the city and the top darker line is the school. Appreciate that.

I will note that the, you know, last year, you know, with the lower amount of the city side of the schools, you know, a lot of that was... inaccurate revenue forecasting. We had a couple hundred thousand getting clawed back, but we also were just into the first year of the new budgeting system, and we counted on some prior year actuals in the revenues that just didn't come to fruition. I was always a little bit cautious, and I had noted in meetings that the city hired two firefighters, a police officer, a dispatcher, and to be net 0.4 negative. We had a lot of increased revenue sharing. Some of that was true. There was a big state revenue sharing increase last year. But we're kind of making up for some of that this year. That's what I talked about, that revenues being down 5.9%. That's really right-sizing the lack of accurate revenue forecasting from the previous year. It's a big part of why this jump this year is bigger than the previous year. But that's the... The general trends, if you want to go back down to the distributions, this is kind of where the dollar figures kind of come in. You can see on the municipal side just shy of 12 million, the school side 16.6 million, the county side up the largest percent. As noted before, cities and towns across Maine are facing some pretty substantial increases. A big part of that, as we just talked about, was a lot of these huge increases in gas prices this year, huge increases in salt prices, huge increases in health insurance. We're not the only city that is being faced with a lot of these increases. They keep going down, so we've, you know, to kind of pull under the 8% threshold, you know, detailed, they keep coming down, actually, to the plus-minuses.

Yes, this is my question.

Oh, you don't have the plus, minus?

You mean the adjustments?

Yeah, the adjustments. Oh, sorry. The fire department got us a bit, and most of these were in employee appreciation lines. That's not non-essential. I had something in my budget on That was part of my contract, which I didn't ask for, but it was in there, about $2,000 for hospitality to take people and others out to eat and staff, and I did that a lot for my department this year, but I can live without taking any staff out.

Ashley, can you zoom in so that we can read the adjustment description?

thank you that's dropping a lot of folks is not essential training to effectively zero and kind of all citywide trainings for departments that's really hard thing to do because a lot of our staff is so new that recently in their positions that having them have some training in those those areas would be nice but we got up you know had everything we can to see that it could be remotely discretionary. He had a resources budget that had the most of that. Their legal was a little bit over, because we're also, some of these things, we're looking at the year-to-date actuals and being like, OK, the legal isn't nearly as much as we thought it was going to be. Highway, again, did some kind of true costing on their year-to-dates and rebids. Most of that came in the other way, which we already added to the budget as we were doing the line by lines. Their latest rounds of things, they were able to get about $27,000. The clerks, about $1,700. And DAX, similar things, you can keep going down. A tiny bit in the Public Works administrative budget. The comms budget we cut out. We're not going to do the website upgrade. I think our website is not local friendly. It's got a lot of needs. We get a ton of complaints from citizens and customers about the quality of the website and its accessibility and use and information and how to find things. We're going to need to do that at some period in time, but this wasn't the year. library. I told them not to do that, but I guess they came in as well with what they could find. The external organizations are at the We did put in... That 10%? A 10% cut into the external organizations, nonprofits, you know, considering those going through every other single department.

That's the commissions as well? You say external, but it's commissions?

Yeah, so... Yeah, so there's a cut to the... It's not eliminating it, I know, Pat, which you've... But I hate to do that. Those folks as well. It's not going to save the budget here. And they... Like general government, I've had the least amount of increases. Not the city's contributed to those organizations year by year. It's been effectively flat at least the three years that I've been here.

What percentage of our total budget is what we give to nonprofits and externals?

I think the name is still misleading because the commissions are internal.

I don't know if this is a big word, but when I was in other budget proceedings that I've done in other towns, when you're doing... You've got to do a justification. So you want quantifiable results from year to year. They keep asking for more. If they're not giving us more services, better memberships to lower-priced memberships, discounting the memberships for children, for recreational services, or... Better bus fees for city residents, giving them a discount. Go on and on. You have to go look and push it. Quantifiable results. You want the best possible service from the non-profits that you can get.

Well, they came in and presented us.

No, I listened. I really did. I didn't see any... The bus service... Yes, I can see that was very valuable, yes. But just because you asked for amount doesn't mean you're gonna get it.

It is something also interesting because I understand all the external organizations aren't included in this chapter, but there was a third drop, a third percent drop in requests. I think there was like a drop in overall total requests from external organizations from last year, right? Yeah, it was considerable.

So we're already giving less, and now we're going to give 10% less here. Yeah.

And, yeah, particularly against a lot of, like.

And overall from the subcommittee meeting from what they requested versus what the subcommittee agreed and brought to council. And then with this 10%, I think an overall cut from all of the external organizations, like $80,000 or $90,000 overall from the total asks is what we cut.

Mr. and Mrs. Ellsworth are perfectly capable of donating their own dollars to their own causes. It doesn't need to be in their tax bill.

But doesn't the town also ask that if you are going to ask for general assistance for any form of assistance, that you would have gone to some of these groups before so you can better, so this way...

Yeah, that's what Tina has been doing. So she's been sending her clients to external organizations before using taxpayers' money that's in the budget.

That's fine. There's always going to be the Salvation Army and the rest of them out there. You know what I mean? There's a lot more nonprofits out there that don't even go to municipalities to ask for help or ask for you to pay for their services rendered.

I'll just note that communities all around us, all around the state, provide money to nonprofits. You can go to look at any town meeting warrant, any city, other cities. This is not something just Ellsworth does. So I think, obviously, we disagree, Pat. I think these are very good. We can agree to disagree. Yeah, and I just want to note for myself that I think this is a good use of taxpayer dollars because those organizations are assisting Ellsworth residents and they're taking a burden off of the city that you would otherwise potentially have to spend through needing more police officers, needing more fire, you know, like there's, you know, so we can disagree. I just, and the fact that we've already reduced it as much as we have from last year, now we're saying another 10%. I hope people, some people will see that as we're taking, we're trying to reduce the tax burden as much as possible in every one, but I'm not going to agree to any budget that cuts all our non-profit spending and, you know, and we can disagree on that and if, you know, and that is what it is. I think this 10% on top of all the other cuts is, I don't like it, but I'm, you know, I want to find ways to minimize the tax burden as much as possible. That's my two cents.

Well, like I said, Mr. and Mrs. Ellsworth, they're pitching the pennies and trying to make the mortgage payments, pay for the gas, everything else. Those that are retired, they do pay. and donate to whatever causes they want.

The OpenGov contract, which we didn't have for a lot of our digital services, which we noticed wasn't split between departments yet. The added interest, that was a little bit of the positive. We double-checked all of our revenues. Some of the revenues increased. The fee schedule revenue increases. Oh, we also added... $10,000 for a recount or a recall. We already spent about $10,000 this year on the additional recount. I know it's not a comfortable topic for probably this council to discuss here, but if there was to be a recall, it would cost money, and we already experienced a recount with the cost of money. So I think we just, for the time being, talked to Tina in our elections group We have to budget that, you know, a recall could happen there or another recount could happen and it's there. It's happened once already this last year. Maybe there'll be a time when the city is not facing recalls and recounts of elections. But, you know, and that could be an under, too. If there's a recall, there would be the... election for the recall that would be ten thousand dollars and then there'd be if those counselors were gone then we'd have to look at another election that might be able to be aligned with November Tina from our team is looking into it and if that could happen but there's some specific natures of the Charter if that happened on how that that second election might actually trigger two. So we could be in the position of doing, in a single year, one, two, three, four, six elections. You can see actually all this stuff in front of you right now. This room is an election site. And so not only do we do six elections, but we have to disrupt city business pretty dramatically, not just to prepare for all these elections, but our building itself in our auditorium, in the city clerk's office area, for early voting, for here. Those are additional costs that have to be borne by the city, and we have to prepare for them as if they're going to happen. I think it's something we need to look at process-wise. I think it'll be probably an uncomfortable conversation. I don't think the recall processes anticipate the early voting piece and how that requirement compresses the time frame for turning an election around to be able to actualize that. you know, confident we'll be able to do without any changes to make it happen and stay in. Um, if it does move forward, um, there's also another piece on if my two city councils remain, um, there's not effectively enough counselors to certify an election piece, but we'll, I think we'll have to, um, if the recall does move forward, we'll have to talk as a council to clean up those pieces of the charter so that, you know, um, if that were to happen, there could be a process with only two counselors remaining that would still be allowed to vote to certify an election etc so there'd be a legal new city council seated or so you don't have to like redo the whole charter ask the state for reincorporation because because nobody's allowed to certify or hold a majority in the council anymore but we'll get to those other process pieces probably later on but i do think we need to budget an additional ten thousand dollars um for a recall or a recount because we've already experienced a net deficit on those those areas election rentals i think tina found some some savings in there um IT professional services went down. They'll hold off on a few things in some of their trainings. Just pretty much everybody's just, you know, unless it's to a core certification, not attending any trainings this year. Some of their capital outlays for some of their minor equipment changes and purchases that weren't like the servers and things that we absolutely need. That's it. That got us a little bit below the school, but also it's kind of a microcosm for, yeah, you gather all the paperclips, you get that amount, gets it down about 0.5, 0.7%.

But now we need to talk about a fire department need that, you know, will potentially blow that all out of the water.

So, Scott, I know Scott and I had a conversation. We've got some – I'll let him give some more background. But I originally thought this was just going to be moving money around, but it looks like it might cost more money. So I'll leave it to the chief to explain.

Before we jump into that, I just have one question. It appears that the consumer price index at the end of April was 3.8%. My question, and I guess it depends on what site you look at, so maybe I'm giving you bad information. My question is, you're sitting at 8% right there. Do you have that spreadsheet that you could plug that in like you did in the years past? What number would get us to 4% is my question. Is that a big deal?

What number would get us next to 4%?

If we got the increase to 4%, what's the total of budget amount? There was a spreadsheet last year that... It's not available. Okay, well, I can figure it out the long way. That's fine. Don't mess with it.

Nate from IT will be able to give you that.

I can figure that out just from that. That's no problem. Sorry, Scott.

Yeah, I'd say, yeah, inflation is definitely at 4%. It's one of the tough things. A lot of the things the city uses is not anywhere near 4%. Gas, we use a lot of gas, 25%. Maybe I'm taking that.

No, the consumer price index. She's getting it there. She's playing the game. A million bucks.

Charlie, last year the city portion was a 0.4% increase.

Yeah, and you've got to figure this out, too, because you've got to pull down the school's 8%, so that essentially the city budget has to be at 0% in order to pull down the school's 2-4. Actually, you need to go even lower than that, because if you don't require any cuts in the school, yeah, you can't bring down a school 8% for $16 million by pulling down $11 million.

It's the top number. It's going so quick, I couldn't.

If you want the total tax bill plus the schools.

It's the bottom number. There's got to be a million bucks. Total.

I thought we were doing the top number.

That's a billion. That was like a hundred. We just have to cut a million dollars, $100 million. There you go. We'll be fine.

There you go. Okay.

That would mean we'd have to be negative 1.33 municipal budget.

The city side of the budget will need to be negative 1% in order to pull down the school's 8%. Again, the city side is 12 million, the school side is 16.6 million. To pull an 8% increase on the school's $16 million by using the short end of the tail,

You answered my question. I just wondered what that number was to get that in line with the CPI. Thank you.

I'm hoping that it stays there. Like I said, the city's kind of uniquely for some of these health insurance, gas, salt, steel. Unfortunately, I think cities and towns are like uniquely prone to that 4% for inflationary items because we buy so much steel, buy so much health insurance, you know, buy so much salt. It's like inflation is a tough thing in these categories. If it was different categories, it's one of the things I want to look at over a long term. Like, are we really going to look at 17% in health insurance inflation costs? Are we really going to be looking at it?

We don't need to spend the amount of money on calcium. cars treating roads in the wintertime. Calcium should be a no-brainer. Cut that right out. Minimum amount of calcium. It's not good for the environment. It's not good for the equipment. It's not good for people's cars.

I think they used the reason they could be wrong, but that when it drops below, too much below freezing, the salt doesn't actually clear the road, so you need the liquid calcium added in so that it can drop the melting temperature even more.

All right, Scott, what do you got for us?

I'd like to say good news and bad news. So when we started this budget cycle, obviously I came to you guys. I took my operational budget and I pretty much put it at all zeros, no increases. The only increases I had were up in the professional services that was related directly to the cost of overtime on the fire department. During this budget cycle, I had one of my employees come back from boot camp and then get told, as a reserve member, he was being deployed. He is now deployed, effective now, for the next 400 days. So he's gone. Where? Where? Somewhere in the Mideast. I don't know where. In the same aspect, I wound up with two employees that wound up with non-job related injuries. they're going to be out for anywhere from six to eight months. So I'm effectively down three employees right off the start going into the new fiscal year. When you equate that to what I have for staff downstairs, that is pretty much an entire shift. And I have another employee that's potentially going out in December for a hip replacement. I run five guys per shift when we're at full staff. Lately, we've been, with sick and vacation times, we were averaging four per shift. That's our minimum staffing by policy. We don't drop below four people, mostly because the ambulance has to have two people on it all the time. The engine should have three people on it, which is why we run five people, but we've been running two and two, just trying to maintain minimum staffing. So in order to cover some of that gap over this period of time, we have two temporary full-time employees that are going to be coming on board. It winds up being a cost neutral when it comes to their base salaries because the gentleman who's on deployment makes more in the guard than he does here, so it's cost neutral on his salary for the temporary employee that's going to be coming in. Now, this isn't including a benefit side of things. This is just the base salary. This particular firefighter medic makes more than the temporary full-time employee that would be coming in. But we're not paying that paramedic right now while he's deployed. The second individual that's on injury leave, he is actually only being paid four hours a week. because he has an income protection plan that's in place and or PFML. So those are covered there also. So we're only paying him four hours a week of his salary. So the two employees on the base salary side, it's the same as if those two people were there. Now the problem that comes up is we have a discrepancy based on past practice and they conflict with each other. The problem is, is in the past, prior to my coming here, we did not give temporary full-time employees part-time benefits. Since I've been here, because the personnel ordinance says part-time employees are eligible for part-time benefits, temporary full-time employees were given the same option. because they're actually working more hours than the part-timer is. So this is where, in the past week, the human resource director and I have been having this discussion. How are we going to follow this? Because all of a sudden we got hit with these three people being out of work while we were in the middle of a budget process, and this was unbudgeted on the benefit side of things for HR. So now the question is, is, Do these temporary full-time employees, do we budget in to this FY27 budget benefits for them? Because they're going to be here a minimum of six months. One of them is going to be here for at least a year. They'll be working the 42-hour work week the same as everybody else downstairs. They're not part-time employees working less than 35 hours. So this is what the question is as far as the budgeting process is do we do the benefits for the temporary full-time employees or do we not do it and we just work off their base salary where it's a net zero as far as the employees who are not working. So I kind of gave the two options in this memo. I apologize for the short notice on this. I apologize for the short notice on the memo. But I got told at 3 o'clock this afternoon I had to come visit you guys. So I really put these two options out to you as far as the budgeting process, as to what direction you would like us to take as far as budgeting or not budgeting those benefits.

I have a question, Scott. Excuse me. You have two people already in mind? Correct. Okay. I know in my experience hiring, sometimes people don't need the benefits.

Correct.

So what is your sense of their personal needs if they'll need health insurance and stuff? So we don't know yet. That seems to be the big one.

We don't know yet because we haven't sent the offer letters to them. They've been through the testing process. Okay. She felt we couldn't move forward until we had an answer on this because this is an unbudgeted, the benefits side of things was unbudgeted for FY27. So she was hesitant to have me put out the letters until we had this answered.

I haven't had the chance to really read through this memo. Can we break it down to... So the two options are either we don't account for any benefits in the budget because we don't know what, if any, we will pay out.

Correct.

Or we just say we make the assumption that we're going to pay them, provide these benefits. Correct. What's the total number on the benefits?

So what she sent to me when she put all the salaries, would you have 181? It was 181. I think when you combine base salary and benefits together for the two employees, one here for six months, one here for a year, it wound up being $181,000.

But their salary is covered.

Their salary is covered. So it would actually be around $89,000. So the net is $84,000.

The net is $84,000. Okay. Yeah. And that's maybe, right?

That's a maybe. And I think, you know, my discussions with her is, you know, do we put that in there to cover the maybe?

Is that what? I don't know if you checked the box.

I did not check the box.

Do you want to see it checked?

Yeah, check it. So that's $85,000 just the benefits. That's what it would be at.

All right. Wow, $85,000 is that big a hit? Yeah. Will you know, Scott, excuse me, before the council meeting when we're going to be voting on this?

As soon as I can get the letters out, I would know whether they needed them or not.

There's the option of splitting the difference since we don't know and there are two of them. What would it be with half if we?

I guess the other question is, and I guess this is like option three, do we fund the full-time, the one that's going to be here for 12 months plus, fund that one, and the other one is here for six months and we not fund that? I don't know if that's going to put us in a predicament where we're funding one and not funding the other based on duration of time on their assignment.

So I'm looking across the chart at the benefits, and some of these aren't optional.

Correct.

I assume SS is Social Security, or is it something of the equivalent? What is SS?

No, that's Social Security. That's part of that FICA. Medicare. All the FICA stuff.

So we don't have choices on that, or paid medical leave. I don't know what RHS is.

That's retirement health.

So the only variable is the health insurance.

I'd question the retirement health because they're not eligible for state retirement as temporary employees. So RHS is part of their temporary, is part of their main retirement system. PFML, that's required through state. HRA, it's part of the health retirement. They get a reimbursement account. That's part of their health benefits.

So if they didn't get health benefits, they wouldn't get HR?

Correct.

Correct.

I can't fathom having a full-time firefighter and not have health insurance. So, again, I don't know how you budget when we don't know, but.

And like I said, I don't know what their needs are until I give them an offer letter and we bring them in the door. I can't give that number. So, you know, that's the big gap question is, you know, what do we do going for FY27? Do we budget and plan for it? or do we wind up in a shortfall because now they need it, or do we just not fund it and not offer it?

And then you're just down two staff.

Well, I mean, the staff would still be here. They just wouldn't be funded their health, the part-time benefits, the health insurance and stuff like that. So the city would still be responsible as the city share the required benefits.

Social security, family medical leave.

Yeah. Could we back up just a little bit? Am I hearing that there's a pool of people that are available for such a situation?

So every year, the fire department, even if we don't have an opening, the fire department always does annual testing, a hiring process, so that we have a pool of applicants in case we have sudden need openings that are gonna be long-term. It's kind of our way of protecting ourselves because we struggle so hard, just like every other department throughout the state, we struggle with hiring. We had this hiring process and only two people only two people were eligible to even go through the testing process. Now we had, I think we had eight applications, but only two were qualified. We still tested them and everything, but this is something we do every year, every spring, so that if something like this arises. And we utilized this last year. Last year we hired two temporary employees and part of that hiring process that happened for FY26, those people transferred over into those open slots because they had already been tested and vetted through the process. So we try to make sure that every year we have a list established of eligible applicants so we don't have to go through this cycle every time there's an open of trying to run applications and testing.

And the two you did last year? Correct. What was the benefit situation there?

So they both were offered benefits. One came in as a part-time employee. and the other one came in as a temporary full-time employee. Both of them were offered part-time benefits when they came in.

And is that what you're considering? So would these positions, you may have said this, but would they both get part-time benefits?

Correct.

Okay, so this number we're looking at is if they both receive part-time benefits. Correct. And that's our best practice.

It has been over the past few years. Yes. Now, like I said, I've gone back to previous to me, which is five years and they had brought temporary full time people in and did not offer them benefits. Um, the contract doesn't stipulate it. It's not that that part's not covered in the contract. I've been through it with a fine tooth comb. I've also been through the personnel manual and temporary full-time employee is the one position in the entire personnel manual that is not recognized in terms of benefits part-time employee is a full-time employee is but that intermediate step of temporary full-time is not is not addressed as to what what they're offered or what they're capable of receiving through the city so Like you said, over the past couple of years, we have offered them the part-time benefits. From our perspective, it made sense.

What if one of these guys or gals gets hurt while working for the city and they don't have insurance?

If they get hurt while they're on the job, they're still covered by the city's policy.

to get herd at home that's on their dime.

Correct.

So again, the reason why I'm here tonight is just overall, I think between myself and HR, we just need to know how we want to move forward with the budget as far as do you want us to fund that budget line and increase her budget line that covers the expenses for these two people.

Can you cut elsewhere in your budget to cover it?

I have literally cut down, even right down to this last exercise here this morning, I cut an additional $2,000 out of my budget from the operational side of things. I've zeroed out lines. I've zeroed out lines and I... I was budget neutral going across everything. You look at my budget, you'll see they were all zeros. The only increase on my operational line was the gas, the fuel expense line, which was increased when all the other department's lines were increased.

And would there be any, are there any other employees that don't have these benefits?

No. All full-time employees are offered these benefits. My part-time employees are offered part-time benefits, and my volunteers, their paper call, so they're not afforded any other benefits.

I would just note, I think this is, like I said, a microcosm for the budget as a whole in terms of just 12 different departments in general government trying to cut every single thing we possibly could so that we could pull back some of the increases to get under the schools increase. There's an incredible amount of paperclip looking that went into that. And one staff shift in public safety and paying for benefits on part-time employees. It blows that entire exercise out, and we're back over. I'd also note that this guy's absolutely right. He didn't ask for anything new. It's really just this is the true costing of what this department, we've had a lot of half firefighters added, and even without this, the fire department is up $309,000 from the previous year. that's just the current that's the collective bargaining increases that were negotiated and the true cost over time the true cost of overtime the true cost of the that's not adding new firefighters the fire department is up three hundred thousand dollars and this is going to be you know an additional amount for these part-time If I'm going to try to cover that to get back below, it's going to have to be cost of living adjustments for general government. I can't touch a collective bargaining, so I can't decrease the salaries of any of the unions. It's police, fire, highway, clerks. Not that there's a lot of money in the clerk's office even. I wanted to get that union piece. So that just really kind of shows how difficult this piece is. even a small change in the fire department or some of these other departments the magnitude of the cuts you have to make on general government and that cost of living increase for the employees that are already here to drop it but they're already below their union counterparts again that is a cut on the predominantly female portion of the workforce um to make up for a class increase in employees and i will say right now

Right now, we are holding all the shifts. We're not allowing them to bring in overtime, to bring them up above minimum staffing. We're supposed to be at five per shift. That's what council authorized the fire department to be at was five per shift. Minimum staffing by policy is four. If there's been vacancies and they're still at four, then we don't bring back overtime. But right now, we've got too many employees out now, long term, that that's not a reality anymore. I've got to be able to get these shifts to at least four.

So one question that I have, and probably you don't have this answer, but I just thought it might shed a little light. Last year's budget, We're 11 months into a 12-month budget. Where do you stand now in your budget? Are you over budget, under budget? Where do you stay, or do you have even that answer?

Actually, I just went through. I'm going to be budget positive this year.

What is budget positive?

So I'm not, even though, if you take a look right now at all my lines, there are lines that are in the negative, but when you balance out my entire budget, I'm actually going to be on the plus side. I'm not going to be in the red.

So you're, I guess, in simple terms, because I'm a simple guy, if your budget was $1,000 of expenditures, okay, Um, it looks like this year your expenditures would be $995. Is that, I mean, I'm just trying, I'm just trying to figure out negative positive things. So, so there's not a huge surplus. It doesn't look like, um, that you have from last year.

No, this year, while I am going to be positive, I am one failure away from being on the wrong side.

That was where I was going. I just wondered how close we – so credit to you and your department for hitting it so close. And the reason I ask that question is – Okay. Has the practice been that you come in 50 grand under? So is there 50 grand there that we might find or something? But that's the only reason I'm trying to get to that.

I guess, and I'll let the city manager address this too, I mean, based on what I have remaining... you know, is it something that can be encumbered? But we can't encumber, obviously, full-time salaries.

Two problems with this. One is charter-related. The other one is the fire department was over last year.

Correct.

Yeah, so the fire department was over. The police and previous years we had, like, you know, this was an audit finding, like, multiple hundreds of thousands of dollars over in public safety cost overruns and departments that You know, they weren't up to date in the audience, and that's one of the big changes we made this year was if you're going to go over, you're going to come in front of city council, we're going to do it in the time that it happens, and you have to, for the charter, transfer money from another department. We've done that a couple times thus far. It looks like, to your point, I do have the exact figures here to date. It's 2,387,891 as of I think two days ago. You got 2,643,000 as the full budget. But as you noted, there's gonna be a few more things that hit there and you'll probably come in just level we think the police might be a bit over. So that might have to, we can close out the year's budget. So this is the first problem is there's gonna be overages potentially on the police. And a couple other areas that are very, very small, but it seems like that piece, so we kind of need to keep that so you can close out the budgets. And what we're going to, you know, that's a big change for our finance teams is, you know, we want to live to these audit findings and make sure that never happens again. So we're going to need that if you have $50,000 to spare. The second problem is you can't encumber Operational costs like this. Capital is the only thing that's allowed to be encumbered in the budget per the charter. So even if there was, you know, you could transfer it within the budget year to line out another department, but we can't say, let's just forward. I think it's actually a mistake from previous years on, like, It's one of the budget problems this year. We pre-funded Parks and Rec by 49,000 in the previous fiscal cycle. We half-funded the Parks and Rec director this year, but it wasn't until we were realizing, like, okay, we can't carry over the 49,000 that was put into the general fund for Parks and Rec director in FY25 into FY26. We got a little lucky because there was some staff turnover in the facilities area, and we took a long time to kind of get the new director on board, so it kind of worked out that we could pay the Parks and Rec salary with some of those overruns, but we can't do that here.

Just for clarity, I wasn't suggesting any encumbrance. What I was thinking is simply how tight has your budget been in the last few years, and it looks like it's right on the crest there, so we don't dare gamble here is what I was saying. I agree.

I will admit 100%. Prior to this year, it's been extremely difficult. We had a lot of things happen over the past several years. This year really tightened down and been very, very strict about a lot of things this year. Uncomfortably strict, but it had to happen. And the same thing with the FY27 budget. It's not the budget that I wanted, but it's what had to happen.

Yeah, that's why that $300,000 over the previous year, it's really just true costing the group that's down there. Now, granted, they've been adding two-year, two-year, two-year, the overtimes. Actually, we've been talking with the team about we might need to look into some longer term analysis of would hiring more to reduce the overtimes, because you look in these budgets on the overtimes. That's 174,000 in payroll overtime, 160,000 in overtime sick, 156,000 in OT vacation. 67,000 OT holiday, 50,000 OT training. So that's a lot of the time. Can you work on the overtime? Same thing in the police, has a similar heavy level of overtime. A lot of the stuff is built into the contracts on overtime on non-worked hours, meaning like you're You take three, six days, you put on a shift. When you get back, those days were counted as worked. So now you're on a shift, and that's an OT time. But those are in the collective bargaining agreements. Unless they were modified, they're not changeable, which is what makes.

But if we hired more and like,

Maybe we could work on that over time so we wouldn't have to, when people go on sick and their vacation or this happens, you wouldn't have to have as much. But we're not going to be able to come up with a true plan. As I've noted, too, we've hired a lot more people in the fire department. We've hired a lot more people in the police department. And the overtime lines have not been going down the last three to five years. So when you add an officer, too,

that the addition itself creates more over time so we really got to analyze how to figure that out over the long term and if there is a higher more to have less over time and have it be budget neutral option well I think in this situation as much as I don't like seeing that number go up I don't think it would be prudent fiscally responsible for us to I mean I don't know if we're gonna offer and if we've been offering folks in these positions the last five years health benefits and then not do it here because it you know I understand it's because they come in because they come in under the wire I think the right thing to do in my opinion is account for those benefits in the budget and as much as I hate it as much as it you know flies in the face of all the work you guys have been doing I just I mean I don't feel comfortable I mean, it's up to you. And if these guys come in in the next two weeks and they don't, for whatever reason, they don't need benefits, then we can account for it. But I think as of right now, we should budget for it. And it is what it is. Unless we're going to say, no, we can't hire these guys at all. And then that's the... And I don't think... Unless anyone here wants to say that, then I think this is the way we've got to do it.

I want to add to that that... They're called temporary, but this is six months and 12 months. This means that these people are going to be quitting jobs to come take these jobs, and they need to be. I mean, health insurance is just a basic. The other thing I guess is a question to you, Charlie. We know that this percentage increase is one part of the formula. that determines property taxes and what happens with them. And how close are we to knowing there's two parts of the valuation increases? One is existing, which is where we've got the contractors, like how much is each person's house going to go up? But do you have a sense, you've been talking about the valuation increase for new construction that will be coming online to help absorb some of these increases? Because that doesn't yet mean

the increase to property taxes that's the that's just the levy that's a piece both the school the county and the city right cost again there will be a valuation change i've been told it could be three percent just across the board not targeting specific areas i've been burned when i've said five percent across the board and it ended up being 31 for here in 18 and as we've noted before the city council and city manager have no control over those determinations.

But what about the new valuations that you've been talking about?

New valuations is different. I did do a study of all of the permits in Ellsworth going back to the late 90s. It was a big enough data set that you could kind of analyze permits by type, growth, valuation. And then in all transparency, I used a couple different AI tools to run regressionary models on growth in the city over that time, because it was a large enough longitudinal data set to analyze all the new growth to be like, hey, how much new, not just valuation, but the new, and that was about, when you do a four year moving average, you're looking at $500,000 on, you know, That Hilton Home to Suites, you know, that's $20 million plus, I think, property. That's going to produce a lot of new tax revenues, but it's not 100%. The assessment cuts off on April 1st. So, you know, how the assessors are going to value that new hotel and the taxes we need to commit for it, maybe they put it at 70%. It's $13 million. Maybe they put it at 25%.

Okay, so it's not at occupancy. It's the percentage on April 1st?

Yeah, it's the percentage on April 1st. So that's...

Sorry, but as we're struggling looking at that number, just remember that's not how much property taxes are going to go up. That's the increase in the budget through all of these conversations, but the valuations... And this is, again, with a big hedge, it is a regressionary analysis.

Regressions basically look at past growth and try to predict futures. And it's a big enough data set where I feel like a decent confidence interval, it's about $500,000. each year in just new and this is actually had an original version of this doom or boom and gloom which was 500 000 and wow like what cities would kill for this much building 50 new houses and new hotels and new this and new that that doesn't cover the public safety increase in a single but i i need you to back up you're not talking a 500 000 increase in valuation you're talking

an increase of $500,000 of property taxes paid by the new properties.

Correct. The expansion of the tax base on new residential commercial growth. That's $500,000. So you can put in...

I was just going to say, can we plug that in? Knowing that this is theoretical, but that there's some logic to it. It's not pulling it out of your hat. That if that $500,000 in additional property taxes paid by new properties... Look at that. Oh, wow.

Make that happen, Charlie.

It's also the importance of keeping the gas on economic development because you have that. And if you don't keep that going and you get into a Millinocket situation, you've got no expansion. Your only option at that point is to crank the tax rates on the people who are there to maintain services or massively cut services, which creates a vicious cycle.

And we have Millinocket and East Millinocket have no business in all kinds of sheep housing.

They're coming back around, but it's been a long time. Go to Old Town.

Old Town is another example of something. Old Town is another example. You go to that downtown. All kinds of cheap housing.

I went to Merida, the main real estate development association. I had a breakfast this morning at Bangor. The state economist was there and talking about general trends. Long story short, the thing is, hey, if you want economic development and growth, you need to develop housing. And it's just all the stuff that we're working on. To your point, Charlie, it's that if we want to grow the tax base, need economic development we need these projects we're working on to bring in more housing to have the people that they can then afford to live here and work here and have enough staff to staff these businesses so they move here and have that cycle of economic development so it's a little somewhat tangential to this conversation but um i agree with you well it's in line it's in line with it

I believe the school superintendent also stressed enrollment was down, so if people could stay here and be able to enroll their kids, that would also help the school budget without the state doing this reformulation. Everything here is interconnected.

And if you're done, I want to make sure, Ashley, because I can't read the labels on the numbers. The numbers are great, lovely big. 3.99 is what, with that 500,000, is the municipal impact. Below that is municipal, county, and school. So that would be the overall increase. And again, that's only with the $500,000 increase valuation. And we have no control over the roller coaster.

I think that's a four or five year moving average on the regression. So, you know. But sometimes less, sometimes more. Last year's a really unique example. Larry and I were just talking about this. Versant built a $55 million substation that added $500,000 in taxes from that one property last year. $500,000 from a single property. And that's like a substation. It's not like some grand new business. But you have enough housing growth. What did they just have, an announcement that... $6 million they just bought the main mill mall for, and they're reinvesting in that. At some point in time, that'll probably be worth it. So that'll be more valuation growth, the new Dysarts, two new tractor dealerships. One seems to be almost fully complete. The other one seems to be somewhat in development. We've got hundreds and hundreds of housing units online to move forward, but we're still trying to get them over the line to help potentially with future credit enhancement agreements, because that's the secret sauce is if you can get that housing growth, not just for your property tax base increase, but so people can afford to live here.

And one of the other gloom parts of Ellsworth is

the 9,000 residents that live here, and a pretty substantial commercial tax base, I should say, so that's very helpful, but the gloom piece is you got thousands and thousands of people coming here every day to go to work, myself included, that I'm using your roads, I'm using all your infrastructure, and then you got four million tourists that are driving down the Bayside Road, You know, that's not even a built road. It was never meant for any of that type of thing. So you have this like the total. Yeah, it's just this piece of like how much you can work.

It has to be chaos.

It's it's it's tough. Yeah.

Well, you don't go.

Yeah.

So when do you anticipate that we'll know the total valuation with the updates?

when we get our tax bill. Yeah. That's almost realistic.

Yeah. Well, that was, we're trying to make that not happen anymore.

Yeah. Yeah, I'll get you that. I don't have that. And I'm pretty sure they're working very hard to make sure it doesn't happen.

Oh, yeah. By July 1st, I can say.

But it won't be by the council meeting, I guess. That's when we'll know what those numbers are going to be.

No, I don't think it will be by the council meeting.

Can there be an estimate so we know what we're doing?

Of the new valuation increase? I can look into some of those questions. We have a check-in, I think, on Monday.

Great. So we'll ask again.

Can you do it in bold italic underline? Tell them we said hi and we'd like this information. But again, the whole concept though of the increases that we're looking at, so much of it beyond. our control because of the contracts and necessary increases. But the valuation is the other piece. And that's to your point about we're investing in making it so people do build stuff here. And to be able to see that as we're making the final decision is going to be helpful.

Good conversation.

Yeah.

Yeah, this has been really good.

Yeah, I'm sorry. Amy's so much better than me. She's like such a good PowerPoint in the general piece, and I'm just like such a data nerd and memos and super deep dives into things that I've learned.

No, don't apologize. It's good.

As someone who studied as an engineer, that approach is not a bad thing. Everyone has their own strengths.

Yeah, and I'm tired. I've just, you know, been doing a lot lately. That was not anticipated. not having a finance director, but all the other fun things that have been dropping on my plate lately. That's why they call it work.

It's not supposed to be all that fun. One old shop foreman I used to work for said, Stop acting so happy. We'll cut your pay. I don't like working here.

If it was fun, you'd have to pay admission. So there's no other department heads coming to talk with us that was on the agenda?

No, just got everybody else.

And I realize you did not set out to do that.

You're the department head. I should note, I know Steve or Pat, what were your thoughts on the fire department's piece?

Say it again.

What were your thoughts on the fire department's part-time benefits and no benefits?

My feeling is basically the feeling that you need to go in planning for the worst. And beyond that, it's a great time to...

again those people may never leave here they may become permanent fixtures you know and that's you know anybody who's working with me if you you're a volunteer here you're a part-time employee you're a temporary full-time employee you're as valuable to me as my career staff is downstairs because at any given opportunity i can turn that switch on and you're the next person that's on the floor And most of these guys downstairs, unless we push them out the door, they're not looking to go anywhere else. They came here because they wanted to be here. We had people leave the city of Bangor to come here to be full-time employees. So it's one of those rare things where they're vested, as long as we treat them correctly, they're vested for 25 years. So volunteer part-time, temporary, full-time. They're valuable to me. Every minute that they give me, they're valuable.

And I think health insurance from the start is how to honor that.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, it's an investment. I mean, even if they don't stay with me or they revert back down to part-time, It's not like they're, you know, my employees aren't making $100,000 a year. They're getting close because of the overtime that's there, which is what we're trying to remedy on the grand scheme of things. They get paid well for what they do, but they're not out, you know, they're here to make a living. They enjoy what they do. And, you know, my job is to make sure they have what they need. and the day they walk through the door.

Well, these are the folks, if my car flips over and I need something to save my life, these are the folks that are doing that, so we've got to treat them right.

I think I'll put that into the...

Sorry, Charlie.

No, as I said, I, you know... I think it's important to talk about where the costs are. We just saw it. I think that's what I said. This is a microcosm. You had that amount of benefits. These two folks come in, I think it's the right thing to do, which are all the points you made about having the fire department. To make up for that, to get it lower, we have to cut pretty much every non-union employee's cost of living entirely in order to make up for just that addition, which would obviously have a pretty dramatic effect on them around the organization. These are the types of pieces where if you're trying to to cover these increases with the smaller size of the city government. That's like the pressures for me. I just, I got, it's not, but it seems like there's, you know, obviously we don't have the full council here. We'll pencil this one in and any other piece. If a councilor wants to take this out and, you know, we're going to put it in, we'll actually send around the change logs. If a councilor just let us know, and then you'll have to vote at the end of the meeting to, take out that line item majority of the council would like to do that they can see I'm always just we're trying to read the tea please put the changes in here at the final budget meeting to your point on next steps with the commitment as well we'll get some follow-up on what that would be. We have the school budget validation vote on this coming Tuesday. So if that doesn't move through, that would essentially pause this project entirely, and then we are gonna have to go back to the drawing board. Not just from the school side, but of course I would have to say the city side as well. I think that would be, we would have to do that. We wouldn't have to, I guess you should say, but I think we would want to. So we'll kind of see on that piece, that might dictate that portion of the meeting. Then there's the commitment, we'll try to get some of the answers on if we do have the new valuation on new businesses, new commercial development, new residential development, how much additional tax revenue that might kick off. And then the budget resolutions meeting in June. And then, yeah, we're gonna try to get that, the commitment will, once it's finalized in the valuation pieces, we're also gonna send out a lot of notifications of here's the assessed value changes. so people have a little bit of advance notice this time around, that the valuation changes have happened, and this is what your valuation change has been, and then getting the commitment done, the taxes sent out, and then starting the new fiscal cycle, and honestly, with the new finance director coming in, really working on the reconciliation, a lot of the blocking and tackling, I know there's A lot of other noise out there right now. I know the city staff is really laser focused on doing very difficult jobs and coming to work today and every day doing amazing things for the city of Ellsworth. They're an incredible, hardworking group of people to be with. I'm very fortunate, even though this process has been long, it's also gotten to let me get to know all these groups from a very micro level and Any city manager that has had to do this three times in a row, it's probably not too typical, especially for a city of our size. Thank you to the team, thank you to the council for all these workshops.

I have one last weird question for the chief. Why are we paying health insurance on a person who is deployed? How come that savings isn't shown? Sorry, we were almost out the door.

No, you're fine. You bring up a good question. That wasn't, with the information that was relayed to us, that wasn't really portrayed in that part of it. You are correct. So with that particular individual,

Oh, I was really hoping that we could just shift that cost over to one of the new features. I really tried to get $25,000.

She and I actually did have that discussion because we were talking about it because I was looking also, is one going to offset the other? Right. When he went on to TRICARE, that no longer became a budgeted portion on his fringe side.

They started offering, I think it was like 2006, no, I think it was 2004 to continue on for Guardsmen and Reservists who use Pricare. You got deployed, you went, and what happens is your employer manages your sick time, vacation time, just like your salary, if that goes up every year, you get a raise every year, and your sick time and vacation time accrues. But everything else, but you can also option to have your health insurance and life insurance be suspended until you come back.

All right. I learned a lot about that.

It's kind of pretty thick, but that's just a summary of a book that's about this thing.