Town Board - workshop

Okay, good evening, everyone. I'm going to call the town of Rochester town board special budget meeting to order. It's Monday, October 5 2026 630pm. If you could all stand for the question. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands one nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. We do have a forum tonight. Kate, can you give the roll call? Councilman Coleman. Councilman Svinsa. Supervisor Inouye. I am here. First item on the agenda is the acceptance of the agenda. I will make that motion with the following amendm

Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Abstain? Motion carries. Okay, so this is our official presentation of the 2027 tentative budget. Wait, you officially present the budget to the board? Yes, so I have

Thank you. Thank you. We will be posting the tentative budget on the E-code 360 and linking that in a news item announcement so everyone knows where it's located. I am going to give a PowerPoint presentation overview. Okay. So what we have here is the 2027 tentative budget, and I would like to review what is going to happen from the filed tentative budget all the way to the preliminary budget, which is the version of the budget that we scheduled the public hearing on. The board has set the date for the preliminary budget public hearing as November 5th, but we do have to officially schedule tha

So yes, the projections for the 2027 tentative budget include one month of the 12% increase over the 17% increase. Okay. So I have... very accurate budget projections for the premium and HRA expenditures. So it's just that there is 11 months that it's 17% increase and then one month that it's 17% increase plus 12.5% increase. At the end of the year. At the end of the year. And then looking ahead, this is not going to be a flat expenditure, right? So looking ahead to 2028, We're not, there's not relief, basically. This is something that we have to fix through revenue planning because this is no

No, we're not paying more. We're just paying more relative than we used to. And I also think that that might actually be fair.

I agree with you. I've thought about this a lot because the state does not mandate revals. They strongly, strongly encourage it. The reason why all towns should have as accurate as possible assessed values is because of this very thing. So, you know, if... Marvel town were to go through a townwide reval, we might see it shift again, but we might not is the point. Again, it's, I know that it's difficult to be in a gray area so much, but that's why during this process, we kept saying, we can't tell you what's going to happen to your tax bill because the way these things interact are not in our c

I mean, all you have to do is look at the total assessed value.

Exactly. You just have to look at that top number, and it's different. So about the tentative budget, Charlotte or Michael, do you have anything, any questions about my presentation?

Well, Kate did the printing and the bindering.

Right. And like, I am just going to say that there's not a lot of policy agendas that we can have that have a significant impact on our budget other than the budget process. But the federal level policies that we see right now are directly impacting every single resident and every single line item of our budget from health care costs to fuel costs to tariff costs to the cost of every single good that we have. And that is not anything that is under our control. directly as a town board but it is something that i think is really important for us to call out because like this is has not gotten an

One bright side is a lot of the tax apportionments that come from the county and the state are based on assessed value. So since we do have the benefit of having a very accurate role that increased the market assessed value. That is something that we might see shift a little bit in terms of our portion of those revenue items. But I didn't want to put that into the budget.

OK. So we do have one department here to join us. Jeremy, if you want to go ahead and come up. I'm going to give, because I think it's important for you to know this too, I'm going to give a brief overview of what's in the binder. So we have a cover letter. We have the actual budget, which are these very short pages, because we are adopting our budget to the first decimal point. Then we have the appendices, which is where the meat of the budget are. The appendices include the tax cap form. This will be replaced by a report from Jeremy, but I have the final roll in the summary so you can see wh

So it's 170 grievances and 158 stipulations and one correction.

I do think that's important also to note that those are going to carry over into 2027. So that is a level. We all know how much work goes into litigation. 159. 158. And it says one correction.

Do you want me to answer that? It's for a new program program.

No, we're using, that's what the 4500 is for. Okay. We're using it right now.

Yeah, that's the difference is exactly the quote for CoStar.

And just a side note that Michael just pointed out, I accidentally flipped some numbers. So the total number in the contractual is correct, but the $160 is for public notices. The 6,500 is the conference. So that's for three employees. And then the mileage, I think I might have missed a... Decimal point on. So yes, mileage. I made a mistake on. So we need to add that one is a mistake that will add a little bit of money. So it should be 1600 for mileage. Right. And the 150 is public notice. So I apologize for that. I, I knew we would find some of those types of things.

Oh, postage is we wanted the board committed to doing mailings, alerting people of deadlines for exemptions and when the tentative role is filed. So this is for like one mailing.

It could be more than that. We just, Jeremy and I were like last minute, like, oh, right. We need to do at least one mailing right before that season, which I mean, also just like, I know that this is a really tough budget year, but we do expect every day we talk to people that, who are planning to come in at the beginning of next year to have their properties re-looked at because they didn't necessarily do that with the reval process. We're planning on doing a town-wide mailing, letting everyone know about what exemptions are available and when they can meet with the assessor. So like we will

It's the conference and you guys haven't seen those bills yet.

Yeah. If we get the vehicle, then. But the conference is like a big chunk too. Education there. For the travel you guys have. Right. screen share this, because I'm going to make edits. That mistake that I just found, I'm going to start filling in. Yeah. I don't think you need a screen share. I think it's helpful for the public maybe to see. I'm happy to share as much as I can.

We should talk about the legal fees, which are not part of any single department's budget. So the attorney fees, I wanted to alert the board this year. We did budget 20,000 specifically because we were doing the reval. As a side note, I know that people keep talking about the reductions that have happened, that happened throughout the process. And I just want to say that to me, that means the process is working. So when... we this the whole process of the reval was meant for everyone to take a look at the data and scrutinize it and if they thought something was wrong to come to the assessor or

And then the FICA is 7.65%. I have budgeted for employees that would be going full-time that I have budgeted to assume that they are going on the town's insurance plan.

That is, I meant to actually include that as an appendices. That is the premium, the total premium cost. So that would be 80%. Yeah. So it's about 12,000. Plus the deductibles.

It will vary. It's budgeted at a flat rate per employee. What do we budget? 70% of the total deductible expenditures. I was... That... spreadsheet is actually in the, my supervisor share server, which I can't access from here, but I will send all when we're y'all, I definitely am sending that spreadsheet to the board.

do you feel like you've it's not every basically every expense in this budget is very clearly identifiable um in the assessors there's isn't a huge to each one to have to flip through and try to find back and forth um the equipment is you guys want your you're going to have Like my office has, you'll have a printer. And then there was some equipment that you needed for. Yeah.

no uh so the postage we do get a municipal rate but it doesn't we don't get like a it um we get charged whatever it is at the time that we're using the postage it's not like a forever stamp so like if we pre-loaded it um and that it changes then whatever, we just get charged.

Yeah, the problem is our postage is not, it's behind. It comes in at least a month late, sometimes two months late. So these numbers... Do not represent our year to date expenditures. They represent them from a month or two months ago. Gotcha. Okay. Cause that report comes with the town clerk's report, which is always one month behind. He's like $600. That's a lot of stamps. If we put preload that.

We can do, we did talk about this. We can do some kind of mailing at the end of the year with this. And so we did talk.

Yes. That one is proposed to go to 35, right? Yep. And you can't look at the numbers in this budget because the deputy assessor was the assessor aide for several weeks.

You have to look at the... For the new year. Yeah, the wage schedule is... I did change. I moved... Some positions in tiers and anything that went from a lower tier to a higher tier is in green. Anything that was in a higher tier and now is going into a lower tier, I put in yellow. Those are only for positions that would be filled by a newer employee though. So we're not like taking wages away from any employee. I just want to, that would be filled by someone who hadn't been in that role. HAB-Masyn Moyer- So we're not allowed to just take wages. HAB-Masyn Moyer- Do you have any questions for u

HAB-Masyn Moyer- And I do I try my best if the board is wanting to deviate at all, I do try my best to communicate that directly so that you're not.

I was not planning on going over anything tonight other than if you had department sign up, but the assessor's office was the only department that signed up. Was there anything, I mean, other than just like, I will probably need board members to take on some of your own budget projects. So if there's anything that you guys are like, I want to be the one to analyze this and bring it to the board. You may tell me that, or you can also reach out to me directly. And I will circulate the presentation that I made. So then you guys also have that. Most of that information is in my cover letter. But I

So Marshall and Sterling is medical. Sprague and Killeen is general liability vehicle. Like, yeah. Who's our dental vision? Anthem. And we get those through Marshall and Sterling.

That's county. And that one is the one shining ray of light. We have a huge balance in that fund because it's a co-insurance. So we all are like paying into a fund basically. Yes. And it draws out of that fund. And we've been carrying a balance since. And they're starting to use some of that balance to offset our premium costs. Now, in the initial letter, they were like, this is a one-time thing, but the finance department said at our last Supervisors Association meeting that it's a pretty healthy balance and that they do expect to be able to have this sustainable balance. we're not going to b

Unless, you know, it's a really busy year, which it could be.

So for health insurance, we did, um, That is why I brought it up really early in the season because we actually have to make a decision about that like this week or next week. But we won't, we wouldn't be able to change insurance until the following year for medical. So it's definitely worth taking a look at, but we have to lock in what we're doing this year soon. Yes, yeah, no, I can.

So we have two resolutions. Are you guys ready for those? And then I have an executive session. We have some updates on a couple of items for you guys. So first, I have to find my budget codes. And this is an actual highway truck body or a pickup truck? It's a highway truck body that was damaged and covered 100% by the insurance. I just want to make sure I understood which truck. Oh, yeah. It's...

HAB-Masyn Moyer- We are going to have apartments at our next board meeting, which is the business meeting and then our next budget workshop is the 14th. HAB-Masyn Moyer- yeah and I have two departments signed up, but we really need to do some non department stuff, which is why I was thinking, we might want to have a Saturday working session on the last Saturday of. october or like 24th we don't have to i just these evenings get really wrong and i get really tired and i start saying i'm a lot i only have two weddings oh you have two i only have two left and i'm like there's only two weekends le