Finance Committee - Regular Meeting

Open the finance committee's meeting of April 7, Monday 02/2026. We are located at the small conference room. It is approximately 06:47. The meeting is being filmed by MCAM, I believe. And it will be shown later through their channel. So pledge of allegiance, please.

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.

So we have placed on the agenda board meeting with possible budget discussion and our presentation. Top manager is listed on the agenda of giving an update. It may not be occurring right away during this April 7. I'd like to go to one item, which is a catch all for us planning for our year long action plan. That way, come if back, we won't have to do that later.

So as as was suggested that if you have any ideas, we need you to get them on the table. We're gonna send them to Jeff and send them to me so we can go through them in discussion, which I hope will happen rather quickly than we know that the town meeting is all set and ready to go so that we can put something together and have it active. And once we create it, I'm hoping if we see that we need to tweak it, we do. You know, it's not something that should be finalized, but we'll learning from it. I have a couple of suggestions.

One has to do with liaisons. Now that was brought to us by the previous town manager. I think it was the first year that I started, so I wasn't familiar with doing the other way, which I don't think other way was. I don't think I was anyways, it was the previous town manager that suggested that. I believe we should take a look at that and see how effective it has been.

And I put together just some ideas about the liaison position and anybody can do research. A couple of things I came up with, the liaison becomes the primary channel for a department's information. Other members may rely on secondhand summaries, not original data. It could be nuances that were lost or unintentionally filtered. So it may create uneven knowledge across the board.

So that's just one take on it. And someone can, by the way, do this inside the positive of this too. But I'm one I mean, we've already we're doing it, so I'm going the other way. Another one, circumventing circumventing the full board process. So the department heads may start working primarily through the liaison and it reduces direct accountability to the full committee.

It limits open questioning in public meetings. So the transparency is not there because, you know, the questions have been asked. We come to the table and then the nuances of what was said and they don't get to hear from the direct supervisor or the director of those departments. This one I found as I was going through this open meeting law risk. So under the Massachusetts open meeting law, serial communication such as a liaison may come to a member, then maybe another member, and all of a sudden you have this it's unintentional maybe, but a deliberation outside of a meeting.

It could or could not occur. It may be innocent enough, but and sharing evolving working drafts through liaisons can raise public record and meeting compliance concerns. So have we touched upon that? Did you do that? But it's something that we should think about if we're gonna continue liaison work.

There's more than I'm just going through some of the high ones that I highlighted. Public transparency concerns. Residents may not see what questions were asked, how the data was provided, and how conclusions were formed. So the public trust, you know, we we lessen that. So that's something that I would put in this pile of when we start putting our action plan together is some of the reasons maybe we should look at the liaison method and decide if that's something we wanna do or not do.

You know, I'm sure somebody can come in and say, there's a positive reason for it too. I will say, one of the positive reasons I remember was the department heads having to go to all these meetings. Well, when I was a department head, I went to a lot of meetings with finance committees. And one district has six finance committees. It's part of it.

To hear directly from our supervisors is only going to help not only us, but the public in general. So liaisons, in short, we're saying it. I've put on I'm going to, you know, be on that list that we should consider as we're going through the plan of action. Any comments about that? Not not we don't like I said, we'll have time to debate this back and forth, Fiddlers.

Through the chair. I just I agree. I think there's some inherent issues with the liaison process because first and foremost, I think it reduces efficiency by creating bureaucracy, where we have to go through certain channels just to get an answer to a simple question, when we could just go straight to the source directly. Why go through intermediaries? Yeah.

Yeah. You know what mean? It's like if if in you know, one of the things is like if I have a question for the fire department. Okay? It's not just to satisfy my own interests or, you know, my own curiosity.

It's for the benefit of this entire committee, but then by extension for the community at large. So I think that being able to just go without going through, again, an intermediary reduces bureaucracy. It increases efficiency. Another thing that I know we haven't gotten there yet, but we had previously spoken about quarterly meetings with department heads. I think that would also really kinda eliminate the need to have liaisons if we're meeting quarterly.

And, again, the you know, we can discuss this more at length, but bringing department heads in, it doesn't have to be a long hours long exhaustive deep dive, but it's more of like a status update. Like, where are we? How are you in respect to what you were budgeted for this fiscal year? You on track? Are you spending more? Are you spending less? How do you you know, like, any concerns? It's kinda like a wellness check where we can have the department heads in. So if something does start to go off the rails, we can catch it early so we're not left in the eleventh hour trying to mitigate it. So I think that's that's a key point.

And the last thing I'll just say about it is I believe it was in this very room about two and a half weeks ago when the town the current town manager said, like, you guys should have unfettered access to every department and every department head. If you have questions, like, you don't have to go through me, and I'm speaking as the top manager. He said, you know, we don't have to go through him. Go directly. You know? If you you got a question about finances, go to the finance director, Sue Nickerson, and ask her directly. You don't need to go again through conduits and intermediaries. So

I'm raising my hand. I yes. As long as we're saying the committee has the right to go to them directly. Because, well, singularly, then we're back up to, like, a mini reverse, you know, semi liaison thing. So it's a committee saying we need to talk to and and the idea of quarterly meetings, if we can pull it off, would help with that process. It it it would become ingrained in their their the environment that they're working in.

And one and one last thing to go along with that is the in speaking with the town manager, he said, you know, days gone by, the process of the budget creation was the department heads would present their budgets to the town manager, and then they would come to the finance committee first and present those budgets. So if we can kinda go back to that model, I think it would be extremely beneficial to not only us, to keep us as an interested and relevant party in that process, but it would also help the town as well if we see something that is amiss. Again, catching it early as opposed to the eleventh hour, I think, is the the key takeaway from all of this so we don't find ourselves in an this unfortunate situation again.

So Yeah. Thanks to Jerry. I I think that I I like where the draft action plan is going and to bring, I think everything should be part of the discussion. I think the liaison and physicians definitely should be part of the discussion here.

I

definitely agree with that. I think really it's the transparency issue that and reflecting on how it's been coming together, it's probably less clear to folks watching at home how the questions come about, how the answers are completed, any information exchange. So I think from that perspective, it certainly is something we should take a hard look

at. Anybody else?

Yes, Mr. Chair, I

agree with Alan. I also agree with Matt. I think trust factor, as we rebuild that, is needed. I think transparency is ultimately the play. You make a good point about questions as they relate to open meeting loss. I hadn't ever really considered that or how the liaison process could unintentionally straight to that. We are also dealing with some nice pattern of absences, unintended consequences of those kind of relying on other people. Matt made a point of that. And I think that there's a solution too in all this. I think once we get access to Munis, they have a monthly reporting package that I believe the department managers get.

Perhaps we can look at being funneled that same reporter to simply adding the Fincom chair to the list. That way that information can come to us all at the same time. We can review those departments that we feel need to be reviewed. And then we can formulate questions based on actual data that's happening in relatively real time as far as munis reporting goes. So I would be all for reevaluating the current process. Process improvements are needed.

Anybody else? Yeah. I personally, I I like the liaison process as it is currently constituted. It could be tweaked. I'll preface that by saying that any finance committee member should feel emboldened to meet with any department head to discuss any things that they wanna learn more about.

So I don't think the liaison process necessarily prevents that. What I like about it personally is that it gives you an opportunity to meet department heads and and know more about the intricacies of each department that you're assigned to. I will continue on saying that, you know, it's maybe you can have it be done every reassign the liaisons every July and, you know, the the rule could be that no one can have the same department twice so that way it builds up institutional knowledge within the finance committee. So if I'm doing building and conservation this year, next year, I would do two other departments. And that way I can learn as much as I can from each department individually.

I don't know how efficient it would be to have quarterly meetings with all the department heads. I mean, there's how many departments are there? 20 departments? So we would basically be out of nine months out of the year or or a whole year. We're just in this continuing pattern of meeting with departments here in person.

I don't know if that's more efficient or or not. I think if everyone is, you know, committing to the departments that they are assigned or requested then liaison position or liaison structure should still work. But I think it's, you know, it's worth, you know, continuing to talk about.

Thank you. Anything else? So I noted that month I think we had that mentioned before in the month report. And one other suggestion I had that we should look at our minutes. It's a lot of minutes, but it's it's pretty lengthy, and any of us can go to leave.

The the attorney general's work on what a minute should be. But what I found, and we see it all the time, minutes do not this is from the the attorney general's office. Minutes do not need do not not need to include verbatim transcripts, every speaker's comments, detailed back and forth exchanges, tone or emotion, lengthy debate, discussion, personal opinions or characterizations. So I think in in an effort to help including secretary, you know, we we we should try to stick to what the law says we need to do. And and I've seen in other places, if someone feels that a comment, and it's easy nowadays, can go to film ten years ago, it wasn't like this.

I, you know, at a meeting, you might say, well, I mentioned I suggested that we have a motion on such and such. It doesn't go anywhere. It didn't reach the minutes. People, you know, look at it and try to remember and then say, okay, that should be part of the component because you're asking for it to be in. Or we say no. But now it's even easier. You just look look, you know, something was missed like that, you felt it was relative and should be part of the minutes. But to try to put everything in conversation because we are not the only district any committee that does this. We get off on tangent sometimes. I mean, committees get off on tangent sometimes.

So it's it's Jessica has been sharing her concerns, and I I agree with her. So that's something you probably should look at. It's formats it's standard formats which you use. And if we're meeting the criteria, the standard criteria, and we feel that we need maybe a little bit more something that we don't have, as long as it's not going to be burdensome. The big thing is meet the criteria that's out there. I've got minutes in it listed for as we look at our action plans too. So

alright. Mister chair? Yep. I mean, just as an observation, I think the the the meeting minutes from particularly I'm just looking at it now from the sixteenth April 16 meeting. I think that's goes up significantly above the bar of, know, what a meeting minutes should be. I think it it catches all of the discussions pretty well. So, I mean, I I if she has you know, I don't know if Jessica has any thoughts on, you know, if there's any adjustments or tweaks that, you know, to how the meeting minutes are currently be done, I'm I'm hoping to hear that.

Go ahead.

So I'll just tell you, it was not at last Thursday's meeting. And so yesterday, I decided to take the track that maybe instead of trying to listen to the meeting and write the notes and then type the notes that I would use the transcript instead. It was a disaster. It took me an hour longer because I had to cut, take it out. It's not supposed to be verbatim. Right? Yeah. It it didn't work very well. It it admittedly, it took me five hours to go through. And it just threw up red flags.

We Mhmm. We're gonna have long meetings. The year long process might make those meetings, like, two hours long and lots of conversation. And I'm just trying to think of a way that how do we capture because the state does say you have to capture the substance of the conversation. Sometimes that's very hard to do without all the other detail. Guys just throw a sentence in there with no substance. Substance. You're You're like, like, what what was was that? That? Or anybody else reading it?

And so I'm trying to think of a way to, like, format the minutes so it captures the substance, but it's not nine pages long. And it doesn't have all the way down to, you know, three letters of the alphabet and the outline structure because it's a lot for me. It's a lot for you guys to read. It's a and so I am open to any suggestion, idea, format that you think, you know, how we talked about a 10,000 foot view. I'm not sure that the state would be okay if we were looking at a 10,000 foot view, but, like, I think I once said to Eric, like, 3,000 foot view.

Like, bring it down, but not granularly, which is where I've tried to be. But some of these car I mean, the the meetings with Joe are very information heavy. How do you leave out the really important information? And then how do you leave out the really important questions you guys ask? So I'm trying to find the middle ground because I like this job a lot, but I don't like spending five and a half hours typing minutes for a two hour meeting I wasn't even in here for. So I have to, like it's like I was here.

Yeah.

So I'm open to it. If you guys wanna ponder it or think of a structure, an idea. I have an idea. I think I'd like to sort of, but we don't need to discuss it tonight because we have the select board sort of pending. But I think we definitely have to do something because I wanna capture the substance because it's important. But I also don't wanna be treading close to verbatim, and, also, we cannot rely on that transcript either. It picks up the wrong words. It drops off letters because of the New England accent. It doesn't say when a speaker is speaking. It doesn't say who it is.

So, like, if you're talking and then Alan talks, the transcript does not catch that it's Alan. It looks like you're talking the whole time. It's I tried it. It didn't work. So and we can't use it as a reference point either because it doesn't know who the speaker is. So if it's not the end of the world, but I have an like I said, when we could sort of approach this, I have some ideas. I can sort of run by you, maybe type up, like, a little template. Says, what do guys think about this? And maybe we go that way or maybe there's other ideas because it's it's a lot. And honestly, I'm interested in saving money on the budget too. Every hour I do this is budget money. Right. So we're trying to make it better.

I'm calling the attorney general's office tomorrow or the next day to see if we can get some specific clarification on that freight. But they're very clear that it's a summary of the discussion, not this anyways. That's just something else that I'm suggesting we add to the as we look forward to the action plan. Mister?

Yeah. Mister Chair, without getting too far into the discussion, I appreciate your thoughts and comments on it. Is it possible that we utilize the same transcript services that the other boards and committees use, maybe there's a newer and lesser expensive but better option out in the marketplace that the town could consider looking at for process improvements there. Yeah. Just throwing it out there.

Yes. Yeah. Just want ask a little bit. I was looking at the clock and how soon we need to get in there.

Just a quick question. Is it or a point of clarification. Is it the AG's office, or is it the secretary of state?

No. I

think the secretary of state would be the appropriate.

For records?

It is the AG? Okay.

It is the AG. Surgery of state. Alright. That's all I had on the on the year one action plan. And I guess we go over and see what the support is hearing from Do we the budget? Excuse me. Yes.

Real quick. Do we want to just go through public comment and adjourn and or do you wanna do you wanna have a formal joint session with the select board?

We didn't advertise it as that. We've got a recess to the select board. I tried to get a hold of the chair to clarify that. Because in one meeting, I saw I I looked back and said a joint meeting. And then there's another meeting. We went in there and called the recess to see the meeting. So I juggled it and said, let's do the recess because I I wanted to talk to the chair to say it should be joint because I couldn't say it was joint. Right. So I went recess. So in the recess, someone's gonna expect us to come back in here. Do you think someone's gonna come back with us? So so I'm if somebody did, then we have to make sure we did public comment. If nobody's here, we just adjourn. Okay. That's why I didn't. I thought presumption was for me to call it a joint meeting and clarify that.

But we do public comment now and Yeah.

Any motion to recess to the Board of Selectmen's meeting for the possible discussion of budget and law presentation?

So moved. Second. Aye.

Aye. So we'll reopen our April 27 Finance Committee meeting at 07:53. Returning from the budget discussion and presentation as it was. Any questions about what we heard or we will hear more Thursday I would suspect.

Yes. Mr. Chair, will we see copies of the draft warrants? I think there's discussion in See

if they have closed. I'll I'll check with them.

Mister chair. Yeah.

I think

they posted on the website.

They're here?

Yeah. I think they are. Okay. Yeah.

I was told they were, but I didn't verify it yet.

Well, if they're on the website, I won't do it. If they aren't, I'm trying to I'm trying to get a hold of the info. Else you wanna discuss about? I don't wanna shut you down. Okay.

So I will contact the interim power manager to find out my words, to get permission to ask the question that one of our members have asked to go into executive session for the purpose of I'm not sure. But I'll I'll I'll I'll contact the interim town manager and say it. It's in reaction to the email he sent out to us. Is that right? You're responding to the email he sent out?

Mister Chad, through you. I it wasn't necessarily through the time angels. Well, I guess that is referring to it. Basically, I asked a question regarding when we find out like, we've been instructed to meet with the time manager individually to see his plan regarding eliminating or consolidating contracted employees, I guess, or however you wanna phrase it. Then my thought is he's gonna present that list to us.

Do we want to, at a meeting after next meeting, next Monday, discuss that in executive session only for the reason that it is this this this we're talking about people's jobs and livelihoods, and I don't know if that's appropriate to do it in open session. It's whatever the the committee feels or the chair feels is appropriate. I just wanted to put that out there. Obviously, at some point, it's gonna you know, the list will be made public of what the town managers and the finance committee's plans are to addressing the the budget deficit. But I just didn't know if we wanted to have the opportunity to discuss some of these things in executive session first permitted that it is allowed by KP law.

I think it's executive session reason number three.

Would you mind if I read number three? To discuss strategy with respect to collective I am going to call it lawyer, by

the way.

Yeah. To discuss strategy with respect to collective bargaining or litigation if an open meeting may have detrimental effect on the bargaining or litigating position of the public body in the chair so declares. And then it goes on to talk about the public body must identify the collective bargaining unit with which it is negotiating or litigating a matter. I will contact the town manager with that question of us going in executive session using whatever means that exists. I'm not determined, but we're not going in there because I but I will ask.

Okay. We're not litigating. That's not our position. We're advisory only. We're advisory to the the conditions that come about from the negotiation, but I will ask that. Other than that, anything else? I will ask for public comment. Seeing none, motion to adjourn.

So moved. Second. All in favor? Aye. Aye.

Thank you.