TranscriptBudget Committee Meeting ~ February 4, 2025

the same timeline so there wasn't really an option to choose a quicker timeline so so how how do we get in the future how do we get to the point where this doesn't happen to us because we're essentially losing These funds from the state M yeah I think it would be a matter of having reevaluations done more frequently so rather than waiting the the period that we waited this time around um doing it sooner so and I hope everybody realizes by not having this this is affecting our mill rate uh it it doesn't necessarily affect the mill rate when you do the re-evaluation it doesn't really decrease the total it it increases your it could increase your total valuation but more or less it shifts the balance of whose property is worth what and so generally speaking we see with reevaluations about onethird of people's property value goes down about one3 stays the same and about 1/3 increases so it doesn't make a the

spending is what really is getting in the mill rate it it really ends up equalizing across the board so it just shifts who's paying that that's true but when I receive my when each of us individuals receive our tax bill there's a deduction for the amount that we all based on our homestead exemption and every time every year that I see that homestead exemption the percentage going down my bills going up because of that yeah and that doesn't change the mill rate that changed how much your how much your valuation tax okay it doesn't affect the M rate but it affects my tax bill yes 100% and that's why we're trying to get that reevaluation done as quickly as possible okay any other questions about page one okay uh page two um we're here now

this talks about our wages uh our categorize expenses so we're covering our wages and benefits you'll see our total wages and benefits are seeing an increase of 99.9% our fixed costs we're seeing a total incre inrease of 1.6% and those are things that we really don't have um the ability to change from the municipal side so we can't change the the uh school budget we can't change the uh County tax we are already committed on debt services and our set contracts and fees we don't have much of a change over and we can't change the price of things like utilities and fuel the only thing we can try to do is address the amount that we consume and so you'll see each one of these is broken down for example when we get to fixed cost education you'll see that that's we've budgeted for a 6.8% increase and so annualized if

you look at FY 2024 a uh 6,882 192 school budget a 6.8 in% increase on that is roughly 6 $365,000 extra per year and so with that value we then did one timesed it by 1.5 to figure out what one and a half year is worth because that is something we do pay monthly um when you look at our County tax it's down 26% 26.7% even though we are uh budgeting for a 9% increase in County tax that's what we've received for information from the county but that's because we only pay that bill once and so it's not a monthly bill it's just paid once in this 18month period um our contracts and set fees those are the kind of things that are paid monthly so we budgeted to do that just 18 18 months there um and again utility and fuel we budgeted based off of which months and what our usual usage rate is during those those months so that gives us our total fix cost um any questions so far yeah the uh and I know we're just

not final yet but the superintendent school budget calls for a close to finalizing see where they really are I mean yeah and and that's we just didn't want to be in a situation like what's happened in the past where we've estimated a under underestimated and last year ended up being a 6.8% so we carried that number over this year to be conservative with with that estimate so if that comes down that's a benefit to all of our taxpayers for sure um and then we're getting into our what we're calling our variable and discretionary costs um you know that's our road maintenance um our our transfers to reserves our supplies equipments abatements and and bad debt and then community services and all our other expenditures and and those are down um 19.4% so total expenditures work out to being down.

next few pages kind of break down um where we can really um see changes so things that are fixed costs we like I said we can't change at the municipal level we can as a select board lower the school budget lower our County tax but there are are places where we do have a little bit of wiggle room but what we're trying to to show here is that our total fixed costs really account for um 74.8%

of the budget and then with that if you include wages and benefits that brings it up to um 78.2% of the budget so that 13.4 plus 74.8 so in terms of trying to find ways to uh cost save here we're really only dealing with a very a discretionary budget of about 11.7% so that's where we're where we can do our wiggle room there and that's where we kind of focused on and so there's not a lot of ability to change those big expensive items but we can look at our estimates for for our other items so got a couple uh bar graphs on the next page that show show that the um you know our revenues what percentage of our revenues our property taxes and inter governmental excise tax and other revenues our wages and benefits and Debt Service services for expenditures um that shows our our 2023 actual and our 2024 actual and again we're seeing here that a lot of our costs are just fixed over 80% of our costs are fixed so there only leaves you

know 11% in change of wiggle room to really focus on um saving money that's the only those are the only lines we can really cut costs on all right so that's kind of the budget as a whole um up front uh our our advisement to the town manager as he prepared a draft of the budget was that the select board wanted to see a level supply of goods and services the same thing that we provided last year with very little new the only thing we requested new was looking into uh providing uh increasing capacity in HR Services because the three big liabilities in our town are really Legal Financial and HR and you know as we've moved into a town manager form of government we have staff we need to bring our HR up to a certain level and so we want our town manager to spend some time focused more on Big Rock items like increasing revenues and and decreasing expenses and so he's already done a lot of work on the HR front but

we wanted to provide um dedicated staff to focus on that in its entirety it's pretty standard across Municipal governments HR work is very complex there's a lot of liability involved and we want to protect the town by limiting liability um we had said find us an HR staff person thankfully the town manager went out and just uh found a consultant who can do it at about one5 of the rate because they are um just built for these sorts of things and helping other local municipalities so that was some really nice savings that we found right there and then the other thing we directed The Town manager to prepare was a uh salary adjustment for um for our staff that does not exceed 3.5% which is the the Northeast uh cost of living index and um we picked that number because we wanted to just have something set I want to give you perspective you know as as you all know generally in employment you're up for evaluation every 12 months and

that's when you can see a salary adjustment well we are essentially saying um to the staff because we're in the 18 month B 18mth budget a year from now you're not up for a salary adjust again you're locked in for a year and a half at this salary and so the the staff are unfortunately going to have to eat whatever that difference looks like if there is a uh increase or in in inflation and that cost of living adjustment doesn't cover everything at 18 months that we expected it to cover at 12 months but we weren't comfortable with um capturing a year and a half worth of salary adjustments we just wanted to hold that at the at a one-ear line that's uh in line with the cost of living adjustment so

discussions about um just straight across the board increases or are people actually getting evaluated and getting it's variable and so we were just letting the town manager know that the total increase that we were willing to accept on uh wages across the board um if so was 3.5% that doesn't mean everyone's getting a cost of living adjustment or or that percentage it's variable and so I don't we're not really at at Liberty a public setting to go into individual the select board can't go into individual people's salaries and stuff like that because of our the laws relating to personal privacy but it's not every person is getting that across the board it's evaluated person by person and that's just the total amount that we were willing to accept during that time someone may get one% another potenti uh potentially yeah yeah and it's it goes off of annual reviews and things like that so I understand the Northeast factor of

3.5% but I want to kind of talk about people that are retired MH on Social Security granted Social Security said it was going to go up 2.5 MH mine went up 2.3 mhm then I took out Medicare my payment for Medicare went up 5.9 so my 2.3 I'm talking specifically for me and other people are on social security so my original Social Security oh you said well 2.3 is not too bad but Medicare went up 5.9 so my 2.3 went down to

1.9 I'm talking about people on fixed income and you're asking for 3.5 yeah we are recommending 3.5% total across the not across the board but as an aggregate for our staff yes and wasn't that for time manager uh yeah yeah we uh gave the town manager a salary adjustment as well this year more for the fire chief what's that and more for the fire chief uh yeah the we adjusted our salary based off of uh the market and the uh direction from us was 3.5% in the Aggregate and in line with duties and responsibilities so but overall no more than 3.5 for the enti for the aggregate yes no that's not true that's what we said yes for the aggregate but you could have somebody that's going you can't the chief more man 35% 3.5 yes you can so you're get well there there might be some people in there who aren't getting it any any adjustment and across the board so really yes but again I'm I'm not here to discuss individual people's salaries I'm

here to discuss the budget line yeah Jo yeah so I guess gu I'm a little confused because on page two wages and benefits you said 3.5% but Administration is 15% and fire department is 16% yeah so nobody's 3.5% perfect example is fire calls are up 12 over 12% from last year and so there's also the if if your wage increases but the number of hours people are working is increasing by 12% that's going to make uh more increas right there so it's it's not necessarily just the number that they're being paid is increasing but the amount of hours and the amount of service being provided is increasing as well because that that was the first thing I looked at too I was like what's going on here and then it's like well there's more calls I mean I we can get into that when we get into that section but you know we get regular updates from the fire chief and for the last 3 years we've seen um upper single digit or

double digit increase in calls every year and so it's just building that into our our model you know we we see that incre ining we have a lot of people Aging in place and so there's a lot of calls related to that we have more houses um those sorts of calls just it takes a lot more staff and a lot more time and the administrative uh yeah the administrative we have also gone from a couple part-time people being moved into a full-time category because we had a resignation this year and so that has some adjustment for for hours there Jerry do you want to elaborate at all about the yeah that's that's it yeah so we had a resignation and to backfill we brought the two people that were part-time up to full-time that netted a little bit of hours in the office um in that change so it's more more hours seeing the part time went down yeah to the part time so yeah okay but you lost one full timer now you have two

full Tim well we had two part- timers and then we lost one full-timer and we brought those two part-timers up to fulltime so really what the increases as benefits though yes yes there's an increase in so again I know you're not asking but I can't go into individ people's benefits but but when you when you have people go to fulltime it's an increase in benefits depending on what benefits they take so that's where that's captured so our goal was to limit salary adjustments on the aggregate to that 3.5% but that doesn't mean that it's going to show us 3.5% across the aggregate because of increased hours and increased benefit costs um on this you guys chose to pay

the the family medical leave that % you guys chose to pay the whole one and not give half mhm for the people to pay the half so does that 3.5 so you're actually given four no that's built into uh that that calculation so so you're actually down to is that correct Jerry no sorry that is that could be 3% cuz the Family Medical Leave Act kicked in and the M employers are having to pay a half a percentage for their staff to fund a family medical leave uh uh fund at this state level and employers have the option to cover the full 1% or only cover the half percent and we chose as a select board to cover the half the full 1% for folks the only problem is if you cover that now and they decide the state decides that's not enough money and they jump it way out you're on the hook for all the rest of that too uh if if this if the state increases that we would be able to re-evaluate that yeah because we're only budgeting to cover 1% so if

that were to increase we're not budgeting for that that would fall on the employees okay so the half is definitely it's on the three and a half the half is on top and that's over the 18 months so we felt like that was fair because there's not an annual review process that they would normally get after one year and so that we felt like that was a good um way to C capture the increased um salary over this 18-month period do you you see what I'm saying like usually we' have that 12-month review period and then you might get potentially another adjustment and since they're not going to have that that 4% with the half% being covered is a is reflective of that 18 months so Al

planning and code enforcement because that is a 4.6% increase does that reflect additional hours can we's that 4 point uh that's going to be the second line down and uh Jerry can you address that page you w and benefits doesn't address any additional all but last year George the the planner got left off the um calculation for increase so he got his increase even though he got left off last

saying it wasn't budget right it wasn't budget it wasn't budgeted for last year but budget for this year okay any other questions on this page we're on six right starting your someone brought me back to page two but I think we're back on page six to page yeah can I just add to the

um conversation about the full percent around family Medicals was that part of the discussion that we have at length about is that we want to retain our employees I know a lot of people take issu with comparing what we're doing to other towns right but the reality of the situation is if our town and leave and go to the next municipality over to get some of those benefits um we want to retaining our employees we don't want to keep starting over and so we looked at that as as a way to support the town staff and keep our employees here rather than constantly being in this we have to train someone new we have to train someone new we have to train someone new I believe Jerry or Mark you correct me if I'm wrong the expense to the town as a whole to do the full percent versus the half per was like $12,000 do you remember well six six 12,000 total so

the company the other half is 6,000 yeah so for us to match what the state is doing and also what surrounding municipalities were doing across the board the entire expense for that came in at $6,000 so just some context as to why we made that decision the way that we did yeah Heather brings up a really good point what we don't want we want to make sure that we're providing a work environment that retains people replacing employees is very expensive because of the amount of time with training and then the onboarding and then finding the person and then being down staffed for a while and so we want to make sure that we're not in a situation that some smaller municipalities fall into where they essentially train people and get them really competitive for a job and then they leave to go to a nearby municipality you know we just have the challenge of our location like within a 25-minute drive there's just a lot of

town offices that have staff openings there's a lot of positions open so we're just trying to make sure that um we're being uh competitive but also being responsible uh and that's where we think a cost of living adjustment is is responsible and and then that half percentage as well so no yes um so I just wanted to say that we're assuming that um employees that we have currently would leave if they don't get this increase no that's not what we're assuming that's what I hear no no I mean I think that even without worrying about a threat of an employee leaving it's still important as an employer to just make sure that you're make providing a competitive wage and providing the resources that makes an employee want to stick around and so it happens at every level of businesses they're not necessarily worrying about someone being poached from their entity but just making sure that you're um getting good

staff training them well and making sure that you're providing them with something that a livable wage that they can can um live off of you know 3.5% cost of living adjustment really isn't a wage increase it's just providing them with the same income and the same buying power this year as last year and and if frankly if we're not um coming back and adjusting that again at the onee Mark which we're not it's not even guaranteed to provide them the same buying power 18 months from now as they have right now so that's why we came up with 3.5% um because it's an 18mon budget and we wanted to keep this as lean as possible but they still could leave if they were offered a position somewhere else yeah I think anyone could leave a position at any time for a different competitor yeah yeah yeah so any more questions about uh we're on page six now so about funding sources we can start this conversation

here is everyone on page six um unfortunately we tried to print these out on a larger um page because I know that we wanted comments but when you add the note section it kind of squeezes everything so I apologize for the small font we were thinking of trying to print it out on a big page but bigger pages but it just didn't lay out and so if anyone here's eyes are kind of like mine you got to squint a little bit on these small numbers but we can repeat anything and they're all all available here I almost brought a magnifying glass tonight to take a look at this so um you know total excise tax we expect it to be um up 4.5% we annualized that amount at

1,149 33 $3 does anyone have any questions about that excise tax I can't call on you so yes um 11615 other exis it actually went down 50% between 2023 and 2024 yet you're expecting it to over double this year why I don't see the decrease of 50% between 2023 6.2 to 4,000 6.2 to 4,000

yeah 35% yeah well we budgeted just for uh an expectation of a little bit more um do you want to address that number just yeah I mean any any of the revenue items can be adjusted uh they were just basically you know yeah so other General estimates other excise tax are things like snowmobile registrations boat registrations stuff like that it's we um felt like that was a number reflective of an 18-month period it's a it's a a a 20% change but it's a relatively small number and when we're talking under $10,000 and so we're uh just wanted to make sure that we estimate accordingly right but if you do it in a few spots it adds up so I guess understand just kind of curious if we're guesstimating why it's not a more realistic guesstimate I think that we're just basing it off the uh 2023 actual because that is is a is a fair number to base it off of even if the uh 2024 actual was a little bit lower just based off of General Trends

so it could have been a low year last year less boats less snowmobiles you um so this is something new that we're using creating at revenues are actually counting on revenues coming in so my only concern would be what happens

if something like Co hits and excise taxes or everything's down because of that because people aren't driving and they're not buying new cars and it hit us in a couple years past so my concern would be that if we're budgeting for this with this expectation I hope we're being really conservative with that because it could screw us at the end if yeah we feel like just budgeting for $1,000 additional dollars Revenue there is a fair estimate and a conservative one and that's over the course it that extrapolated over the course of 18 months it's 9,000 but that's the other excise I'm thinking motor vehicle excise yeah well uh do you want to explain why we use that number you want me yeah no in gen in general the uh the revenues are are in total or the estimated non-t tax revenues in total are on the conservative side so in this particular case other xze because it's so small I didn't really consider it uh

when looking at the the actuals um but it is a fair point uh that if you know if it were 6,000 maybe that would be closer to reality 4,000 I'm talking about the m i get that what I'm saying is in total for the non non-property tax revenues uh uh if you were going to ask me is it a fair estimate my answer would be it is a conservative estimate not a liberal estimate and primarily for that reason uh that uh you don't really want to overestimate refence you don't want to you don't want to be too far off in either direction right you do want to be pretty close to where you you think you'll end up but if you're going to be off it's better to be off slightly underestimating revenues than it is to be slightly overestimating revenues right yeah and then for the in total my comment would be that your your overall non- tax revenues are probably about are probably conservative in in the motor vehicle xze like people still have to

register the vehicle they own so if if there were some sort of uh n disaster people still have to register their vehicle in that 18month period unless they decide to get rid of their vehicle so we again we think that that's a conservative estimate um and just up four 4.4% so thank you good question though so what happens if under motor

vehicle I want to be on the other side of that say our excise is higher granted we where this our projection is for this budget if it is higher to those additional funds do they carry over to next year yeah they just add to the Surplus yeah they add to the Surplus and then we'll get to that later but we're trying to make sure that we're utilizing the Surplus in a way that whatever we're taken in the previous year we're taking that into consideration uh and but before last year that Surplus kind of built and because we weren't estimating revenues so we're over and and this iteration of the board felt like that looked like an over taxation but because you're building that Surplus and not applying it and so one thing that's important to us is that we're taking into consideration if there's a surplus at the end of at the end of the year and making sure that's getting rolled over into into the next year to provide that

back to the taxpayers because we don't want to get into the um habit of holding on to taxpayer money and saying we already have your money to pay for this but we still want you to give us more money to pay for this because that's it's it's just not the way that uh you you you run a municipal budget so thank you so next we're going into permits and fees um so you can see we have some increases here on our fees and that is because we as a board adjusted the fee cost this year pretty much across the board we realized it been several years since permits uh the per like building permits um subdivision permits things like that had been um adjusted and so our our code enforcement officer and our board sat down and took a look at what the cost of doing business and the other surrounding towns are taking into consideration that Durham's still a different town than our surrounding towns uh looking at pel some

towns with more development sometime towns with less development and we found that we were really under on a lot of these um a lot of these uh fees and so we adjusted the fee schedule to be what we considered a more fair fee schedule and that's what we're see why we're seeing we saw an increase in in revenue from that and we're expecting that that will continue over the next next uh 18 months and you know we'll start doing an annual consideration of those fees because we just think that that's a way that where we can increase revenue for the community is uh looking at things like those developments and stuff like that so and one real quick thing too is we realize that some of the fees were taking up more of the staff person's time than than it was valued at so if takes some if someone's paying a fee that's only $20 but it takes a staff person 4 hours to do that task it's it's an unfair cost carried by the rest of the

community for someone's task so that's why we adjusted some of those fees we took a look at how much hour staff we putting into it so what was the timeline on that again when those were adjusted July I think we adjusted them part way yeah I think it was like July or August so sorry Jill so okay I thought I had

heard at the last board meeting that it was May um cuz I was kind of curious about the code enforcement fees they pretty much stayed Flatline even with fee increases this year so again I'm asking the question why are you expecting the hike to be so high yeah because we'll have 18 full months of those increased fee collection as opposed to just partway through last year adjusting it and then having that so based off of if we get the same number of applications that we did last year in every every single one of those is exposed to that increased fee cost we expect that our revenues from those will go up over the that 18 month by that margin so and again like Mark said our estimates are conservative if so this is you know saying we expect probably a little bit more for for fees uh but we want to budget conservatively in case there's not as much activity happening and that sort of stuff so well I do

thank you guys for finally increasing the fee yeah that was a big thing for us is cu we have heard that from a lot of folks and so we we sat down and we started the discussion but it took us a couple meetings to get through it because it was a lengthy discussion it required a lot of information so some of those fees were changed one meeting and some of them weren't changed for for another two another meeting or two meetings so I mean we heard from our code enforcement officer like when they made the change on some of them by the next meeting people were already coming in and paying those previous fees so excuse

the permits or fees line yeah and so that's where we we were happy to see that we have a 36% increase there on the permits and fees so any other questions might be saying Joe if there's all this increase in local fees why is the total uh uh Revenue down there and that's because we put the notes in here some of these are only paid to us once a year and so as you can see like our homestead exemption for those who are unaware when you get your homestead exemption you get x amount of dollars taken off the valuation of your home before you pay your taxes that lost revenue is reimbursed to us at a certain percentage of that is reimbursed to us at the state it's not 100% of the Lost Revenue it's just I think it's 72% um but if we're only collecting that once during the 18-month period and that's the same with like business equipment tax exemptions veterans exemptions tree growth and uh local road assistance

program and so same thing with tree growth when a municipality uh has someone in tree growth their property is valued at the value of the the the Forest Products on the property and that is often times much lower especially in a municipality that has um that's near population centers it is much lower than um uh the normal valuation so there's a lot of lost revenue from the town there to the benefit of the land owner and the state reimburses a portion of that and so we're only collecting that once in this 18-month period And so you'll see there that's why we're um expecting a 17% decrease in intergovernmental uh uh collection there and then state revenue sharing is calculated excuse me no no I just say should that note on that be decreased each year say what should the note on state revenue sharing be decreased each year no it's just a 6% decrease annualized no the note say estimating 3% increase oh it says that might just be

typo from whomever put the note in there that was from an original that I forgot to delete that was from an original note the first kind of go round that J and I had with the amounts this 900,000 is based off of actuals uh for

fy4 uh but then just on Monday the state released it the state Economist just released uh their uh project projections for FY 26 meaning the state's FY 26 which is from July to June of next year and they're projecting 64,000 for that 12-month period uh or 617 something like that which if you were to do a year and a half it' be around 925,000 um and Jerry asked me said do you think we should increase that we could uh you know really from my perspective uh you know on on these Revenue items that you would personally I would really only focus on the the large dollar ones if you want to uh uh suggest or make a recommendation to adjust uh the revenue estimates because there is value in getting closer to what will be um what we think will be uh the real Revenue um it's it's there's not a significant impact other than helping us to plan in future budget years right uh there's no real impact on actuals right

there's no impact on actuals based off of what our estimates are it doesn't really impact the fund balance because the fund balance is going to be what it's going to be based off of what we actually take in so it really is just more of a planning tool um for managing

uh the town's unassigned fund balance in the long run so it is there is some value to getting those closer to uh actual but again as I said earlier we we still want to air on the side of being more conservative than more um but is it another value that if you underestimate Revenue too much you're making it up for it in property tax that's correct and that's why you don't want to be too far off e in either direction so there is that value besides just but that's correct if we were to increase this from 900,000 estimated Revenue to 925,000 estimated Revenue spread across the taxpayers it it wouldn't be a large difference there but those are things we keep track of because like you said Jill like a th000 here or a couple thousand there could add up to you know 50 or 100 or 200,000 at the end of the budget and so that's something we keep in mind when when we make those that's why we didn't say well

let's just underestimate at 800 instead of 900 if we think it might be as much as 925 the thing with state revenue sharing is it it varies and it it's a calculation and so as you all know who've been on the budget committee for a while it's different each year and so this is just what we decided to go with for an estimate to kind of split the difference and get close tell us um what is the local road assistance program what is that um Jerry or Mark do you want to take that response it's a 9% of the Budget Transportation budget at do and they disperse that out to the towns based on S miles of road so each municipality gets oh so because we plow or whatever we take care of the roads okay it's it's for specific specifically to maintain roads and sidewalks and uh Bridges uh and you have to report back to the state every month how you used it uh you can set it aside if you wanted to but so there are C there are specific

uses for it but the town ends up using it every year as part of their General operations okay thank you let me get back to homestead exemption in 23 you notice the difference between 23 and 24 actuals and we have we're not going to be doing a Ral till 27 so it really looks to me that our budget for Homestead exemptions is quite a bit too high 4,000 difference between I think that's because it's 18 I believe that the percentage will drop again this year it says one year oh so but you're anticipating an increase and I don't think that will happen yeah well we do see in increases in number of houses in town over the course of the year as well we only had 11 last year yeah but again it's just some the estimate we came up with based off of that increase and the expected decrease um and so this is if you if you want to make a suggestion to change that number there based off of your calculations more than welcome

too well even even with that argument from 23 to 24 we had an increase in houses but yet we went down on Homestead I'm just concerned that we're over projecting that probably by 50,000 well no the difference the the the actual was 262,000 and we're projecting 275,000 which is not is only you

24 reduction those years ruction will continue yeah and so that's a place if you want to make a recommendation to make a decrease there more than welcome to did you say we have an estimate what it's going to be this year we don't know anything

valuations assessed and all that that's the other thing too is the depending on if someone's property gets evaluated at a sale or something like that we're seeing that increase as well so um that's why we went with that number

anybody Mark questions about intergovernmental um expenses or or sorry intergovernmental funding sources okay if seeing none we can move on to page services where we we're covering like our Eureka rental fees which represents 18 months of expected fee rental our junkyard fees um user fees and trash tags cable franchise fees uh ambulance fees and then miscellaneous charges for services excuse me sorry so we expect that those funding sources will be down 10% 10.9% and that's

you're anticipating it going down not going up or at least staying the same uh do we want to have Chief answer that question or do you since everybody's getting older and supposedly using the ambulance more and we're see 12% increase so that's a good question I don't know the chief chief do you want to do you have a response for that question I can't you're looking at ambulance fees yeah 14-

get another seat put you in the seat here it that it's just a valid point Jill it's uh it's the I I don't want to say guesstimation and it's not mine um certainly Mark the town manager just trying to see what the revenue projection be um I did it out you know if you do the one 117 * 1.5 you would get 176 670 you know that could be more realistic but um with Medicare Medicaid

and the Pennies on the dollar that we've been seeing it it can fluctuate uh I think we're at 95,000 currently outstanding and it's not on these ambulance fees don't get locked into one year or 18 months it it just continues even backwards to collections and whatnot so it's just an ongoing process actually since I've been here um so that could easily go up and and I would expect it to just as you said uh our fees are standard they're equal to to this area so they're not high uh we are having a good um collection of those

through the company uh commstar uh and our our ambulance call volume's up significantly so um that very well could be up to 176 they chose the 135 for the fiscal so uh 41670 but that's your choice if you want to add that to the projected Everything Changes right if we collect less then then that's on us and if we collect more then that's better for you all and and each individual call changes as well so lift assists might have a higher um if we're getting a lot more lift assist there might be a higher Personnel cost because there's more people responding for a lift is but there might not be a collection of a fee or service as part of that um you know if we're getting very serious car accidents which we hope we don't get a lot of and there's very high level service provided by paramedics and transportation and stuff like that that could be more expensive if it's if it's a fender bender and we're putting on a

Band-Aid and something like that it's just it just fluctuates based off of the nature so this is a little bit of a conservative estimate I thought the ambulance fees was just the transportation fee I thought it had nothing to do with the Services can oh I I I no not at all almost like your um

your business so BLS which would be an EMT that is a lower rate than and then there's two ALS so a paramedic level H has one or two and they also bill by the mile so that's $22 per mile uh we go to the five hospitals so if they want to go to main Med their doctors are of main Med or it's appropriate care to go to main Med Pediatrics uh sometimes we're up to 30 mil times the 22 okay um so there is a a staggered system of that and then what they do cardiac monitor cardiac drugs um or just as he said a

transport a BLS transport okay if this is for chief I can keep them in the Hut scene perfect um it is um actually stay there um so because we uh um we offer our services to other towns do we if we transport for another town do we build that town as well that's a great question yes so when when Durham transports we bill with a transporting agency if you will we build and that includes Mutual Aid so if we get called Mutual Aid and we transport then we build the reciprocal is when we call

Mutual Aid into town and they transport they get the billing y but yes that that does happen okay thank you John uh not for chief um is this the 135,000 all those numbers in that column are they 18 month I mean or are they uh

yes okay so I me I guess in my my thought would be that 135,000 seems to be really low if we're talking about 18 months 117,000 last year for 12 months now you're saying 100 so only 20,000 more for six more months that would seem to me to be yeah it's a conserv number that we could may be way too it's a conservative estimate because of the high variability of the cost so like if we're getting you know very serious calls and people are we're getting a whole string of people need to go get life- saving carried down to Portland yeah that could that number could be huge if every and I hope every call doesn't become that serious but yeah so with that huge fluctu ation and what a call could could cost felt like it's more appropriate to be on that conservative side and so it's admittedly a conservative estimate okay we talk about it in I guess later yeah you we're just answering how we got those numbers what

you all want to do with recommendations is up is your prerogative yeah NE no uh I think this is slightly connected if you look back to the budget summary page would mark would you rather suggest we mess with funding which one source increases where they're realistic as opposed to using uh fund balance to decrease yeah so um you know as part of this uh process looking at looking at these numbers uh and the questions being asked um my suggestion would be to uh

make a proposal to adjust uh the revenue amounts to something that you feel is more that committee feels is more realistic um and is isn't too conservative um so for example uh adjusting other excise tax perhaps adjusting state revenue um homestead exemption uh ambulance fees uh interest on property taxes could probably actually is probably a little bit more than it probably should be in interest income Jerry and I actually talked about that because interest income I don't know what interest rates are going to do over the next 18 months uh so that one was intentionally we looked at the actuals and like well it's already 112,000 for an entire year I really don't know what interest rate but if the committee feels it's something where they would want to estimate higher um again I would say take a do your estimates as best you can for each uh you know uh your recommendations for each line uh with an eye on the overall

total funding sources to see whether or not that makes sense um from an estimation Point as opposed to adjusting the unassigned use of fund balance and and we can hop right there into like the interest income conversation so that again is a very conservative estimate we have a locked in interest rate of 5% uh it went down it was locked in for 5% at for 6 months and so we you're your all's guess is is as good if not better than than mine when what interest rates are going to do and what we can get locked in um Jerry uh negotiated very

aggressively and we moved our money from One bank to another to get this interest rate that we have right now it was you know well over $100,000 of increased Revenue we're just being conservative with that because we don't know what interest rates are going to be and if interest rates tank we don't want to be overestimating um again we want to be responsible for the fiscal impact on individuals and we're feeling that a little bit more conservative on the estimate of revenues is is a better option there and so that's why we're coming up with these numbers you know so I don't have the interest rate crystal ball if I did I'd sell that information for Prof um I have a question about the cable franchise fees uh can you give me the line number 14 646 144

okay so um my question don't know what page 18 is but page 18 shows um The Reserve accounts and it looks like this past year we got $973 so is that the difference that's what was left over that went into the reserve account or is that what we actually collected I'm actually going to have to look at that yeah um I know I did look at it I don't remember what what that was but it wasn't the franch I don't believe it was the franch yeah that's not the franchise fee there so franchise three is what fills the Telecommunications as far I thought correct it has in the past yeah okay so well in the past yeah I I'm old you know yeah Heather sorry on PG te at

973 I think that was the leftover arpa oh was that I think that that's that amount that we were I think that's we we can H that answer for next week I mean for your next meeting I have another part of that so with that said um the cable franchise fees went from 425 to 275 and I think that's because people are ditching cable and streaming so are we looking that 418 is that for 18 months yes that's the that's the 18mon

some cash receiving done back in last February I don't have the details here i' have to look at I'd have to look at what it was what it was okay so with that said though that if you advate I think you're using that term annualize annualize lots of a terms

okay so if we are annualizing that we are staying flat from last year me do the math here I'm not texting I'm just using my calculator well yeah like within 50 bucks yeah it's yeah so franchise fees I believe only comes in once a year yeah that that's fine if it comes in once a year but what I'm saying is I think more people ditched their cable Oh Yeah from last year to going forward so I think we're too high on that and if it only comes in once a year are we expecting two payments definely do no we're only excting one way it is so we got to definitely adjust that then too well it depends on when it comes in right yeah that's true I think it comes in in

it'll come in next fall but then we won't see it with and so is this reflective this this shows reflective of more than one if we're only expecting 27 I I actually think the the 9,000 that's in the again I'll have to look at it I think the 9,000 that's in the um telecommunications Reserve is actually a partial payment of this um total franchise fee and it should be added to that 9 should be transfered there y yeah that's my that's my guess we can get that answer for next meeting all right thank you which means it would go down as well at the same the same time the same subject is there

once that information comes in does that do they tell you how many houses they Supply that to I I don't know I'm not sure trend from with fidum coming on board and a lot of people signing up for streaming versus cable it'd be nice to know if there if there's a trend or downward trend on that from them I would think that they would know that as a business I certainly want to know it m yeah that's a good question be interesting to know if they if they do have that information readily available too MH and would a follow-up question be should fidum be paying a cable franchise fee they're not providing cable just just just yeah

property taxes what's the um what is the interest rate on that 7% 7% thought I think that's what you guys it's something that's voted on at town meeting every year okay believe it was 7% right and again like we said this uh this interest income is is a very conservative estimate just because we don't know so if the committee if the budget committee wants to take a stab at the interest rate and come up with a different number more than welcome to hear that recommendation what dollar amount are you using for what for CD how how much

is uh it's it's not a CD it's a well it's a yeah I thought we had one of them in a high yield savings account though no they're all CD okay my so they are a CDs and around 5% right now they're 5% but how long they left months 1.5 million right two of them were they're both 1.5 million one was 3 for six the one for three is already matured the one that's for six ends in Mar you relock in at sorry 5% 5% how

much money is available to put in the CD is what I asking 3 milon three million but that that'll drop as the as the year goes on as we eat through cash so it's 3 million right now because we uh we just received a whole bunch of tax revenue so can I ask another question did you say that when that three month came up it re reup it no we need that cash to the bill that's why one six month one's three month just to manage cash flow

what what really made our current bank upset was they were only giving us like 85% and they really should have been giving us the higher interest rates because they went up for a while so when I moved it they decided they were going to match even a regular checking account gets that

not happy that I yeah I think Jerry had a couple VPS at each other's throats over it so we need we want more interest y um did you have something to add about this the thing that I wanted to add is that this this is you know such a beneficial move for two reasons one The increased revenue from the interest and also the fact that we don't have to pay interest to get us through the year to pay our bills right so that's a winwin regarding this very specific very specific

total funding resources are are down about 3% but like we said we highlighted a couple places where we were very um conservative with our estimate and they wants to if you all want to make a recommendation to to be a little bit more liberal with the estimate there that's that's your prerogative so just letting you know why we chose those numbers any more questions on page

just be a one meeting situation right all righty so uh funding requirements um General government you can see we're up about 14.1% and then uh Administration that's up 13.8% % assessing is down 4.4% information technology that is up 54% because we changed our uh provider for our it we were um so the the IT services

that the the town had been using over the last few years exposed us to significant risk and like like for for like hacking and things like that and so we went and uh tried to mitigate that risk by getting a more robust it service and then planning and code enforcement is up 3.8% any questions on 20 23 26 or

3.8% I what's up besides payroll that's 3.5 that can all be seen in the details this is just a uh on the next page or the next two p we'll see it we'll see that we see the department up 13.4% other public safeties up 3.7 with a total Public Safety increase of 13.1 again we're going to go into details in in subsequent pages on on these as well Public Works uh down 3.6% municipal buildings up 56% Solid Waste up 24.4% with a total change of 2.9%

uh Community Services we're seeing a a down 96% and that's because um that's well that's we didn't get many requests for money but also we have a recreation account already funded with more money than is right here so rather than allocating more money for uh Recreation we already can distribute that out of the recreation Reserve so we didn't feel the need to fund for more um money this year so chairman yes we may not have that Authority next year yeah correct so if we don't have that Authority then we didn't get request in a timely manner this year for anything we no one came in for the free uh the the scholarship fund I know a member of the committee told the baseball committee to reach out to us and ask for more money but that came in too late for this year so we just didn't allocate that so if we don't have the authority to distribute out a reserve accounts next year then then we'll have to revisit that the following

18 months for uh for recommendations to give to to local so why would you not have um if the town doesn't vote to give us authority to distribute out of Reserve accounts on the on the warrant this year so requirements um down 31.2% assessment

and fixed cost up 3.1 abatements and bad debt down 100% other Financial uses down 35 for uh a change of think of 3.2% and so the total requirements for funding the town for the next 18 months is down 0.5% so it's a a decrease in total requirement on our Municipal

we start going uh my yeah I guess I have a question if our total funding requirements is down. 5% why are our taxes going up yeah we Mark and I had that conversation and I figured people were going to ask that so Mark do you want to provide that answer for uh so in general

Jerry had mentioned um if the if the general costs for goods and services in the broader economy are increasing by 3 and 12% then it generally makes sense that the cost for consumers for governmental goods and services should also increase by 3 and a half% um but from uh a fund balance

management perspective and a kind of a stability perspective um it's much better and it's generally my recommendation to all my clients uh that you can you keep the tax levy um steadily increasing 3% to 5% so where within that range um when you can afford to do so or when basically the economy is in a generally good good situation what that does is it uh it makes it predictable for for towns people for taxpayers it also helps to avoid sudden increases or decreases in

in your tax rate uh so for example sometimes you know there are towns regardless of my recommendations that'll say oh well we want to keep the tax FL flat we want a 0% tax or we actually want to reduce the tax compared to Prior year and then they do that for a couple of years because that's what they want to do and then all of a sudden for whatever reason they either the select board or the or the school committee is not able to do that and all of a sudden because of regular price increases in the general economy uh and because of raises and all that all of a sudden they have to increase the the tax and the comparative tax increase is now 10% increase from the prior year because you've been keeping it flat for one or two years um so in general my recommendation is just try to keep it steady when you can particularly in even Economic Times uh when it gets to um Economic Times where um you know you're

in a recession or a depression that's when you would want to start to say okay well now we want to start cutting back uh in order to ease the C tax burden on taxpayers uh but we're able to do so because in the years that we've been uh going along we've been kind of matching what the cost of goods and services are to the town that is then turned around passed on to the consumer which is the taxpayers also funding funding sources are down 3% too so the the cost of our budget is down 5.5% but also our funds are down because of that 18 because of that 18-month period in some of those state revenu sharing and those state funded things like the tree growth and stuff like that we're not getting those so we just have less money too so that's where we have to come up and make that difference so so the 3.5% is just a randomly picked number based

on that information not randomly picked it's picked based off of the general increase in inflation over the course of the last couple years so in for example uh postco you had inflation rates that rise rose up to 8% right well in those weird Economic Times the towns that hadn't been uh you know basically keeping flat um or I'm sorry the towns that had been keeping flat now all of a sudden had to have a significant increase I had one one client that actually had to go through that right they had they hadn't maintained a a steady increase uh so then they actually kept it flat for two years running two years running so basically three years of the same tax ta Levy um and then all of a sudden because inflation rates went through the roof now they were like oh well we have to increase our we have to increase our tax levy by 19% and people were all up in arms well why do you have to increase it by 19% well because we

haven't been keeping pace and now the cost of the town for its Serv for its goods and services right you know uh supplies uh you know uh Road repair Paving anything that anything that has gone through the roof well that has to be necessarily passed on to the taxpayer so it just makes better sense to say okay well if in general the cost to the town to provide those goods and services is going up by about three 3 and a half% might as well turn around and pass that on to the taxpayers uh for an even Keel

type of uh economic uh you know even kill economic uh um assessment to them on a on on a yearly basis and again it's also married in with all right well where are we at with our fund balance and where do we want to be with our fund balance so for example right now the town the select board you know knows that the fund balance is too high because of those several years of of uh not really paying

attention to revenues and the fund balance of increase to going into this year was uh What 3.6% uh 3. 6 million uh so then for FY 24 the idea and going on going forward the idea is to slowly reduce that down there's a Temptation on a lot of towns well if if our unassigned fund balance is way too high why don't we just not tax not increase the taxes at all and reduce it a lot faster I can certainly understand that but if you do that you end up running into the same problem sometimes you're you're wrong in your estimates and you end up reducing it faster than what you an anticipated and then you come up to another year where all of a sudden you're at this cliff and you're like H well now we have to now our now our fund balance is way too low and so we have to increase our taxes just in order to pad our fund balance again because an unassigned fund balance is necessary it's not like you can just run a run

with a fund balance of zero or yeah you got to manage cash flow a little bit there and then at our current we'll get to this later but our current rate of fund balance expenditure it's like a 4.7 years or four and a half years before it gets spent down to a point where we expect that we just need it need the the amount two months of cash flow uh liquid and so the other thing too is by maintaining some of that fund balance and not just saying all right this year zero taxes because we're spending the whole fund balance down we're allow we can keep some of that in that investment income and so when we have periods where we're getting good uh interest rates which again we don't have the crystal ball but it can help us with that that too so generate some Revenue yeah I'm definitely not advocating Zero by any means but I guess my the question in my brain that keeps coming up is why not compromise between our social

security residents and the CPI because one I mean I know it's regional versus National but National CPI isn't 3 and a half% so I guess I'm just curious if you guys even had the thought process of compromise yeah and that's something we think about we take very seriously you know mean age and Durham's about 41 but we know that we do have a large population that is in the retirement community we understand that they're on a fixed income this is one bill that they they um Can Vote for but don't you know necessarily can change they can't you know you can pay less and you can drive less right you can go out to eat less and we know you can mitigate things there it's just one of those things is that we understand that but we also need to like provide the same level of goods and services that the community has asked us to and that's where that cost comes into play and it just it's the a well not the

aggregate but that CPI works out to be about 3.5% so we think that that's a fair expectation to hand off to the taxpayers as a whole so okay so you didn't take in their we do think about it but it's because you could use more of the fund balance we could use more that half% and come up with a little bit more of a compromise and so we could use more of the fund balance but we have a schedule that we think we're comfortable with with paying that fund balance down to fund future Capital so that we don't have to borrow again in the future also keeping more of that liquid and more of it invested right now and so if there was some sort of catastrophic emergency in town and we had some very large expense pop up right now we could offset that because we we could go to the town at the next town meeting and try to offset that with that fund balance whereas if we spent that down if there's that catastrophic emergency we're now

either having to borrow or having that large increase so we just think it's a responsible way to bring it down down slowly but if the budget committee wants to make a recommendation to use more of the fund balance that's totally your prerogative so this just our our thought process on it so Heather yeah um Mark you can speak to this more accurately if I remember correctly when we were at our least amount of cash flow where we needed to use the fund balance to get through the year at at the lowest point we were at like 800,000 is that am I remembering that correctly so when we talk about that right that that feels I mean I'm super conservative I don't want be in a situation where we're going down lower than that to be able to pay our bills we went from $35 million to 800,000 this past year Well in part is because of the way when we're collecting we only collect taxes once a year um so when you

have that one collection you're spending it your money down until you get that next collection so we do we do a cash flow analysis we we're we're good there but if we go too low we we might have the money but we don't have the cash flow and so we'd have to get like a tax anticipated note at that point we're trying to avoid any sort of borrowing so yeah uh the just to give you an idea of the fluctuation in the cash flow so um uh this in FY 24 meaning last January 1st we had 4.4 million going into January uh and then that was slowly reduced U because the difference between inflows and outflows is about $500,000 a month uh all the way down until June then the cash balance or available cash balance was $1 million and that's including the Cedar's balance right what we had in savings uh that that was in June and then once July hit because tax the tax commitment went out at the end of June once taxes hit that's

when July's balance uh shot back up so perfect example January through May we our cash inflows are roughly 340,000 320,000 July our cash in flows are 5.3 million and so we just get that one payday and we have to manage it throughout the year I think the easiest way for people to think about it in terms of like what they can relate to in their in their personal life is if you look at your escrow balance on your um mortgage statement right when you're at your highest point you're at your high point but then when your property tax bill gets paid or your homeowner insurance gets paid you're really close to the bottom of what's in that account and this in my brain that's the eest way for me to think about this what that's relatable and and so we would potentially have cash flow issues if we just said spend that fund balance down to two months of of uh expenses well once we get to that June timeline before

we've collected taxes in a normal 12 12 month year we might not have enough money so we'd have to get into borrowing a getting a tax anticipated anticipation note and we just really want our select board wants to really avoid paying interest so that's why we want to have that balance there no how are you controlling the the uh the fund balance what do you mean just how are you controlling the the the degradation of it the so uh as you can see in the on the summary page right um in FY 23 you can see the uh the net uh was an

addition to fund balance right and that was result of FY 23's budget not estimating uh revenues for FY 24 um the the budget contemplated a $668,000 deficit meaning they were uh the town was planning on eating into the budget by 668 I'm sorry the fund balance by 668,000 now uh in reality you're you're not really ever going to hit that exact budgeted use of fund balance because again we almost always are conservative on our estimates of Revenue and are almost always uh estimating to use a budget more than what we will actually expend and we can't actually go over uh the uh the budget expenditure so the yes so when you say to me as during budget season when you say all right well we're going to budget to use 668,000 I'm thinking all right well you'll probably be around 3005 $500,000 of actual use and that's exactly what happened uh in fy4 yeah if you flip to that front page you'll see we had

66 because Revenue was underestimated uh no I mean revenue was underestimated by only $100,000 um uh I'm sorry no you're right uh Revenue was underestimated by about $175,000 and uh and expenditures came in under budget by about 100,000 and for example like we had not transferred money into the investment uh option when we did the budget last year that was in process so we didn't budget for that when we got that good um when we get that good good rate we saw 150% increase in our our Revenue right there and so you'll see here on the additional use of fund balance we had budgeted 668,000 in FY 2024 we only ended up using 428,000 of that and so so the idea is uh again not to not to dramatically decrease the fund balance uh right away what it is is say okay well we have you know too high of a fund balance we have un balance about 3.8 going into the year if we eat into it by or if we budget to eat into

it by 668 realistically we're going to eat into it by about 500,000 which is what happened and then what we want to do is we want to slow that rate that we're eating into it over the year so that you're kind of having a soft Landing to come into where you want your fund balance to be and then and that takes several years right and so then once you get to that point where your fund balance generally is where you want it to be within a 15 to 25% range of what your expenditures are that's that's the general rule of thought basically two to three months worth of expenditures then it's really just you're not budgeting to use a fund balance most years right you're the only time you're budgeting to use a fund balance is when you're like oh well we really had more we had more revenues than we really thought we were going to have and we had a lot less expenditures and so our fund balance is starting to

rise so then we're going to try to try to keep it um will'll increase our fund balance our use of fund balance for the next year to bring it back down but right now what your the situation that the town is in is it has two Hive of fund balance right as far as the select board is concerned as far as taxpayers are concerned and in general and what we want to do is we want to slowly bring that back down to about the 15 to 25% range and you you generally want your your fund unin fund balance to be on the higher end of that range during good Economic Times um so that when a recession hits you have that cushion to allow it to go down to about the the 15% range hopefully by the time the recession ends so that then by the time you can bring it back up to that 25% range so in sumary yeah um an increase the the the budgeted use

of fund balance is affected by an increase in the budgeted revenue and a decrease in the budget in expenditures yes yes that's correct all three Factor all of those three major factors on the summary page affect affect your um targeted property tax or you could look at it the other way your different your revenues and expenditures affect how much you're budgeting to use fund balance does that make sense so in the past we've used the fund balance to offset increases in the taxes correct so we're going to come down to a plateau where that's not going to be the case so we need to be thoughtful that as we're raising the budget that there's going to be no buffer there to lower it and we're going to and we're going to eat that every single year whatever the increases are and that's why you want and that's why you generally want to have this why I suggest having a a steady increase year toe of between 3 to 5% so that when

you get to that point because people are thinking in their minds oh well we're always going to be able to use the fund balance to offset the tax increase so that we can keep it so that we can keep it low but if you're if you have been uh

managing it well that 3 to 5% increase which kind of marries up with what general inflation is should be about what you're going to need anyway in order to keep in order to keep your um your town providing the services the goods and services on a on a you know regular basis normally we've been increasing what those goods and services are that's correct and it's kind of been hidden I I don't want to say hidden to the taxpayer it's been not as blatant because we've been able to offset it right so in future that won't be there what I think one important thing to remember is that we're trying to maintain our Municipal services at a flat rate but the the our biggest expense the school we don't control and so the way I think about it is if if our biggest expense for most households that would be the mortgage goes up 9% one year that's the difficult to absorb in your personal budget and if our NE one

of our next biggest expenses County tax goes up and so we start this budget process off with most expensive things going up 6% and your second most expensive things going up 9% and then we have to try to mitigate that impact and so if we just carried that percentage increase over even with our flat budget that's that's going to have impact at a higher percentage rate than we would want to see to the taxpayer and so that's why we're using some of that fund balance the other thing too is that the we now have our Capital uh Improvement plan with our 10-year expenditures that we're starting to um put money into in the hopes that those big needs in the future don't get um come up to us unsurprised so way I think about is you pay off a car and you start taking that car payment and you putting it towards your next car right and so that we're trying to mitigate that and then also at the same time manage it so we don't have

to take out tax anticipation notes and pay interest to pay our bills so that's that's our tactic to try to address that concern I have another question as you just LED right into that I didn't see any documentation to here as to what spending on Capital I saw that we have what we're asking for what we're transferring over but there's no like what are we buying like yeah I think we're not there yet in the budget yeah that's where we're getting into all these really small lines so try you're hoping I fall asleep John the uh cash flow analysis changes completely going forward right yeah cuz we have two periods of collection you have two periods of collection two lows Maybe s gu there we had two periods of collection depending some some people uh when there's two periods of collection just come in and pay their whole tax bill up front some people spread that out it's different for people paying

their taxes versus out of their pocket versus escrow accounts and so that's something we're taking into consideration too and and part of the reason why having a a healthy um fund balance can help with cash flow management particularly in this 18-month period with that change in cash flow thank you Wicked smot that was a good one joh good question mark gave it to me I thought I saw him Whispering anybody else okay we're at the beginning of administration on page 10 I think we all bump back to the front page but page 10's where we are now all right so um the total changes here is uh 13.8%

annualized that's 530 8,833 um you know you can see we've got some changes in department head wage of 3.9% department head wages where full-time staff wages are up 56.2% but you'll see part-time staff wages are down 100% And that's reflective of the resignation that we had and then moving two people from Full part-time to full-time so we don't have any part-time staff anymore um you know you just see our basic expenses here like our election worker wages C office wages there's some changes there payroll taxes are down U 8% health insurance is up 186% um health insurance is up 9% and added family coverage you know when you when you move like I think you pointed out when you move someone into full-time versus part-time they have the opportunity to take benefit so there's an added expense uh right there our worker compensation is down our retirement is up um you know training and development is at 0% travel and

mileage is down we've got a 0% estimate on heat electricity telephone and internet's down 25.9% our legal we're expecting a 50% increase and that's because our our suggestion is that we move to a a monthly retainer um model Jarry do you want to explain the difference between what we're doing right now and a monthly retainer yeah so the monthly retainer uh gives us the opportunity to uh talk with uh the town attorney as much as we want when we want we just get buil monthly for that service and we're using her a lot more these days so prior to that we were just we just budget and I don't think we use that attorney much at all yeah um and and part of the reason why we're using the attorney more is that we we've now adopted a policy where like if there's proposed ordinance changes we want a legal mind looking at it because there's there's a challenge of like what the town votes on and what the town gets

presented and locks in might have legal implications that that don't line up with state law and so having a town attorney available for that and also you know in in in if there was a bad situation with any sort of legal needs we would have the town attorney as well and so we're just building a much um more robust uh uh relationship with our

town attorney than the towns had with previous Council so is the 24 number accurate the first no I got distracted by Neil's question uh with regards to the monthly retainer um is that the only expenditure for the attorney or is there is there any hourly billing above and beyond that U only she has to go in and litigate that doesn't any litigation or if you have to go to court or anything like that that is just basically legal

though um we're down with with our auditor our business services are up 44% payroll processing service is down 33% equipment rentals are down building repairs and management is flat General Insurance is up 6.3 6.7% advertising is down 33% printing copings um up and you'll see there we have two

a little bit of a but uh we will now be printing two of our award-winning annual reports every year we we won an award last year for our annual report amongst the small municipalities so yeah and we do Ours by uh with staff internally not with uh external staff so two award-winning annual reports in this budget can you explain why too I'm I'm missing something here yeah because we're going to have the two Town we're going to have the printing for this upcoming report and then the one for the town meeting that's going to be in June of second weekend of June in 2026 all right thank you under Business Services can you give me the line number is that 20 7222 yes it is

okay question I don't know it's quite an increase there and is that what additional Services there there are additional Services there Jarry can you so um one of the services is Mark so he's flat for and then the other 20,000 is for human resources over the last next months help with I'm not picking on Mark but Mark came in and did a great job in converting a lot of things that needed to be converted to what extent do we continue that service versus uh

have so they can perform the service I won't make Mark answer that question but yeah yeah so we think it's very important as a select board that our our finances are done by a certified public accountant and it's very standard for uh for um our for municipalities to utilize annually their uh accountant to do their services and their quarterly reporting and so that's why we think it's important to continue that moving forward so in the past sorry in the

past we've had an audit service that would come in and check out all of our MH books a year after the at the end of the independent yeah we still have an independent audit um which is always going to happen with the with Municipal funds yeah and so I will say that our um findings and our audit are we've been you know getting really good um responses and fixing outstanding issues that were existing before we were working with a a certified public accountant so that's that's a a good thumbs up kind of a report card do we get to the point

basis are not needed are in the existing staff can be educated to take that over or not I think in order service what's that you'd want to for an audit you unlikely and the reason why it's unlikely is just because my experience has been you can't find people that know how to do governmental accounting yeah which is why I have a business and I would note that when staff was doing it before you all had 2 million that you didn't know you had yeah and that was don't know how long they yeah and so in order for in order for us to bring in order for us wait one at a time please in order for us to um do it internal we would have to create a position and hire an accountant a certified public accountant with experience with experience in Municipal um finances which if we if we didn't have Mark we would just be adding another employee to to do that and we just think it's a much wiser use of our funds to do that as a Consulting uh

value instead of a full-time benefited employee which has additional costs so at one point different to one point I know that town manager has suggested that he wanted to increase the amount of hours back in in the office MH what line is that

the line we're talking the line we're talking about right now it is and so rather than um having staff do human resource work right now digging into their hours because our staff are busy full-time right now we would then have a HR consultant handle some of that work to free up staff time to work on things that we we have valued is more important for them to address is that HR consultant going to need office space no no no we were really lucky to find uh a Consulting for smaller municipalities a lot of these things um it's it's better to explore the the Consulting option rather than the employee option just because that expense and liability with having another employee if we were a much larger municipality where this this had a much larger workload um and and

that would be a different conversation but fortunately based off our side size you know if we had to have someone full-time for HR the budget line would probably be um quadrupled for that person compared to the the service uh is that we're getting with leg attorney do the wa Alan's not finished oh you I hear we' also talked about what had been discussed about when some of your fulltime employees need to have some time off but saying they're going on vacation how was that well because of a lot of moving Parts with this 18mon budget we're saying we're just keeping it steady the way it is right now rather than having an increase there and so right now if someone is going on vacation or out that that the other staff do have to continue to pick that up so and then maybe wa times yeah and so without increasing a full-time staff person that that's how we have to manage it and we just didn't after we recommended this HR um person

Jerry came back and said his recommendation was just that um consultant because we don't want to have a lot of new added to an 18-month budget because there's already a lot of questions you know thank you Don can the legal can the lawyer do the HR no I mean it's on the Chanel can the payroll company do HR I know the payroll company I had does HR yeah um not ours no no and

or or if they did we'd have to do an added expense because it'd be a new service it's not built into the existing contract so um we can't do it without increasing how much exactly is the HR please uh $20,000 for the 18-month period if she may not use it all just a budget number $220,000 a year you said 18th for the 18month period and so that's 65 ,000 45,000 is budgeted for me and 20,000 is budgeted for the HR person over that 18-month period why do we need them we've never needed them before now all of a sudden we increase we're exposed to a lot of liability without an HR professional and we've just got lucky that there hasn't been any major issue um so for example Our Town manager started to develop job descriptions for each position behind behind there the the the glass um those didn't exist it was just one that was developed before starting to develop things like wage tables that extrapolate what increases

could look like over several years there's ADA compliance things with um our job descriptions that haven't been met in the past and then things would like on boarding and any if there's any um issue that arises and so the select board is not comfortable with the level of risk that it exposes the municipality to right now and we've just been lucky in the past so we we want to bring in a HR um person to to cover that and so we felt like this is a really good approach to it yeah how is our accounting handled out what's the process I I know the payroll is done by St I guess but so uh so the accounting is done the data entry is done at the at the town office so the the daily receipts are done at the Town Office AP is input into um the trio

Services then my services which are essentially outsourced controller Services uh uh I come in on a quarterly basis and I'll review all of the books all of the data entries post all the necessary adjustments because there's always errors or there's just things that need to be reclassified I'll generate um uh quarterly reports for the select board such as that cash flow statement the the quarterly financial statements uh and then at the end of the year I close the books like I did this year and I help with the uh help with the preparing the budget I help with uh the auditor getting the auditor all the information that the auditor needs uh so that's how overall the the accounting is done um the data entry like I said is is all done here but it's just data entry like staff are put billing things to certain accounts and stuff like that so who does payables the staff right M from

Trio yeah that right as what they do is they put it into Trio they code put it into Trio uh and then they go ahead and cut the checks on a regular basis yeah mhm I may have missed it at one point in time we going to buy into a different non- Trio thing did we pass over on that we're not at that line yet but yes okay oh wait the first the first nine pages went quicker than the 10th page so can I add something about the contracted Services um we have been in a situation multiple times where when an employee that does a specific fun leaves they leave with the institutional knowledge that they hold for that position and so by Contracting especially the financial piece um it doesn't leave the institutional knowledge of it doesn't leave with the employee in terms of HR and then and then on top of all of that there's the savings associated with not having to pay benefits not having to pay vacation

time not having to pay sick time not having to pay to train um and getting people who are are um they have the specific specialty that we need for that specific job and we only have to access that level of service that comes at a premium price to be able to hire someone to be a town employee that has that level of service or level of specialty that we need for that so when I'm thinking about it I feel like it's the biggest bang for the buck because we're getting that high level of Specialty Service that we need for that function but we're not having to pay all the associated costs with having a full-time employee or a part-time employee to do that function and then frankly we run into space like if we added more employees for this Donald do we have that increase cost like Heather's talking about we just now need to find a space for them and so if we had a full-time HR and a full-time uh Finance director be pretty crowded in

uh in the town office so did you have something else to add I just wanted to say do recognize Allan's point that it doesn't help coverage if people are out to go this route but to me in terms of cost Effectiveness I I think you know you have to weigh the pros and the cons and to me the the cost benefit associated with doing the Consulting piece of it versus hiring a full-time employee just makes more sense for our town ready yep I don't think anybody's ready for me but I'm ready I'm going to make a statement that I don't really want to address tonight but I think everybody's been dancing around an elephant and I just want to point this elephant out because I think at town meeting it's really going to be brought into the circus three four years ago the town was

presented that if we hire a town manager they will have the financial knowledge they will have the HR um they'll bring in grant money so on the surface of things it looks like one might say we hired a town manager that couldn't do the job so now we're having to subcontract out and I've had other people say to me why do we still need a town manager if we're subcontracting everything out yeah don't want you to address it tonight cuz I need to get to the rest of this budget and get to bed but I just want you guys to prepare yourself that that question probably will come up a little bit more rudely than the way it's been presented tonight and I would like to address that with the just briefly we did an analysis of our surrounding like I'm taking time to do an analysis of our surrounding communities with Town managers and the vast majority of them have more than one person so when you look at their uh

responsibilities uh on the MMA sheets that we have access to as elected officials to see the salaries and what their jobs and roles are generally speaking in the surrounding communities the town manager has one job and that's Town manager as opposed to town manager Director of Finance um HR director and all those things there's just only 280 work hours in a year and that's just a lot to have one person do and so when we look at how other municipalities handle it they either handle that through peeling off their legal or sorry peeling off their financing and their HR and using Consultants or having a specific person assigned to that when I look at nearby communities with same population size as us they have executive secretaries for their um Town manager or they have um assistant Town managers or they have those dedicated staff and so I I didn't make the presentation four years ago as to what the expectations

for a town manager was so I I can't speak for who made that there but um our town manager is fully meeting the select board's expectations and I think highlighting the need for come some of these specialized things that we can fill with contract roles versus other staff just deals with the Limited hours there are in a work year and so that's that's all I would say about that you know all right so we left off at Business Services you want to continue from there y Business Services

um go around to payroll other people asking the question not me I just wanted to give them a heads up yeah no I think perfect question yep payroll processing Services were down 33% equipment rentals are down building repairs and maintenance is flat over the 18-month period General Insurance is up 6.5% we're estimating a 5% increase for 2025 and then again 2026 but that's only paying half of that in that 2026 time frame advertising is down the like I said the award-winning Printing and of the uh Town report is up because we have to do two Postage and Freight is up just that's cost of doing Postage and Freight's up uh dues and subscriptions 1.1% um and that's just based off of 18 months for dues and subscriptions and software licensing we've pulled that line and put it in elsewhere General supplies are down 28% lean cost is up 33% election cost is down 99.1% and miscellaneous expenditures is up

157% um and that's for a main Pur payment for a uh the retirement system for a employee who resigned so that's a onetime cost there that might have been Prov you an H yeah and that's the issue I mean I'm not necessarily defending her otherwise but yeah yeah and I mean that's one of the challenges when you when you work for a municipality you have to uh enter into the main pension system and prior to uh

uh when someone filled out their paperwork that was not um done correctly so they weren't paying into the to main purs when they should have been so that's not entirely true oh sorry specifically for Durham you have to enter Durham you have not all mean not in all means depends on what your what your agreement is with the Social Security Administration which was Durham 15 years ago and whether or not you signed up to it these are the types of these are to be to be honest these are the types of very complicated questions that an HR person would know about that almost nobody knows about I would like to remind you of my request to be recognized before my apologies question Donna um on the dues and subscriptions there um you get GP Cog in there how much is that because I got told that was not costing us a penny it cost us $8,000 and we usually get a this year we got $23,000 in return on that in terms of uh

the grants that we're awarded and um money that we save negotiating with them for uh it's salt and fuel sorry so it's an $88,000 due but dues but we get a very good return on investment there what are we getting back on that I'm sorry so it's an $8,000 this line just shows you the dues for that and this we're get we are getting so far as of February 4th $23,000 in Grants through GP Cog that are only available if you are working through GP Cog so good job and what is that going to cost the town I mean like we we getting 23,000 in Grants what are they expecting ,000 we're we're not paying any money for those grants what are they expecting us to do for it so that's like for example our downtown envisioning program is paid for entirely through a grant from GP Cog um so that's not an expense that we're getting and then it's just the there's no um Town match for those grants that we're getting so if we decide to do

nothing with GP Cog at the Town votes it out do we still get this 23,000 no in order to access the GP Cog grants you have to pay the dues for GP Cog and so our goal as a select board is to maximize the amount of grant opportunities that don't cost additional Municipal dollars into our community I just speak for myself the way I think about it is a grant was T is a tax that was taken from you somewhere whether it is in your sales tax your private property tax your Municipal tax federal or state and so as the select board looks at it we want to find as many of those grant opportunities and bring as many of your dollars back into Durham and GP Cog is a really good return on investment there so they costing us 8,000 if we do nothing with them at all we lose everything and we spend out 8,000 have I got that right if we did nothing with them yes not necessarily because they help us uh get a negotiated

fuel cost by working as a a group to negotiate within GP Cog salt too and salt as well so it's how we work together with local communities to get a benefit for the large orders that you can group together when you get multiple communities together and you get that economy scale benefit okay so it cost us 8,000 for them to help us get lower prices in salt yeah cu the way if you think yeah the way if you think about it's like if you and your neighbors all get together share on the shipping cost and you buy the Costco membership or whatever and you buy all your stuff in bulk so okay thank you it's been a really good return on investment for our community our select board is hoping to continue to make sure we're getting the most out of that so Phyllis um going back up to the training development can you give me the line number Sor it's 7105 20 7105 y um what is that training

is it just for what is that training Jared do you want to cover the training yeah it's training for the employees for the systems or everything what what you need to do to title 38 for the clubs for um Mark does a class preparing for the audit so we'll send our employees to that I go to trainings it's trainings for the employees MH so trainings on um how to utilize the the programs that we have how to utilize how to work within the municiple setting and things like that if if if you folks in this group go to some training we pay for that that comes out of that yeah boards and committees if they like for example if they want to get a training on Municipal budgeting or something like that that's that's something that comes out of here right okay thank you good question yep and as you can see that's something that we just one and a half times the one year Val so I think we did make it to Total

Administration which is up 13.8% and do we have any more questions on that section what what line was um 20- 7356 software licenses what was that moved to seven it was moved down to 26 23 7356 you said well kind of split

are we good to move to the next page page or do we want to uh have any more questions here he move on okay so now we're in the information technology section um we're seeing 126% increase in IT services uh we've moved into those new IT services we were um expect we're seeing that expected cost at $2,883 per month this is one of the this is one of the lines that had a slight adjustment to what was sent out in the previous budget um that used to the previous line was budgeted at 49,4 and it's now budgeted at 51,000 um the website uh you know up

124% we also now are using myg which is $8,000 and our website is $2,100 software licenses so this is a line here where we're moving over to town Cloud which is a a new service provider who's building out the software right now they're based out of Brunswick and so when we move over to them it will be uh about $115,000 a year cheaper and so we 15,000 period so 15 locked we're locked in at $155,000 as opposed to 2,231 and we were able to lock in um for how many years at that 10 years at that price so um it's a new service offered locally that is being utilized by some other municipalities as well and they really you know price to steel to break into the market and we're comfortable with the questions that they were able to answer and with their background and their experience and it's also local they right in Brunswick and so that's nice to be able to use utilize them we did budget that for a little bit of

overlap for trio and town Cloud to exist at the same time because Town cloud is being built out right now we anticipate it being online in July but we budgeted for um Trio to extend um an overlap a little bit there so yeah well sorry I can't call you but ask question um so we're not under contract with um Trio it's a month-by-month payment uh we actually yeah well we actually were paying one annual payment M but now we're paying buying twice a year now because I don't know exactly when this is going to come out so the town Cloud comes out and it works I'll cut off the payment to Trio yeah and so we have that ability W with Trio and we also worked with um our assessor to make sure that they can work within new new programs as well so and and and I did it

six months too so um we're on that uh July 1st to June two it's just easier it's very i w say it's difficult it's very to do this budget the way it's set up now especially on 18th month because you want to know what's getting paid in January to July and what gets paid in July to December it makes a difference and the town software like when when you're at Municipal events and you talk about Trio people are kind like oh boy yeah that's the challenges we're having so we're hoping that not only will this save money by having that contract locked in but it will increase efficiency in the office and sometimes when we're looking at Municipal budgets we only look at the dollar amount but that that human timeline is a is that loss that opportunity cost can be huge so if we can cut down the time people are spending on this sort of stuff that opens up them to do other things that we can hope will increase Revenue news or

find other opportunities there so Donna um do you know how many people are into the myex um gov how many 960 yeah 960 yeah and we're hoping to help promote that a little bit more at the um town meeting as well uh you know about 2,000 households in Durham 960 we're operating on the assumption that some households may only have one person using it um and then there's always going to be element of people who aren't going to use it because they might not utilize tech services on their phone or just might choose not to utilize it but we're getting we're finding it to be a really helpful tool for outreach and we're just trying to make sure we increase transparency increase communication and this has been a really helpful way that we can do that especially if there's emergency situations and stuff like that and one thing we're hearing you know when people's power goes down hopping online isn't always

possible for some reason I have terrible web like service at my house if I don't have my Wi-Fi I can't really reliably get on to the internet super well if I have to receive notifications through town services that way so having a text message has has worked for folks like that so thank you yes M uh question regarding

Trio and town Cloud um I guess it's really two questions regarding Town Cloud first is are they going to be able to migrate historical data from Trio and second is is there going to be an additional cost to that or is that built into no that's all built into this yeah we we asked that question too

Hardware is at 0% so we're seeing total it that's a 54% increase and that's 72,000 annualized and that is because we are using more expensive IT services and we have a little bit of overlap for trio and town cloud um and so that's where we get that increase

minute recess so I can use the restroom okay it's not miss it I thought I think missed it I thought maybe I was assess I don't know discussion on this or I think we should see what time we're done tonight I'm not staying later than [Music]

asking questions as we go they they're welcome to come but we don't have to we don't have to include them in our conversation what we don't have to include them in our discussion but nice get the questions answer today yeah that's what I was thinking yep just get the questions we might think of more questions but the

break right so Jerry can I ask you a question about for why we're taking a break then M my understanding is when reading over the frequently asked questions we needed to have a point person and Joe thought that was you is that you you can send it to me I may just hand it off to one of the clerks it depends on what what it is and where the information's coming from okay well according to the question and answer we're supposed to officially have a person assigned to foa you can use me that's okay and what media sources are we using when we're announcing public meetings and town meetings I'd have to ask Jess what they've been using they take care of that okay it depends on the the meeting too there's some requirements loal yeah some meetings required like um like print resources like Sun Journal and stuff like that others require it to be presented in two public places and I think in the past

we've done the town office and then getting go um our one store that people frequent right so okay all right I was just asking before I was able to sign my form if you sign up on my text you'll get it there too so everyone sign up for my text I'm Joe I don't think we heard a review on assessing bottom of page 10 page up oh page [Music] up yep so uh mapping is down 33% um most

of this is down 33% % I'm guessing that's because we only are you paying for it once in that 18 uh uh 18mon period so and a total decrease of 4.4% 11 and thank you for the brief recess there needed it did that we already did page 11 here no y so it yep planning and code enforcement um full-time staff wages up 3.4% part-time staff wages 8.5% uh Committee Member wages are down 40% payroll taxes up 27% workers comp was $2,430 in the budget and then health insurance is down 51% retirement is up 2.1 or 2.1% and travel mileage is flat funded at 0% advertising it's down 6.7% Postage and Freight is down a third dues and subscriptions are down 10% % um 0% changes on uh General supplies and miscellaneous expenditures for a total change in total code enforcement at 3.8% do we have any question oh hands yeah go ahead why is part-time wages up 8.5 Jerry can you cover that that was because his increase last year wasn't

budgeted for so it's budgeted for now and this year um the the planning board okay no the parttime plan plan the planner sorry not the board but the the actual number is the same 4390 well yet and but then we have um maybe didn't work all those hours or something

okay uh so total General government there is a 141% increase annualized at $762,000 $62 and $40 so do we have any questions on page 11 before we move to page department heads wages are up 3.5% part-time staffs are 16.7% this includes night coverage and more than a 10% increase in volume call volume and then an increase in in minimum wage those minimum wage workers were just the increase that's built in the minimum wage um payroll taxes are up 32% health insurance is flat workers comp's up 29% retirement it's up 2% we have a stien increase of 11 thou uh 11 111% training and development is down 4.8% heat down 16.7% electricity is down 11.1% telephone and internet is up 52.5% um that's because if you all recall we now have computer aided dispatch so we have a you know needs for uh data plans in the uh Vehicles is that correct chief on the tablets dispatch services are down 30% ambulance services up 50% and a lot of

that's inflation for stocking the ambulance and the call volume you know the medical supplies cost more I'm sure Jill experiences that that too uh equipment and repair maintenance up 16.7% is just the cost of repair Old equipment buildings and repairs is at 0% vehicle repair and maintenance is at a flat fund dues and subscriptions flat General Supply is flat radio is up 11% that's just the cost the inflation rate on those radios is getting is getting up there and uh safety equipment is up 11% um we're down a little bit in diesel miscellaneous expenditures are flat percent for a 13.4% change in total fire department um budget which is annualized at

department section I know I'm on the wrong line but what are we buying what do you mean um patience patience patience just in general with the fire department like what's the fire department buy Capital expend Capital we'll get there oh we'll get yeah we'll get there God killing me J the answer to that is we're not buying anything we're putting money away for four more years yeah I guess I didn't hear this what night can you explain the night coverage note on 7:20 I I can

budgeted for nine months of night coverage so in April the uh Town's people voted unanimously to go within night coverage so I had in the budget nine months so I have to add three more months and then of course 18mon budget so night coverage is uh an extra

23,7 for for the 3 months so that's 90 days which is 3 months 12 hours a night $22 an average hour it was 23,000 so that's a majority of the increase for night mentioned uh Joe uh minimum wage went up 50 c cents an hour so half the department is based on minimum wage every hour they work every call every training is up and we don't know what that'll be in 26 so last year it was almost I think only 35 cents this year it's 50 but it's not established main state has not established for 26 what that is so I have to at least budget something in there for six months of of payroll increase that could be anything uh our increased call volume being up 12% again I don't know what it'll be that was just last year so that equates to thousands of dollars and things that I don't control so Mark can talk about payroll tax workers comp when you increase your payroll all that goes up too I I have no control over any of

those line items um and then other line items that you won't see uh we'll have to pay for like H so that's under equipment maintenance that's up $1,000 it's 20% I'm going to have to pay for that twice um you saw the ambulance um yeah I'm still on part-time staff wages there okay what8 okay so that's annualized at

parttime is also the uh part-time Captain for 18 months the secretary um call volume all of it no I'm just I'm I'm thinking about the increase the increase is about over $7,000 23 of that I get is the nighttime thing so there's another 50 in one your ra and no that's that's I'm not in that line I'm sorry that's s you're above that minimum wage people got a 2.5% increase in their wage that's what 50 cents equates to if that helps yeah I'm this $50,000 here I don't I get part of that is part the part-time wages increase but well that's over 18 months though what you're looking at talk annualizing it annualize that's 3 the annualized 232 is 305

he's annualizing the actual yeah yeah but that doesn't include that's only nine months of night coverage okay I'm added that back in the 23 that you said okay still give you 50 is how much we're going to be up in the next 18 months of of calls so hundreds of dollars per call and that equates to fuel and maintenance and everything else but how many people come out we now have 42 on the roster for night coverage you you're getting paramedics at night um that they're the highest you know dollar value so so can you clarify that depending on who picks up in night coverage it depends on the cost it does y EMT versus Advanced EMT versus paramedic correct so so we have to average that a basic EMT could be 17 a paramedic could be 21 if they have firefighter certific could be 23 if they're an officer so every employee is almost paid different I'm just asking 50 grand sounds like a lot for one specifically the the wage amount uh was

calculated by taking $21.85 multiplying it by an estimate of about 14,000 hours man hours over the course of uh one year and then that would be annual and then that would be uh multip by multip by 1. so the 2185 time 14,000 hours arrives at

$35,900 and then you you multiply that by 1.5 so that's where the part-time rate came in it's basically the S it's basically being being driven by the estimate of manh hours which in this case is about call laum is that all for Mutual Aid I mean no that's a flat those numbers are flat D Mutual Aid you got to get it out of your vocabulary it's flat as a matter of fact well how much was just done for Durham then how many calls for Durham do you have those are calls for

give you the exact numbers they're right in front of me for fear that that that would be asked uh Mutual Aid given ambulance Mutual Aid given we gave 39 that's that's a paramedic intercept or a transport we gave 39 EMS Mutual Aid

received we took in 35 can you clarify that 39 we're still billing on those Mutual Aid calls yep that's flat so we received 35 I called for 35 Mutual ambulances multiple carreck multiple calls maintenance of our ambulance being at the hospital we called and received 35 ambulances we gave 39 I was looking

at the fire is this all four nope that's ambulance okay so fire we received 22 and we gave 35 that's also station coverage we went to the scene 25 times we did station coverage 10 and those those numbers are consistent year-over-year they're not they're not out of whack those are in the 30s year-over-year I think it's important to think Mutual Aid to is investment in our needs in the future so there's a house that's standing right now because there was a chimney fire this week and the our our ladder truck is being refurbished and uh we had mutual aid from Lisbon who showed up with the ladder truck and and that that's you know a really important thing that we have that relationship with and you know I think the the town's developed really good relationships even with uh some of the full-time departments so you're getting some really high quality uh support get those Mutual AIDS so it's a give and take in

in a in a rural community where we're we're I think we're breaking even in the Aggregate and if you ask someone who's house is safe you know like last year when we had how many people respond to the meal metal BR fire I think 12 14 towns 14 towns responded and there's a house that's standing there with the the burn line was 4T away where that farm wasn't connected I think that that that a justification for Mutual a right there someone's house something no phis does phis um can you speak to the stiens what that is I can um certainly the first two I'll give you the other ones uh the first two are built in they haven't gone up since I've been here uh there's a a deputy of EMS get gets a stien quarterly for being the deputy of EMS here and there's an assistant chief stiping so it doesn't matter the person because that could change uh quarterly so those have not gone up and think it's said that's 4600

a year that and that's not even split I think one's like 1750 one's 2250 um but those are stiens for the position and again those have not gone up in the four years I've been here why why stien not a better there's no it's all it well it depends on how many hours I put in right oh yeah and both are are very active um

that's the way it was set up when I was here and and it seems to work it has not gone up that that's just for their their role in their position it's actually so I can call at them 247 to either respond or handle a situation or cover me uh on vacation and say I think that I think of that as like almost like a retainer for that service you know it's really hard with the the fire service PR when the call is going to happen or what the call is going to happen and if if Chief wants to go on vacation or go by the town for for the night he has to have someone who has the skill set to cover cover it um if there's a a major incident so okay thank you it also sounds like it's easily exchangeable yes so we control it so quarterly statement right if they don't show up if they quit then they don't get paid uh and I have to sign off on that and there's a redundancy um and then payroll at the Town Hall pay signs off and then the

town manager signs off uh for that stien on that Court okay so it's almost just like having a salary position but it's called a stip instead so helps keep that estimate flat it's not variable by hours and call on and I just wanted to clarify one thing that Chief said because I think I heard right but I want to make sure what you were saying is it's not our overall call volume that has gone up 12% it is just our responses to Durham that has gone up 12% and our mutual Aid has stayed flat over the years it does appear Mutual Aid has stayed flat the 12% is is overall overall calls those

are 911 calls right whether Auburn requests us somebody else or a citizen so and these are not these are not doctored other departments will go out for training they'll do an inspection that type of stuff these are 911 calls they are up 12% they went from 405 to 455 they continue to climb uh and honestly th some of those calls uh bad on me I don't even put them in people call me to check their house check a detector can you just you know check a a gas Le for me K stuck in the tree y i i don't even create a call so so we're actually lacking calls it is 12% for what we're called upon that could be could be mutual aid but o overall call volume is up 12% year over year right but if you're dissecting it down and Mutual Aid hasn't changed from year to year it can be then stated it's in town call volume that's gone appear that it's in town call volume uh car Rex were up 25% we did 52 the year before we did 65 last year

those are the ones that we were called to that's not just all of them cuz Sheriff will go to the non-injury accidents so those are the ones that we were called to and that's both ambulance and in the fire side of things um bless you bless mut does seem to be on those uh the year before we were doing 70% medical last year we did 75% medical out of totality of calls 75 were medical related okay which equates to billing and that's why Billings up to 117,000 it's never been up that high you all

question any other questions on this uh fire department section oh on the I'm sorry go ahead f um safety equipment um the unfunded mandated what do what is that sure Chief's coming an inspection this year from BLS if you will so every piece of equipment from a fire helmet to your boot to everything had to go through the unfunded mandate is fire helmets have to be replaced in 10 years regardless of of the activity that it sees so Boston could see more fire than us I I doubt it because of all the mutual aid but um we had to replace $4,000 just in fire helmets they're $400 a piece that's the cheapest going that's not a leather helmet you can go up to 2,000 I had to replace 10 helmets this year because they were out of date so the so the mandated unfunded the state's not giv us funding for is that OSHA also said eventually you may have to have two sets of gear all our firefighters only have one and those have gone up to

roughly $4,000 a set uh and we have about 20 22 firefighters so we're staggering them so that we don't just try to replace them all in one year but I had to replace I was over by what 100 something on the safety because uh I had to replace four to six sets of year so again mandated to do so funded through through Federal how often does OSHA come around to say check all your equipment well say now you need something else we're not playing that game they will if there's an injury oh um oan will come otherwise we we've invited them every four years for for an allinclusive and that goes on Captain dimick and and again all the firefighters were doing their due diligence that was a 4 and 1 half hour um inspection of every piece of paper of every employee of every certificate and uh again on the captain for doing a due diligence over the years and we passed and we shouldn't see them unless there's an injury or or a

complaint okay all right thank you chill I have two questions um sugar I already forgot one all right I L the one I do you remember where in this paperwork is grants that we apologize you two both were in my line of sight you mean this current fiscal year for 2024 where are the grant L if you if you look in the fund balance on that last page where it shows all the fund balance the very last page yeah want the fund Bal the grant matching Reserve you can see there was $22,000 that was uh that was uh received in

Grants uh the town transferred in $2,200 and there was expenditures of 20 almost 25,000 okay but I I I'm assuming the fire chief hasn't lost his Grant magic and the select chair stated that just from CB Cog we got or C GP thank you we know what you mean that we got 23,000 so did we miss reporting funds so no that that money was for the union I mean for the uh Vision thing it didn't go it was a free service it's a grant it still should have been recorded under Grant matching it wasn't a matching Grant no okay so where are all of our grant money recorded not just the ones that need to be matched so grants are recorded as we get grants in if there if there's no cash flow that comes in and it's just I don't even know what to revision yeah so for example like if if so if there's a service like the downtown visioning work work that's going on right now that's an expenditure but we don't end up seeing

that cash flow because that the grant funds are directed to the service provider rather than making them pass to us and then go to the service provider so we access that via the service provider um it's kind of like if you buy a car and you sign off on the warrant off on the the the discount they carry that that cost for you okay so can we have a grant report please in the annual fabulous super cabalistic the award winning yes the award can we have a grant page since it's not properly reflected in the budget you remember the next question no I'll Circle back to it if I ever do so I

I thought I remembered um from what would your last meeting or not the chief was going to get a stien I don't is is that in there I see it's under the 37100 line um the 5,200 per year for EMS and Emergency Medical Service and emergency medical director um that's built in there and so that that where does it say that I don't see 30- 7100 5200 a year for EMS and EMD what does that me that's the stien for chief the chief yeah that's well that's the stien for whomever is filling the role of those two those two positions so uh it it would EMS Emergency Medical Service is that the correct way to say it Emergency Medical Service honestly uh Neil both of those an EMD Emergency Management director um that is a contractual discussion I've had with the town manager and the select board not willing to have it with the budget committee it's outside I think your perview of benefits and wages um it it's really go go to how many more hours

the fire chief in this town uh Works runs calls texts a call in the back of the inm goes on the holidays and does CPR all of it and then brings in those revenues when I do transport yeah and so that's a that's a contra yeah so the town has determined that they want to establish a stien for EMS and emergency medical director and that's that's reflected in that line and so why would that why not include that in um wages uh because if the the the layout of town employees were to ever change in the future that's something that could be transferred to somebody else not that we have any plans for that but if you look at other municipalities um that rule is held by people who hold variety of different jobs there's even some examples in real small municipalities where a town manager who has that sort of background has hold that first response background has hold it held that role and there might be towns where

the um there's a separate position dedicated to that role or even um someone in the the municipal police force holds that rule and so the town felt the the select board felt that it was more appropriate to establish a stien for that because that who feels that rule could change you know and so it could be an assistant chief it could be a captain at some point those are so we just felt like that was a better way to uh manage that expense Sean did you have a question earlier no I'm good thanks okay any anybody else you want to recognize Heather um before we leave this section there's just a couple of things that I want to point out especially about um the equipment repair

I don't know if it's equipment the gear anyway what all the things that Chief was talking about in terms of the GE number one um I appreciate as a select board member and also a taxpayer that he's doing that on a rotation basis and not trying to replace all that gear at the same time um number two while I appreciate that he is attempting um to save money money I think it's really important that we are protecting our volunteers that are um putting their Liv on line for us um and

so I I just think that it needs to be noted um that the fire department should have proper safety yeah I think the least we can do when someone who makes near minimum wage is going into a burning building is give them the best safety equipment we can and if you look at the medical issues that people in the fire service have your your issues aren't less because you're a volunteer service member versus a full-time service member so I just think that safety is important I don't think anybody questioned that oh no we're not saying anybody is we just I think it's I think it needs to be set out loud you know that it he's doing a good job making sure that he that his staff and volunteers are properly um protected and I just I think it's important to make sure that that's set all out any other questions from the committee all right so other Public Safety animal controls up 3.7% any questions on that

line all right on to page 13 Public Works uh department heads wages are 3.5% change full-time staff wages are down 4% overtime wages are 3.2% part-time staff wages are up 51.8% payroll tax 91.5% % health insurance 11.5 workers comp is down 7.4 retirement is down 3.1 stiens are flat funded at 0% uh training development is up 50% due to increased training opportunities Heat's down 4.8% electric is down 12.5% telephone and internet's up 4.6 other contracted Services is up 166%

added a contractor for Gravel Road grading uh twice in 2025 and once in 2026 equipment rentals are flat funded equipment repair and maintenance is flat funded as well building repair and maintenance is um down 16.7% ground uh maintenance is down 100% because it's moved to building and grounds vehicle repair and maintenance is flat funded at zero Tree Service flat funded at zero Paving and road work is down 33% because we're only having one Paving during that timeline that's correct Calvin y uh Road painting and and striping is down 16.7% crack ceilings down 11.1 General supplies are flat salt two full winter season so that's up 33% same with liquid deiser which is up 33% winter sand is down 33% uh gravel asphalt tar and concrete's flat funded erosion controls down 1% signs are at 0% coverts are down 33% small equipment's down 1% do we have any questions on on this page before we go to next yes oh sorry Joe

I have two questions why is full-time staff wages down yeah so um we've been able to really uh work through our accounting over the last couple years to really tighten up estimates for things like uh uh those those costs and so we're seeing that reflected um in in the full-time staff wages dropping by 4% we also had a retirement and then replacement and I don't believe the person who replac the retired individual is compensated at the same rate that the retired individual left at so okay but phis then I had two questions I'm go ahead um and the greater are we

renting the greater and the driver or just the greater can you cover that Contracting of a private contractor yeah greater the greater comes with a driver okay thank you it's not automated it's human driver and so so I think I asked this last year about that grater and I said well why can't we just buy one and you're like well it would be way more than I bet this I bet if you added a greater to the budget well no so and so I was I was laugh down last year too but um so could it could the if could we put this in our capital I mean could we eventually buy one if we put money aside and can that grader be used for other things I will I will let Jerry and uh C answer that question I kind of shutter at this price too because when you grade a road you get rain and more rain it

doesn't really last so at that cost you're not really getting a good bank for your buck it all um I would I would encourage the town to look at getting its own greater well least putting money right aside not all at one time grading Gravel Road it just doesn't last why that's why you do them twice twice a year right and at that cost that's that's a that's a pretty steep steep cost and I think Calvin was using cuz they have a greater but to try to or to try to get that organized they want to use it because everybody wants to use it at the same time and really puts Calvin in a pickle because if he doesn't get those gravel roads graded he gets screamed at maybe one those gravel roads great so that's a that's a have you lived on a gravel road yeah I live understand why so I you know I I would encourage the town to look at that in the years to come because that's that's I think that's stowing good money after

that yeah I think Calvin can expand on your second part of that question was can you use the greater more for than just the gravel roads and um you can do ditching with it yeah can so why is the number 40,000 I'm a little confused on

and once in 2026 so there's other oh other stuff in there there's other stuff in there equipment repairing cont there's engineering surveying all that I didn't see it anywhere the cemeteries like Sawyer Cemetery who's going to be doing that or what grounds is on and that's move to

the next that was taken out of haven't gotten there yet oh we haven't got there yet haven't gotten there yet you and Jane need to sit next to each other okay she's falling asleep stay tuned for page 14 right right we're getting there guys can you educate me Calvin I think educate me on how you schedule winter roads plowing basically okay in the summer time we work what 4 days 4 10 hour days y but in the winter when we have crazy weather like we've been having every seems like every other day got a plow road so how do you schedule that you don't you just look at you look at this is what we've done the last few years and you throw it down at the wall and hope you're right there is no just keeps an eye on the weather and when when the weather comes they go there's got to be there's going to be some time though I mean normally you have 10hour days but obviously some of these guys got to be working more days oh more minut

yes 15 15 16 hour days so you end up taking it off a Time Another Day yeah like this morning they were in most of the night last night treating black ice and freezing rain and they went home this morning at 10 o00 so yeah okay just curious just to clarify do you have some people that come in just for plowing or is it all staff that are doing those plowing we have on call driv okay mother nature does the scheduling for us yeah I don't know if this is the right time but I guess I will start off by commending Calvin's picked up a lot of extra duties in the last year if I'm not mistaken he's now the cemetery's guy which sounds like just sending send the mowers out but I know they're looking at broken stones and the other thing is probably is huge pain in the butt is he's now the building Guru whatever his title is which I will to bet is a huge pain in the butt so I don't know if I guess I'm saying is the pay reflective

of that extra Duty stiens and so on and so forth I believe the pay got reflected last year for his building supervision but I'd have to look in my it should I think well 23 actual is 73 and 24 actual is 76 so oh really I just throw that out there as something however you want to call it I mean I appreciate Chiefs doing extra duties but I would say Calvin's picked up a couple of extra duties too if we haven't already considered uh uh rewarding that or paying for it or whatever the right term is I can tell you a story yeah so

when um when he took over the uh building the grounds the interim Town manager up his pay to cover that okay I thought that it did occur already the next year he didn't want to take a 5% raise like everybody else because he thought this group would crucify him so he so he didn't take it what the budget committee oh you guys are so afraid of us it's kind of funny we just asked the hard question he was he was Guy turning down racist right so he turned it down so it was the first the town managers adjusted my pay and it was the first time I had ever seen a town manager we didn't have Town manager so I was like I don't know you can do that without going to to meeting or anything he said I can and I was like I want to get because he's leaving if I get before this budget Committee in the and they go what did you do thought the he thought the interm town manager was going to make an adjustment and leave him out to hang

when when the budget committee came out didn't take 5% ra zero rather than have a long discussion I guess I would just ask the SEL board Town manager to is it is it appropriate this year or not I think we have to be a little careful in this forum of discussing public um publicly discussing but if the

indication from the budget committee is that they would be supportive of a change and in a that we would would consider that so J um I don't mean this comment rudely but you haven't needed our permission before so I think it's I

I don't I think it's singling out one employee if you're saying you're only going to have the conversation if we give you permission I'm well I'm saying that we decided this year to try to go flat because of the 18month changes so if the feedback is that the budget committee is supportive of more rather than you know coming with a larger number and then uh getting feedback maybe negative in terms of that number we just went with that flat to try to be uh just simpler any other questions from the committee we have 10 minutes

page we keep asking this gift right all right so we'll move from on from page 13 to page 14 and we're still in public works so tools are at 0% radios are down 20% 57% increase in uniforms which is added allowance for part-time employees and department head uniforms um safety equipment's flat miscellaneous equipment's flat gas and Diesel up 33% because of two full winter seasons M miscellaneous is flat and the Public Works total budget is down 3.6% I I do have a question on uh going back to uh Paving is the 400,000 does that cover four miles no two miles it's about $30 a foot

so it C is about two and half 2.5 miles so I guess a comment is if we had a plan of every 10 years finish 40 mil we're falling behind off that plan M well he does two miles of coc ceiling so if you do both there's four mil that ask my

askas 70 uh 47550 that line yeah why is that so so high it's two full winter seasons of plowing most of our fuel is used in the winter actual was 35,000 to double that 70,000 is that not a realistic look at it I think we're anticipating fuel costs to be higher just per gallon too so I think that's what that's building in there so a lower cost anticipation would 75 more realistic so I had 45,000 budgeted we spent less um I uh I think we got a

pretty good deal on fuel this past year and I don't trust with all the things going on in the world I think we would be shortsighted to i' want to stay with that 45,000 and two full wins at 45 is where you come up with that

in terms of that the need think alen pointed out I hear the pl going by a lot this week compared to previous weeks so yeah we ask Mother Nature to give us a forecast for 18 months on her activity and we didn't get any positive response oh it's called Farmers Almanac yeah yeah well it's I feel like it's any have questions all right moving on all right so municipal buildings part-time staff wages are up 31% with the with the cleaning Contracting there um payroll tax is up 48% um that's a small number even though it's kind of a big percentage uh workers comps at 500 Heats at uh 500 electricity is down 3.2% telephone internet's down 100% um other contracted Services have been uh moved elsewhere building per building repairs and maintenance is up 33% ground maintenance is uh flat by the looks of it and then oh sorry new ground maintenance is new sorry 15,000 because of the moving of things and then street

lights um is zero securi is down 100% General supplies are down 50% flags are up 100% because there's two Memorial days in that in that 18-month time frame and then um we are at a total change here municipal buildings of 56% which is uh 56.7% which is annualized at $34,320

and because I've been asked to ask this question by several people um is that going to include the soer cemetery and any others or anything how many do you I don't know i' been told soer specifically so I didn't know if there was other ones involved in that oh we've got a page full of do you cemeter okay but sawers in it this one's just being added the new one's just being added okay thank you talking about acrossing the yes that will

before the town to vote for the town to accept responsibility for that cemetery and we're budgeting assuming that that's going to take place yeah thank you heather for jumping in there Jane I'm you might have just answered it and I'm too tired to understand it but I the 15,000 is is that because cemeteries was moved to ground maintenance that's great okay it's usually around like 7,000 right I'm guessing right so that was what what I just said is the Sawyer ceter has come before the select board for the town to take over responsibility for that cemetery and it has to go before the town to get voted on but if it's approved there needs to be a budget to add that Cemetery to the cost of being taking care of it like it's going to be that going to be accepted because if it is we have to take care of it yeah and if it if we were weren't to budget for it and then it was accepted which we anticipate it will be accepted then

we're adding something that we haven't budgeted for maintenance of so aren't there like seven cemeteries in the town more than that yeah so so are you taking over all of them or just they already that's what I thought other questions don't I warned you page 15 um before we

go forward um I anticipate there could be numerous questions we got solid way is this committee this committee like to stop here at 9:26 um or do you want to go through solid ways and end at the conclusion of that discussion keep going keep going all and then we do solid waste and then all right one more one more Department get first solid waste uh haulings up 22.7% that's a 5% increase for 2025 and a 5% increase for 2026 based off of 2024 tonnage um there's no composting line here but if the towns wants to do it it would be 6,500 tags uh flat funded just bulky waste day is up 82.2%

and will occur twice in this budget in May of 2025 and may of 2026 Solid Waste is up 24% annualized uh with 483,000 uh it's interesting because I have I have cella's app on my phone I just happened to discover it last couple of weeks you go on there it says uh that your waist will be out at 6: a.m. and your containers have to be 3 ft apart MH and I know that that was what they were suggesting in a new contract when they it's oh well they were suggesting once they have the trucks that they would be supplying 64 o containers for waste and another 64 for

recycling Where Do We Stand do we did we have the option of opting out on that or because we didn't we sign a like a three to five year contract five year five year contract y they were the only people who bit on the request uh for right I know I'm just wondering where do we stand with having to abide by yeah well this budget doesn't include that for that time frame I don't think we're would be seeing any of that happening till after this 18-month budget is that correct Jerry from your what you're being told so they're looking to get started on July of 26 mhm so that's a whole different discussion for our next town not this town meeting but the next the first uh June time meeting that's yeah yes um so on the hauling is that increase we have more homes using um I I

I gave you all um a tonnage report as well here in this in this here it's just we're getting we have more more trash can picked up every year the amount of trash can picked up increases and that's that's reflected here and so we're trying to extrapolate that over the next 18 months so because people aren't Recycling and so they're just throwing I just think that people I think that people just are gener we're seeing a trend of not just recycling or trash you can see in this in the the report I gave you people just throw are getting rid of more you know my speculation a lot of people order a lot of things online and you get a lot of boxes and a lot of packaging and that sort of stuff go ahead so I know that that was the theory but total tons collected has been almost relatively flat 20 the price increases per every year too by either 5% or the the uh Consumer Price Index whichever is higher and so that 5% is reflected there

too so okay okay that's built into the contract yeah it's that's that's baked right in every year we're going to give you minimum 5% increase but if the consumer price increases higher you're stuck with that so we tried to get other pids but it just they kind of got a monopoly on the market any questions

finish or three more pages I vote I mean it could that means it could take 10 15 20 minutes I don't question I'm still just putting it out there wording it that way any any else have input I'm I'm good to stay I am I'm okay that's three I got my sugar up my snack so I'm

assistant $11,000 that reflects the new uh General assistant amounts and we generally haven't seen that money get removed uh people aren't requesting it most people don't qualify for it in town and so we're not seeing seeing a need to in increase our amount there and then outside organizations we remove that line at 16,100 because we feel like that can be allocated out of existing Reserve accounts already and so rather than asking for more money to pay for that we we already have the money that's necessary to pay for that do we have any other questions on page 16 yes yeah I just wanted to add about because we're talking about how it never get withdrawn but there's an increase in it you may have seen that the state increased the minimum and we have to reflect that we're in line with what the state was why that's the general assistance line yes that's why it has been but now it's even don't

it St so where is the money for the dur baseball and the snowfield you approved last year we have that money if if those requests come in would come out of the um Recreation Reserve account which has $ 23,7 42 in it did you vote to give the money last week no your last meeting I don't believe we voted to give any money to to then last meeting does that sound familiar to you all well it was in your budget and you approved the budget well I I think we we didn't we didn't we said that we saw that there was that was roughly what the request had been in the past we saw that that amount was already existing in the reserve accounts so we said we can distribute it out of the reserve accounts rather than allocate a special line for it so CU we don't want to add add $16,000 to this account I thought you to approve it

might have no I we voted on trans of that's that was a separate that was a separate that the it we said we already have money for that in the reserve account so rather than raise it and appropriate it but just spend out of the existing Reserve that's you're marked for

debt Services um this cover this is just reflective of the fixed fixed cost of those over the 18 months um so total debt Services is uh down 31% um then assess and fixed cost County tax it says annualize you know down 26%

um because we're only paying it once but the one time we are paying it we're budgeting for a 9% increase on that so we that's what we're hearing out of the county um we can't control that do you attend meetings uh I I don't attend the county meetings no so we probably should have a Duram representative attend yeah I think that's a good good feedback um I don't know if we've had anybody from the select board attend the I think that other members of the community have attended um but uh the thing too is isn't there that's what we're budgeting but they're not setting their actual rate until after we um already committed right they they can set their they their

estimate is pretty close but it's not final yet yeah or at least I haven't heard from the treasurer saying it I was just going to say they approved their budget at 9 tce okay yeah so that's where why we get that 9% but like we said we only pay that once um education we're budgeting for 6.8% uh increase so total assessed and fixed cost is 3.1 % um abatement in bad debt down 100% uh other fin other other Finance uses uh transfer out this is um $598,500 which is annualized at 37,500 this is our uh fund balance that we're transferring out um for for uh various reasons there and then total townwide is down 3.2% any questions

um the onee the oneyear um County tax is not part of the townwide line on the summary page so it's really kind of understated no it is a what it is incl on summary page yeah but six six months is or not I'm sorry six months of is not is not I mean one of the reasons why that Community the townwide line is down 3.2%

against yeah yes you're correct because it's a one because it gets only paid once uh within the 18-month period Then if you were to annualize it you're missing out on 6 months but once we go back to a 12 month in FY 27 there's only going to be one payment in that 12-month period as well so it is what it is when

you compare it so it's not like you're stuck paying it zero times one budget and then two times the next budget no but but the town wide line is understated by $4,000 in what way bud sum if it was argument but not really because we're trying to we're trying to determine what the total expenditures is going to be for the for that 18-month period but yes I mean if you're if you're saying if I I want to annualize multiply this actual amount or this budgeted amount from fy4 by 1.5 and compare it to what would be

18 months worth of County taxes yes you're right that's not that's not exact um uh page 17 no I'm sorry and that would also apply to uh for Debt Service that same argument would also apply for Debt Service principal because there's for most of the principal payments are going to be twice but the two main Municipal Bond Bank principal payments they they'll only come out once during that 18 time 18 month time frame so you'll see the notes there in that transfer out that includes a description so 37,500 for public works 270,000 for fire department 15,000 for building and 6,000 for Grants and those are earmarked for those uh Reserve accounts so we finally got to that line well so what are you buying anything this year out of those Reserve accounts I I don't think we have Calvin do you have any expenditure that you expect out of the reserve accounts this year yeah got 254 for lo7

for mm and then I I don't believe the fire department don't see Chief's not here but he doesn't have anything coming out of that so is there and correct me if I'm not stating it correctly didn't we have a committee that looked at the 10-year plan and then ranked what item should be purchased so there used to be a CIP committee when there was an annual recommendation for for that but we're now moving into that flat funding on the 10year line and then last year at the town meeting was presented the 10year replacement schedule and expected costs in that time which and then by giving the select board the authority to expend out of those accounts they can be uh more variable because if they don't end up needing the piece of equipment as soon as they think they will which we've run into at least once last year we don't have to expend those funds then so yeah I'm too think about it sorry if you think about a way I know

what I know what Jan's asking you're looking for like is there going to be a warrant article for this piece of yeah I want people to know hey that's not happening that changed last year that was voted on a town meeting and we're doing level funding and then as equipment is needed the that comes before the select board and the select board votes to expend the funds out of the capital accounts to purch the equipment consistent with the 10e schedule so my personal opinion is there is no transparency there to the average Joe who doesn't listen to the meetings we did present last year at the town meeting the 10year plan and so that can that's publicly available we can we can give that we're going to revisit that I think it's on the website so we're going to revisit it every year so that well we have we we established it in 2024 and so we are confident that that's going to cover us until our our

replacement needs until 2020 or 2034 I get that you have a plan in place that's awesome yeah but I think the town's people who are um ultimately funding this should know what we're spending the money on yeah and that's on the website is that 10-year plan so I get that but the average Joe isn't going to go looking for that I think at town meeting that needs to be on the floor that this is where were spending the funds I think that's transparency okay yeah that's good feedback does so you don't each look at the next year so that there's always a 10-year plan in place you got to wait till 34 it's no so for example um there were some there were some items that were planned to be purchased uh that in the public works CIP that weren't purchased and so they were simply moved in the schedule uh in couple in future fiscal years MH so what ended up happening was um Calvin took a look at what was planned and said well

we're going to have to move this to fy2 or we're going to move this to FY 27 we're going to move that to so my question is so right now there's a plan that we're looking at that went from 2024 to 2034 so wouldn't the reference next year be for a plan from 2025 to 2035 are we

adding a year each year yeah and and and that's what you generally want to do anyways you want to continually look out another 10 to 20 years yeah so the department heads are considering that that's really important to have out yeah well we'll definitely make that presentation again this year that people know what's coming next year yeah and so we'll definitely make that presentation again and I understand your point like this sets it up so we don't have to raise an appropriate that money that year for that expense but I see what you're saying is that if we're just making sure we're vocalizing many different areas this is what's anticipated to be purchased this year for Capital out of that Reserve um more so than just what we're announcing at the meeting so we there's a couple different ways we can make sure we do that and certainly at least build a reminder of that 10-year schedule at Our

Town Meeting into our presentation so just my opinion I I do not want to leave what Duram baseball group and the snow bill club and other Town groups get for financing up to the select board I think it should be on the ahead and end this meeting if you have questions anything about page 18 we'll start with 18 we'll start with page 18 at our next meeting um we'll ask our questions then and then after that we'll go back and St discussing the budget and taking motions for um recommendations our next meeting is scheduled for next Monday it'll take place here at the fire station it'll be televised and the meeting will start at 6:30 p.m. still work for everybody all right I'll take a motion to adjourn move second second all in favor good night everybody