agreement amongst the members of the board to form a task force of nine members represented from the board of selectmen from the school committee work committee cup budget committee think the intent is to appoint this task force on monday evening and the task is to work off the five year financial forecast that's been developed by the congress and there i think their contract is up we might decide to gauge  operations and maintenance facilities revenue sources and then i added i think one of the things that a task force needs to do is to go back and review the recommendations particularly in the town side  task force one had made because i don't think that we have secured stations i thought it would be important not to per se suggest that we have to execute on them but maybe to revisit them and see whether it makes sense as we move forward so i think that's go appointed on on monday evening so i think that's an important committee through to really watch pretty quickly into some of the work the concept has already done and we talked about whether this task force would have any impact on  number of reasons particularly around a new high school campus and so the board is next to appoint the transportation advisory committee and there their task is can really develop a transportation plan for the town really look at things more broadly look at things you  mean i think some of you that watched you know listen to the concept or i think many of us understand that you know you know we're pretty much although we don't talk about free cash and of robustness of this year right we get certified that you don't perhaps i will get through the twenty budget that we need an override well maybe there's other ways of looking at it you know because i think a residence you know have have given a lot to us so we suggested one year to sort of accelerate you know their review this task force review this woman colleagues and perhaps some of the well i think that the consulate is fabulous work and having them as a resource going forward as well along with this committee and the broader other committees in town is going to be going to be important so i think we set a year because i think there are a lot of you know issues that that really need they need to address to look at because it had a lot number of what if scenarios and you know there was through that some of them are really compelling don't know whether they all work but i and i think what we're doing here is that we're not winning we're just saying we're committee has an appointment so that will decide you know who they're representing and i think i mean the way i think that's how we did the last time i don't think it is it should be up to the board of selectmen to the site specific members i think will leave it up to those bodies as i've indicated here to make a decision other than the serving on the task force and to i don't think so we haven't formed the task force yet we've got a number of edits to the charge and so i think on monday we will form the task force and make the appointments and at that point we'll just  and then we can discuss that or that we discuss the process and try to resolve it during self if you let me think about that i say go back to plan to adapt that model be most useful for almost circumstances like working in projections of school enrollment and that sort of thing so to the extent there but i do think that it would be useful to have a warrant when he member who is versed in that model and has versed in data analysis and can lend assistance to the task force in that capacity because it is going to be a very numbers intensive effort in terms of examining these options and perhaps looking at some options that perhaps account center didn't identify to suggesting that it would be good to rate all right then up with that i'd like to move on to the first quarter ten reports of the trees will you be able to leave that an otherwise it might be correct in assuming that the the increase in chapter seven the money for the schools recognizes the school report will also cover this but and otherwise yes just to detail questions as much for my understanding is anything if they're both in the other available phones on page three the st line item sure what would be driving one hundred percent collection in the st quarter for that they did ok ok and then a similar kind of question  deficiencies within the buildings that are being  s of regular expenses so just take this with that in mind but the projected balance is to the positive seventy nine thousand dollars so if you just focus on the salaries to start you'll see that there are some leave of absence and some turnover of staff more expensive staff members being replaced increases as some student needs them so that's a bit higher administrative expenses are a bit negative and that has that's tracked in the wild into the principal transition and the substitutes are right now projected to break even but that's using it so early in the year that it's hard to project so we're using the six year average to to project out for the year for s its special education to efficiency so based on the known place then it's and possible new with new places that we know of right now are projecting breakeven but this special education could in districts expenses we're projecting a positive ending balance but as students are identified this number could change and then that special education transportation we just it's too early in the year to have received invoices  reporting by building or something like that if there is negative unexpected make it a very it's will we're going to be looking to other number in general find pots of money like circuit breaker or even other reserves to cover that rather than becoming so significant that i really want to make sure we understand how we got there free cash numbers in excess of eight dollars a year before it was certified on five million dollars so starting from a starting point five million dollars if we drew free cash down by about three million in the absence of any other developments  was that you should only prepay the february and may installments because those would be the only amounts that got the ball on the taxes from last year so it sounds like and whatever i paid in december was really budgeted for that fiscal year anyway except i hated it can be several rather than showed us it's for real estate taxes it actually shows i think a deficit so i think trying to understand where we where where those that two million dollars because it's not in here right yeah it's how floyd i i can't tell you exactly how floyd when he takes it in how he got it  have a two million seven hundred thousand dollar under performance on the budget because those were paid in advance we didn't recognize the income revenue until the current is this year instead of the just the balance sheet actually will be another collection of property taxes no point well ok so in fact so that's more in line with what you're and you were saying right which is that you get down to two we spent down to two and replenished with three dollars or whatever but what's interesting about that is  he estimates a small number it always comes a little bit higher but he can vary by hundreds of thousands of dollars from exactly that lever four hundred and twenty five thousand you know that for you know kind of working to get that money and that's not something so the other surprising i did my understand the schedule correctly is on health insurance which so the turnback of seven hundred and forty thousand means that the this is just not the is that work into the budget was it known ahead of time where will that sort of roll through the years of hollands approach or just the if you had retirements that turn back show up for free cash wait how does that affect this cour ers budget i mean isn't it just to damn if they're well usually if you fill a vacancy you're probably paying less generally you're paying usually with a v especially with the retirees you have long term employees making school question as well i have to have that conversation and how the school does their entrance so it sounds like it would be somewhat misleading to treat this free cash certification as free for it's not really free free cash an more good portion of it is already committed so for anybody making comparisons between real cash number this year and in prior years that adjustment would have to be made well it's for me it's very useful to be able to explain this better than ask something that is very easy really does understand  had said at the time the typical new growth tends to be around fifty five thousand six hundred and ten it's not far out of line of what's typical of that problem the high side i think he i thought he'd said is that we've switched from a three year was that was shifting to five because that's what the state was asking for except what they want is better data year to year but over all that's going to save us money administratively because it's not so maybe there is a rebel scheduled for next year but it is  are very conservative about what they say about what they assume for new growth because precisely because they don't want to get in a position where budgeting higher than what they than what might come in and relying on that in our budget and then you get to the next year you have to cut something back because you have a higher i thought if i may i think it's not that we always used whatever they eventually we may start up in with sort of a number but i thought if i book something higher than the assessors are willing to sort of agree to win in the or in your letter to us mit may come late because it typically there's a lag in terms of when they can identify that so well we can ask them that to morrow but i don't remember us ever going higher than what they how does that affect you know it's relatively early but the available revenue for next year in the budget in the spring i mean is there a need to do some of those what if scenarios in the constant years at least speeded up so that some of those would have to be put into place for but a lot of it also depends on you know with respect i think it's some point i haven't seen a detail the patrice gave that to really understand i mean i suppose a little bit different issue with the two point seven prepayment but to really understand the components of free cash right mean i important to what you doing tonight is understand the components of it and then evaluate you know where those components continue to exist because as long as i've been sitting either on this table or the member of the force level we've always had her back that's just the there's been an effort to budget less conservatively so that the the term backs with and if you are consistently if you are consistently experiencing turned backs because of a conservative budgeting policy there's academic visitors from asia come for year to bring their children and that's how belmont experiences this too and a number of other demographic things that maybe may just be a one year but  i would like to discuss the great up we had a discussion briefly in an earlier meeting where it turned out to be very unwieldy to try to edit that document in real time in a group by the same token this document as far as i know is no further along now than it was in august and  i'm a little concerned about having a document which is a supposed to be a a significant guide to belmont's financial operating  procedures and if it's a document that we're really going to live by it should be drafted carefully so that we're consistent with our own policies but but to actually achieve a document that meets that standard is going to require and i'm still a fair amount of work and i'm i don't see at this point the group that is taking responsibility for it just my so i thought i heard that the board of selectmen meeting monday night that one of the you know the that was a hard garcon document to deal with because it actually covered a very wide range of activities from the responsibilities of the our committee to free cash policies to personnel matters and the operation of the treasurer's office and the expertise to draft such a comprehensive set of topics doesn't exist within one not clear on how the financial task force committee would actually be able to get this done so so i thought i wouldn't speak for the task force but you know as i read the document yeah you know there are obvious places where it could be refined good news some improvements but it's not in terrible shape and so i think it's it's i can imagine that that committee would take some portion of its  and the policies themselves i do think that there's a fair amount of work that needs to be done on editing and documenting and i do think that that's probably personally  better not great use for the financial task force what might be better than him i don't know if this group takes it on i think it's important is for a subgroup to work on the document itself and just bracket places where there are  policy decisions to be made about how much of this reserve or whatever and delegate those policy decisions to the financial task force not the drafting of fifty page document and i think it's important enough to do i mean you know not that i have a little free time but i'm happy to work as a part of a group of this group to kind of take ownership of drafting a document recognizing that that subgroup isn't going to be the group to make the substantive decisions about what should the towns policy be about x y or z i mean i think conscripts to do a fair amount of work pulling together the policies that we have in place that are not in a central document but they're spread all over the place the st thing and they made it very clear that this is their proposal not what we as a town may want to adopt so we need to take what our policies are compared to what they have in here and then somehow figure out how those policies and then bring those policies if they're financially or into that to come back before a committee be approved if it's changing a policy that exists or make sure that the treasure is in in line with that and everything else so i think there is i mean that's where i would start is to look at comparing what the existing policies are to what they're recommending and then try to figure out where we're going from the capital budget section of that document fault although i think it's still a significant amount of amount of work both outlining the desired policy objectives in the next week crafted document when we were still working on it and then i think chris is right so here we seem to get stuck with the philosophy as i was on how to use the reserves in relation to the operation so when we developed the free cash it's a left without question i think it's a wonderful idea to do something like that so he doesn't help that you know hurt us from a rating agency perspective but having you organize a set of policies that guide us into the future particularly as we start to sort of look at the things important from preserves around some i mean one of the policies could be that from a cap a budget perspective we should based on our infrastructure we've talked about this and we should have our spend each year be about this level i mean maybe that's a guideline  so maybe guidelines and maybe policy that when you when you say it's a policy it was intentional she just said it should be that it was a guideline is important you know i think we're following that because when you create a policy you noted here too and i think that can hurt you from make sounds right so i think having a financial document and document that in incorporates all of our financial policy guidelines in town this would be helpful i absolutely agree but you know i should be more accurate actually so what we did as a warrant committee was to meet and discuss this report but we didn't actually form a working group for that document per se we have a working group and i think the sign off in our policy has to come from some higher level and the you know working group it's certainly take a stab at a st draft of the document but then the i think sherman i think that the board of selectmen like he has probably had more of an ability to reach and reach out to all the respective stakeholders the board of assessors the couple budget committees school community whatever to request their contras or request or assistance with sort of formulating capsulated financial policies with their town so we can take it up on monday night in which you know what our thoughts are for your next meeting sense start thinking about how to actually put the record together right thing that we had talked about the end of january but it's it's not too early to start getting some initial ideas anyway so we have nothing no game changing insights people generally seem satisfied with the report that it's not too long it's not you know that it's got the right level of detail amazingly no one admitted to never reading the report that this is a random sample of three this was sent out to all of them and those who responded so that i don't think we have anything  major insights from not from not survey we're also reviewing comparable towns what they what their work committee or finance committee's report to their town meetings and haven't found and haven't found any model that looks like a bolt out of the blue that looks amazing we still have some more of them to review her by her next meeting which is going to be next tuesday one thing we're trying to perhaps look at tweaking the current thinking in last year's report and doing some tweaks to it see what ways we could tighten it  up so that's sort of the the lower our latest focus is seeing whether there's some small changes a committee made to the format that might make it a little bit tighter ok well i didn't i knew we were geniuses but i didn't know we were to basically repackage the information and that's pretty in the tables as they appear in the in the work in the report but i have some thoughts for the software tool that we actually generate but the tell me numbers do not there's not a there's not a groundswell to say it's too long ok with it and i'm still i can't say i know what is done in a place like lexington arlington in the sense that some years ago i saw the town manager's reporting arlington and i thought that was a terrific product and had a very extensive front and kind of narrative  budget i don't know if the arlington warrant committee or finance committee produces its own document yeah yeah and it mostly consisting of the all of the war articles individually listed with some narrative with a recommendation on each of them i didn't look at the time in a just report to see if there was other things oh well wait a warrant committee report that was limited to commentary on the war in articles would be a very different yeah concept than what we're going for sure without without too page a two page narrative intro it was a it was quite a bit of a different thing than what we do the committee is probably shifting the work the working group is probably shifting into a mode where we're going to make recommendations based on our heart insights and what our comments and what we think could be done  maybe not getting the information that the there's there's not a lot of insights we think from other towns that are going to make us conclude that there is a beautiful old format that some other town is using right now that we're going to we're just going to have to say here's here's something we think will help ok with us this sounds extremely useful because i think every couple of years we should take stock of what we're doing and  if we're heading in a generally productive direction with some tweaks that sounds fine might think it's possible but in general i think we've just found that that the warrant committees in other towns or the the finance committee says are sometimes called for just doing a whole lot less than what we do be interesting to find a way to reach those who don't really know why yeah oh yeah i think that working group is looking up a lot at the readability you know it's just  packaging maybe making things a little shorter at the beginning put pulling up the table you know things to make it more user friendly that i think is part of the energy that the group has right now to because i think we felt the same way that probably the people responding are the people who spend a lot of time preparing and who always do look at it and that we want to reach the people who will skim it and make it valuable to them y terms of trying to understand the budget it always seems to me that the budget has a tremendous amount of inertia or many light items are last year's number plus x percent  there are occasionally things that change more significantly so we had an informal guideline of the change was more than ten percent and some threshold amount of dollars which has been you know five or ten thousand dollars that we would call that out in the individual chapters but it might be worth highlighting those changes up front in the summary because that's really what seems most significant often in looking at individual department is to know what's really different this year compared to last year and putting that in the executive summary may be a better place for  on the operating side i'm probably going to do something similar that's going to have a budget message it's going to kind of go into the highlights of the budget what's changed but it's not i'm trying to make it a little more user friendly a little less burdensome on some of the department descriptions and more to do with the actual budget numbers itself so it's going to have a different feel good you should know by the way that about fifty five percent of the people that responded to the survey claimed that they were reading all of the relevant budget documents produced by the town so not just the work of the report but also  office make a noble we're really constrained there's very little that we can do outside of state statutes and pretty much we view our charge as property tax relief there may have been other charges that were supposed thirteen tax payers or homeowners who take advantage of this right now so i know you were concerned about what this could look like in terms of annual revenues just given the constraints around the program it seems to me  there's from time to time a lot of uninformed talk actually about this topic and i think if you researched it and identified what  commander stance will click ok have you considered at all and i'm not trying to create more work for you but i'm looking at examples where towns or cities have sought of the city or town specific relief from the state legislature and obtained legislation that just applies to their jurisdiction probably oh yeah i'm aware of a couple of at least one community that that has is meaningful to this process but i mean it would be to go in and say here's what we spend on any will be service in it's pretty good public safety because there's a ton of inspections and fire drills and all that kind of thing but it's other other information or facts about what other towns have done around the especially but also and also the facts of the you know what what we're providing in our services because i think in general it's been go up and just say hey can you give us something and they wants this subgroup to go but i think it is you articulated earlier we saw our charge was to look at mechanisms for property tax relief in order to find ways to make tax increases more palatable heading down the pilot route is it the only relationship with the initial charges that it has property tax in the chart and if we want to head down that route but i think our group can do that but we didn't want to assume that we were task to go this way had a very short walk into a very firm wall and so now we're going to go off and do something entirely different if the work committee wants us to do that i think we could and so we're you know i mean from the headlines and just everything we should be doing just to be clear a factual point suppose in some alternative universe we had a you're right you you know you want to take the median well just to get things to complete things that i think are sure a report based on what you found on the on the property tax relief issue itself would be very useful  so the construction would start soon thereafter in addition a large application was put in for c p a money because the exterior of the police station needs to my surprise about one hundred and eighty thousand dollars worth of work on the roof it's a slate roof that has some damage and there's still leaks and needs to be repaired  well so that's so let me just conclude by saying steady progress steady progress is being made on the police station and the goal is to really have this completed by sometime in tw going to go out to bid before you're from spring anyway and so what the committee has tentatively agreed is that we will approve the project but defer it and ask them not come before town meeting until i hear from the sprint because they artificial with your town feel to you know the other to get anyway yeah if it can be done and we just stage these were effectively pre allocated i mean i say we tell the meeting does this we're recommending we're moving projects farms we recommended favorably we the committee approved this night so they can go on further action both here and tell meeting of twenty thousand dollars we also approved and these are both both home projects  of and invasive plant infestation on the that have talent that's twenty five thousand four hundred tanfield playground restoration we need some additional and find other money to reimburse this work runs through money was spent to preserve the stained glass windows we think there's a good argument you made for the cloth being secular and the clock being something townhomes but the last thing tonight the community path for a one million i'm sorry backing up to the belmont tower clark is requesting sixty six thousand two hundred and fifty barry said that the police station was approved for seven hundred and eighty torrance who seems to have really impressed everybody with his expertise and this shit is so he would like seventy five thousand dollars for the slate roof he would be very happy proven he a little more was meeting june th there to deliver the final schematic drawings and costs so between now and then there's an awful lot to talk about if we spend a little bit of time talking about fundraising which is not part of the committee but there has to be a clear coordination between fund raising the work of the committee the fact the old building is falling apart we replace it the less money will spend in maintenance