computer good evening evening tom all right so called to order community announcements i'm going to explain the trash rules one more time and a bulky item is a common household article that will not fit in your trash cart or official overflow bag please call waste management eight hundred nine seven two four five four five by one pm the day before your schedule trash day for pick up every household is allowed one bulky item per week residents that are moving have to plan in advance please dispose of large amounts of trash and bulky items privately excessive trash for not be picked up at the curb bulky items include things like mattresses box spring had boards furniture and the like those items not considered bulky which must be disposed of privately or metal construction materials all residents should have received their carts if you do not have a set of carts the black trash and blue recycling please call d p w at six one seven nine nine three two six eight zero in order for trash recycling to be picked up it must be placed in the official cars with the lids closed course must be up before seven am on your schedule pick up day and the pick ups between seven am and six pm if you have access trash please buy overflow trash bags they're sold at star market office remember to flatten all your cardboard boxes neatly return deposit bottles and cans to the store get your nickel back and only put items that are pictured on the lid in the recycle car a few questions about whether something can go on recycling or not please call the recycling coordinator six one seven nine one three two six eight nine and to that end saturday september twenty ninth from nine till twelve they'll be a drop off for oversized cardboard and old barrels and recycling bins that can be reused if you have old trash cans or lots of amazon boxes the cardboard bring your old trash cans and take them on september twenty ninth to d p w we will not take any cardboard that is not properly prepared remember the barrels that are smaller than the thirty two gallons can be reused as yard waste with a handy sticker that says yard waste on them you get those stickers at the d p w office winter's hardware and hillside true value or you can there's old blue recycling bins you can use for storage or gardening purposes  in there's no early voting for the september fourth state primary election for voters who qualify for absentee voting there is in person absentee voting available in the town clerk's office during regular hours until friday august thirty first alternatively qualified absentee voters may submit a signed written request to the town clerk for an absentee ballot to be mailed to them the voter should specify which parties they wish to receive two thousand eighteen national purple heart day your observance and recognition ceremony the town of beaumont will hold as the annual observance recognition ceremony for a purple heart at the belmont public library three thirty six concord avenue tuesday aug seventh at ten am so anyone austin we've been working with the state through the community compact program bringing expert analysis to small towns and large cities we do such things as forecasting capital budgeting financial policies organizational reviews we help on selection processes to fill key positions a number of other things as well we're dedicated to improving the efficiency and effectiveness of local town government the consultant team is well let me just introduce as you have met a number of the elected officials an appointed official of the town but i'm stephen cirilo and this is appearing with me is tony touristic we start with tony first tony is the retired he's retired we're both retired we're both old as dust tony's retired finance director for the town of andover he was the first president of mass government finance offices association i'm stephen ciriello i'm also retired as i said i was the budget director for the city of newton and the finance director for the town of brookline between the two of us we have where i am obviously the lead in the forecast there are deliverables in the forecast there are two the one of them is the forecast spreadsheet and the second is a user guide both of those items have already been delivered to the town as of late last week the financial policies will be delivered to the sometime in the fall so on to some of the advantages of revenue expenditure forecasting first of all very very powerful two that allows you to look over the horizon to see what budgetary conditions will be in the future now there's an important rule about revenue expanders forecast and you can't not assume a change in the current laws or service deliveries or or changes in rate of some nature unless they've already been authorized or there's an agreement to raise them for instance we could not assume in the forecast there would be a general override sometime in the future because you don't know if it'll be passed or not so we could never include that in you can include  what if scenario sometime in another analysis and we give you the tools for that in this document but we would not include it in the primary forecast for the community  doing this it allows you to determine what the effect on inflation will be on revenue and expenditures which usually sets the parameters of the discussion to allow you to balance your your next operating budget now there's two tools to come out of revenue expenditure forecasting first of all is a gap analysis and the forecast a primary forecast is a gap analysis and a dinner for the difference between revenue and  res or appropriations and on an annual and cumulative basis and again it allows you to set the parameters of the discussion for budgeting and ultimately close that gap to zero all budgeting is incremental in nature and so we start with the fiscal year nineteen budget which is already in balance you've already authorized it i assume you could change it a bit in your fall town meeting if you have a fault but at this point in time you  somebody who's going to be designated within the community to update the forecast or one of the next year's five year forecast and so the tools to use a guide in the spreadsheets will allow that individual whoever is the sign that rule to put that forecast in place and you'll be able to identify the gap from that the second tool is something called a what if analysis and this is really an interesting tool  you might as policymakers want to say what if what if our collective bargaining is x percent what if it's two percent what if it's three percent what if it's one percent well and one spreadsheet you can go to one tab within the spreadsheet and change one number and it ripples through the expenditure tab and ripples of the summary to in an immediate real time you will know the impact of the decision of that sort you could do what you can basically you isolating a variable to see what happens if the variable changes and later on the presentation will show you exactly one actually to one for if there's a change in collective bargaining or what you'd like to what the cost would be if you decided to change your collective bargaining position another one was what would happen if health insurance was at a different rate then it's currently in the forecast so we could show you those items there there are a two things that we add we usually just keep everything basic all the laws stay the same all the revenues all the service levels but up we insert a best practice when we see that it's necessary and in two instances within this forecast we built in some best practices and i'll tell you what they are now and then was when we get to the other slides in the powerpoint we can discuss them further one of the the first best practices matching recurring revenue with recurring appropriations or expenditures that's a that's a generally accepted accounting practice and it's a practice that we incorporate in all our revenue and expenditure forecasting for the communities we work with the second is for capital i know there's a lot of discussion about capital here the best practice is is that a community should a stablish a percentage of total revenue or net revenue let's say to be committed in your early to capital and i notice it's not a dollar amount it's a percentage of the revenue and the reason for that is it and i've seen this in many many communities  you have a budget you have an operating budget you have a capital budget and then suddenly times get tough and immediately in order to prevent service reduction or layoffs money is immediately moved out of capital and into the operating budget and that's a one time bandage to solve those issues because that's usually a structural problem at that point in time but only that but the cost of replacing or repairing that capital that was deferred grows when you postpone it and so the collins center believes that the best practice is to commit to a certain percentage now with that said i will also say that the town of belmont has as  fiscal year nineteen the year that is currently begun the town is committed from the general fund revenue five percent which is a very good number that's basically the right number for the size of the community you're in but as your existing debt service runs off and as your revenue net revenue grows that percentage tends to go  down and so our best practices recommendation is to set it not a dollar amount but as a percentage so as your revenue grows your capital grows as well i've had conversations with the capital committee about this and i'm sure  happy with that recommendation so on to the forecast so let's go on to the revenue and expenditure assumptions i'll also say that i don't know who has all of the passouts there is a pass out for the power point but there's also another path of that i believe it's like going to have that have additional work in it and that's the revenue and expenditure attempts the reason it's not on the power point is if you can imagine this is a wall of numbers and it wouldn't it just wouldn't fit on the screen and so to simplify this we'll will not put on the powerpoint the revenue tab or the expenditure tab but hit the highlights of what's going on in those stats which gets us to the the ultimate forecast projection so on to the revenue assumptions first of all new growth development that's for construction new construction someone who wants to add a garage or on a fix as fix a kitchen nor or a new house is built or my favorite anon it did our tactics in property suddenly becomes taxable that's always my favorite that's always growth all of that gets added in  created and we've taken your average of your last ten years and we excluded fiscal year eighteen because there was an extreme bump in your new growth development caused by i guess a large development project and so  we realize in fiscal year nineteen the new growth that your budget is based on for this current year was nine hundred thousand dollars but as an on an average you've been using about seven hundred thousand so we use in that number seven hundred thousand in addition to that we have the debt exclusion for the school project starting in fiscal year twenty one for the two hundred eleven million dollars thirty year term five five percent interest now why is a debt service included in the revenue sumption as well this is the debt exclusion that means that as the debt service increases the property tax increases to cover the principal and interest and so starting in fiscal year twenty one and you'll see that in the forecast summary you'll see a rather large increase in property tax late for you from fiscal year twenty to fiscal year twenty one chapter seventy and this is an area that  i paused on every time i looked and i actually said that i have used five percent in and a forecast because i usually do not use five percent for revenue growth for chapter seventy and forecasts usually it's less than that however in fiscal year nineteen your chapter seven increase was over five percent and what you have is a a community that is growing school population and so it's very likely that at least for fiscal year twenty you'll have a chapter seven a projection of about five percent but you can't count on that forever and so we phase that on down from five percent down to should be fiscal y of the commonwealth right now the commonwealth is in relatively good else they had a large surplus where including unrestricted aid growth an annual growth of two and a half percent the annual growth for some local receipts  identified five that would be growing first of all motor vehicle excise is three percent annually meal's taxes two percent annually and then finally departmental revenue licenses and fines are one percent annually now free cash i'm saying in this projection the here we were projecting the use of two million dollars of free cash i'm not saying that your free cash is two million dollars i want to make that clear your free cash is greater than two million dollars but on average over the last few years you use two million dollars to support your operating budget and the remainder rolls back into the next year's free cash and i usually do not forecast and i don't recommend to anybody to try to project and forecast free cash so going against all my principles in this presentation i am making a last attempt at forecasting free cash or forecasting what your liquidity will be and we'll show you that  slide further on them and the presentation i will however caution you not to believe that this is written and in cement because it is a broad stroke of what your liquidity for your community could be in the future finally your you have a policy now current if you used the general stabilization fund to balance your annual budget this occurred from the fiscal year fifteen general override in which a piece of that was used in the rest of it was put into the general stabilization fund and used to support balance your budget your future your budgets intil it was depleted i believe you thought i was going to go through fiscal seventeen and now or eighteen and now through good planning and management on the town's part you're able to extend the use of this through fiscal y twenty one as the after using the general stable general stabilization fund to balance the fiscal nine thousand budget you have two point six million dollars left in that fund and we after consultation with the more and so in the forecasts we show that that money is phased out and will not no longer be used in fiscal year twenty two now on to the expenditure we using an assumption of a two percent koehler increase plus of one half of one's percent step increase again this is part of the what if scenario if the tools and the way we structured the spreadsheet allows you to either generically change the percentage or for a specific year change the percentage so if you say i'm going to settle for two and a half percent koehler in fiscal year twenty you could plug that in and still stay with the two percent for the remaining years and again immediately see the impact of what that change would be the school in town expenses general expenses are we setting at a two percent annual increase now i want to caution you this is not the school's head numbered that's important that's the school other school expenses other than spending for sped we have an annual increase of seven percent and i believe the capital increase the capital increase might be a book three percent i think i can remember the number now and then the regional school is in there as well that's an increase of three and a half percent and these are based on the percentages the school committee has in their projections we used their projections we thought that that was it would be important to have those percentages used in their budget there is one one decision point here that should be pointed out and coming up a matter of fact in the next item agenda right  my believe is a discussion in regional schools and you have right now a decision point to make whether you're going to stay in or get out of a portion of the regional schools and that decision point comes up and i believe the school year at the end of fiscal year twenty we needed to put a bookmark in we don't know what the decision of the town is going to be that's one of the things we don't know we know one thing that i believe that they'll be a debt service number that's required and so we've incorporated that debt service in into the future and then we so we reduced the school regional school from nine hundred thousand to four hundred fifty thousand starting in fiscal y twenty one and then extrapolating it out at the annual growth of three and a half percent now this is a decision point that hasn't been made i mean i've been told you're getting out i've been told you've been staying in i don't know what the town is going to do but it's a bookmark and  should have a full discussion on and then when you finally decide you could plug a number into this forecast into will show you that from the expenditure right up to the summary tab and you'll know what the impact of making that decision is  we have snow and ice increasing at two and two percent electricity increasing by three percent non excluded debt that is just regular debt service runs off so like when you pay off your mortgage  runs down and since it's a debt service is based on most of the time on a declining balance you have a reduction from year to year in principal you know principal and interest basically interest and so in order to get to that five percent target that we referenced in our best practices policy we've taken the run off the debt service that exists and then is saved in the next year is that you don't have to pay it anymore and rolled it back into capital to hit the five percent target you could either do use it for debt use that money for debt financing or you could use that as pay as you go there are some years that is very small amounts of money like thirty forty thousand dollars of the years that's greater than that but in order to get to the five percent target that's one of the things we did and i referenced and best practices we have the police building in here now although i still think i'm including it as authorized on issue but we have the the actual numbers in here now the seven point four million dollars for thirty years at five percent interest is in this budget and that kicks in in fiscal year twenty so i'm going to go on the spreadsheet on the summer you're going to see that because that sort of jumps out you was well capital are you already have policies in place i believe based on the fiscal fifteen override that you have this non discretionary capital roads and sidewalks of annually has to go up by two and a half percent and i believe the discretionary capital goes up by two percent in addition to their you we have about seven or eight maybe more hundred thousand dollars in your department two budgets a order to as the debt service the existing debt service runs off and as your local net revenue grows in order to stay to a five percent target money in the future years has to be added in two i guess discretionary capital to maintain the five percent women so as the years go on there's going to be more and more money applied to capital but i will say that it will only represent five percent of your new revenue benefits this was something that allowed me to go into the parlor a psychiatrist when i was when i was looking at the your departmental budgets i was finding th benefits we're all in the on the vine departments and that isn't those the structure that the college center uses in their forecasting so we had a we had a pull out all of the personnel benefits from the line departments and center them reposition them in the benefits position so that we could have a generic approach we could plug in a percentage estimate for whatever health benefit we're talking about so we pulled it out of the line i lined apartment budgets and put them into the benefits section and now we have certain things we were assuming were suman right now and this is used in most cities and towns because nobody knows health insurance is so volatile we usually use an approach we say we start with an eight percent and we go eight seven six five points and that's in this year's four case eight percent of fiscal year twenty seven percent and twenty one six percent twenty two point five percent and twenty three and twenty four but when you're working on the fiscal year twenty one budget which will begin about a year from today whoever is assigned to work on next year's forecast for the community will put in there their estimates and it's very likely the bill again ratcheted to eight seven six five the lower still move those percentages and only because it's it's it's impossible to it's impossible know what the health insurance as i've seen swings of health insurance where it's been eighteen percent and i've seen swings in health insurance the been zero percent and this is in the last ten years it's this is one of the serious collective bargaining  little less than one percent of your levy and that's four exemptions that abatements state assessments is just a generic two and a half percent growth and again free cash i talked about free cash we're using only two million dollars but free cash is we're going back to that best practice again of trying to use recurring revenue against recurring expenditures recurring revenue is levy stated seats recurring expenditures  free cash is not a recurring revenue for cash is a non recurring revenue one year it's high one years low your community has done a pretty good job of maintaining a balance by not spending all of it and that's a good decision on your point on your point but what we're recommending is a phasing out of free cash over a period of five years so that the free cash isn't supporting general services it's still there but it then supports other things such as strategic reserves like a general stabilization fund or capital or opioids or something along those lines and finally your reserves your property liability worker's comp those are percent c there so now on to the five year revenue expenditure forecast for fiscal year twenty three twenty four and you see this is our spreadsheet and i want to take you through the structure of this you see across the top you fiscal years going from left to right and then of the top you see the revenues coming in a grand total of revenues and in the annual percentage increase in the revenues and on the bottom you see the expenditure classes of expenditure and you see a grand total of expenditures and the annual percent growth in expenditures and this is the analysis you see in the gap between revenue and expenditure so for fiscal year twenty which is the budget you're going to be begin to work on in the next three or so months there is a projected deficit at this point of six hundred thousand dollars and a cumulative deficit over five years of oh about four point seven million dollars i want to point out what that cumulative thing me is by law every city in town is required to balance the budget annually and so since this forecast is based on that stretch elations fiscal year twenty's deficit is rolled into fiscal year twenty one which is rolled into twenty two and so forth so assuming that you balance your budget in fiscal year twenty that six hundred thousand all knowledge deficit goes away and therefore that six hundred thousand dollars deficit is pulled out of the twenty one budget as well so you see there in fiscal year twenty one y projected deficit is a little over three hundred a little under three hundred thirty thousand dollars now couple of things to look at in this budget if you look at your fiscal year twenty year one you see a growth a significant  and two the annual deficit grows from three hundred twenty nine thousand to two point three million dollars why is that when you run out of general stabilization fund at that point in time there's no more general stabilization fund to be pulled in to balance the budget so at that point in time you you have no essentially cash one time cash to cool to balance your budget you have a structural that's a perfect example of the structural deficit that communities have when they use exercise and again if you want to plug in and say all right for fiscal year two thousand and two we are thinking about giving make a number of i don't care free percent increase in kohli's i'll just make that up now or let's say it's a one percent rather than a one and a half rather than two percent well you changed this this specific cell for that fiscal year and it ripples to the expenditure deb and ripples to the summer tab and you would mediately know what the cost is for your the this is the capital budget a lot of people are surprised that you actually had five percent in your using fiscal year nineteen but you know you have it in your budget i think there's a tendency to just look at the discretionary fund but you have a lot of other revenue floating around in this budget and that doesn't even include the excluded that this is just ongoing revenue rather than one time given and so you have a five percent increase in fiscal year twenty five percent of your net revenue in fiscal nineteen is going to the capital but in fiscal twenty you see five point two nine percent and we couldn't get anywhere around that that is the police department project it's going to really be hitting in that year and so suddenly you percentage goes up to five point two nine but we we brought it back down and used it in the five percent again that's a standard percentage for cities and towns but you also see that in order to maintain the five percent on the lower half of that slide  exclusion runoff which is a small amount of money and then the annual growth growth or the new revenues those things have to be the debt service has to be rolled back into capital and new revenue has to be assigned to capital in order to maintain your five percent and finally on the capitalist is just a big a better way of looking at it you see the general the regular over debt it's the debt service the authorized on an issue desert service the debt service run off the c or current appropriation and you match it against the percentage of net revenue and that's where you get to the five percent finally let's get into some what if scenarios you what if scenarios this is what happens if your collective bargain is one and a half percent rather than two percent you remember in the first forecast the primary forecast i showed you you had a deficit projected of six hundred three thousand dollars in fiscal year twenty if you go to one and a half percent rather than to your deficit is suddenly down to three hundred thousand dollars i'm not saying you're going to go to one and a half i'm just showing you the utility of how you could use this to figure out what would the impact be on us if you made a specific to this decision about collective barga we have another one this is one of the scenario for health insurance what happens if it's seven percent rather than eight percent for fiscal year twenty suddenly you're deficit goes down by one hundred twenty thousand dollars so from that you could understand that for every one percent of collective bargaining it's going to cost you six hundred thousand dollars ish and for every percent one percent of health insurance costs going to cost you one hundred twenty thousand dollars up or down and finally this is the slide that i really did not want produce it is an estimate of liquidity and this is important because you have a bond rating you you're born rating is based upon a certain estimate calculation of what your liquidity is and the bond rating agencies in massachusetts because we have a we don't have a v you have is something going on you have that existing general stabilization fund that is going down and will be depleted as of the end of fiscal year twenty so that in fiscal year twenty one the last of it is used and there capital known fund that your town has done very well with it's been growing by about three percent a year and you have a tendency to take some of your progress at least half of your free cash and roll it back into next years for cash you don't spend it which is a good policy it's a very good policy but because of the stabilization from the general stabilization fund going down and because you're about to borrow two hundred eleven million dollars for a school project you want to maintain that bond rating at all costs and so in order to try to attempt to get back up to the ten percent range what we're suggesting is that as we phase out free cash as a use in your operating budget for direct services we use the free cash to be placed in a general stabilization fund to be the same generals that stabilization really doesn't matter but not be used to balance the operating budget but to be used for to protect your aaa but also let's face it in case of emergencies some extraordinary thing happens that you have to retrieve money right away you get to it it's not the best thing to do but cities now has to do that but the first priority should be to try to maintain as best you can a ten percent ratio for reserves to net revenue in order to maintain your your your bond rating and so weird that's the one of the two things we talked about we would recommend you commit to a five percent capital annual of net revenue and we recommend that you sure appeal liquidity by by taking your future free cash as it gets phased out of your operating budget and putting it to  protecting your born rate so in conclusion the town has a structural budget problem using one time money free cash in general stabilization fun two matched against recurring expenditures a lot of communities have this problem this in the town it's a lot of communities but this is a structural deficit doesn't correct itself the town has to find a way to not use nonrecurring revenue to support ongoing services and that's what we're trying to do here we're phasing out the free cash you  on your own because the money is going to run out the general stabilization fund so in when those things occur you have actually basically you have a two years signal here to resolve this matter because once the general stabilization fund runs out the town really truly has a problem so therefore you have fiscal twenty in fiscal year twenty one to address having discussions and address this matter so that when you get to fiscal year twenty two when you're borrowing the money for the school project you don't have a choice between balancing your budget and losing your longer and that's why we recommend the liquidity reserve to be built up to back to the ten percent we also think that you have some unused capacity in your local receipts which can be used in the future not the will not solve all your problems there is some but not enough to get rid of a two point structural deficit you we have  an inflation rate on sped school budgets that is unsustainable by the time so you have collected biting you have health insurance and now you have a third budget buster and sp and i don't think it's possible for you to continue having a seven percent annual growth in spending and eight percent annual growth in health insurance two and a half percent annual growth in collective bargaining without having deficits in the future so you've got to think about while not not one hundred percent great is way better than i expected this to come out when you first started the process so and if we can get the override from twenty fifteen to this long it's way longer than i thought it was going to ever go so just to phone completely what you did but no way i have a pretty good handle on what's taken place here so question this couple of focus on the quickly slide free cash how did you reconcile to that number in the to take into consideration you know so there's a trend every year right i know you made a point to free cash is one i my position is that components of free cash are occurring in nature because every year you have turned back sheer will ridges and revenue return back to an expensive so how did you come up with your free cash certif free cash number every year for the for the audience is looking at the slide in the package that was the top part of the slide which is focused on free cash and then it dropped down to this slide here but free cash is made up of several components many many components and that's why we normally do not recommend anyone try to forecast for three cases going to be but it's made up of first of all it's made up of receipts or revenues over and above what was in in and in balancing your budget the second piece is expenditures that weren't expended we're weird as the expenditures not to get updated well usually it's vacancies if you have a vacancy it usually takes a few months in order to rehire somebody in that vacancy lag goes back to an expanded and goes back to undesignated fund balance which ends up being part of free cash  have in prior years been slightly conservative in your local receipts and as a result of that money flows back in to free cash there are a whole bunch of other things is what those are the this and then you have to take out some things like the end collectibles you you don't collect all of your property tax and when you're speaking as the finance director slash treasure collector like community i can tell you that it's great if you could have a i have ninety nine percent collection and i'm i suspect bill maher has something similar to that but you still ninety nine percent means that you have at the moment that the year ends you have an uncollected property tax and personal property tax  in this case it's been on average about nine hundred thirty four thousand dollars now they gets collected and in the future all of the gets collected either before those properties go into tax title or after they go to tack to what property is one hundred real estate is one hundred and those have to be subtracted out and so as a result of that you take you take those you have to have you have deferred revenues you have to take those up and then so you come up with a certified free cash and then from the certified for a cash you then start spending in a year and a half after you get for instance and your fiscal eight hundred free cash will not be certified until about november of eighteen and will be used in your fiscal year twenty twenty budget or twenty one budget issues because you're you because you're a little be used in your fiscal year twenty budget because it's two years in but you approach two years time and so we use some of that estimate to say all right what is your average of expenditures and so we now start with all right we know what your average in we took five years worth of experience and how you got to your free cash and we looked at the general trends and we use those trends to project forward and again i don't recommend  project for a cash forward to these amounts where that said we now know that you also have a deficit projected deficit and so somewhere along the line you're going to have to tap into the some of your own used local receipt capacity to balance your budget on the words be a little less conservative than you are in your in your future budget developments and so if you use more of local seeds to balance your budget there's less local receipts that flow back into free cash so somewhere along the line free cash is probably going to go down a bit but when you are projecting free cash to go down all that much in till about fiscal year twenty two  and again some of that is because of the prior year being carried forward as you as you get less and less free cash you taking some of in and leaving it there and the rest of it's going forward we're assuming that as is a flat two million dollars going to be consumed in the operating budget hopefully not for direct services and as a result of that less of it will be left behind to be carried forward to the next year and so it's a it's a very strange calculation here does excess revenues no turn backs included here right well that's all part of that thought part of that because we're going to you're in this other four million that comes across the top what's that what's that all about that's for you and that's that's the other things that are we couldn't pull out of it peaked to two point three million in f y twenty two right you explained the use of the stabilization fund for the next two fiscals and then it's depleted in about as up i was surprised to see it then decline again as you went into into twenty three and twenty four down to you know half a million and then around twelve the best nature of it in fiscal year twenty two you have to find a way through revenue growth or expenditure reductions into a budget to balance it and then that two point three million dollars is then reduced out of the three point seven million leaving you a net of four hundred so the presumption is that there were cuts made in order to balance that budget and then those cuts carry on tripoli to extrapolate for the the next couple years interesting is pretty significant but again this perhaps understates it because it's implying this model implies that there are cuts made in two thousand and twenty two to balance the budget and then those cuts carry on for subsequent four hundred fifty s expenditure is still in this budget going forward growing at three and a half or so they did you analyze the delta between staying in and getting out ok but keep in mind see we have this model of trying to please so we can play with the numbers and we have any assumption we want in there and play all the what if games that we'd like to see how it all plays out and i've spoken to staff but if they need any additional help wanted on the modeling just to call me i guess just because steve's made some assumptions doesn't mean we don't have to usually offset each other for the most part but we least need to have a bookmark we didn't want to put zero in that would be a problematic and we didn't want to put nine hundred thousand dollars in this way its right name right  you want to come up to the table chris is the mike here next to roy you talked about phasing out free cash as a support for the operating budget and but when i look at the model i see that two million remains in truro so could you just explain that because i must be missing something you know my difficulty in articulating this i am assuming that there will be two million dollars of free cash you out of your certified for cash and the remaining free casual road forward ok but the two million dollars has been used to support your operating budget and that's part of the structural deficit and we think it is best practice as we think to slowly because we didn't want to do this in a dramatic fashion we would slowly phase that two million dollars out to support the operating budget so the stuff that goes into sports salaries and services would not be there anymore but the two million dollars would be there but it would be used for other things we're recommending putting it into the general stabilization fund to protect the border and so this is assuming that that ends up in the general's stabilization  ok thanks this is great thanks so i guess had two comments and two questions in terms of comments i hear what you're saying about your nervousness about liquidity to me i'm grateful you did this because it to me it seems essential so i know you think that no and you said no one should ever do it or whether but i'm hoping that will continue and that will be able to unpack the four million dollars because it seems like if we eventually go to ask for an operating override we need to be able to explain to people and if it feels am i correct that the only place that that's kind of reflective here is in you making what you were guarded as an aggressive assumption on chapter seventy eight is that the only place like how did you  wouldn't we want to build in something i guess about that explicitly allows us to incorporate the forecasts we have for projected in rome and into the budget first of all just briefly pull back and say that exclude committee person so my passion is schools that there could be things that are done by the time we didn't have time to do them but chapter seven news based on a number of factors minimum a local contribution in rome and all of that should be developed internally ok but in just using it from my experience with other communities usually the state interjects themselves in with higher state aid amounts when this thing and woman occurs and they try to get that back to a certain commitment from this town and in the state and that is occurring because the cost of school budget is growing because of in rome whence it starts tailing increasing or changing in some way because in rome it does go down by the way i've seen romans go down schools close more we'll kind of have that the narrow neck was ok my last question is i'm just trying to understand your page where you had the or is it like the sumption said that the override lasted through twenty one and then so i was trying to figure out i didn't so you have side just to except to kind of reinforce what steve said about the kind of a basic fact about the expenditure presentation we settles level service we also met level staffing yes so for example if you're looking at the school projection here the school projection here is current with level staffing so if there's an anticipation that the school population is is going up this will set up so you can change that payroll number and we would suggest you change the payroll number in in the in the co because that that's the best the sheet that feeds in to the expenditure projections so if if that were happening you know you'd rely on assuming the school to give you that number for a time but we could want to hear out the best way in other words i would cellars but it's it's in health insurance of their effect if you drill down deeper health insurance what you realise is that your numbers of participants is growing from year to year not only for because you're bringing in a new staff but you're bringing on replacement staff people have retired and they get in retiree health and people are replacing them so now you have two people in the same position essentially having health insurance so when you do an analysis on health insurance you i know in my community we we always assumed new membership for the town new membership for the school because of this aspect in addition to the existing numbers that are we're not just inflating the unit costs are also isn't sure you want to do i had the same question that tom computer had and and i confess i didn't understand the answer can we just look at the law that long range revenue and expenditure forecast page recognize that we have to do something to cure that we can't carry that but the model of the following year is projecting a deficit that's down to four hundred eighty four which assumptions about revenue and expenses are being changed i read this model as you're just projecting out those long term trends so yes we have to cure the two point three million in fiscal year two thousand and two but this model is suggesting that it actually gets better of the five following year without unless revenues here are somehow in fiscal year twenty two being reduced or expenditures reduced in a way that's not embedded in the assumptions that you're talking about i'm not sure how we get to a lower deficit next year and i just think a different way to the cumulative death deficit i would think thirty to three point two so went up by two point three ok but the following year it only goes up by four hundred thousand or five hundred thousand and i'm not sure where if you're saying that when you corrected the revenue and expense projections somehow to clear the deficit from the prior year it's not clear to me how the model does that because it looks like it's just growing last year's revenues by x in last year's expenditures by y is two things going on first so somewhere in fiscal year twenty two you have to either increase receipts lower expenditures or a probably a combination of both in practice  for this for you if you look at the numbers just look at the numbers for revenues for twenty three and look at the expenses if you do the math that's three deficit one fifty to one sixty one of the one sixty two to one sixty six and twenty three oh yeah it's three point seven right what steve is saying is that outside of that if you were to address the issue of the two of the three point two cumulative deficit or the two point three in twenty two you roll into twenty three in it if in fact you've corrected it in some way which is not reflected in the twenty three projection because of the two numbers out of the three point seven then you're actually then you're your deficit just within that year is four hundred eighty four thousand we legally have to balance the budget so sometime if you were to get a look at the numbers one sixty two versus one sixty six you know you're deficit is three point seven that's your annual you know that that's  meet the point being is that at it over the years as you have into a surplus deficit of six zero two three twenty nine to two point three to three point seven and twenty three so on its face each year a separate in the state and twenty i got a deficit of six o two and trying like i was at three twenty just within it's year but cumulatively it adds up if you don't correct that prior year that's the point it's so the cumulative is really clear in and out each year and that's the projections showed and we went for forty five million dollars override the point being is that cumulatively through twenty four we have a four point seven operating structural deficit cumulatively that we have to address earlier you know in those years good morning you had me in a different direction if i look at this total revenues in the total expenses in fiscal year twenty four our one hundred seventy million into twenty four with that kind of a structural deficit you would have to have done something before you get there to take away the deficit from prior year us the op the structural issues that accumulated to that point we couldn't go into twenty four were four point seven million dollar operating structural deficit we would have to have addressed it either through increased revenues or expenses he's not showing that here he's not showing the fixes what it says to us and all of us collectively is that over view the operating structural deficit is the larger the force of a well i'll also say that we have a diminishing health insurance eight seven six five it's probably unlikely to be five percent of fiscal twenty four so these could be higher will be they have no ability based on assumptions to address it's up to us collectively to say do we do reduce expenses which of course means staff do we somehow look for chris revenues which we were species overrides this model allows us to do the what ifs to try to figure out how we can each year balance our budget so the cumulative is really the annual deficit based on this set of assumptions assuming that you've cleared out the prior year and  in a way that's not in these projections and you'll hear it out and made that balance zero in your numbers a self contained deficit for the year it doesn't take into consideration what you may have done prior years thank you you pass the mike  of us and so you were pointing out that in terms of the schools that means we're not hiring additional staff in order to address the additional headcount but i also want to look at the general stabilization fund because when we were originally thinking of it we were thinking of it as getting us through a certain number of years and using it to keep each year whole at least that's what we've done so far  but this is a different strategy that's in here this is take one left divide it into and use it for the next two years which is why we do have a deficit in the next two years so if we had if we were continuing the prior approach we would take care of next year and then we would need it in the following and then we would probably be close to as we would sorry we would use it next year both for level staffing and probably for whatever other increases we had and then would would be out at the end of next year not the following that story so by making the choice to use one point three and twenty and one point three and twenty one we're taking on the fact that there is a deficit even in the level staffing budget so for both of those years we're going to have to find some pretty significant cuts in order to be able to do  of the deficit in twenty and have less than twenty one when you say in addition to that it had additional levels of service that actually creates a large deficit and it's not the same deficit it's a larger deficit particularly when the remaining jim staples issue goes away i agree and the only thing i would challenge is i wouldn't call it adding additional level of services i would call it adding additional staffing to maintain the level of other words we've used so so is that part of why the deficit isn't as high as we thought it might be no sooner the deficit and all compliment the time whoever probably the selectmen in the world going to do a great job of this but they've they've control they've controlled the use of the general stabilization fund holding it as much as they can to save it they've on occasions i believe they've used more free cash when they finally get it certified they plug in more free cash using list generals that will say sure but again general stabilization of free cash are both nonrecurring revenue so yes the you know the you know the general stabilization fund was stretched and that was really well done again it doesn't get rid of the structural deficit you know what i was asking more is in terms of the revenues and expenditures we're projecting if you're used are you using higher because i know some of us thought that we were projecting pretty some one time numbers in there it's higher the term back so low course it's going to be higher but we have to pull them out because they are one time in nature and one of them was because of this development and you know all these building permits and whatnot but  the only i wouldn't say aggressive when i say the excise is goes up by three percent that's just if you look at your history of excise tax you're going to see people buy cars eventually you know i totally agree with you on that but i think in the past we have not we've been more conservative estimates and so i was saying i was asking if this budget was if it used actual you know experience like that so that it would end up with a little bit more in the budget and maybe a little bit less free cash at the end of the day which is not a bad thing but it might also i mean way the structural deficit isn't right as long as we thought it was going to what i'm assuming is that some of lower expenditure or something the one number that i believe is aggressive i will say one number is aggressive in the riverside and that's chapter seven and that's because it's unusual to have a five percent delmon is unusual because of this and rolling growth reclined was the same way and so i was accepting of it because i've seen it from a similar community brooklyn is similar to that but that's the only one i would describe as aggressive everything else is probably pretty good assumption i don't mean aggressive and i get way better i want to do two things before we move on one one being to those of you with others who are here for other agenda items i apologize that we are running significantly behind but this is crucially important stuff and we have a joint meeting of four committees we really need to do that and then the next agenda item will be minuteman which will be also for all of the committees so it's going to be a while before we get to anything else just to let you know and secondly i've been remiss in telling everyone they need to identify themselves for the record before they speak i apologize roy epstein chair of the war committee i think this model is the most sophisticated effort i've seen so far to get our overall budget in a structure where it can be analyzed i wouldn't interpret what we've seen tonight as a specific recommendation i think this is an illustration of a tool that requires further  in terms of some of the parameters that we've been talking about such as the best way to handle say enrollment growth and compensation as it actually of balls in the schools and other components of the four of the budget especially as it rolls forward clearly there is a large implied deficit at about the time we expected whether it's twenty twenty or twenty twenty one or twenty twenty two it's it's going to happen and the magnitude will be dependent to some extent on the use of the general stabilization fund but whether it's all used whether the general stabilization fund is exhausted by two thousand and twenty or of it's stretched out that just implies the cuts will have to come elsewhere  maintain local services so what i would suggest that i'm actually given the the the complexity of the material and the lateness of the hour if the model could be provided to us as quickly as possible so that we would have the warrant committee and other interested bodies could have a chance to study it it would be useful maybe to reconvene early in the fall after we have a better understanding of the inner workings and formulate more specific questions and i guess related to that is the question of model maintenance is is does the collins center expect us to modify the model  be the keepers of the model and we would submit suggestions to you for changes well normally the plant has been that we turn it over the town the town as it designee who maintains the forecast a the actual numbers of the best numbers in for the next years we've already provided a user guide to give that person instructions on how to do it i suspect that i haven't heard the calls group do this but i suspect another contract there could be something arranged for them and i'm hoping we have enough expertise in town but how soon is the model then ready to be turned over at this point it's been turned  i think that's why you're here and it was with we certainly i certainly would rely on and your expertise and your advice and through guard to model this is what it's for is for all of us to manipulate it and i know you're probably more qualified than we are to do so so we'd love to hear your input on it i guess connect with patrice and you can create what you need i mean i mean tonight's point is not to go in through spin through all the scenarios tonights to ask questions about the model and the assumptions or whatever it is you want to ask are we have the general goal we have is is is to develop things that communities use and they use it internally and they work through it however we have done what we call little hand holding in the first the first handoff we are we would be sitting down with the community and actually be their resource when you want to work with what if scenarios and that's really just if if you felt you wanted that type of support the first go around for you when you were what if we make this change on health insurance and a staff person would work with you on the spreadsheet itself in up kind of a live environment so that is available it's not part of our original contract we have to discuss that but we have we have done that as a kind of a shock term support because we think it's important that  you know what we're doing isn't city much shelf and that's whether it's the forecasts the policies that and other projects you know our task from from the governors to is to give tools to communities in  area of many best practices that can help them kind of look at their own destiny and what would what would it take to to make improvements in the community but in the short term where you know we have officer queue for that tony you know i think what i what we had talked about when you probably have seen it is like well well should we have a financial taskforce too and i think the board decided that we are literally a task force to with all of you and so that's why we sort of engaged conce validating look at the numbers and making certain that we feel comfortable and validate them although i think they're fine because we've really looked on couple times and coming up with some what if scenarios in which we have to start to make decisions over the next couple years in terms of what we're going to do we're facing this no matter what we can run this number we can run the numbers twenty five different ways and we know we have a structural deficit in a level funded budget it's not even level service and so if we start to add some assumptions around christine roman or other components of service but in town you know that the structural deficit is going to increase so i think it's so important that we start to look at these issues in the fall you know that would be great i want to thank all of you for coming in the summer all so the next item which all of you will be here for our capital budget i don't know if that falls within anything you're interested in but certainly please stay few like would be a minimum regional ok from technical school district at tom meeting we decided that after we opted at tom meeting to leave mit me and that we wanted a group to get together of community members parents grandparents educators administrators town hall representatives to talk about what is the best option for our students moving forward as it relates to full kaisha legislation so that the primary responsibility for this group was to talk about what kind of options we have for the students it wasn't necessarily meant to be a financial analysis at that point it well and we believe that this presentation may want to be presented to the community get in the fall for more explicit conversation about what the aspects are of this process and what the pros and cons are as it relates to not only the quality of the education that we think that we'd like to provide the students but also begin to talk about the cost of location which i think is something that we're hearing tonight is a variable that would like to be able to plug into this give a quick for a bill update tonight but i can say that the school superintendent is supportive of the work of the group that we value this unique opportunity that we are legally mandated to provide our students in every community massachusetts which is a vocational experience and education and this group really did a great job of measuring this through a set of analytics that made a lot of sense on behalf of students and families first and foremost see the superintendent said send out a call for asking for volunteers for the for the working group i think maybe fifteen to twenty people  were were at the first couple of couple of meetings we met eight times total we started with the commitment that the superintendent made to town tonight meeting to take a look at  opportunities we took a look at took a look at how they looked on academics we took a look at how what their programs that they offered and we sort of realized we had to answer two questions is the the first is where should belmont  look for its primary source for career invoke decade options for its high school students and the second is what form should that participation take in terms of the first question about  where after taking a look at the data we we narrowed it down to three kinds of possibilities one would be to keep using minuteman is the primary source a second was to take a look at cian folk folk tech which is a nother regional school and there had been some i guess preliminary conversations with there's a tween between the belmont school  between the belmont school department and shushing about whether that was whether that was a viable option and i think we were encouraged to go ahead and look and then and then third the five communities of cambridge wal somerville medford and boston using a madison park are part of a group that's called to solve collaborative and they all have their own ninth grade programs in each of those five schools  but for then and then for years ten through twelve that they pool where necessary programs and so we took a look at at cambridge because there had also been conversations with cambridge about that being a possibility as the access point to that to that solve solved group we also were willing to take a look at newton north but new north right off the bat ruled out the possibility that they would have space we prepared prepared it's about three or four pages of questions for each for each of the three choices and sent them out we that we got answers back from from all we got a very we got a very detailed answer back from a minute man we had a pretty to to it take a look at this and and then the bottom line is that i think there was you know there was pretty widespread i mean there was unanimous agreement that in terms of which in terms of which of those options would  looked at three three options two of which are real and third is is is is is a middle path that may be available in the future one option is to sort of keep the path we're on now and to exit exit the as exit the in district twenty twenty and then b b going on a year to year basis as a nonmember seeking seeking space is there the other the other option that's available on the the table now is a would be something that would have to come through the school come through the school committee but i mean we were a prime our prime focus now was was really to answer the super tenets on questions and so and so and so we just sort of laid out one path would be for the superintendent to engage the school committee to to to talk about  starting the process to have a conversation about whether or whether belmont should stay stay in the stay in the district both from securing long term access to the school and and and as well as providing the kind of support for for those programs and and i mean i think i think i mean i think this is this is  where the superintendent could help could help sort of talk about the difference between trying to have to have the district trying to trying to provide these these are choices every year as a nonmember versus are dealing with dealing with him membership so first of all this i didn't plan on going into a lot of detail tonight this presentation is online it's on the school committee in school department website the full work ing group report is on there as well quite the criteria was academic social motional ensued life factors the space and availability in a room with numbers in roman of the factors of the school the longest term sustainability factors for our children our students and then the financial factors was the last part we we feel as a as we look at trying to serve our families part of that launch from sustainability was working with just one vendor i e minute m and as a place for all of our families who go here about programming and go soko or get on the same bus and be part of a learning community that was an extension of the belmont public schools community with socially what we have now we have a great relationship with him in the other option when we start to look at cambridge in medford accent or a we start to separate families and separate options and it may not be as the kind of student experience a family experience would like to offer our our community and you know in the end it comes back or a lot of work over the years trying to look at the the funding of vocational led especially as it relates to minutemen there was a gap there that didn't seem right between member nonmember districts around especially not just tuition but around the amount of money for the capital cost that would be attributed to members and at that point i was started shooting to nonmembers and it just didn't make sense we think that that equity pieces has been bridged a little bit so we're looking forward to possibly hearing more from minutemen to see if bridging that gap is an amount of funding worth it to the town to revisit being a member of minutemen but to answer the question that we promised a town meeting in the community that we explore we believe that the minute me an option for it's our students is the best option of the ones that the group explored in that are available to them i think that everyone should go on and take a look at this we did present that or the group presented it in june it's online right now the criterion this really really nice way to fall the thought process of the framework but in the end i think that the community is going to that discussion  whether it be town meeting like that in joint with the school committee and with the support of the work committee what kind of funds do we want to dedicate to the service to our students and families using minuteman both either as a member or a nonmember would be the number one show all quality of school experience would be made at the end that the only slight difference and i'm glad you asked that question is that depending on the agreement that we are able to strike with the minuteman folks if you are a member you would have that stability of always knowing that your child would have a seat so that that's a comfort level that we can offer our community as a nonmember if the capacity started to dry up in the roman got higher minutemen as nonmembers who would not be guaranteed seats for students so that's that's one of the variables that would have to explore as we look at the three are playing which is member nonmember and the nonmember what some sort of a priority arrangement that we could maybe navigate over the next year and as a member versus thousand eight twenty three minute man hypothetical nonmember charge for obama twenty four to sixty three there's like a ten thousand dollars per student delta between being a member and ten thousand dollars cheaper to be a nonmember and send your children there taking the debt service out of it putting the building debt service in it looks as though the idea is for the nonmember towns to pay a capital charges equal to the average member capital assessment for the debt service and that belmont's would be assumed to be slightly higher than the average if we joined and had to with a minimum high school a quality education that was outstanding the best in the state terms in the programs issue has always been mentioned as well as the uniquity between number towns continue to subsidize nonmember towns which will continue and so know i think we should revisit this but frankly we wanted to stay in the district you know that we wanted to stay and we said let's reconstitute the district on the new regional agreement and talk about what kind of building we want men to me and when and when nothing to do with that concern about is the school committees ability to continue to push forward toward the nonmember town's capitol which is the bellman provision which they seem to have weaved for now and so that was always my that the capital that the capital charges will be charged to nonmember towns as soon as the building is placed in service the building is going up faster than it really thought service yep that's what i was reading as the nonmember so i did so we're hoping that the building will be placed in service in the fall of two thousand and nineteen so so over this next year i'm on the finance committee for a minute man i hope i mean we will be working on planning the nonmember towns paying a capital they're going to charge that i mean that's compelled to you can decide to not allow their students to attend but they're going to stay on the other side we really need all of the kids that want it for it we're not going to take out the charge i mean that's been the issue in the raw unfortunately be great if committee and a former member of the middle school committee not to weigh in an opinion just the process of getting back in because this did come up in order to get back in the regional agreement lists the towns in order to get back in the regional agreement has to be amended to let a new town in so towns have to vote within their town meeting and then the town meetings after it leaves after after june of two thousand and twenty what we're talking about is the mechanism between now and the end of june of two thousand and twenty is simply there would have to be some unspecified mechanism within the town of belmont that would get the town clerk to send a letter to the minuteman school in committee saying that we would like to rescind the letter of with withdrawal and then they then that would have to be saying you're saying that's a different mechanism for living there i mean outside we would try town wide referendum and this and i would be really eggs versus getting back into minuteman if the town shows that so so my understanding of the exit was that the town voted on an exit we sent a letter but isn't it desi that has to accept our exit or isn't there isn't there such someone who has to agree to accept our exit and yes you did agree they did agree to accept our rights are in the warren committee looked at this question quite a bit i think it was two years ago or three years ago and i have to say that when i first started looking at this question i was in favor of remaining and after a lot of agonizing over this i ended up deciding to be a lever not a believer but a lever and there are a couple of competing considerations one is we were concerned about the capital obligation of the nonmember towns and it seemed at the time i think this was the fall of two thousand and sixteen i forget exactly seemed at the time that there was a an understanding that the nonmember towns would pay the capital charge based on a formula that was something maybe not exact but at least capital expenditure associated with the new school that starts actually now and then of one exit it and then came back in i'm not sure if there's some recapture provision for that initial capital but that's kind of a detail in the scheme of things th question then given the the delta in the tuition between the member of the nonmember town i was really trying to estimate how likely would it be that minuteman would reach capacity because if it seemed really very likely that minutemen would fill up then and in belmont i always felt even in two thousand sixteen that minuteman was was the best alternative for vocational it for belmont students and so it is on reconsideration today if if the new school is really going to fill or to stay there because he want to make sure you can send students there but the information available right now when i look at the presentation from june is that the school is actually well under design capacity of of so the design capacity six twenty eight and the actual enrollment is five thirty five thirty so it's one hundred down and we have no member  is a significant town within within the district well so the two important pieces been or three important pieces of information i got from the june presentation was that at least us of today minuteman is well below its design capacity second even though the design capacity is six twenty eight there's an expectation that the building if necessary really could accommodate something like six seventy or six eighty you know and thirdly least so far in watertown is not considering becoming a member town so when you weigh all of that it seems to me that the zero and then actually there's one last issue which was important to me in two thousand and sixteen regardless orse i would say separately from the quality of minutemen as an educational institution all the information i've been able to gather on this says that the costs are out of line and the explanations i've heard from a man about why the costs are higher because that that fact is not disputed that the explanations that i have heard don't account for the the magnitude of the difference between minuteman and other vocational schools in massachusetts the cost structure is very high we heard the war committee heard commitments that's not too strong a word from minutemen years ago about how they were getting their costs down and i heard similar commitments restated in two thousand and sixteen i don't know whether any progress has actually been made on those fronts where in essence the school was over staffed and has been over staffed for a long time given the enrollments so all of these issues when he put them together makes me believe right now that the decision to leave was the correct decision and i don't see the that it would be advisable to consider rejoining until there's some really tangible evidence that the school will really reach capacity even and i can't and i would imagine that schools like watertown and other systems are engaging in the same kind of exercise but i think the upshot of all that is that a  decision to rescind or read the decision to read rescind the decision to leave probably should wait until the last minute sometime in two thousand and twenty and then if if enrollment at minimum and still is low i would imagine we should actually stick by our original decision to leave and then reserve the question of whether to rejoin at some later date  to reserve until the situation really changes at that point out the questions that would need to be answered in you know in the the the affirmative i would i'm glad that you took a look at the documents and four other people who are in interested in  understanding what the operational cost model is and based on this year's this year's m budget there's a seven page seven page document posted on the school website under the under the phone under the vocational ed that sort of shows how that ten thousand dollars gap is is currently currently on calculated and then and then and then how how that will change with changes in the enroll meant and and then and then just finally as a  active member of the minuteman school committee i mean i've i you know i am pleased that my colleagues understand that the funding model and the enroll in questions are the two key questions that have to be that have to be dealt with to make the district successful in the long term cons and the fact that we have a full slackens meeting as soon as you guys leave that will begin and we have a ton to do this is important  stuff but i will is there anything anyone needs to say tonight before we get it can i just ask him what's the path forward in this because if this is something that's being floated and consider do we mean is there is there of the the so called working group i mean do we participate in some way because i think you understand my point of view on this and i'd hate to sort of start to socialize with me in the community that we're thinking about staying because frankly i'm against that you have to turn  on the path as i assume bringing together the committees to talk about the pros and cons on really on the quality of programming which you've already decided is probably made at me and i think it's really a member nonmember a conversation that would take this into a fall conversation outdoor one day liquor license discussion a grab just grab another chair mary porter and i will know for those of you who are here on the high school matter that will be taken up as the last item on the agenda as it will be for every meeting going forward fall cushing square festival there are two issues here one issue has got to do with the festival and having the outdoor liquor at the festival for c l c cafe the other is the overall town alcoholic beverage policy which is not terribly clear on outdoor service of alcoholic beverages sans food or out yet so particularly on public land but ok i was going to you're jumping ahead of me here so i mean so i guess the we did have town council look into it we do have the powers under the current policy the current alcoholic beverages policies rules and regulations to grant this to grant the use of alcohol in the service of alcohol outdoors for c l c for the cushing's where festival it is not typically something we do what i would but i would like to do a bunch of questions as to how this will play out what i'd like to do see if we can get to the festivals coming up in the fall get you going for that in the meantime maybe have town council propose some alteration to our beverages rules to make clearer on this point because it does say th of the the ability to do this but i think we need to be i'd like to put in some clarity as to if we do out there liquor because i've seen it in davis in harvard square as for october fester they have these cordoned off areas they have someone checking id they have a license person they have a police detail they have all of that and they have areas that are approved by the town as to where it's going to be and they have someone who is legally in charge like a manager for the day is qualified and tips trained in all to do all that their hours of operation of it there's access to restrooms either indoors or for porta potties outside they pay a fee to the town to use it so there's they have insurance which covers the town if someone gets injured for it or on the public street so all of these things would have to be sort of written into a paragraph would probably go in eighteen point two because that sort of where all this resides in our rules but eighteen point two a and b do let the board of selectmen do it now but we do have to do so we can do this for this event but it is sort of a gray area but i do want to help you out with the because i think that it's an oversight of the rules in my mind not because we've done them when they read it to sort of point that out i wasn't rules and it'll be a separate application with a separate fee but i don't know what the fee is in town council would have to write us something that would pass muster but i don't think this is difficult to see why rip off from one of her talent but i want to the things we want to get you going to move forward we want to get you guys going as i don't want i don't want this just this the wording of this stuff to get in the way the substance of something we all think that happened yes agreed so i guess can you tell me what you're going to be doing specifically where what how well i mean from what i understand we can only have we can do it outside in an area this cordoned off so you would have to have we will have a tip certified person i can get there on the street of the sideline sidewalk in front so th was to cordon it off we would have roping as well as i was going to make like a fitting clean to hedge around there would be one way and one way out he actually has to many many events he's tip certified as well as additional police detail right that day anyway but we have discussed having a tip certified person actually right there giving a wristband to the person with the idea coming through in that they there's a tip certified person serving who has is also again one of those employees he has several and then there would be a third tips sort of type person checking on the number of people because according to his business regulations he's allowed to have twenty five  s twenty four of these total whether it's indoor outdoor a combination of both so we were just assuming that all twenty five seats would be outside that day and we were planning i mean given the nature of what this is going to be i mean my thought was to have it be more a little bit mean the policies were the policies were big most you remember to go in and change a bunch of stuff so it was just all well i was thinking in future might be an interesting thing i brought this article from the citizen which are not brewery has been they're setting up every week in arlington and doing this  garden thing and they're they're actually paying down some money to do it they're hiring dancers and it was so successful the first week and there's going to keep doing it every weekend through the whole summer which is great and i've contacted are not as i thought maybe somewhere if this is a yes yes but they're just samples it's not like i sit down and say right so i don't have a particular problem with doing this i think it's actually a good idea and this might be a good controlled way to experiment with the idea and i'm going to really enough in the because the festivals for that is okey dokey and that's what those sort of comments and traditions that you just discussed out into the policy that's what i'm saying you know because then we would have this separate class of outdoor look rest of us and all of this would have to meet these requirements so it's clear yes ok got it because right now it's a little money we have the t own council says we have the power to grant this under the current rules but then for perks for future we need to be have something clearly written that's one that i mean because also i mean it would be opportunity to do special event type things for us as well if we had the ability to apply for that i not we also we can control so i mean there's something in the language about a group of nonprofit group having the ability to apply for this license yes i thought was a little odd because well then i was thinking should i apply as the c s m a but you  this point because we're not meeting till the end of august use but we've used all of them before and they've all been way up the ball honestly even in ways mercy situations and the price per gallon seems pretty good to two dollars and fifty six cents i wish i could get that it's creeping back up though i mean since last year asphalt markets are so you'll see in f y o six were as high as forty two dollars and as low as thirty one dollars ninety cents but it's creeping back up now so we've but we've got three years of flat thirty three dollars we've excuse thank you three thank you thank you execution of f y nineteen a track r n m contract with the ambient temperature in the amount of three hundred ninety six thousand nine hundred ninety seven dollars and that sounds like mr dorrance this category t a c nineteen it's ninety three thousand school to fifty five in both ears fiscal year eighteen and nineteen the budgeted line item was three forty eight for both in both years the actual expenditures in fiscal year eighteen for ac was three hundred sorry four hundred eighty thousand dollars so we overspent by one hundred thirty two thousand dollars in fiscal year eighteen the good news is the again it's been flat lined budgeted is three forty eight for fiscal year ninety in the contract amount that i'm presenting to you is four three hundred ninety seven thousand dollars so it looks like we have a v about forty nine thousand on the front end as compared to one hundred thirty to seven thirty four last year so i would be being less than forthcoming if i said the variance will just be that forty where is this all or believes all of our buildings you know each d c maintenance or repair repair and maintenance preventive maintenance and service calls both in why did we level funded from year to year if we had such a huge by forty nine thousand dollars so we are controlling it because we're change the scope of work to some extent we have actually there are a number of variables if he'll give me one second to go to my coverage you've got looks l hundred ac units of one kind or another there are a lot of them just the filter changes along take almost a month so it's pretty extensive preventive maintenance and then we have all of the service contracts the service calls that have to be done when there are failures for example just friday we had a situation where a pan under an ac unit that was overflowing leaking in the ceiling had fifty gallons of water in it because of the little tiny drain in the h p a c unit was caught so instead of running out of the pipe and discharging it overflowed into a pan that was a preventive maintenance failure it was covered by the contract frankly but the vendor didn't do it so there are countless items like that that are preventive maintenance items that just have to be done arguably  i think there's another way to do this but right now we just don't have the resources for the manpower to do this it looks like we're spending four hundred thousand dollars a year in outsource but i would be not stating that currently to say that he is a highly skilled guy for the budgeted number we have we brought in a guy who's got some fundamentally tracy skills he can replace fill those he can do kind of gross things if you will recharge units check to see if the free on is that the right level but to hire a solid h b a say tech that has controls experience my guess is for nineteen and what you're suggesting to us is that perhaps for fiscal twenty there's a different approach yes absolutely vote would be hiring somebody to do the work i would like to see us hire three people two solid h older and they will by the day and we potentially bring the high school online which is going to be a very sophisticated building we need more depth on this four hundred fifty is going to turn into five hundred point b perhaps that you work countability built in as well rather than you know with contract we just mentioned that some of again you know there is searing because what idiom is so part of the reason that this contract is different and that's as long as you'll see it is because there are a lot of controls built into this contract that were not in the last contract because including for example the previous contract didn't include on the repair slip every time they service something they have to produce a slip that includes a description but it never included a time in time out never required a signature so now if they don't put a signature on it and it doesn't have a time in time out then i can get paid for it the other contractor also did not include any fine language around what markup or padding so right now this contract that i hope you'll sign talks about a ten percent markup on wholesale cost it's not a retail cost but wholesale cost so there are the controls for instance that have to do with the drop shipment of parts they have to come to our office so we can see what the part looks like make sure it's arrived and it really has been ordered that was not the case in previous contracts so in the interest of times i can continue with a number of items like this but basically there are a lot of controls built into this agreement that were not in previous agreements to overturn the jews to other towns hire people like that we want to share these three guys or something well respectfully what i'd like to do is ask you to indulge me in some benchmarking really just like the superintendent is doing like to look at the same towns that he's using for benchmarking and figure out what their staffing looks like because i will respectfully submit to you that our staffing levels using basic benchmarking lexington as an example aren't where they should be now we'll may not agree that headcount is the right answer but when you've got constant run rates on items like we have here you might want to look at another model friday when this leak occurred there was an attack around so i was on a ladder with a pump and a hose pumping the water out probably not the best model if we have resources on hand we can respond quicker to these kinds of situations i think my concern lies with the previous conversation of the thing or i mean we're showing up for your photograph with levels of well  chairman of the capital budget committee i don't expect either patrice or steve to have the same answer because they are too recent in the position but mark you'll recall a year ago capital budget paid for an h v a c van because we were told unfortunately time across update discussion impossible but we're not moving along so we're going to stop and do that this is a big this is a thing so just with the surface here for yeah one of the items yeah come on u been poking my nose in the things i've done in town and one of the things that i found is that every department is accruing vacation and sick time the way that they're doing it very differently used the prior week so so given that that was our goal and given that all the departments are doing it a little different what i decided to do once the assist admin assistant who has a lot of experience working with would be centralized it would be signed off on it would be accurate there's been instances i think just contest in the past where people people were saying one thing they were cruel way it was for became balances and it was be argued that it was something else  you want to speak write again all the time i'm sorry just a cup or to human resources director so right now all of the departments are individually tracking their departments time because it's not in the mean a system is garvan just indicated so some examples have been you know people that have possibly been over accruing time resulting in expected payouts that they ended up not getting at the time that they leave employment things like that so by centralizing everything else set up a system where we kind of start the balances that everybody has and verify as of july first going forward and getting everybody onto the same cycle in terms of how time is accrued how it is handled the people that are doing it weekly which it really should be done weekly since we get paid weekly then there's folks that are doing it monthly so getting everything consistent then we'll be able to take it to the next level in terms of getting that into munis payroll system which will set up a lot more automation for the accruals as well as actually print people's balances and time use on their paychecks which is not happening currently vacation on the slip they fill in the sack and that goes to the labor party has a real yes yes department sign off on the payroll each week and then they review the print out sheet from the week prior to make sure that what they signed off on got entered correctly into the into the system we're not voting to repeat this is just well i would ask if the board supported that my office be the centralized time partner has ruled that we've we've had several conversations with them and i think you know everyone wants to be know that every all clearly spelled out in each of the union agreements how i'd like to see how much for her and all you know what that's probably you know we're really just keeping track of it it's really when people leave we want to be meeting august twenty fourth at eight am where we're going to be doing only appointments because i want to give them the respect that they deserve in the time they deserve particular in interview some people particularly for some very important radio appointments like the planning board however for now there are some places committees like the vision twenty one implementation committee who do not even have enough acting members to have a quorum to meet so i think we need to address that do some resignation so we have to meet up act on these plus the meet belmont committee we meet belmont coming up in the month i think they need this job we don't those are the two that are more emergent i we do have some that are fairly straightforward where we have recommendations from the chairs like energy committee historic district commission housing trust the registrar of voters is fairly i have a question and want a vote and i don't really know the answer this question but as far as that let's hit the vision twenty one because i think that's fairly that's thirteen applicants and several of the applicants have applied for other committees as well some of which i think they may be actually better suited better suited for correction and that will get to that when we get to those yet the some of these are resignations of some of these slots would not be the full time so we need to figure out which ones are going to be the ones that are all for less than a full term you know i mean well someone here for one vacancy for ninety goes got gong for instance is up in twenty twenty so that's a two year term while we go with the three that natalie recommended for a full three year terms and then the two that you mentioned for the staggered i think that's a fair way to go about it so i move that we appoint  won't question registrar voters though before we move on which is i know you have to have what is the opening here because i was confused you have to have it at least both parties represented democrat republican and the republican committee had recommended re appointment of stanley's or results ski but then there was also an applicant from vero here and i was but it didn't have his political affiliation so i don't really know  politically correct and he also applied to a number of other committees so that we'll find something for him but the question is i'm just your own one opening and the only one opening is the republican opening and there's only one republican the recommended what we have a two people for one slot we have to know the political newly insured us out as a preference it's not i just but i would suggest it's not we don't have to do this tonight that particular one but i just didn't know what is the it's a weird thing to ask but for th appointments you go through on advance and we here and if you look at the chairs have given us a lot of feedback so i don't think there's a lot of controversy if you're not i agree warrant for twenty teams state primary vote to approve of the second on favor give a problem with sort of a public safety concerns so we did that the only thing i want to point out with solar is i did some fact checking with with chris and what we found is based on schematics of what you put on the site it looked like there was one mega ray a solar array was one megawatt and based on the revenue that we could generate from that it's not a ton because it depends on how you structure it where is we could get some nice revenue from the town but necessarily belmont like you normally might not make up very well so there's a lot of unknowns with the solar it's still ranked number one even though there there are so many ties so don't take the order in particular but above the line that would stick around would be solar and digester by can skate park food leaf composting hockey rink and open space which was last for all tied and i would also say that i ideas so below the line so then transfer station would also go above the line below the line which would then drop off would be dog park park and ride playing fields pet cemetery and driving range using these criteria using these criteria but in the dark part with the pet cemetery so you know kidding aside i think the seven that now are you know one that with the other one or the seven we should consider although it's probably more like six but to be so just so the public understands the ones that we're going to continue looking at our solar and robot digest can skate park food leave composting hockey rink open space and transfer station and we're not going to move forward for the post closure use the incinerator site with dog park park and ride playing fields pet cemetery driving range those are going to be off the list agreed ok i'm fine with that mr chair that's the direction we're going to take three and we're going to be a play by the way one where after we do the deep dive on these issues and we get more information we're going to hold another public forum to get public comment on the remaining items so this is we're going to do that that we're going to do that we're going to do that last for every from now on every single item related to high school with the last on the agenda above knows i'll be on vacation from saturday on august fourth to saturday august eleventh there was a concern at the department head meeting that because we were lacking in the system they may be a need for someone to make decisions in my absence after some thought i am a question a human resource director jessica p i'm fine with that you know but i think i think it's long is there's an agreement understanding that just which act without him if you said this in the controversial at all between august fourth and august eleventh i'm not going to worsen and i would also imagine that these would be decisions for which circumstances require immediate with yeah sure of course like a second the board of health met recently and voted to approve new good new regulations as they believe to tobacco and taping the new regulations consist of capping of tobacco and babying us here in town more information can be found on the belmont porterhouse web page i spoke to chris roy belmont late director in regards to their contribution i asked chris if he would agree to a special town meeting article to increase belm late two thousand one thousand opeth contribution from twenty thousand already budgeted to two hundred thirteen thousand which is there are as the board knows water and sewer have already increased their contribution to meet their own arc having the enterprise funds meet their ark was yeah we have talked about it i have distributed a memo for capital for f y twenty to f y twenty five c attached i wanted to get a head start on this item i've asked apartments to list all capital items over ten thousand including capital lives in their operating budget the concert has listed over eight hundred thousand and these types of items within the budget that are funded annually i think it is important to review these items and pray i prioritize needs not to just automatically place them in the budget once completed i would provide the capital budget committee  with my proposed plan i realize this is different from past years and i'm hoping people are open to a different it finally i requested it economic development funding through the state thanks to senator william brownsburg or i will let the board know if these items are requested have been funded i asked for about one hundred fifty thousand impeachability states for parcels the town or dislike when liaison committee reports approval minutes we have none and with that as the next item is a b here at the aug twenty eighth mean just to let you know we will soldier on without you have to hear it the next item being appointment of high school traffic working group i would do the usual one which i have to recuse myself to do best fact that i live on golden street and as a programming note and the time the high school items come up on the agenda for the future they will always be last on the abrams but i don't think he could attend all the meetings because i think this is a so i know we said twelve members but i think as we launch in there's opportunity for folks to come if there's a need to appoint others president we can do that as we are if we if we hundred from my point of view if we understand that perhaps other parts of town need to be represented we can consider doing that time you know right and i think i believe off believe all three of these residents are off parts of town that perhaps should be represented we can i mean this is more of a working group brainstorming and the materials that are be handed out folks will be understanding of some of these issues and that's my goal is to here to do that you know if we